We have come to Winchester, our nearest city and an old haunt. From here you can be in water meadows or downland within minutes. We walk out past the cathedral towards St Catherine’s Hill, its iconic dome part of the Cretaceous chalk of the upfolding Winchester anticline. But since I last walked up, my old route through a meadow has become the park and ride I protested against back in 1996.
In the wood skirting the hill, a light turbulence of the air stirs the leaves into a brightness of fur. A dog fox and vixen weave through the trees. We find our way in up a track beside the M3 where it roars a great maw through Twyford Down, the site of many 1990s road protests. I pause on the footbridge where I once unfurled angry banners. A lorry honks.
We strike down into Plague Pits Valley. Benign and rich with teasel heads and the chinking coinage of goldfinches, it swallows the road noise. White cattle with wet black noses lift their heads. The ground is a crumble of thawing mud that gives us purchase as we climb 220ft to a beech clump. The statuesque trees grow on the buried ruins of a Norman chapel in an iron age hillfort, beribboned by a white chalk path. Within the fort are three burial mounds and a 17th-century turf-cut mizmaze.
From here, people are enjoying the view. There are paths along the River Itchen’s water meadows, the blue-and-bone flint of the Hospital of St Cross and Almshouse of Noble Poverty, and the city: my hard-won university, the prison tower that saw the end of Thomas Hardy’s Tess, and the squat magnificence of the cathedral. Above it all, an ecclesiastical kestrel balances like a flag on the thin whip of a hawthorn growing out of the slope.
We descend the 100 steps we should have come up, defrosted chalk freighting our claggy boots. At the bottom, a striking piece of graffiti from the local artist Hendog draws admiration: a small boy sits enchanted on another’s shoulders, looking up at a kite, the hill, the people. Below them, the rude rolled tongues of cuckoopint poke through the leaf litter, blowing raspberries at winter.
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