On that special, second day of my coastal walk, believe me, all was magic and mystery. I felt like Sir Gawain on his quest for the Green Knight. The sun shone, and the sky was a cloudless, ineluctable blue. I passed this thatched, double-arched tollgate ...
... on the way to Culbone church, one of those churches the tourist guides call 'the smallest church in England' ...
Inside two German walkers I'd met earlier were engaged in some gorgeous a cappella polyphony (you can see their walking poles on the left of the church porch; mine are on the right next to my backpack) ...
That morning I'd startled two red deer which had run noisily down a brackeny combe. Then they'd frozen in perfect unison, both looking back at me, thinking themselves camouflaged ... And I'd disturbed two green woodpeckers, eating ants in a green field, which had then ricocheted away over slopes slanting to a blue horizon ... And I'd seen a falcon from above, with black-tipped scimitar wings, perched on a stumpy tree, then gliding off up-valley in motionless flight ...
The stunning moorland purple and yellow carpet of heather and gorse had been pure Wizard Of Oz. And, in the woodlands, the variety of trees was stupendous: oak, holly, birch, rowan, maple, sycamore, pines, many rarer species I could not identify. Butterflies did their limp, fluttery thing, and greenbottles (flies you don't normally notice) sparkled on cow pats. Tame, dumpy robins skulked an arm's length away. However, the bright red berries of the wild arum flower showed the season was on the turn.
Yet it was still summer, and I walked through green tunnels of legendary shadows and celestial light ...
