The old golf course is being reclaimed by the wild. I’ve nothing against golf, but in a country where around 1,200 sq km of green land – an area not much smaller than the whole of the Peak District – is devoted to the ancient game it’s nice, sometimes, to see the grasses growing long in the fairways and the livid fruiting bodies of Amanita toadstools springing up in the semi-rough. An ancient sign on a beech tree telling us to “Replace Divots” is half-consumed by time, rot and forest damp.
I get wet knees kneeling to inspect an Amanita muscaria, three inches or so across, its red-orange cap as glassy as crème caramel, white spots rinsed away by the rain. It’s toxic, of course, this fairytale toadstool of the beech and oakwoods. Indigenous people in Siberia have long consumed it for its psychoactive properties (often, I gather, after first refining or filtering it through the bladder of an obliging shaman). I’ve already had breakfast; I just admire this one.
The fairways are now flyways. Magpies, cocksure bosses of the lower air, cruise the rough verges of their year-round territories. Overhead the woodpigeons are on the go – because it’s autumn, and everything is on the go, everything’s restless and antsy and either making to leave or already left; everything feels transitory, like I ought to be able to feel the turning of earth beneath my feet, and maybe trot on it for a while, as on a treadmill. I feel, standing on the edge of the forest and the grassland beneath the vast open canyon of sky to the east, in the midst of a great, wild whoosh.
Down at the little lake – which on the oldest maps is a “Fish Pond”, on interwar maps is a “Boating Lake”, and is now pretty much a fish pond again – I watch an unexpected kingfisher tower like a skylark 20-odd feet above the water, before plummeting at a steep angle to smash-and-grab for a minnow and then skim away back to the trees. When I get to the water’s edge, it is clear and the low-sloping October sun throws the small shadows of small fish on the greenish silt of the pond bottom.
