Bugles sang over much of Britain in the middle ages, filling the evening air and listeners’ ears with mournful sounds of aching beauty. Bands of musicians gathered in diverse places whose names still reflect those assemblies: Cranbourne, Carnforth, Carnwich – the crane’s stream, crane’s ford, bog of the cranes. And here, where a Roman road sweeps up to one of the higher points of a low county, I stand on Crane Hill.
A visit to a familiar haunt 500 miles to the east last month has inspired me back to this spot. In faraway Lower Saxony, northern Germany, and through an open bedroom window, came the calls of the dusk buglers, a flock of cranes flying in the half-light to roost, their plaintive cries pitching and rolling in minor keys. So mellifluous are the tones of these aerial troubadours, far more varied than any lusty skein of geese.
Indeed, crane music is embedded in much north European composition; on my way here, I turned on the radio, only to be greeted by some Jean Sibelius. The Finnish composer also wrote Scene with Cranes. Two days before his death, he delighted in hearing again “the birds of my youth”.
But here, today, no cranes call on this clay-capped plateau, no slender-necked birds stalk the thoroughly drained fields of growing wheat. The spinney, with its thrusting bluebell leaves and badger sett, refuses to mutate into squishy alder carr. My medieval predecessors must have walked over this ground with perennially wet feet. Yet only the name of Crane Hill is left today, a vestigial clue to the damp pasture and soggy scrubland that surely drew the flocks here.
My fellow country diarist Mark Cocker’s indispensable Birds Britannica records the crane’s calamitous decline in history, from King John feeding 100 paupers on cranes caught by his falcons on a hunting expedition, to Elizabeth I being offered just a single bird in a banquet laid out 30 miles from here as the crane flies. If they are to come back here, then wetness is key.
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