One field is all I need

I don't think I'm unusual in having a favourite field.

It's down a short and often very muddy farm track, just past the gate in the photo above and it has a well trodden path through it that could take me in all kinds of directions. But often I don't go much further.

Years ago I'd stop in this field - it wasn't my favourite then - because I didn't have the energy to walk more than ten minutes from the house. Now, sometimes I can walk miles, sometimes I can't.

Sometimes now I dawdle there so long anyway that I never get out even if I did mean to walk over the small hill to the farm beyond, or up to the heathland reserve where the buzzards live.

Sometimes I know I'm going to the field and no further, and that's ok. Today was one of those days.

It's February. It's been raining for weeks so the mud is deep and oozy, red where the iron in our soil has bled. The trees are still bare, but there are shoots, and catkins, and the birds are singing springtime songs from the hedges.









There are sometimes cattle in the field, but not often. It's too small and lumpy and wet to grow a crop in. There's a shallow dampness that's not quite a stream, with marshy plants and ground that never sets hard even in summer.

There's a telephone wire from which a pair of kestrels swoop into the clumpy grass come high summer.

There are huge oaks, cities in their own right, where I'll see woodpeckers later, and saw jays saving their acorns last autumn. Today the trees are splendid, their dinosaur trunks vast and warm under my hands.

There's a stream big enough to paddle in but it's on the other side of the narrow wood that runs alongside the field. Magic happens on this side. The field is only metres wide between the skimpy wood and a rough hedge. Birds leap across the gap between wood and hedge, linking their hideaways and their food and their song perches.







And in high summer every step I take lifts butterflies from the grass and marshy ground like table crumbs from a shaken cloth. It's magical.











Today, I went out in the late afternoon, low sun coming from a high blue sky that turned suddenly black, with a wind that rattled the branches and flung hailstones into my ears, and I couldn't have asked for more.