Spring

March

Stage five

Haslemere to Witley, 12km

The calendar Spring started on 1 March although the Equinox isn’t for another three weeks. This was a radiant Spring day and my last walk as a 62-year-old. I have been looking forward to Spring since this journey began in December and today’s walk felt like the seasons’ turn of the wheel.

Yellow in the hazel catkins like glowing chandeliers, yellow daffodils trumpet the new growth and a few yellow celandines like shining yellow stars in the green grass. The birds know it is Spring too and even the blackbird sports a yellow beak to call his territory.

These are the days I love to be out in the country, feeling the warm sunshine on my face and seeing the land come to life. Everything feels refreshed and full of new energy. It is the annual exuberance of renewal when nature commits to the year ahead.

I walk through metal-making country full of old furnace names and ponds. The woods of the Weald were burnt for charcoal to make cannon for the Tudor and Stuart wars. This landscape was once an industrial heart-land where iron ore, water for power and wood for fire met. Now the land is quiet and lush, with carefully restored Tudor buildings and pond bays of wildfowl.

I leave the Spring idyll and step into a place where the energy of new life has drained away. Into hostile territory as I take a footpath through the woods with signs that warn of “Extreme Danger” and firearms in constant use. I cross the railway and beyond is a felled wood, deep in sticky mud, with fallen barbed wire fences and I am glad I only have to walk through, and not fight for, this terrain.

Then into the sandy country once more, and the first flowering blackthorns celebrate the sunshine and a new year’s walking ahead.