WENDING ABOUT THE WEALDLAND

PRINT EDITION CONTENTS past issues

PAST GALLERIES

In her latest Land Rover column, Helena Douglas describes an amble in the West Sussex Weald ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

I give in at the third time of asking. As anyone who has dogs will know they can be remarkably insistent and the beseeching brown eyes of the pup were hard to ignore. With an article refusing to be beaten into shape, the air warming in the late afternoon sun and spring showing its colours, it was time for a walk to exercise both human and canine minds and legs. I decide on “round the back”, a four-miler encompassing meadows, woodland, a stream and lake, and always a good bet for flora and fauna.

The terrier and pup set off down the farm track in their usual zigzag fashion, sniffing the new purple clover flowers on the verges and scent-marking tall leggy docks while I admire a field of tail-swishing polo ponies grazing on jewel green new season grass. Along the fence, swaying in the breeze, is a swathe of sweet-smelling cow parsley, a native biennial also known as Queen Anne’s lace, thanks to its delicate tiny white flowers. Growing among it are numerous ox-eye daisies, their white and yellow faces turned up to greet the sky.

At the end of the track the 18th-century farmhouse sits solidly in the lee of a stand of oaks, its stone walls giving off an aura of permanence. A shaggy German shepherd eyes us without moving from the shade of a rusting red tractor, itself surrounded by bits of old plough, cast aside like shoes after a long day out. In the yard a muddy Land Rover Defender, the workhorse of the countryside, sits next to a gleaming Range Rover with alloy wheels.

Turning left down a hard mud path—there has been no rain for weeks—we enter a meadow awash with bright yellow creeping buttercups, their petals glistening in the sun. As the dogs leap and bound, jumping over muscular thistles, some almost in purple bloom, my ears fill with the song of a blackbird trickling from a hawthorn hedge entwined with pink dog roses on the start of their journey to become autumn rosehips. Along the base of the hedge is a large patch of tiny-petalled lilac germander speedwell, a useful food source for heath fritillaries, although none of these small but striking orange and brown butterflies are on show today.

At the end of the meadow, an oak stile leads us down a slope into the evergreen wood where the atmosphere immediately changes from bright and breezy to darkly damp. Fir cones crunch underfoot, the new season fronds of ferns gleam in the dim light and the loamy smell of the springy woodland floor fills my nose. Hanging on tree branches and looped across the ferns a myriad of spiders’ webs sparkle in the shafts of sunlight. In the brown gloom the dogs turn from silly to sensible, trotting along the path with purpose in their legs.

We soon emerge blinking into the brightness of open scrubby area full of new growth. Four years ago this patch was a wood of Douglas firs until a storm hit and felled almost all the trees into an impenetrable pile of trunks and branches. Now cleared, the area is regenerating; brackens are uncurling their summer tendrils skywards, the branches of tiny beech trees are thickening and scrubby gorses glow yellow. A tree stump in the sun beckons and I sit awhile, the dogs lying at my feet, watching a common blue butterfly darting here and there, landing momentarily on a clover flower, still for a second in the sun before flitting off. Overhead a buzzard glides lazily on a thermal current looking for prey, its mewing call hanging in the air.

After a few minutes the terrier decides it is time to move and we start along the side of the field that leads to the lake in the deciduous woods. Last year the field was grass and its gentle rise was the perfect place for a good gallop on the Big Lad. Now it is planted with oilseed rape; the yellow flowers rolling like a bright sea towards the horizon. As the terrier trots steadily on and the pup leaps in and out of the undergrowth on the trail of rabbits, I notice that the white flowers of the blackthorns have already turned into tiny sloes: it will be October before they are ready to be picked and made into next winter’s supply of sloe gin—providing the birds don’t eat them all first.

As I wander along admiring clumps of pink herb-robert vying for space amid a carpet of dandelions my eye is caught by a glint of copper in the new oak leaves above my head. There, perched on a leaf is a Beautiful Demoiselle, a stunningly handsome damselfly with gauzy brown wings like delicately folded silk and a gleaming metallic blue-green abdomen and thorax. The Beautiful Demoiselle (pictured below) and the more common Banded Demoiselle are the UK’s only two species of damselfly with coloured wings and live by water; with its streams and lake the local area is the perfect habitat.

The lake is home to Canada and greylag geese, grey herons, mallards, moorhens and coots. I am lucky, a heron is standing long-legged and motionless on a log at the water’s edge and I watch for a few minutes before it flies off on lazy wingbeats, its feet trailing neatly behind. In the silence it is hard to believe that this area was once a flurry of industrial activity; beside the lake is the remains of an iron-age furnace, which produced cast iron, tools and cannon from local ore, charcoal and water power in the 17th and 18th centuries. Today a pair of mallards puddle among mossy rocks in the stream, the dark green head of the male glinting in the shafts of sunlight cutting through the trees.

In the cool shade the last of the bluebells—the scented English variety, not Spanish invaders—cling to their colour. Then as the woodland starts to thin out I spot an orange tip butterfly whirling along the cow parsley in search of a reclusive all-white female. Orange tips are notoriously hard to photograph because they rarely settle for more than a whisker of time; despite having my camera at the ready, my ambition of photographing one is not going to be realised today.

The final furlong of the walk is through open meadows full of surprised-looking newly-shorn sheep and fattening sturdy lambs. The terrier and pup, tired now, succumb to their leads without question and we plod over the hard ground looking forward to home and a cooling drink. The squawking harsh cry of pheasants rings out from the depths of the hedge as a wood pigeon coo coos its constant call from a sycamore. In the deepening afternoon light a medley of insects fizzes in the air. Then with a rush and a swoop, a glint of blue, a hint of red and a dancing forked tail, a swallow makes its entrance, curving through the warm air as it plucks its insect supper from the sky; a fitting finale to a glorious wealdland walk.

Helena Douglas is a writer based in the depths of West Sussex and the author of the Land Rover column for More Intelligent Life. The pictures are hers.