At the beginning of the walk, there’s this blue sky, criss crossed with white vapour trails. Two cows in a field, lying down on the top of a knoll, a grassy knoll, or a knowe or even – a wold maybe – but that comes later. It is one of those special days – with sunlight, blue skies, stillness, a slight haze in the air so that sounds are dampened & elongated just a little, just enough to change the atmosphere, setting, awareness of what you are experiencing into the heightened consciousness of actor and witness of action, so your life turns into a film. You are acting and feeling, and watching too.
The attention – so often only half aware of surroundings, half absorbed in a different set of circumstances, an imagined conversation, a memory of what someone said once, years ago, and thinking of what I could have said, how I should have responded – meanwhile outside the bus the landscape rolls past, familiar, just a backdrop really – did I tell you most of my life takes place on bus journeys is it surprising that I dream constantly of looking for a bus route, bus stop, missing a bus, getting on the wrong bus, going the wrong way, not being allowed on a bus or a train because I have inexplicably forgotten my passport….
The attention is entirely held and that is what makes the difference. The witnessing awareness is here too – and there are swallows on the telephone wires.
Like a bird on the wire, ….. I have tried in my way, to be free.
(from Leonard Cohen)
The road is bordered by trees – beech, sycamore, larch. And we are watched by – first by starlings and rooks and later, by swallows. Several cyclists pass us, dressed without exception, in elegant figure-hugging lycra shorts and colourful tops. We wave cheerfully, they wave, say hallo, swish past us, and all in this stillness and sunshine. No cars at all. Maybe one or two. Once, a quad bike, with a passenger dog on the back, gazing forward, impeccable balance, pure canine delight.
An old house I mean truly old, slates sliding off the roof, which has a caving-in look to it. A local resident tells us it has been like that for the 40 years he’s lived there. A handful of cottages opposite the deserted decaying house, make me think of sand tossed down onto the earth, a handful, like a scatter of jewels that cling together.
Then there’s a wood beyond the house and a pathway worn through the wood, a small stream with a 4-log-wide bridge thrown over it. Two of the logs creak ominously and I put my weight on the ones that don’t give underfoot, that feel more solid, even if they have deep cracks running through them, they don’t sink downwards when you place your feet on them. But in this wood there are lots of fallen trees and no birdsong & I want to retrace steps, go back to the road and the sunlight and the occasional cyclist whizzing past like an arrow of fortune, twinkling rear red lights receding into distance.
The view is the destination, so I decide. We both agree and climb a hill with no name, C pausing to rest half way up. The view is to the north, to the invisible city of Edinburgh, to the Firth of Forth and the sea, also invisible, but this view expands and extends, misty Pentland hills to the west, misty Arthur’s Seat to the east, a tiny hardly discernible hump, and east of it, a whitish rectangle which C thinks could be a cruise ship in the sea, as the firth of sea travels inward and can appear to be an extension, from this distance, of the hill. The whitish blob could also be a tower block. Or, I say, it could be a cliff, like the whitish cliffs of Dover or Dieppe or those found all over the south of France, in profusion. France has them all, everything in fact and here we have nothing, I say. But a splendid view, blurry with haze and idle speculation.
From the hilltop, turn left, to meet up with a track downhill. And on the edge of a field of ripe-to-perfection oats, a light breeze whispers through the yellow stalks and rattles the dry husks like the gods’ messengers rustling through the oak trees of Dodona.
On either side the river lies, Long fields of barley and of rye, That clothe the wold* ...what’s a wold asks C, a gentle slope I say ….and meet the sky* – and the yellow oats do meet the blue sky at the top of the wold only, annoyingly, there’s 3 or 4 chunky wind turbines, not the biggest ever but big enough to destroy Tennyson’s pastoral image of barley/rye/oats-clad wolds through which ....the road runs by, To many-towered Camelot.* 
Here, there is peace, solitude. And then a faint sound as two range rovers approach, driving slowly up the track. The drivers wave, in passing. A wooden signpost tells us in one direction lies Middleton, in the other, Heriot. Cattle graze in bucolic bliss, in the valley.
And still, there is no sound of traffic. A short avenue of beech trees. More cows and calves, who stare then move away. Ah yes and when we stopped for roadside lunch and coffee, some cows behind a thick beech hedge but not so thick we couldn’t peer at each other in mutual curiosity. The long slow slurp of cattle drinking from the water trough.
The keening sound of a buzzard above the cattle in the valley. A field full of thistles, the ariel flight of thistle and willowherb down, and the bright flight of red butterflies and a white one.
All in this specialness of sound and stillness and beech-hedges and time slowly turning and twisting and not being at all the way time usually is, a procession, this was a curious mixture, like a great cosmic bowl of sky & light & thistledown & stars we cannot see, all being stirred and here we are, within the Milky Way, seen only on rare winter nights this band of luminosity, pink-tinged and violet and indigo and ever twinkling in the night sky. This, the outermost band of the star dusted container of where we live, our galaxy, our place of belonging, our home.
* The Lady of Shalott, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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