Spring delights ON YOUR DOORSTEP

Out the back door, across the ring road, past the sewage works and beyond the industrial estate, Rob Cowen discovers a daily dose of the sublime in the edge-land of his hometown, where the dawn chorus is in full song and hares dart among the pylons

“Edge-lands are probably not what most of us picture when we think of the countryside”

Spring has long been my high point of the year. Everywhere you look there is an assertion of life. A promise made good. New, green blood runs riot through old branches; the warming earth erupts with shoots and the landscape is bedecked with full, rich, limegreen leaves and bee-busied flowers. All of it tells us – to borrow from Ted Hughes – “the globe’s still working”. But to enjoy this season and engage with its wealth of wildlife, you don’t need to travel to far-flung destinations or nature reserves. There are adventures to be found right on our doorsteps.

Only the other day I rose early to watch hares. Dressing with the lights off, trying not to wake my wife and kids, I hopped down our stairs, pulled on boots and struck out for the edge-land about a mile away from my home.

The world was still cloaked in calm, pre-dawn dark; no car stirred. The air, thick with blossom nectar as yet untouched, smelled as fresh as new linen.

INTO THE BORDERLAND

Over the ring road, cutting down through backstreets, I started to feel the familiar pull of this marginal space, wedged between town and country. There were glimpses of it through the car-cluttered cul-de-sacs – a deeper density to the darkness beyond the streetlights.

Past the housing estate at the bottom of the road, I paused for a moment at the disused railway, now a cycle path, which acts as a high water mark for the sprawl. This is the town’s limit. Beyond, patterns of the urban landscape dissolve into something other: a kind of wildness. Between this point and where the ground rises again into ‘countryside’ proper, there exists an overlooked borderland of bramble and hawthorn, of old common and tatty field, holloway, pylon, wood, river and pasture gone to seed. To the left is a mesh of allotments and a sewage works; to the right, rough meadow and an industrial estate.

As morning flared in the east, I felt the same shiver of excitement I always do when I cross over into it.

The first time I saw a hare in this unlikely setting, I naively presumed it had to be a rabbit. I couldn’t quite believe that this wily lover of wide-ranging cornfield and cropland would tolerate being so close to a town. Then I watched its sandy brown shape rise onto those gangly legs, extend its long, Indian ink-dipped ears, and shoot across the scrubby field I was standing in.

Part of my disbelief was down to appearances. Edge-lands are probably not what most of us picture when we think of the great British countryside. Inglorious, often riddled with relics of infrastructure, these spaces where human and nature intermesh

are constantly in a process of collision, collusion and negotiation. In many ways they are the antithesis of the kind of breathtaking scenery that might grace the cover of this magazine, but chances are you’ll know and perhaps love one of your own. Maybe it’s where you played as a kid or just a spot you dash to with the dog after work, but with 80% of the UK living in the urban environment, edge-lands are almost certainly your closest ‘green’ space. And they can be gateways that provide a daily dose of the sublime, if we’re only alive to it.

SPRING FROM NOWHERE

But edge-lands also provide important pockets of biodiversity for the non-human world. In this patch of ground, 15 minutes walk from my home, I’ve recorded not just hares but roe deer, tawny owls, sparrowhawks, buzzards, swifts, kestrels, woodpeckers, rare moths, butterflies, badgers, foxes and the first hedgehog I’ve seen in more than a decade.

Once, on a dull Tuesday, I watched an otter nosing for trout along the river. These places are common in every sense of that word, but still seem all the richer for it. Because of their proximity, we can get to know them in amazing detail throughout the changing seasons and the different times of day. Sitting, touching, sensing, smelling a place, revisiting and returning as the year turns is an act that roots us, restoring a vital relationship with the bigger, living world that lies outside our day-to-day, self-obsessed lives. It’s something worth getting up early for.

By the time the sun had fully risen over the hare field, I was ensconced in a wildflower-braided field border, half-hidden by a blackthorn, in the shadow of a pylon. The birds were in full voice: threads of song wove together, lifting and lilting, refrains and solos – the wrens trilled and there was the rusty wheel squeak of great tits. I could make out a warbler somewhere and, intermittently, the thick flute-notes of blackbirds. You tend to focus differently in such a place. Once, sitting in this same spot, I noticed the field had turned up a piece of clay pipe, like a thin hollow bone. I stared at it for a while, thinking about whose jaw it was once clamped in, wondering about the layers that lay in the mud beneath my boots. It’s one of the amazing things about even seemingly insalubrious settings in Britain – every square of soil inch holds its histories. When the first hare appeared it seems to send a ripple through the soft, spiky tips of the young wheat. I lifted my binoculars, quietly. Then another materialised some distance away. Heads popped up intermittently between feeding, meaning I got a great look at those dog-like faces, those ranging, twitching ears and bulging, goat eyes staring my way. I stayed as still as possible, for hares are notoriously shy creatures, normally solitary but congregating in the spring to mate. For 20 minutes or so, I watched both breakfasting and high-kicking around each other in circles. At one point, as they drew closer, one stood full height for a good three minutes, looking glorious, framed in the sun as the whizzes and whistles of birdsong rang all around. It was only after it had ducked back down and vanished in that mad, dashing, blurry burst of speed hares casually slip into, that I realised there was a huge grin on my face; one that reappeared the rest of that day whenever I thought of them. Watch hares ‘live’ like this and you can understand why they have remained the embodiment of the most vivacious of seasons in our myth and culture for millennia. Practically invisible in autumn and winter, hares seem to spring from nowhere at the point the dead earth comes to life again with greenery, dashing and mating freely amid burgeoning crops. It’s hard to overstate how significant this would have seemed to societies entirely dependent on arable farming, but an Egyptian hieroglyph points the way. The symbol of the hare denotes, simply, existence itself.

A glimpse of such sheer existence can be just as powerful today. Brief, yes, but enough to get me through a long day at a desk. I recommend everyone tries their own daily dose, right now, as the earth comes alive.

Rob Cowen is an award-winning writer and author. His book Common Ground was shortlisted for the Portico Literary Prize, Richard Jefferies Society Prize and Wainwright Prize 2016 and selected as a ‘Book of the Year’ in the Sunday Express and Times.

“Hares are notoriously shy, solitary creatures, congregating in spring to mate”