Country Life
Traveller's joy
Peter Quince
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It is a very good time of year to get about the country on one's legs. Even more than the first bland days of spring, these restless, changeable autumnal days pull at one to be out and about. The year seems to be breaking up into fragments before the final collapse into winter. The whirling winds throw left-over bits of summer across the landscape, all blue sky and warm air; then an early patch of winter arrives, chilly and grey; and in the space of a day the earth spins through the calendar. As the trees sway, and the leaves pelt across the ground, the general bustle and restlessness intrude themselves upon the most orderly lives.
From my window I watch the rooks tumbling in the gusty air above their nests, like a horde of demented acrobats; they are enough in themselves to make one itch to be outdoors. They are enough for me, at any rate. I don't know how many hours of agreeable ambling around this parish, when I might have been more dutifully employed indoors. I owe to them.
They are not alone in their air of high spirits. When I had walked through their wood up to the hilltop fields, escorted on the way by much unnecessary cawing, I came across a huge congregation of plover in a field of winter wheat. They too seemed :to have endless energy to spare. Long before I was near enough to justify any alarm, they rose from the ground, one or two getting up first, followed by a gathering throng until the entire, multitude of plover, many hundreds of them, were airborne.
My path lay along two sides of the field. As I moved along, for perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes in all, the cloud of birds remained overhead, each one performing spirited and unnecessary aerobatics as if in fully independent flight, although the whole flock stayed bound together by I know not what means of communication.
The sun shone on the bright fruits of the hedges. I picked and ate a blackberry or two. November was more than halfway through, and here were our hedges still stocked with b!,ickberries. (Not very sweet nim must in .honesty admit.) No wonder there were swarms of' small birds, finches and sparrows and tits and blackbirds and many more, clustering along the juicierlooking hedgerows.
The hedges were all swathed and festooned with that delightful whiskery creeper called ' Old Man's Beard.' Clematis oitalba. It occurred to me that I had been on the move for a couple of hours or so and at no point, I think, had I been out of sight of a fine display of this hedgerow familiar. It has, of course, another name, rather more poetic — 'Traveller's Joy ', so called by some anonymous genius of antiquity precisely because it adorns the hedges by the wayside, to the pleasure of the travelling man. It seems most apt that this season
• which tempts us to stretch our ,egs across the countryside should also produce Traveller's Joy in unlimited quantities.
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