Many men toiled under the direction of Victorian engineers with spirit-level eyes to lay down a flat track for wheels bigger than mine. They dug mini valleys and raised micro hills to make the cuttings and embankments that drove a railway through this gently undulating landscape.
The smoke and sparks are long gone from this little branch line out to Bedford, leaving a serene cycle path for easy riders, who can pedal without having to push too hard.
We should be grateful for the high causeway that bears us on solid ground above the rough-coated horses grazing the stream-threaded meadows beneath. And we can marvel at the ingenuity and improvisation of those who built a bridge bolted with button-headed rivets to carry us over the River Ivel. How, I wonder, did horses and carts transport the bridge’s iron girders on a roadless route through the sucking soil of marshy clay?
On a bike with no lights, I waited until first light before setting off. For me, it was a track towards somewhere, but for territorial birds the line marked a physical boundary. On either side of the great divide, two song thrushes had been beguiled by mild weather over the Christmas break to open their throats. In full voice, they played out a north bank/south bank competition, trading notes instead of blows on slopes that had filled with bushes and trees since the line’s abandonment more than half a century before.
Days after that holiday visit, I rose off my saddle to see the south bank bird emboldened to hop up from where I had seen him before, a half-concealed perch on an ivy-clad trunk, to lodge among the exposed topmost branches of the same tree. There he sat, the king of the jingle, throwing out phrase after phrase. Like all of his kind, this male song thrush was a sampler, pitching snatches of songs that never developed into full melodies, but with such vigour and volume it was as if nature’s microphone were in his beak. His “sing as if it’s spring” exuberance was matched today by three rival birds on both sides of the track, producing not so much a chorus as a collision of voices.
