White Horse Pilgrim

Looking out

We travelled clandestinely, hidden within a long belt of trees. An overgrown drove road a century abandoned, it sweeps across hill and dale. Occasionally we darted into the open where woodland failed, crossing some silent meadow before entering fresh cover. And we had the trail to ourselves, save for one cyclist who passed and was gone in moments. This is my dream-trail where imagination burgeons like the thriving vegetation. Here's where I clear my mind, empty out the negative thoughts to evaporate, allow my imagination to refresh, and begin to create a new narrative. Where I start to see the real world from a fresh perspective. It's a good and helpful place. Or benign and helpful in a world of temptations? Whatever, it's a place to reconnect with nature, which is a forgotten corner of the collective unconscious of the people of this land. 

We stopped to look out. There's a bright world beyond, spacious and inviting. What is over the next hill? It isn't just the overgrown lane that sponsors the imagination. Even Brena lifted her head from gazing the cow parsley, curious about the colourful space beyond. 

Such is the power of this place that I returned to truck and trailer only to be surprised by the time. It was a couple of hours later than I expected. (I hadn't been wearing a watch.) Down there time flies past. Time is measured by the sun in the sky - and by the seasons. It's not so much timeless as governed by a different paradigm to the chronological modern world. The 'old' time. The time of that veiled collective unconscious, and of my stories too. 

Favourite trail

Friday was bright and warm. Indeed hot. The cats lay and cooked in the conservatory until, overheated at last, they crept into a shady room to lie on the concrete floor and cool. Horses stood and dozed, fragrant with sweat and dust. I was grateful for air-con in the car, though it worked hard, the roar of cold air competing with the Indigo Girls and then Joan Baez. Then I just wound down the window, turned off the air-con, and put my foot down. Enjoy a bit of romance, hair blowing, chords escaping. 

I swept up Brena into the trailer and headed for the hills. There it was breezy, the sort of day where sunburn creeps upon the unwary. So, long sleeves and a hat with a brim were in order, and some protection for my neck. And plenty of water to drink. I know all the gates, posts, mounds and fallen trees to mount from if I have to get down to pee. Sometimes, needs must, practical trumps romantic. 

Sun after rain brings forth burgeoning vegetation. Canola is bright. Cow parsley spreads a white froth on the margins of trails. Incongruous in late spring, Hawthorn is white as frost. At last the world is alive, flourishing and - as Brena reminded me - very tasty to a greedy horse. 

My favourite trail led up a quiet valley. For a mile I can imagine myself far away, in some Transylvanian valley perhaps, for this place has little in common with modern Britain. It is as if a fragment of the past has been preserved, mysteriously and wonderfully. 

Riding on, the valley becomes lovelier: deeper, remoter and more mysterious. This is a splendid place for a picnic. I've stopped there to eat on a number of occasions, tethering my horse to graze. One warm summer day, when Doru was tethered and I'd eaten, I lay in the long grass to doze. A hiker stopped to enquire whether I'd fallen off. 

I love this place. We'll trot along the level valley bottom, then canter up the hill beyond, stopping in the middle distance for Brena to graze and me to collect my thoughts. For this is a place of rest and inspiration, a glade in which to dream, imagine and weave tales. This is the valley that has given birth to many of my stories. Here dreams wander waiting to grow upon the fertile soil of a ready mind. 

Blue

After a ride through vibrant canola, a different ride today accompanied by the relaxed hue of bluebells. Each copse and belt of woodland is floored with a hazy blue. Rain or not, irrespective of the mud, truly spring is here.

Usually we canter along the shady path threading the long wood growing on a long-abandoned drove road. On this stretch we're homeward bound and energy is plentiful. But today it was better to linger, savouring the delicate colour and fragrance.

As ever it surprised me how few people were to be seen out here. So much beauty, so few people. Is it that I am surrounded by young souls, newbies, people seduced by goods and technology, too busy rushing around to notice mere nature? It is as if these woods have been bypassed not just by roads but by thought and memory too.

Yellow

A rolling yellow blanket extends across the hills, a flood of canola sweeping across the green. The canola is tall now hemming in the trail to a thin line across the land. It's tasty too, Brena tells me, grabbing at the yellow flowers with her eager lips.

Beneath the bright crop the land possesses a sculptural quality. There is detail close up, of course. But, standing back, the canola is a uniform yellow stretching over hill and dale. The occasional trees, regular tractor lines, rare copses and the thin line of the trail, these alone provide scale and perspective. So little content stands between micro and macro.

