Swifts and Swallows
In the Lake District. The reality of running in the wilder countryside.
If I close my eyes and only breathe, the smell is of the land behind my grandparents’ house on the Isle of Arran, all heather and fern - masses of fern - and inexplicably, roses. They do that, they drift on a breeze, they are nonchalant in someone’s garden and somehow also, halfway up a hill in the middle of the Lake District.
I’m just praising the wholesomeness of my morning run when I see one sickly lamb and two dead ones. The dead ones are further up from the sickly one. Birds of prey circle them, they follow me as I wiggle across a field, first to a no trespassing sign on an enormous gate, then along a stone wall which only finishes with a corner. The birds squawk. I head to a path with arrows pointing out a footpath for pedestrians, but they’re only visible in-between the legs of a herd of cows. The birds hang back. I walk carefully, unsure what twenty cows with cattle might choose to do, and I stay close to the wall. I always do, if I can - I’m not going to be able to outrun the herd but I might be able to climb to safety. The herd remain still, I take shorter and shorter steps, then suddenly they are spooked or drawn by something and barrel away from me. I pick up my pace from a creep to a trot but two cows hang back, still staring. They don’t follow the herd. The birds continue to circle and squawk - in warning or excitement? - and as these two cows begin to gallop straight towards me the rest of the herd about-turns and follows.
Over the course of two years of living in the countryside, this feeling of abject terror in the face of an onslaught of charging eyes has become somewhat familiar to me. I quickly calculate how far I am from the gate, how fast I can run and how fast the herd are moving. Not a chance. Almost without thinking I leap up onto the wall. It’s high - it’s above my head height - but such is my fear I get my arms and chest on top of it and although my feet slip a little on the wet rock, the way it is stacked gives me enough of a foothold to lift the rest of my bodyweight up. The saturated moss quickly soaks into my top but the softness is comforting, I can grab this, I can hold on. I check over the other side of the wall for possible escape routes but it isn’t necessary, the herd - clearly flabbergasted by this leaping target - has turned away again.
The birds continue to caw as I lower myself back down the wall. Further away now, one of the cows stops again to stare. I move slowly but deliberately away and only when I feel I’m at a safe enough distance do I stop glancing back and allow myself to just run. My heart is audibly pounding as I unlatch the gate and firmly close it behind me. Its a shame not to get to explore that other path, and to not actually have run more than about a mile and a half, so I do just see if I can reach the top of another hill, this time surrounded by sheep, some much more civilised and less sociable field dwellers. Well as it goes, I can’t even get to the sheep, the fence is very much barb-wired and what once might have been a gate is covered in chicken wire. To keep the sheep in, or to keep me out? No matter, the views are exceptional even from this vantage point. In the space of only a few minutes, the clouds have moved across the tops of the fells and hidden them even from being in vague silhouette. I know their shape only from memory, from memory already.
Back beyond the birds, back beyond the lambs. Were they squawking to warn me away from stealing them? Their poor, sweet faces in the grip of nature. The sickly one, lifting its head only to see me pass, before resting it back down with closed eyes. Back across the streams and brooks, careless about getting wet feet: one cannot swim in Lake Windermere one day and then fuss about wet feet the next. Back beside the ferns, whose smell plants me directly in the summer holidays, in freedom, in being beyond any school or work version of myself. In being this version, concerned mainly with differentiating the swifts from the swallows, the hills from the clouds. To understand, to see fully, to be amongst.
Who do I tell about the lambs? Who should know, when I don’t know who to tell?
Back at the house, I no longer hear the birds of prey. Just an occasional splash of rain falling lazily from the barn roof, and yes the swifts, and the swallows.
The following day we meet the farmer, the one who owns the sickly lamb. We told our Airbnb host who told her, but by the time she checked on the lamb this morning, it had died overnight. She said it’s because of this crazy weather, it was probably pneumonia, she could have given it antibiotics but it still might not have worked. It’s hot one minute and cold the next, it’s too much stress on them. The sweet face, the sadness of it all, the reality of it all. She apologises profusely for the fact I had to see the lamb like that and I’m surprised, this is working land, I never had illusions it was otherwise. I apologise to her. I’m utterly heartbroken. I wish there was something I could have done, but I did all I could, didn’t I?
Bizarre side note: as I was putting this piece into Substack I swear I heard the call of that bird of prey again, here in Corsham. I’ve since learned they were likely buzzards.