REFLECTIONS

THE RIVER STORT winds languidly out of Bishop’s Stortford, seemingly oblivious to planes flying over out of Stansted Airport. After a mile of outer-town wasteland the towpath passes a nature reserve, enchantingly called Rushy Meade. Here, you are plunged into the emerald light of meadows, reedbeds and spreadeagled trees; Alder, oak and willow mostly, with Hazel and Black Poplar growing among acres of nettles and Bramble. The trees look happier and healthier than their counterparts lining the nearby roads, or punctuating the surrounding arable fields where they struggle with half a century of industrial farming and the residues of herbicides and pesticides. These trees look sick and about to give up, but those at Rushy Meade, protected by their location and a few good-willed naturalists, have grown full and lush into leafy canopies full of birdsong. You enter a world of green where a grassy path tunnels through scrambling undergrowth, past several ponds, opening into glades where stream banks are alive with dragonflies and wild flowers, where mauve Comfrey flourishes, Hogweed grows tall, Wild Carrot, Ragwort and Teazel grow freely, and nettles mingle with Bramble. A wooden plank crosses one of the brooks, choked with rushes, where a huge pollarded willow sprouts withies from a gnarled and knotted base. A dead oak stands alone in a meadow, nettles growing from the hollow trunk charred long ago by a lightning strike. I was standing by the river bank when a Kingfisher flew up into a willow and perched on a cascade of weeping branches. He had the sun on his back, a shimmering blue, dazzling, celestial, iridescent. In profile, I saw clearly the orange-rust front, the snow-white neck patch, the outsize dagger that is his