(Written 2007)
It is now over thirty years since I began commuting daily via Chelford railway station to work, by train and bicycle. Green commuting has provided me with several tangible benefits, particularly fitness, independence and the saving of expenditure on a second car. It has also provided me with many unusual memories. Plenty of wildlife can be seen from the train. My train often passes buzzards, and sometimes foxes on clear winter morns. Every spring I watch out for the stock doves that nest under or near the arch of the railway viaduct (at Holmes Chapel), flying out as each train passes. In the river below the viaduct I once saw a pair of fine goosander swimming, and from the viaduct I can see right down into the crow nest in the tree beside the arches. Once, I saw a barn owl from the train near Chelford. And always in summer, there are rabbits!
After disembarking from the train, the roads around Chelford are lovely rides for a naturalist. This very morning I was cycling to work along the Chelford Road from the railway station to Chelford Roundabout when I heard, faintly, a familiar birdsong above the traffic roar of the A-road. Perched in view on a twig above the roadside hedge, it was my first yellowhammer of the year, singing its "Little-Bit-Of-Bread-And-No-Cheese" song - except that the “Cheese” was drowned by the traffic rumble. Many years ago I used to hear a corn bunting along with the yellowhammer - but alas! the cornies have gone, now. We must all change our habits before too much else also becomes memory.
As a keen naturalist, I have learnt that there is no dull season in the countryside. Many things have caught my eye or ear that few motorists could have detected. My regular cycle route passes along the busy A-road road with its relatively barren fields, rather than down the wild tracks patronised by some fellow cyclists. Yet, my glimpses of the secret treasures of the countryside over more than a quarter of a century have nevertheless been innumerable.
Spring is a wonderful season for country cycling, especially when you look up. All sort of creatures live much of their lives far above one’s head! Riding beneath trees early in the year is a noisy business and an entertaining one, as one peers up through the stately branches hoping that nothing will fall from the skies. One day something did fall - a young grey squirrel which, to its horror and still clutching the branch that had broken under it, landed on the road right in front of me! It lived - but barely, as the oncoming cars just missed sweeping its life away.
The seasons pass steadily. In spring, the bird world is on the move. Chirruping skylarks fly northwards over cyclists riding along the Chelford Road. The first summer visitors arrive in roadside copses - blackcaps in thick roadside undergrowth and chiffchaffs high in the trees. One March morning I saw no less than than four mad Marchhares in one field. Chaffinches in the oaks along the road from Chelford start singing a month before their relations in the local woods. April and May bring fast fliers, house martins around old houses and swifts overhead.
Some wildlife dances the summer away, and cyclists are well placed to spot butterflies. In May, the occasional orange-tip butterfly drifts across the road, while the familiar “cabbage-whites” are a regular sight all summer. Other wildlife is statuesque; once in a while, a little owl squats motionless on a fence post in its nesting territory, while the local kestrel often stares down disdainfully from a high perch right over the traffic. Still other creatures move like quicksilver. One morning over ten years ago, a stoat shot across the road in front of me, tried to mount a stone wall opposite, then, failing, dropped and raced back, escaping from the grinding mill of the traffic stream at the risk of its life.
Many, of course, do not escape. We all see the pitiful detritus left by the traffic tide along the road edges. Not all the flotsam is tragic; I have a bag-full of useful adjustable spanners and other tools I have collected to my amusement over the years. But the living are far more fragile than the rusting, and the daily sacrifice is a ritual that grows in cruelty and needlessness as the traffic multiplies. Sometimes the dead tell tales: the numbers of flat hedgehogs I ride past give me an inverse measure of the abundance of their mortal enemies, the local badgers. One broken casualty I found near Chelford Station was the corpse of the first polecat identified in this part of Cheshire since the species began to return to its ancient haunts. Yet, only their widowed and orphaned dependants miss most of the crushed creatures and broken birds.
