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Ok, so I could have taken the main road... but the lanes were more inviting.Spring always gets me.. a yearning in the pit of the stomach, a deep-seated desire for the moors that are a couple of hundred milees north of here...
But Buckinghamshire is a pretty, rural county full of tidy feilds, low hills, wide valleys and thatched cottages.
Driving through the sunken lanes, the hedgerows that border the fields have been neatly cut to stop nature encroaching on the narrow roads. The first hawthorns are decked in Spring green and promise to veil the shallow horizon until winter comes again.
It has rained heavily today. Emerald moss covers the fallen trees in velvet. The sun is so bright that the roads are lit with reflected glory, punctuated by the dark stripes of tree shadows as I enter the woods.
The silence is broken by the distant roar of the motorway, a great invisible Worm, snaking across the landscape it devours, and by the incongruously inelegant squawk of a cock pheasant, offended by my intrusion.
Coming out of the beechwoods the sky is now clear, the sunlight blinding. I turn a hairpin bend on the hill, and the sun is now behind me. A wide swathe of rainbow colour bathes the far horizon as if the Goddess has draped Her curves in luminous chiffon, tantalising and tempting the sky gods.
Petals from early cherry trees dance on the breeze, pink and white, like confetti at a bridal.
Red kites wheel above the newly ploughed fields, gleaming white with disturbed chalk and in the meadows ewes guard the newborn lambs, seeking the meagre shelter of leafless oaks. A grey squirrel darts acroos the road, risking all to get to the other side.
It is beautiful, my England in the Spring. And yet.. I yearn for the bleak beauty of the high moor with the rocks suspended from an iron sky and that silence unbroken by man.
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