Kites soar and circle above the small limestone village mentioned in the Domesday book but rebuilt a little over 200 years ago to a design by Humphry Repton. There is a substantial red kite roost near the village, and 40 of them bring the sky to life with their twists and turns, tails contorting and long wings clawing the air.
Surely there is no other prodigal English species that brings such pleasure. In Repton’s time the villagers may have watched red kites over Laxton, but by 1871 widespread gamekeeping had eliminated the bird in England.
The decline in gamekeeper numbers and softening attitudes towards this carrion feeder created the opportunity for expansion, but Milvus milvus did not take advantage until reintroduced in the 1990s.
We may never know if earlier inhabitants of Laxton mourned the bird’s original demise, but today it is a thriving, widely loved, bird in the Midlands, and were it to disappear again I feel sure local people would be deeply aggrieved.
Above the village to the north is another of the second world war airfields that splatter the landscape. Spanhoe was used by US troop-carrying squadrons at the end of the war and shut down immediately afterwards. One section of runway is now a small airfield from which throaty-engined little planes take to the air. Much of the base has been reclaimed by agriculture, but some concrete roadways remain, enveloped in scrub.
Most interestingly, the central area has been excavated for iron stone and is a thinly soiled, scrubby, rough grassland. It looks good for a summer visit, but is rather quiet on this cool, grey day.
There are no frogs out in the two large shallow pools; however, under a large chunk of asphalt we find more than a dozen smooth newts. They are still torpid, their movements slow and uncomfortable, waiting for the right day to emerge and return to their breeding ponds.
At Wood Hollow, eight fallow does stand watching us from inside the edge of the wood. They are wearing dark, unspotted winter coats, making the single milky straw-coloured leucistic deer among them look even more extraordinary.