Cyclists also notice flowers. I watch every year for the little colony of bulbous buttercups on the grass verge along the Chelford-Monks Heath road to flower, probably the descendants of ones that grew in an ancient flower meadow on that spot. Greater celandine is spreading steadily along the roads round here. Other colours are abundant too, but I was delighted one day to find myself riding, by Chelford station bridge, past the ephemeral sky-blue flowers of a chicory, that strange will-o-the-wisp plant that comes and goes again just as mysteriously. It was the first chicory in that part of the county for years.
Autumn brings different bounties. My children have never gone short of conkers, for the first and brightest of the season always roll past my very wheels. So do acorns, in search of which the jays leave the deep woods and fly openly to their favourite oaks in October, although they never reveal themselves to me in any other month. In good acorn years, mighty flocks of a thousand or more woodpigeons rise from the distant Capesthorne woods like smoke on frosty mornings, flying over me high and suspicious.
Of course, autumn is the season of lashing rain and hedge-flailing tractors (keep those tyres hard - few thorns pierce a tyre pumped to over 50 psi!) that, along with broken bottles are the foes most hated by cyclists. Not hated but puzzled and sighed over are the queuing motorists who hug the kerb where cyclists need to pass, offering their wing-mirrors in tempting lines as targets for wet riders who have no intention of waiting in the exhaust-fume-engulfed line for fifteen minutes. The motorists are drier and may or may not be warmer than I am, but they breathe each their predecessor’s waste gases, sitting in atmospheres far more enriched in carcinogenic benzene and nitrogen dioxide than the cold wind on the cyclists’ faces. Even before the days of global warming I preferred my seat, cold as it was, to theirs.
Autumn is migration time. Wild creatures travel, too, but not along our roads Sometimes their flyways cross our roads. At the highest point of the road between Chelford and Monks Heath, at different times over the years I have seen lapwing, a flashing peregrine, a crescent-winged hobby – the only hawk that can catch both a swift and a dragonfly - and even to my amazement (one shining dusk) a woodcock, flying across in front of my bicycle.
The season of dark nights is the time for checking one’s lighting system and examining the bike for any possible cause of breakdown. Bikes do break down, of course, but punctures apart their failures are far less frequent than those of cars. Moreover, one can usually push, or even carry, a crippled bike to the nearest help. Cars are heavy! In addition, the technology of bicycles constantly improves; modern bike lights, with their tiny batteries, are much more reliable than the old sort. Safety is also better, and there are other bonuses; for years, I resisted those startling yellow jackets, not wanting to become a mobile banana. Yet, the first time I put one on, I was converted; and not just because of its visibility. Its wind-proofing ability was startling; I have rarely been cold on a bike since, even in the hardest weather. No longer was I easy meat for that “idle wind”, the one that prefers lazily to go through you rather than round you! In fact, on bitter winter mornings I now arrive in the office just pleasantly warm, to receive both the admiration and the envy of the motorists sitting around me, whose car heating systems never seem to warm them quite as much as their own circulation could have done. It seems that cyclists are by no means always more chilled at the extremities than are motorists . . .
Another aid is the wearing of a scarf over my mouth whenever the air is cold; in my younger days I was a regular victim of a persistent cyclists’ cough, until I learnt to protect my lungs. It is a fiction, incidentally, that cycling becomes harder as one gets older. Now in my mid-forties, I have less health problems than I did five or ten years ago, and often fail to catch the bugs that strike down most of those about me when epidemics arrive. I have no reason to suppose I will not be enjoying cycling to work for the rest of my career, which will undoubtedly be shorter than that of my uncle who was still cycling to work at the age of eighty.
Nevertheless, I do not regard myself as an unusually fit person! I am anything but a sporting fanatic, and rarely take any exercise other than commuting. But cycling daily is remarkably health-giving. One winter, I chickened out and got a lift four morning out of five: I was grateful for the help, but by spring I was putting on weight and had a stiff back, so that I was glad to abandon the car for all but emergencies. Sometimes, when I cycle home, I ride for variety through a quiet green songbird-filled arboretum and down past a nearby gym. The windows of the gym gaze down upon me as I cycle past, and I often gaze up in amusement at the sweating athletes pounding away on their treadmills and exercise bikes up above me, to which they have resorted after a hot day in the office. Do they not realise how much fresher the air is out here?
