In Lower Wharfedale, there are new kinds of silences everywhere. Around Beacon Hill, on the Chevin, the seismic roar of aircraft booming off to Edinburgh or Alicante from the airport nearby has given way to the white noise of a sunny heath in April; a silence textured with the bee-charged buzz of a goat willow, the delicate song of a dunnock, or the soft gloops of mating frogs in a pond. Along the verdant stretch of the Wharfe near Otley Mills, where peace is usually eclipsed by the rush of traffic on the A660, birdsong glitters in the fresh green trees like sun in a stream, and a dipper alerts me to its presence with the tiniest of chirps.
Today, in the high pastures to the north of Otley, the Harrogate road is so empty that I could safely nap on it, and the silence up here is big and breezy, with buzzards mewing and curlew calls bubbling up from the hazy fields below. You can hear these things usually, of course, but in this strange world of light traffic and unblemished skies, the clarity of it all feels like hearing with new ears; the lockdown has brought a wild quiet to populated places.
I don’t mean to suggest this horrible coronavirus situation has done us a favour by turning the countryside into a prelapsarian paradise. The silence can also be eerie and strange, or mask an underlying hostility.
Huge construction fencing has been put across the right of way that runs alongside Lindley Wood reservoir, not far from the town of Otley. Residents in Clifton, just outside it, have put up “locals only” signs around the public road running through the village and berated passing exercisers. Fearful, ugly and unneighbourly sentiments have occurred nationwide of late.
A little later, the path goes close to an elderly farmer working in a field. I approach tentatively, but my caution is misplaced; we chat amiably about the weather, and she laughs at my careful, fretful use of the gate. It is an ordinary, gentle encounter with a stranger, and I am excessively grateful for it.