This is my green upland prairie under a yellow filter. Here is my familiar downland wearing a bright new dress. Under grass or canola, beneath a blanket of snow or ploughed bare after harvest, I know this place. What I don't know are the Romans and Saxons who farmed here, the people who worked these fields during the Middle Ages and afterwards. I grasp and appreciate the form of this land. However I don't know the generations who scratched the surface of these fields. There again perhaps they changed it but little. The timelessness of these hills transcends us all. In that case what difference do I make? Writing, photographing, recording - noting down the here and now. Changing nothing but observing much.

Valley view

I love to look down from the hills. Here's the Thames valley looking rather tame, if you will forgive the expression. It's pretty and evovative, if not vertiginous. But I love such places with their tranquillity and history.

I spent the evening at a work function for a colleague who is leaving. Not for the first time someone remarked that, in effect, I don't fit the stereotype of an office-based project manager. Well of course not. Eight years in Transylvania did their bit. I don't see life and work in the West through the same lens as those for whom urban Britain is confirmed home. I wouldn't. That is no judgment. Simply it is the broad open spaces that offer me comfort. The land that, somehow and quite inexplicably, feels like my home. It's tame compared to former haunts. But I love the hills here.

I love the hills. But if only I had a good and trusty human trail companion. I've passed beyond the point where solitude has special virtue. If only there was a refuge in the hills at which to stop over. Back in Transylvania there were stopping places, but no-one thoughtful to talk to. Here I have friends few of whom ride and no haven in which to hide away. What am I missing? I have a sense that, unseeing, I'm passing by someone or something. Or looking too hard.

 

Between showers

The day brightened enough to suggest a trip out to ride. My slick machine swept into action. Just over an hour later I was aboard Brena in a quiet valley several miles away. Another half-hour saw us on the ridge looking down across the Thames Valley. This is Dean's Bottom, where King Alfred and his men chased the defeated Danes (i.e. Vikings) after the Battle of Ashdown - just one thousand one hundred and forty one years ago. In the hills memories are long.

The power station in the valley threw up a huge cloud. See the sheep grazing in the shady foreground, on the old turf covering the remains of a Roman temple. Today's edifice throws up a spectacle to stand above the relics of a long-dead empire. And I traversed the Roman road imagining a legion marching towards me: the tramp of the boots, the clink of armour and weapons, their raucous voices and the greeting of their officer to an august traveller. (Well, I'm not going to imagine myself a tramp!)

The sun was low. It was time to turn back towards the trailer. At one point we cast a shadow across a meadow yellow with cowslips. It's not a lofty exciting hill, but it's still attractive in green and yellow. Years ago I used to ride up a hill like that leading trail rides - usually the first day of a week out - stopping to picnic at the top. One of these days I'll pause atop this little local hill with victuals to consume.

We rode into a pretty sunset. Just in time because we would be arriving back at the trailer at twilight and would get to the field with just the faintest glimmer still in the westerly sky. Slithering through the mud in darkness is such fun. A little bit of light just makes the difference. But I did not dwell on logistics. I enjoyed the view across to the golden-fringed pink clouds above pastel fields.

Horizons

It was a warm, soft early spring day. A procession of receding ridges melted into a slight and inobtrusive haze. The first flowers had appeared, snowdrops and crocuses, and buds are swelling. The ground is firm but not hard. Sheep and cattle are out at pasture and the sward shows the first tentative signs of new growth. Silence enveloped the rolling hills.

I used to drive out of the still-snowy mountains to experience a day like this on the lowlands. What joy filled my heart to feel the warmth and see the new growth, neither of which would reach my home for another couple of months.

That early spring euphoria grips me still on a day such as today. Happiness such that I could sing, a broad smile and a deep feeling of well-being, like the morning after the first night with a new lover. But without the yawning and the coffee to stay awake.

Bare as the pockets of spendthrifts the beech trees remind me of winter, unsurprisingly after their flamboyant celebration of autumn.

I guided Brena from the well-used ridge trail onto a perpendicular way, grassy and little-used. In a mile along the ridge one may see twenty people on a Sunday. But branch off and one might see one or two people in five miles. People who can read a map and are willing to walk more than a mile from the car park. Members of a rare breed.

I encountered just one, and met her with chivalry for she was the nearest thing to a damsel in distress that I could hope to find. There was a dead muntjak in the trail, part-eaten by foxes, and her Thoroughbred would not pass. The trail being hedged, there was no way around. so I rode an unconcerned Brena to and fro past the carcass to dispel the aura of peril. After some minutes the wary little mare was sufficiently convinced to convey her charming owner past and homeward.

