Hoots of yaffling laughter are funnelled to us down the old green lane’s dark tunnel of holly. My young son and I stop, look at each other and smile. It is a familiar sound, and we know that if we quietly creep to the light at the end of lane, to the five bar gate hung between megalithic gritstone stoops, we might catch a glimpse of the guffawing green woodpecker on its favourite stag-headed hawthorn.
Stealthy as foxes now, we steal onwards, brushing beside buckler ferns and the last of the burned out bluebells that have illuminated the fringe of the lane these past weeks; ducking under freshly-frothing elder flowerheads; and edging around grasping brambles, where speckled wood butterflies are dancing in the dappled light and towards the end of every summer we are to be found blackberrying.
Another peal of merriment from the woodpecker, with a hint of mockery at our efforts at secrecy, echoes within the arch of honeysuckle-twined hawthorn branches. We inch forwards, through warm, scented shafts of sun and into the cool shade of the largest holly, the one that is reliably the most berry-laden come Christmas, offering decorative seasonal sprays for us and winter fuel for the fieldfares.
A pause in our progress, while my son crouches for a closer look at a hawthorn shieldbug on a wild raspberry. I crane through a gap in the lane’s ragged avenue to the sloping field below. Patched as it is with heather and rabbit-harbouring bramble and a scattering of his favourite young oaks to climb, its former life as a pasture is still apparent in the blush of sheep sorrel, the swaying heads of foxtail and the bowed spires of Yorkshire fog. Bluebells betray its yet more distant past as woodland, to which it will soon return, as so many of these valleyside fields which proved too steep for tractors already have.
Just below us is an ancient charcoal burning platform terraced into the hillside, on which, in a minute, we will sit as we often do and listen to the golden willow warbler song floating up from the hazel coppice; lay on our backs to watch, drifting in the blue, the final flakes of the weeks-long, slow-motion snowstorm of downy goat willow seed; and look across the gulf of our green Pennine valley to butter-yellow hay meadows bubbling with curlew calls.
It is here that we came, years ago after first moving to the valley, along this lane to get to know our new, other-than-human neighbours, and to this view to orient ourselves within our new home ground. It is here that we come, on morning school runs and after-dinner rambles, to read the landscape’s news – the latest badger excavations along their nocturnal network of trails, the combing of the mown hay into windrows ready for baling, the gabble among the clattering trains of jackdaws on the evening commute to their winter roost, the weather coming in over the valley’s wild western headwaters. It is here we nestle ourselves into the terrace and its cushions of heath bedstraw and play I spy with the unchanging, ever-changing panorama of field and farm, wood and moor, and while we do we stretch our legs out next to each other and I measure the bittersweet passing of the years by how much further my son’s boots reach down towards mine.
And it is to here that we trace, every spring, the volleys of laughter from the green woodpecker. Only once before has our fieldcraft – or, rather, our luck – meant that it has remained unaware of our presence long enough for us to admire its splendid, parrot-like plumage. Today, as we take the last steps to the gate, it pitches off its perch and we follow its buttercup-yellow rump as it scuds downhill into the coppice. Its two tones of green, the flesh and skin of an avocado, are a reasonable match for the hazel leaves it believes offer it camouflage. It laughs again, but this time it is not having the last one, for, now settled on our terrace for a snack and a story, we can still see its holly berry-crimson crown, and we smile.
Landscape Story 