Thirty years on from the impassioned action of the road protests, the Newbury bypass soars above us on the old railway embankment. I can’t entirely accept it even now, having been part of the campaign. Today, walking in The Chase, the nature reserve that lies adjacent, the roar of traffic slips into a background hum, aided by other memories I’ve built up here.
Many of those have been with my dearest friend, Sarah. She volunteers as a “cow watcher” for the National Trust, and I’ve come with her as she checks their whereabouts and wellbeing. They are conservation grazers; keeping coarser scrub in check, spreading seed and poaching areas, and encouraging greater biodiversity and plantlife.
The reserve was once common land, with a sheepwash and blanket mill that gave this village its name, Woolton Hill. It was enclosed for hunting in 1819 and eventually became a National Trust property in 1944.
It’s also been my playground. I remember trees like spilled pencils after the great storms of 1987 and 1990, and later more felled trees when it was clipped by the Newbury bypass; I was pulled down from the branches, flicking cable ties into chainsaws to jam them up. Sarah and I recall devastating sewage spills that killed invertebrates, fish, lampreys and native crayfish.
But we also remember coming with our children, losing boots, falling (or simply lying down) in the streams; “welly walks” with grandparents, watching great spotted woodpecker chicks fledging from a hole in a Corsican pine, waiting for otters in the alder carr, and following silver-washed fritillary butterflies.
Sarah tracks the cattle on her app, via a collar round the neck of Colchis, one of six hardy black, red and white Shetland cows with upswept horns. We wade across a stream to find them grazing among wild daffodils and golden saxifrages.
Our circuit complete but our chat not yet done, we agree to meet at the garden centre cafe. Thanks to the brain fog I’ve been bemoaning, I head in error to the pub. When I eventually get to the garden centre, I follow the zigzag caterpillars of peaty-black mud from Sarah’s boots across the polished floor of the cafe. Apologising, I add my own, with a little jus of cow muck.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024, is available now at guardianbookshop.com
