A Love Letter to Wiltshire
This is a piece written for radio. It was featured on BBC Radio Wiltshire, for BBC Upload for their 2021 Valentine’s themed A Love Letter to Wiltshire.
It started as all good love stories start, in the spring, as the warming breeze whipped its way through the first blooms of wildflowers. Yellow-headed daffodils nodded their approval, and blessings were granted from the bluebells that cast lilac hues in woodland shade. It grew with the skylark’s song and by midsummer when the lanes blushed pink with red campion, I blushed back. This love had settled. By the time autumn came and leaves changed from green to rust and threatened to fall, my love clung on. And even, in the bare-branches of winter, when the frost bit hard and the mud grew thicker, it did not disappear, or wilt, or threaten to vanish. My love held firm.
I am not Wiltshire born and bred. There is no moonraker made in me, but I have fallen for it. I often come to sit on a hill near the county lines, where I can make out my old home of Hampshire on the horizon. I trudge up the steep incline in all seasons, with the wildflowers, with the falling leaves and with the sting of winter winds. The counties spread wide before me, reaching in opposite directions as red kites sail on wide wings like ships at sea. But I now turn to the sweeping downs and staggered copses for home. Back turned on Hampshire I face the expanse of my new love, rural Wiltshire. And I like to think, that since that day I slipped from one county to the other, that it has welcomed me in.
And since then, since I first fell in love in the summer 7 years ago, I have continued to fall deeper. A love founded in the wilds of Wiltshire, that in summer smell of dry, high heat, when the moons are made larger and redder by the drifting dust of harvest. And in the winter are still, almost silent save for the quiet whisper of a chalk stream carving its way across the countryside. There is much to love here. I love it because it calls me deeper. To explore, to follow my feet along the old drove roads ushering along stone chats as I go, or disturbing sparkling clusters of linnets from crops. I love it because it calls me to stop, to look deeper, to notice the white rumps of roe deer that skirt along the hedgeline, or the passing scent of fox from road to copse. I love it because it is a landscape that encourages me to discover; to think on earthworks and barrows and all the stories they carry beneath their chalky skin. But most of all I love it because it welcomes, it quietly accepts and shows you its secrets, regardless of your heritage. I feel welcomed by Wiltshire, welcomed by its mesmerizing landscape.
My love affair, the one that started in the spring to a soundtrack of skylark song, still pulls at me with the same intensity in which it began. When I’m here it drags me from my desk. Insisting I finish work early. Beckoning me to walk up that steep hill with the red kites and the big skies. And when I’m not here, I’m thinking of it; of the downs, and the animals, and those drove roads that cut high above the landscape, my feet twitching for their familiarity.
And like all good love stories it strengthens with the seasons and knowing. One that promises to be here for many Springs to come.
