As I get out of my car, beside the old control tower at this former RAF and US airbase, I hear a woodlark. It barrels over, a fluttering round ball with a melancholy twist on its hallelujah. I’m helping to lead a walking, writing and photography workshop with young people from Wiltshire, for the charity Thriving Through Venture, which aims to stimulate positive shifts in mindset through community action.
No better place to start than here. Despite its association with the military, this is a wild space, shaped by human stories of freedom, hope, war, resistance, peace and refuge. It has its own communities: volunteers, conservationists, historians, runners, dog walkers, families and wildlife, which all intersect.
The military aviation enthusiast Christopher Netherclift guides us round the cold war relics: a decontamination suite, American fire hydrants in the middle of open heath. The young people are unaware of this recent history. I tell them how (when younger than them) I watched nuclear bunkers being built out of blinding white concrete, to house 96 cruise missiles.
This generation have their own end-of-the-world fears and crises, and I want them to know that they’re not alone; that people have gone before; that lives have endured, in understanding, peace and solidarity. Action. Women danced on those bunkers in protest at the nuclear weapons stationed here. Wildlife returned.
At the wide central cross of what remains of the old runway, we witness the arrivals and departures of summer and winter birds. Wheatears alight on any high point on this flat ground – a heap of gravel, an anthill tump, bright-flowering gorse – fresh in from Africa. Alert and upright, with an “at-tention” soldierly aspect, the males (smart black eyestripe, navy blazer) arrive ahead of the females. Meanwhile, a restless veil of golden plovers lifts and resettles, and a rumour reaches me of ring ouzels. All the while, a small boy rides his bike in circles around us, squeaky as goldcrest song.
The following day, the teenagers explore the community of a local village, cook a meal for refugees from Sudan and Eritrea, and prepare for their own departure: a trip to a village in the Gambia. A community exchange of sorts, with the wheatear on the gorse.
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