Crossing from road to wood is both easy and hard. Easy because the boundary is a single strand of barbed wire, hard because I’m stepping outside the law, again.
The transgression pays off in minutes, though, as three wood-wraiths rise and drift ahead of me through the trees – brown hares, unhurried, seemingly unafraid. I pocket plastic as I go – cartridge cases, baler twine, a foil balloon – but can do nothing about feed sacks embedded in the soil or decades-old tree guards, brittle and disintegrating.
When I emerge from the wood at the break of the slope, the landscape unrolls at my feet and I understand why the people who interred their dead in the long barrow at the top of the dale chose this place. The chalky turf is spangled with daisies, violets and celandines, and I see my first bee-fly of the year, my first orange tip. I doze off watching the flame-flicker of a brimstone dancing along a holloway no longer mapped – and wake to the black-hole stare of a stoat standing 10 feet away. When it finally moves, it is red as a fox, lithe as a ribbon. I follow downhill to a cluster of tumbledown hawthorns and find rushes teeming with little black spiders, and a gushing spring with the signature clarity of chalk water. I drink. It’s good, but the thirst that pulls me to places like this is for more than sweet water.
It’s now 90 years since the mass trespass of Kinder Scout in the Peak District highlighted the burning need for a right to roam, and 22 years since the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 gaslit us into believing that the 8% of England to which we have free access is some kind of wondrous benevolence. Fine if you live near one. Elsewhere, public footpaths and bridleways only hint at what we’re missing as we cross private land, often hemmed in by wire, or barracked by signage that forbids us from being led by hares, or stoats, or butterflies or old ways.
When I slipped under that wire into the full breadth of my homeland, something glowed in my animal brain. I’m both adrift and connected: fully out and wholly in. If I had to put one name to that sensation, it is simply freedom.
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