The climb up Hurstbourne Hill into the sleeping bluebell wood is accompanied by the sound of vehicles straining up the A343 towards Andover, one field away. My boots make a light hollow thump on the chalk. Bullfinches pipe through tight, nascent catkins. A soaring rose briar wobbles like a raised whip over an arched plume of traveller’s joy or bedwine, the feathery globes spaced like bobbled plaits on a horse’s neck.
I think of Farmer Blount’s Tinker. Joseph Blount was a divisive character from this village’s Rookery Farm in the 19th century. A generous employer and friend to the poor (the wall outside his home was known as “wayfarers’ table”), he could be vindictive and unforgiving if crossed. Tinker was his old grey gelding, lent freely as a “trace horse” to help pull loads up the steep hill. At the top, Tinker was unhitched to make his own way back to his stable.
There are hoofprints on the footpath but, to my amusement, they have been made, quite freshly, by a cow – the giveaway curls of chalky turf squeezed up between the toe claws of its cloven hooves. I wonder where it went. At the top of the hill, in Doles Wood, flint rubble rises to the surface, softened only by coppery beech-leaf mulch.
This redundant hazel coppice once supplied trade enough for 20 local hurdle makers of rustic woven fence panels. Now there is the architecture of play: a den’s worth of good sticks against a tree, a rope swing, a precise mandala of beech nuts.
In the valley between this hill and Doiley Hill, the grass-washy steel ribbon of the dual-named River Swift/Bourne Rivulet winterbourne is up and running fast through the pretty village of Hurstbourne Tarrant. The tweedy stripes of no-till stubble, where seed has been directly sown into unploughed ground among last year’s corn stalks, descend to a mix of tiled, solar-panelled, but predominantly thatched, roofs, cantered over by straw hares and foxes. The great thatched barns of Parsonage Farm dwarf the primary school. A gleam spreads over the land from under the low-lidded Hampshire sky, making all the old new. It gilds the thatch, silvers the stream, lights the smoky baubles of bedwine, hides a cow and ignites the gloss on holly and ivy to a shine.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
