Today was another almost cloudless blue day and I decided to revisit an old friend of a route. Taking the path across the field from the A1071 just outside Boxford, I turned right at the bottom of the hill and followed the bridle path up the slow, wide slope towards Bower House Tye. From there, I turned left up the "tunnel path" to the Boxford-Kersey road.
The very start of true summer and greens are glowing everywhere: blue-green of growing wheat, bright lime green of maturing barley, parched yellow-greens of the short grass (there has been no rain for a couple of weeks now), silver greens of the poplars. They are just starting to drop their fluffy, sneeze-inducing seeds, which look like cumulus clouds that have shrunk in the wash.
The tunnel path has no flowers lining it now - the bluebells and primroses are long gone and the cow parsley is beginning to solidify into dull green seed heads where the cream-coloured starbursts used to be. I followed the road through Wickerstreet Green, so deep in thought (most of it following angry and pointless loops around the absurdity of the Covid 19 situation), that I didn't actually notice where I was until I passed the seemingly indestructible "Say No to the EU" poster, nearly half a decade on and still attached to an innocent oak tree, just before the footpath off to the right. I gallumphed on down it, past the farmyard on the left, past the guinea fowl and the resident peacock, who shook me from my gloomy thoughts by "EEE-AAAHH"-ing very suddenly and loudly. I was grateful to him: he was taking sense.
Following the road round the corner to the right, I took the footpath on the left, past the scene of Walnutgate (I won't go into that one again, but suffice it to say that it was once a story involving a nut-tree and an unknown thief, who may well have had four legs and a fluffy tail and been entirely unable to read the savage notice which appeared following the incident). I almost missed the hidden turning on the left into the trees today as it has become so obscured by the frenzied growth spurt of May.
After admiring the view across to Kersey church from the high point beyond the trees...
I passed the strange plantation of bird-cover shrubs on the right and followed the path down the hill to the little stream at the bottom of the valley. The wooded part of the path was magical today, with the brilliant sunshine daubing splashes of yellow and gold on the undergrowth.
Along the valley path and up: steep, then steeper, then steeper still until you think you've suddenly been transported to the Lake District, before the path flattens out and shows you an uninterrupted view of Kersey on one side and fields to infinity on the other.
Back to the A1071 and across into Coram Street, I took the path on the right which is now surfaced with moon rock (well, that's what it looks like). It used to be a pick-your-squelchy-way sludge of mud in winter and stumble-among-concrete-hard furrows in the summer. Now it is an easy walking route, with an inevitably growing number of walkers and their dogs. The monotony of the cinder track was relieved by a perfect garland of ivy which looked as though it had been carved by Grinling Gibbons.
At the four-way crossroads, I took the path marked Hadleigh Heath, diagonally to the right, and through the hedge on to the track at the end. I had intended to follow the path along the tops of the fields, parallel to the road, but again I was too deep in thought and had turned left on to the road before I noticed. A handsome black horse was trotting up and down an invisible line in a field in the distance, presumably an electric fence. He seemed like a personification of the current situation; a world of artificial and arbitrary barriers which nobody seems capable of challenging. The electric fence was probably not even plugged in.
I crossed the road towards the quarries, past the red farmhouse and left along the footpath past a miniature pony and his sheep companions. Over the footbridge and across the flinty field beyond it, I turned right towards the gardens of Polstead Heath, a secret pathway leading over a small stream, past an unexpected and quite large pond, overhung by weeping willows. I followed the narrow path, being snatched at by brambles and looking out for grass-snakes, back on to the Polstead Heath road.
Left along the road, then right down a path through a hedge and over two more dry and cracked fields until I can turn right again and out on to Potash Lane. It, too, is a tunnel now, with the foliage meeting overhead, filtering the sunlight like a series of sieves.
Back on to the road through the houses at Polstead Heath, I turn right today, past White House Farm with its beautiful Elizabethan-style knot garden. It brings back memories: I tried to create one of those once and made the mistake of planting a fuller's teasel. It was a fearsome beast, full of sharp thorns, but I thought it would look sculptural. It did. So did the countless millions of its offspring which promptly rampaged through every border and every crack in every paving stone in what was a very large garden. One even found its way into the lathe and plaster of the sitting-room wall. There is a patch of fuller's teasels in Edwardstone which seem to snigger at me when I walk that way - perhaps its legacy reached even there.
Back on to Holt Road, I walk towards home, zig-zagging from side to side to keep to the outside of the sharp bends so as to avoid close encounters with oncoming vehicles and flying cyclists.
This is a walk I have done many times before, at all times of the year. It might be the same route, but like every walk, each time it is a different story.
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