I am glad to ride a steady, sensible draught-cross. 

Once in a while one does need to dismount and clear an obstruction. That's when a lead rope can come in handy, there being a tree or a fence to tie a horse to safely in most cases. My rescuee didn't have a rope to hand. There again, English horses are used to be tied up to a loop of baler twine "so that they can break free if startled". Some are adept at taking advantage of this feature. My horses coming from the Balkans are trained to be tied to something solid without a breakable link, and are all the safer for it.

This weekend I rode Brena for about six hours in total. With more work she is settling down after an idle winter. Going out riding is becoming "normal" again for both of us. I like to be in that place where riding is as natural as walking. It used to be my home terrain, that fluency flowing from many hours in the saddle. Spring is the time to recapture that special relationship. It was a special pleasure to request a canter and not be treated to a small high-spirited buck. I am sure that it was a pleasure for Brena to be ridden by a more supple and relaxed me. The outcome is trust, and with trust there is much less need for rigid control. I say that because, for me, a deficit of trust can only be replaced by obedience to orders. That means control and, again with me, a tense rider. Tense because I am not quite sure whether I shall be obeyed. But with trust, never mind that a canter becomes a gallop. We're in a big open space of my choosing, there are no hazards ahead, and I know that Brena will tire within a quarter mile. I know that she won't deliberately do anything mean. She is sure-footed. It will all end well.

A flying of crows

A mass of crows wheeled above the hilltop, the air loud with the beating of their wings. When they settled it was to rest rather than to eat. Black against the grey sky, the birds seemed timeless. A raw, bleak sight they made, glimpse of a world depending not upon men or horses. Ravens, of course, would have been a different matter.

Snow lingered in the woods. Winter remained amidst the trees, quiet and undisturbed. Other than the trees it seemed that nothing lived, and they clung on in hibernation. Beyond, a little green buoys hope of new life for we have passed the low point. Seasonally we are past what, metaphorically, is represented by the dark hour before dawn when birds have not yet begun to sing. But only just.

There is always a little novelty somewhere. This morning 6024 King Edward I hauling on an excursion to Bristol. One cannot miss such a sight, though 6024 will be making this trip three times over the next month. It's not a great photo however capturing fast-moving objects in poor light isn't what a pocket camera is designed to do. Trains, unlike horses, cannot be bribed with food to stand still.

Scenic interlude

I could have sat for hours looking at the view from the top of this road-less valley in the Bucovina. I do love those intriguing conical hills. A geologist, I feel, would have found much to comment upon.

The riding style is curious - perhaps reins were being gathered up as I photographed. At least they are loose.

The real and the illusory

Our first ride for a week - and Brena was full of life and keen to step out. That manipulation by the chiropractor clearly was needed.

I kept the ride slow in recognition that Brena had just been adjusted. She needs to settle back into alignment with muscles that were supporting the problem area relaxed. We can get back into faster work next weekend.

The sun was low as we travelled along the ridge. I was curious to see a peculiar optical phenomenon reappear - the intriguing (if faint) halo around the shadow of my body. It's a kind of solar glory, presumably depending upon dew droplets on the grass. A bank of mist might show up a proper glory and even a Brocken spectre. Now that would be something: a real mountain phenomenon on our gentle hills.

Deer were out on the northerly hillside, lit by the last rays of the sun of the day to cross the ridge before shadow arose to blanket them and the green slope. As usual Brena and the deer ignored one-another, however a hiker put his dog on its lead as a precaution. The man was fascinated by the deer, as town-dwellers often are, whilst his urban dog did not seem to recognise their scent. Out here a fragment of the wild world happily extends close by.

My illusory halo dissipated as we journeyed into the valley.

Tethered to graze behind the trailer, Brena stared at a car travelling slowly along the lane. This is a familiar parking place for hikers so cars do come and go. Every vehicle fascinates the ever-curious mare in a way that deer do not. They do not alarm her, simply something about a moving object intrigues.

With the old white Lipizzaner Pintea it was hot air balloons. He would stare intently at the most distant balloon. I'm not surprised: he would never have seen one of those in Transylvania.

I don't recall Doru staring at anything. He was just too solid and aloof to be interested in anything but food.

Then it was head down to guzzle the rough winter grass, of which there is a surprising amount out here. After years in the mountains, it comes as a pleasant surprise that the vegetation does not retreat to desiccated brown for months on end.

The sun slid down to touch the horizon. I loaded Brena and we headed back. Before dark fell I still had two dogs to walk.