and gasped, like a man who’d seen a deer in a skirt. We talked a little about routes we’d enjoyed in the area and he asked me what I did for a living and I tried my best to tell him. He explained that he had made a lot of money from property development, taken early retirement, and his expensive walking equipment was part of his way of spending the inheritance of his offspring, who no longer spoke to him and, in his words, ‘didn’t deserve it’. As if to compound this abrupt, unexpectedly uncomfortable turn the conversation had taken, another walker passed us – a woman in her late twenties clad in a long thick cardigan and bobble hat – and Robert immediately began shouting across to her about my ‘great job’, which I’d in fact just told him was my old job, which I’d emphatically and with a considerable amount of relief quit the year previously. He then instructed her: ‘You need to get with this guy!’ Considering the fact he’d clearly never met her before, what he was saying and the various assumptions it betrayed, her response – to smile awkwardly and step up her pace just marginally as she passed us – was an impressively restrained one. I offered her an awkward smile of my own, which I hoped communicated I do not know this man and am very sorry about the words that keep coming out of his mouth, then made my excuses to Robert and walked on, passing beneath a railway bridge on whose roof grew lichen that looked halfway between stalactites and loft insulation, then up a steep lane to a spot where, the previous year, I’d seen a small, pristine, black rabbit run across the tarmac in my path.
Is there a proper way to be a walker? Apart from showing the fitting amount of consideration to your environment and your fellow humans, I don’t believe there is, and that’s something I like about it. Walking tends to be goal-free in any official sense, yet can be associated with any number of small unofficial personal goals. Some clothes are more practical for it, without doubt, but it’s entirely up to you what you wear. Something that changed about my walking habits between 2015 and 2016 was that I became a bit better at watching and listening, but I don’t think even this represents the ‘right’ way to walk; it’s just something I wanted to try. I wasn’t watching or listening too well the day on the hillside overlooking my house in 2015 when I almost trod on the young badger, or when I saw the back end of that pristine black rabbit disappear into the hedgerow, but I started making a bit more of an effort shortly after that. A few weeks later, I was heading through a kissing gate from a twisting path to a field when I heard a miniscule anguished squeak coming from the bushes behind me: something that, in my previous, less present-aware state, I might not have picked out of the light din in and around a wildflower meadow in midsummer. I slowed down and listened some more, and in under a minute, two furry animals, each not much bigger than one of my feet, locked together, spun onto the path behind me, at least one of them in extreme pain. One of these animals was a young rabbit and the other was a weasel. I’d watched rabbits suffer a few times in the jaws of my cats but this was another level of ruthless. Seeing the nameless dark burning in the weasel’s eyes and the shrieking rabbit in its jaws, I momentarily became the rabbit and the weasel became the headlights.
What happened next astonished me further still: a larger rabbit, bouncing out of the undergrowth and hurling itself at the weasel. There was something deeply, heartbreakingly powerless about the gesture, but it was just enough to break up the original ball of weasel and rabbit. As they separated, all three creatures noticed me for the first time in my static, mesmerised position, not more than eight feet away. The adult rabbit hopped into the bushes, its offspring flopped and writhed behind it, probably mortally injured, until both were out of sight. The weasel made a fast-forward creep in the other direction, pausing and getting on its hind legs for a second to peer at me in a way that suggested it blamed me for everything and was wondering, just for a moment, if nipping over and disabling my spinal cord in punishment was a viable option. I sat quietly on the grass, and five minutes later the weasel re-emerged, scuttling across the path like a cackling villain in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, confirming everything we know about the etymology of the word ‘weasel’. I heard nothing more. I wondered about looking for the young rabbit and putting it out of its misery. I decided not to, not just because such a prospect filled me with dread but because I had no place interfering in any part of this episode. I had been in a slightly fragile state of mind on the day of the weasel’s attack, and for the ensuing twenty-four hours I could not help returning repeatedly to the image of that mother rabbit flinging herself out of the bushes, doing everything in her power to save her offspring, even though what she had in her power was virtually nothing: the impossibly touching, doomed heroism of it. A small part of me wished I’d had my phone with me and filmed it but then I realised I didn’t wish that at all. The Internet just conned me into wishing it, because the Internet knows that humans like to share stuff, and that sharing stuff often comes from a kind place and carries the promise of bringing us all closer, so it gets us all addicted to the process, but leaves us ultimately emptier as a result, hovering in a state of non-presentness, getting nostalgic for stuff that happened barely any time ago that we didn’t even take the time to properly absorb when it did happen, skimming across everything, not quite fully experiencing any of it. But the Internet is also teeming with good intentions and seductive promises, and that is the problem.
Summer Solstice is a punctual visitor whose punctuality, though unvarying, always takes me by surprise. Midsummer’s Day does not really happen in the middle of summer of course, and if it did genuinely mark the midpoint of the warm part of the British year, that would feel desperately unfair, but its arrival always elicits a slight sense of injustice in me: a Hold on! We’ve only just got to the point where all the leaves are green! You can’t start heading in the other direction yet! protest. As I headed home from the site of the weasel attack, this protest rose inside me more acutely than ever. There were signs that the lush party of June in Devon had reached its crescendo: nature’s equivalent of that moment on a night out when you stay out, thinking things will get wilder, and they do, but in an insalubrious way that you regret. Blood-caked bird wings and gristle lay on the path ahead of me. My bare legs had been stung by the towering bully-boy nettles of full-throttle summer, thistles that didn’t have the guts to slag me off to my face. A local foraging expert named Brigit-Anna McNeill – more commonly known as just Anna – had told me recently that the stings were good for you. In which case, I was seven stings healthier than I had been at the beginning of the day.
A forager is much better than me at looking and listening as they walk through the countryside: they see beyond the wall of green that the rest of us see flanking us in midsummer and recognise individual species. My Scythe Fair companion Jay, who cooks a lot of foraged food, regularly walks the paths near my house sampling all manner of leaves and flowers like some kind of mystic ground-level giraffe. I wanted to gain the confidence to do the same so in midsummer 2015 I joined one of Anna’s foraging courses in the grounds of Sharpham House, on the hill above the spot where the river reaches the spectacular peak of its congenital indecisiveness. After only a few hours in a tucked-away corner of the UK’s Deep South West like this with a group of strangers, a strong sense of community sets in: a possibility in the air of being part of a new underground society. To be fair, the particular characters of the day perhaps exacerbated the effect: a towering floppy-haired mushroom expert called Louis who reminded me of the hunky rebel leader Diane Keaton falls for in the futuristic Woody Allen film Sleeper, for example, and a barefoot father–son team called Rainbow and River who constantly seemed to be climbing trees, even on the few occasions when they weren’t. In this environment a sentence such as ‘Look – Rainbow is making a spit poultice!’, which might seem outlandish in most places, becomes normalised suprisingly quickly.
One of the bits of vegetation I ate for the first time on Anna’s foraging course was a thistle. There is a tendency to force your mind open when you eat a thistle, to prepare yourself for it to taste very different to what you expected, but what it tasted like was a thistle. At best you might have said it had overtones of fibrous, angry cucumber, which didn’t work for me as someone who’s always believed cucumber to be redolent of many of the most disappointing aspects of life as a UK citizen. I preferred my first tastes of wood sorrel, mustard leaf, Anna’s nettle tea – which she said had completely cured her hay fever – and hart’s tongue. Ancient wisdom says that hart’s tongue prevents people from having impure thoughts and, sure enough, I did not have any impure thoughts for a whole three hours after eating it, but that might just have been because I had a headache. We also found some lady’s mantle – also known as alchemilla