A choir of birds flew over Clee Liberty. Their voices sharply urgent, excited. Once perched in a tree all facing north, they fell silent. Apart from a bounding flight and ardent voices, their distinguishing marks were dark streaks that fell across their bodies like the shadows reaching across fields from great oaks in the valley below.
The birds were female linnets, I think, birds that Aristotle could not identify but called Acanthis, after a woman in Greek mythology turned into a bird. Her father’s starving horses attacked and ate her brother Anthus, so Zeus turned the sisters into birds so they would not starve. They could forever feed on seeds of the fields and moors: finch-faced sisters, Acanthis their scientific name.
Around Nordy Bank, the iron age earthwork ring on Clee Liberty common on the Brown Clee hill, the sky was blue but hazy. A skylark launching himself from the centre of the ring soon vanished from sight even though his exultation could be heard from the other side of the haze above. This gave the feeling of being surrounded by an opaque wall: an enclosed world enclosed.
The linnets, once collected for singing in cages, did not stay quiet for long. On an agreed signal, all rose together from the young bare oak tree growing on a more recent earthwork made from quarrying on the common more than a hundred years ago. In perfect synchronicity, the sisters bounded through the cool hazy sky, with voices fresh as rain.
An unkindness of ravens, in twos and threes, left their hunting on Clee Liberty to head west, back to the community of non-breeding ravens on the border. There, in another hillside liberty at Stapeley Common, the wind was blowing strong enough to drown out voices fired up with the coming spring.
Gradually, flinging themselves into the wind before wheeling back into heather around the Mitchell’s Fold stone circle, two stone-flecked, striding-legged, crook-beaked birds struck up the anthem of the hill country: the curlew song of the soul in all its grief and joy. And then there was hope.
Follow Country Diary on Twitter
