The sun shines, I have a spare hour, and I feel drawn to climb a hill. I don’t feel like driving so I head out the door and just start walking. The nearest hill borders the town on one side, and the sea on the other. Today I’ll be walking along its landside. I have a hankering for birdsong.
I pass through thickets of beech, sycamore, holly and hawthorn, their different densities and canopy heights echoing the chatter of birds in different and exciting ways. A wide-leafed grass dominates the path here. Possibly a garden escapee, I’m uncertain. But as the breeze wafts their translucent blades in and out of the sunshine, they light up a brilliant green, as though activating a bioluminescence.
Soon, the path leaves the cover of leaf and opens out onto the jawline of the hill, following a patinaed dry-stone wall for a mile or so. Striding along, I glance at miniature worlds of slate, granite, mudstone, all encrusted with lichen principalities. I remove the loupe from my pocket and take a moment to explore a particularly inviting patch of lichen. I hold the lens to my eye and enter a microscopic realm – a symbiotic cityscape of tubers and puckers. Competing strains of lichen push up against their neighbours, testing their resolve. Lichens are excavators. They are mining colonies. They cover about 8% of the world’s landmass, extracting and processing minerals and nutrients directly from the rocks they live on.
Beyond these nation-state stones, I look over into the fields, where sheep feed their gambling lambs – not so small now as they were in April. Or as gentle, as they butt with their heads to coax out the milk. A watchful mother eyes me with suspicion, and I move on.
At the base of the wall, I notice a small, football-sized boulder, speckled with moss. It’s home to a lone frond of fern. Proportioned just so, the ensemble reminds me of a bonsai diorama. On a different scale, I could be looking at a granite prominence, topped with grass and a Scots pine.
A little further along, and a metallic blue glint snags my eye. I look down, and there is a large Dor Beetle, stranded on its back. These are one of my favourite black beetles. Handsome, with a beautifully balanced form, and sporting a tactile, sculptured carapace. It’s underbelly shivers with iridescence, blue to purple in the sunlight, and its little legs wave at me in slow motion. I wonder how long it would have taken to right itself, in the full sun, were no-one here to help.
Carefully I turn it over and set it on its way again. For the briefest of moments, two paths, and two lives, intersect. I watch it reach the safety of the grassy threshold of the heath before I carry on, wondering what other adventures it might have today. I wish it well and continue.
I climb upward. Steeper now. The kind of steep that works your buttocks, and makes you breath heavily. My mouth feels dry, and I wish I had brought water. As things level out, I can breath through my nose once more, and I’m hit by the heady sweet scent of a hilltop dusted with flowers and sun-warmed grasses. Delicious. I crouch down to take a closer look at some tormentil. I have reawakened my sense of smell over the last couple of years, and now I delight in sampling the unending array of aromas that wildflowers offer. So there I am, on hands and knees, bottom in the air, hoping no other hikers come my way, trying to drink in these tiny yellow blooms. A delicate smell. A background note that reminds me of honey.
Up here, away from civilisation. Immersed in the rhythms and cadences of nature. This is when I am at my most mindful. Where my being seems at once alert, excited, and yet blissfully relaxed. I let out a contented sigh.
Up on the hillside, the sky is immense, and it dominates my sense of environment. Miles and miles of blue real-estate all about me. Above my head, towering white clouds cruise past at thirty knots, criss-crossing at different altitudes, navigating their way around the world. Down below, the ground recedes from my feet and rolls away down the hill. A vale of woods and farmland extends away west, until the distant hills of north and south rise up in a pincer movement, escorting the flatlands right across to the other side of the island.
This continuous central valley was formed because of a major fault line that slices the island in half. Boggy, marshy, willowy – we call this scrubland the curraghs – and it’s a wonder to explore. This valley is less than 50 metres above sea level, so if the geological history had unfolded ever so slightly differently, this beloved island might have easily been two.
Somewhere nearby, I hear snooker balls clashing. No, its my daughters messing with pebbles on the beach. Blending expertly into the heathland with their orangey breasts and brown balaclavas, stone chats trick me with their calls. Time and again, I’m fooled into thinking that some invisible creature is knocking two small stones together. The likeness is uncanny. Elsewhere, meadow pippits chirrup and dart, and chirrup and dart, skirting over the tangles of fresh heather or tufts of spiny grass.
Bees and butterflies drift along with the sea breeze, barely in control of their trajectory. They skid over the land hoping to intersect with some stem or stamen to cling onto. How they hope to snag a flower, I have no idea. Every few seconds a drone careens past my face with the whine of a miniscule motorcycle. A 0.000001 horsepower engine. I worry for them sometimes. How many run out of moorland and get wafted out to sea?
I look at my watch. Oh my! It’s time to get back. I have just enough time to soak in this glorious scene. Here I stand, at the very peak of the hill. About my eyeline is my beautiful island, a ruffled quilt of green. About my ankles, the low-growing heather that sheaths the highlands. Above me, an umbrella of blue – the heavenly dome that makes me feel so small. And off to my left, the royal blue of the sea extends into the infinite, melting into the softer sky like bands of blended oil pastel.
I empty my mind of all thoughts, so that I might pour every drop of the now into my awareness and experience it fully. Sometimes I manage it well. And, like the sea and the sky, I can”t quite tell where I end and the living, breathing landscape begins. It’s a wonderful feeling – to smudge my outline, and feel at one. Just for a moment.
Newsletter: About nature, mindfulness and happiness
Want to come for a walk? Join me as I explore the natural world and describe to you the fascinating things I find.
Slow down, escape your troubles, and let me whisk you away to somewhere calm…
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