It's always a pleasure to walk a "new" footpath. Even when it's in an area you already know well, a new footpath is a new angle on familiar landmarks and, although it might not be a Himalayan trek, it's still a new adventure.
Today I walked a circuit around Kersey and found some new points from which to admire its handsome, blue-clocked church tower on its hill. I started from Cox Hill in Boxford, through Wickerstreet Green and William's Green, down into Kersey Vale. Kersey church meets you here from a distance, across a wide, flat valley, then vanishes for a while before reappearing ahead. For the third day running, the sun shone in an uninterruped blue sky, giving the pale colours of early spring a summer-like intensity, the perfect backdrop for the church on its hill.
From Kersey Vale, I followed the track on the right, then left on to a footpath through a disused farmyard. I have walked this path before and enjoyed its atmosphere of gentle abandonment. Since I was last here, Storm Eunice has left its mark. What used to be a delapidated barn is now a pile of rubble, topped by a jumble of corrugated iron roofing.
I followed the footpath down a farm track, which gives another distant view of Kersey church, across a neatly ploughed field, with the old vicarage and its companion cedar tree just beside it, as they have been for centuries.
The path leads on to the road towards Kersey Mill. Here, I turned right and took the next path on the left, along the edge of a field, having first stopped to chat with a kind soul who was busy collecting up the roadside rubbish, apparently thrown from passing cars.
I followed the path across a small footbridge over a stream, then right, across the field and on to the Kersey road. Here, I had planned to walk back towards Kersey, but decided instead to explore a new path on the right, which I had never used before. It revealed a perfect view of the church on its hill, surrounded by more recently ploughed fields, folding over each other like layers of fabric.
The signposts soon ran out, but I found my way round a sharp corner, among some even sharper thorn bushes, and through a small wood. Here, the twiggy branches framed another angle on the church.
Back on the familiar territory of the road, I took the tunnel-like path on the right at the bottom of the hill. To one side of the path is a colonnade of tall poplars, growing in lines, which hints that some day I will find them all reduced to stumps. I always spend some time looking at them, as once they are felled, it will take fifty years at least for the path to look as it does now.
I went through to the edge of a very large field which joins Kersey to Lindsey. This field too had been ploughed and harrowed, so it stretched away like a smooth, brown carpet.
From a lonely and exposed position half-way across this desert, I spotted a tractor, still working the soil. I try to avoid walking through fields when tractors are working, so as not to be a nuisance and get in the way - but also to avoid the unlikely, but alarming prospect of the driver of such a huge, relentless machine being lost in thought and failing to see me. Today, I had no choice but to carry on. My unease was not helped by the fact that all trace of the normal footpath route had been erased, leaving me blazing my own trail across the trackless, brown wilderness towards what I thought might be the entrance to the woods the other side of the field. I missed it by a few dozen metres (Storm Eunice had thrown some severed branches across to disguise it) and I had to retrace my steps along the edge of the field to find the footpath sign. Here, I discovered that the lower ground through the woods was still flooded beyond boot height and the higher, dry ground was still a tumbled mess of storm debris.
After wading knee deep in piles of twigs and new-growth nettles, I made it to the edge of the wood and the continuation of the path up a slight incline, along the edge of a silent, grassy meadow. Here, Kersey church had finally disappeared behind the hill and ahead of me, instead, was the homely, squat tower of Lindsey church.
The footpath leads on to the small byway, which joins the road towards the Lindsey White Rose to the road towards what used to be the Lindsey Red Rose. The silence here was profound and I suddenly realised that the wind was missing. Finally, after weeks of endless blows from the north and east, the day was calm and positively warm. I heard the incongruous call of a distant owl, eerie on a still, warm, sunny, spring morning.
The road to Dove Barn was closed to traffic, thanks to some workmen who were replacing a telegraph pole, so for once there was no interruption to my walk along it. The only sounds came from another wild, overhead dive-bombing contest between a pair of nesting crows and a buzzard which had invaded their air space. It's surprising how often these displays of flying prowess happen - a reminder that the tranquillity of spring is a figment of the human imagination. For the natural world that we enjoy so much at this beautiful time of year, spring means both new life and ancient struggles.
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