My very own Silent Spring in summer

Hubby and I have just come home from a mini-break somewhere in Warwickshire. I didn’t enjoy some aspects of it as much as I thought I would. The reason for some disappointments – rudeness –was obvious, but others it took me until I got home to realise why.

We went ‘up-north’ as Hubby called it (he’s a ruddy geographer for crying our loud, but I reckon his Southern upbringing trumps that) for a special cycle event with his mates and dinner on the Saturday night.

Not knowing his cycling buddies, not knowing anything about cycling, not wanting to know anything about cycling, and not really being attracted to the county, I was wondering why I agreed to go … Because I’m a dutiful wife, that’s why! If I’m not defending his honour against the likes of Fearful Sharkey and his Snivelling Sycophants, or the Gobby Guardian and its Regurgitating Rabble, I’m by Hubby’s side, smiling sweetly (well...) and making polite (well...) conversation.

The day he was playing bikes, he left the hotel early, so I went into breakfast on my own. I stood in the entrance to the dining room where a waitress had her back to me while she was laying a table. Slowly. She eventually finished – good – and, without looking over her shoulder to see if anyone was waiting to be seated, she went off to the far end of the room to collect more cutlery. I was just about to cough loudly, when the head waiter appeared, but he proceeded to lay napkins on tables before attending to an increasingly hungry and bad-tempered guest. He pointed to the table next to the door, expecting me to sit there. It was, as I said, next to the door where everyone coming into and going out of the dining room would gawp at me; there were at least 25 other suitable tables available, several in the sunny bay window overlooking the formal gardens.

“Please can I sit in the sunny bay window overlooking the formal gardens?” I asked.

“Go on then,” he said sullenly, and waved his arm roughly in that direction and walked off. “Coffee please,” I yelled after him.

Breakfast over and done with, I donned my walking boots, grabbed my knapsack and OS map and set off towards the kissing gate and the local hills. Through the gate, I quickly ascertained that the map was useless. There were trails going off in all directions, criss-crossing like crazy, and it was impossible to tell which were the official ones. There were no arrows to make it any easier.

Unperturbed, being a canny Northerner used to walking in fog, snow, and lack of arrows, I worked out from the contours roughly where I wanted to go, and followed my nose, expecting to come across agricultural fields, copses, stiles or other such clues to keep me in the right direction. It worked pretty well for about 20 minutes. Then the well-worn trail petered out and I had a choice of left, right, straight-on and everything in-between. The OS map suggested that if I kept to the thicket along the edge of the golf course, I’d come to a road that I could cross and pick up a field trail to a forest. Sounds like a plan.

I soon walked past the clubhouse, past the carpark, down the driveway and onto the verge by the road. But the promised trail across the road was nowhere to be seen. I studied the map for a while, and thought I might have walked through the ‘wrong’ golf course. There were several of them in a small area. Choosing discretion over valour, I decided the safest course of action was to retrace my steps back to where the well-worn trail had petered out. I got to outside the clubhouse and Wham! Bam! No thank you, Ma’am.

I was brusquely asked, “Are you staying at our hotel?”

The obvious riposte would have been, “What’s it to you?” but instead I said, “No.”

“Where are you staying?”

“Somewhere else.”

“Where are you going?”

“For a walk.”

“I can’t let you onto the golf course.”

“Well I’ve just come from there and am now retracing my steps.”

“Health and Safety.” Aw crap! “It’s too dangerous with all those golf balls flying around.”

The temptation was to point out that members of his golf club can’t be very good then. But I didn’t. He continued, “You should have kept to the public right of way.”

“I meant to, but the trails aren’t well marked and there was no sign to tell me I couldn’t come this way.”

“That’s not my problem.”

“Oh, yes it is!” Gloves were off now. “If you don’t want people to wander onto your golf course you ought to put up proper signage. Don’t lecture me about health and safety. I do risk assessments for the RNLI!”

That sounds good but it’s for small-scale fundraisers, not the bright orange boats themselves. He didn’t know that, and choked for a few seconds before his misogynistic ego kicked in again.

“You should have stuck to the public footpath.”

“I thought I was. Stop lecturing me and start being helpful by advising me how to get back to the woods over there.”

“Down the driveway, along the road then right up the dirt track.”

“So walking along a busy, winding, poorly sighted road with no pavement is safer than walking under a thick canopy of trees along the edge of a golf course?”

“That’s not my prob…”

“Yeah, yeah. Thanks for your help, eventually, and your courtesy – not.”

Off I walked with my head held high and my butt waggling away in tight jeans.

I did eventually get back to where I wanted to be and spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon following my nose. Normally I enjoy that sort of walk but today I was quite bored. The views were glorious, the weather perfect for brisk walking, but everywhere I went, I couldn’t avoid traffic noise. Not in your face, but incessantly in the background.

And there was something else.

Dinner that evening was actually more enjoyable than I thought it would be. I expected the cyclists to talk about brake pads, punctures and energy drinks, but that only happened in the last 30 minutes, by which stage I’d had so much wine, I was ready for my bed regardless.

The next day, I drove home while Hubby cycled home. I got out of the car and was immediately bombarded by swallows. I took the suitcases inside and went into the kitchen to make a cuppa and smiled at a pied wagtail hopping over my car roof. Then a sparrow hawk perched on the fence on the opposite side of the lane. The penny dropped. I’d hardly seen any birds during my walk the day before. Maybe a couple of pigeons and a magpie, but that was it.

I wondered if it was because the hills were surrounded on all sides by busy A roads, and I did come across a lot of dogs and their handlers. Of course, golf courses are sterile, manicured, weed-killed, biodiversity deserts, as well as harbours of misogyny. Whereas here? Agricultural. The land Government, planners and developers love to portray as bad for ecology so they can re-wild huge swathes in order to offset flights and housing estates.

My experience reminded me of Rachel Carson’s 1962 seminal work Silent Sprint, in which she linked increasing pesticide use to the precipitous decline in the avian population. Fifty years later, and her work is as pertinent as ever. 

Whether the lack of birds in that corner of Warwickshire is down to roads, golf courses, dogs (vying for dwindling acres of green space) or something else, it’s a humanitarian as much as an ecological tragedy – which is one and the same thing.