As spring days lengthen and “smale foweles maken melodye”, like Chaucer’s “sondry folk” I long to go on pilgrimage. So every Easter, following this vernal impulse, I walk up the north-eastern edge of the Chilterns. Here on the sunny slopes of Church Hill, I put my faith in an annual miracle.
Scattered along the chalky escarpment, about 60,000 pasqueflowers (from the Middle English “paschal” meaning “of Easter”) are surfacing and coming into bloom. Felty flower buds nose through the shallow soil, haloed in plumes of white-haired bracts. I can’t resist stopping to stroke them. The undersides of the petal-like sepals that form the buds feel warm and soft, with the irresistible downiness of a newborn’s cheek.