The air can be freshest of all in winter. Winter is not, however, the season it once was. It brings much milder challenges nowadays than for cyclists of old. A far distant memory is the snowy morning when this cyclist, sent home by an anxious management, rode through a blizzard to Chelford station and caught what he thought was the twelve-fifteen, only to be told it was the snowbound nine-twenty train, three hours late! Winter in the twenty-first century still has its challenging side including many rainy and stormy as well as starry nights, and bitter, stunning mornings of ice-brittle beauty - although these are fewer than they were. Yet, the high whistles of flights of Scandinavian redwing, flighting from beech-top to ash-top, shows that the thrush world still knows the season, as do the great, white-winged swans that sometimes whistle over toward the one of the old sand-quarries or a hidden mere.
And there are rarer silhouettes that pass through the winter sky above the cyclist. Squadrons of Canada geese often throb overhead, like avian Lancaster bombers, but far rarer and higher-flying are the flights of pink-footed geese from Greenland or Iceland, whose faint calls drift down to me occasionally on midwinter days when the incessant unhappy grumble of cars on the road fades enough to let them ring down to me with the clarity of far-away bells on a frozen morning.
Yet, soon spring comes again; and with it, an Easter flavour of the fragility of life and of the renewal it ought to have through the message of that season and of the One who made that life. But without repentance there can be no new life; and our springs are more precious and less guaranteed than ever as our world grows older. Yet, the countryside has a lasting character to it that, with care, will long outlive all of our busy lives. One arboretum that I sometimes cycle through is full not only of song-birds but also of trees both ancient and young. The tallest and one of the finest trees is a towering Wellingtonia whose ancient bark is as soft as sponge and full of hollows in which treecreepers and other tiny birds shelter. It will fall one day, but its replacement is already there, a sapling that was a tiny thing fenced against the rabbits on the first day I noticed it. Now as I ride past, I watch it grow larger all the time; already it has sprung up to amazingly more than half the height of its ancient neighbour. The power of our environment to restore itself is from of old, but as immense as the healing power of a child’s body; and it is for us to do our best to keep it as fresh as it was when the world was young. And cycling is one way to do it, a way which enables one to relax body and mind until, arriving at work or home, my mind is clear, my lungs strong, and my world as green as ever, so far as the One who created it has given me the power to make it, and to enjoy it.
Thus, I have uncountable memories. Many of them are ordinary, or even transitory, repeated each year, season after season, yet still always sweet and fresh. Yet, a few are special treasures. There was the bobbing common sandpiper I saw by a field flood-pool near the road one day, where no other ever was before or since. There was the oystercatcher whose yelping calls startled me one day as I rode along the Chelford Road. At the same spot, I saw the other day a bird flying across a field with a peculiar, bounding flight. The bird flew directly towards me and dropped into a tree right by the busy traffic, where I stayed quite still until she – a female great spotted woodpecker – was tapping at the bark in full view within yards of me and a hundred cars.
Perhaps my special favourite memory is of one summer morning when I was riding with a slow traffic stream queuing to turn into an entrance. A sudden brown movement in the field opposite the site entrance, where lay a crop of newly cut hay, caught my eye. Pausing, I dropped aside out of the traffic stream and peered over the hedge, into the field corner. There, in almost full view of the passing cars, lolled a sleepy vixen, while her three half-grown fox cubs played in the stubble. The family relaxed, played and relaxed again, unnoticed by the endless traffic. For nearly ten minutes I watched, wondering at the contrast, before I left them - for they had far more time even than had a cyclist, and stayed when even I had gone. The experience had been mine alone – no one had slowed to ask what I was watching, for none of the drivers could have stopped even had they so desired, or known what they were missing. Imprisoned in their little boxes, unable to pause on the roadside, they drove grimly forward while around them the living world of which they seemed hardly a part lives secretly, fragile-ly on.
George B. Hill (Spring 2007)
[published on the Chelford Village Website]