It was a beautiful winter morning, shortly before Christmas – one of those crisp, smoky mornings with ice skinning the puddles and a sky of unbroken blue over the leafless woods.
Nature calls you imperiously out of doors, then smacks you in the face when it has got you there. Setting off from The Swan Inn in the West Berkshire hamlet of Lower Green, eyes running with chilly tears, breath pluming out like a leaky locomotive, I gasped with cold. Five days ago I had been basking in 35°C heat in tropical north Australia, and this thermometer plunge into the minus zone was a shock to the system.
Out in the fields rooks strutted the stubble rows, their fat feathery thighs making them roll like drunken sailors. My boots cracked milky panes of ice in the ruts; brambles hung whitened and stiff in the hedges, each spiny leaf tipped with a droplet of half-melted frost. All the pleasures of walking in the English countryside in winter suddenly came flooding in on me. After weeks of energy-sapping heat on baking Queensland beaches I welcomed the rough embrace of winter stinging my cheeks, a brisk exhortation to stride out and get the blood coursing round the body.
Up the steep breast of Inkpen Hill I slogged, puffing out steam, stripping off scarf and then woolly hat as the interior radiators were turned on full by the hard exercise. Up at the top there was time to pause, pour a cup of coffee from the flask and take in the quite stupendous view. I gazed north, 20 or 30 miles across the plains of Berkshire and Wiltshire towards the White Horse Downs and the distant Cotswolds. The windows of country houses flashed among spinneys and copses that in the full leaf of summer would shield them from sight. Sheep moved slowly along the crest of the down, their fleeces turned to gold in the sunlight.
The black T-bar of sinister Combe Gibbet, by contrast, stood stark on the humped back of a Neolithic burial mound. The original hanging scaffold, set here on the skyline so that everyone for miles around would see it, was used only once. In 1676 the bodies of George Broomham of Combe and his lover, Dorothy Newman of Inkpen, were suspended from each cross-piece and left to rot as a grim warning, after the pair had been hanged for murdering Broomham's wife Martha and his son, Robert. It was Mad Thomas, a barefoot village idiot, who blurted out that he'd seen the victims being drowned in a pond. They had stumbled by chance across the lovers, in flagrante delicto, on the down.
Beyond Combe Gibbet rose the green inverted bowl of Walbury Hill, bisected by the ancient trackway I was following. The works of our distant ancestors litter the long ridge of the downs hereabouts: burial mounds, ditches, rutted tracks and the high-piled ramparts of Walbury Camp. It is easy to see why Iron Age men fortified this hilltop – at 974ft above sea level, Walbury is the highest chalk hill in Britain. Anyone commanding this site would be able to see strangers, friendly or otherwise, approaching from any direction in plenty of time to prepare an appropriate reception.
From the old hilltop stronghold I dropped down into the sheltered valley where Combe hamlet sits. In the south wall of the flint-built Church of St Swithun, shadowed by yews, I found a tiny stone head carved by some humorous-minded medieval mason, an imp-like homunculid with crazed feline eyes and the cheekiest of smiles. The narrow interior with its fine Victorian glass and elaborate Georgian graveslabs of black marble breathed peace and stability, a fixed point in a whirling world.
Up on the back of the downs once more, I faced into the wind and forged northwards. Pheasants exploded out of the hedge roots, and meadow pipits flew swooping and squeaking across the track. Back at the crest of Inkpen Hill I took a deep breath and went half-running down the slope, through a tunnel of pale elder suckers and back into Lower Green, heading for the door of the The Swan Inn.
There are certain pubs that you'd cheerfully take root in. The Swan is one of them: a firelit winter pub par excellence that brews its own bitter and serves its own organic beef. Cheerful barman Tomas, a Prague boy very much at home in the Berkshire countryside, pulled me a pint of the sort Australians will never understand. I sat by the log fire, feet well out in front of me, fingers a-tingle as they thawed; I felt my cheeks reddening and my grin widening. It was good to be home.