Ridgeway in early summer
The chalk path was the colour of bleached bone, bright enough to sting the eyes under a clear-blue June sky. Murphy trotted far ahead — black tail flagging above thyme and rock-rose — as I followed the ridge toward higher ground. Below us a patchwork of fields rippled in the warm breeze, while swallows skimmed low, stitching the air with quick arcs; somewhere in a village farther off a lawnmower droned, sweetening the wind with newly-mown grass.
A free Tuesday and no deadlines until August felt like a gift squandered if spent indoors, so I’d pointed the Landy away from the coast, parked beside a hedgerow heavy with elderflower, and taken the footpath through Old English meadows — grass whispering at my knees, birdsong riding the thermals and the land dotted with solitary oaks that threw deep, inviting shade.
Once on the ridge, the land revealed itself in full circumference: inland, a quilt of barley and pasture threaded by hedgerows; seaward, a bright horizon where pleasure yachts glittered like dropped pins while distant container ships inched across the blue, thin as half-erased pencil marks.
Midway along the spine of chalk, the barrow rose — a smooth green dome, scarcely higher than a gatepost yet stubbornly deliberate. Its official date wavers somewhere in the long hallway between Neolithic and Bronze Age, but numbers matter less than its persistence: a knuckle of earth that has outlasted every survey, boundary, and fashion the county ever invented.
I’d come for more than scenery. On a day more blustery than this one, I’d knelt on this very mound and asked Emma to marry me, fumbling through nerves while the wind tried to snatch the ring box from my fingers. We hadn’t been back since; life, work, and familiar coastal walks kept us nearer sea level. Today felt like a quiet homage before a lazy summer.
Boots slipping on chalky marbles, I climbed the mound and sat facing the Channel. Murphy looped the perimeter, nose to turf, confirming the absence of rabbits painted onto some older memory. From here the town hid behind the headland; only gulls and a faint accordion of skylarks kept company, their cascading calls carrying clean on the wind.
Lunch was simple: a supermarket cheddar-and-pickle sandwich still in its crinkled wrapper, eaten slowly while the sun warmed my shoulders. I thought of Alfred Watkins and his “straight tracks”, strings of ancient sites aligned like beads. From this barrow the geometry was easy to imagine — hill forts inland, a church spire to the east, perhaps another tumulus sunk in bramble. Whether coincidence or design hardly mattered; the pleasure was sensing a quiet lattice beneath the surface, older than postcodes and steadier than Wi-Fi signals.
Murphy padded back, panting but full of unfiltered joy. I took a small stainless steel bowl from my pack and filled it with water. His happiness was immediate, mine expansive, yet for a moment they harmonised, both of us content to exist without tally or timetable.
When a lone cloud drifted in front of the sun, shadows cooled the turf and the sea deepened from turquoise to true blue. Skylarks rose higher, notes cascading like bells in a distant tower; swallows flicked nearer, harvesting invisible midges. I folded the sandwich wrapper, slipped it into my pack — half-superstitious that no litter should bruise the barrow’s patient geometry — and stood to take in one last slow panorama. Shepherds, smugglers, soldiers, holidaymakers: all must have paused here and felt the same uncomplicated surplus, whatever century their boots belonged to.
I whistled to catch Murphy’s attention. Then we diverted from the ridgeway taking a circular route back toward the hedgerow and hidden car park — an artefact of combustion rather than flint. Chalk dust would, by evening, whiten the encaustic tiles of the hallway; the sea air would drift through bay windows propped open for summer. Yet for an hour on an unnamed barrow I had gently reaffirmed an old promise, in the company of skylarks, swallows, and the long straight track that ties this high place to every horizon in sight.