[EDIT: you can read the stories from my progress across my map here.]

It seems to me, cycling through this year, around this map, that the seasons move in two ways: gradually, then suddenly. The first smell of autumn; the early dew; the later sunrise. I love being up early. Family commitments mean that I’m rarely free to be off and away at this time, but I managed it today and feel I’m winning the day. I have a long ride to get to today’s grid square, but I enjoy the low early sunlight, the rabbits in the fields and the cats slinking homewards after a big night out. A woodpecker chatters overhead as I ride through a cool, shaded pocket of woodland. The road narrows, grass appears down the middle, and I pass a sign saying No Through Route. The road dwindles to a track. I like it. I don’t like where I live, but within my map, not too far away, are places that I do enjoy, that feel quiet and rural and peaceful. This year has made that abundantly clear to me.

The track becomes too steep to ride up (or at least too steep to ride up if you’re in a late summer, laid-back kind of mode) so I dismount and push my bike. Despite this wood being a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) there are drinks cans and half-burned bags of rubbish in the undergrowth. A Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) is a formal conservation designation. Usually, it describes an area that’s of particular interest to science due to the rare species of fauna or flora it contains – or even important geological or physiological features that may lie in its boundaries. SSSIs often contain important habitats such as grasslands, parkland and woodland. Some even contain ancient woodland and ancient trees. In other words, these areas have high conservation value, and need to be protected. England has over 4,100 sites covering more than 4,200 square miles. Over half of this area is internationally important for wildlife.

Woodland covers the steep downland slopes and plateaus of much of today’s grid square, making it one of the most bucolic and beautiful corners of my map. Up at the top of the ridge the path left the woods and crossed into farmland. A sign warned me ‘Bull in field’ but today I had the fields to myself. Before me was a green, rolling valley of fields separated with bushy old hedgerows. It was a picturesque patchwork of crops – corn, hay, wheat, fallow – and woodland.

I swooshed through a field of dewy long grass and clover as crickets bounced out of my path. 8am and already warm. It was shaping up to be a glorious summer’s day, the perfect morning to have woken up in a bivvy bag on this hilltop. I’ve missed my nights under the stars since lockdown began, and only notice this morning that I have fallen out of the habit of grabbing my rucksack and heading out to sleep under the stars. I zoom down a bumpy, grassy hill in a field yellow with ragwort until a familiar but hard to place fragrance pulls me up short. Then it comes to me – pizza! I look down and notice the small pink flowers I’m riding over. Wild marjoram is actually the same aromatic herb as oregano which is used in Mediterranean cooking. Its small, pink flower clusters can be seen on chalk and limestone grasslands in summer.

Wild marjoram is important in Greek and Italian cookery. It’s mainly used dried, which brings out a stronger flavour. It’s probably best known as a pizza herb but can be used dried or fresh in tomato and lamb dishes, salads, grilled meats, stews and soups. Add it to savoury stuffing, meatballs or roasted vegetables. You can use wild marjoram in drinks, too. Freeze the flowers and leaves into ice cube trays with water to make a cool drink even more refreshing (and really pretty), or use the leaves to make wild marjoram tea. 

I’m snapped from my study of hillside herbs by the nasty bite of a horsefly. Their bites hurt, but the flies are slow and you can often gain a modicum of revenge by splatting them before they fly away. Not all adult horseflies bite – only the females have mouthparts able to break the skin and feed on blood. This is because only the females need a blood meal. They need a high protein input to help develop their eggs after fertilisation. The way that horseflies feed on blood can seem brutal when compared to the precision of a mosquito. A pair of serrated mandibles saw into the skin, cutting until they break small vessels and the blood begins to flow. An anticoagulant in the fly’s saliva then prevents the blood from clotting as the insect sucks up its meal. While mosquitoes release a mild anaesthetic, horseflies don’t – which is one of the reasons their bites are so painful. The fact that they cut into the flesh rather crudely only adds to this pain.

Along a quiet track down in the valley I came across the site of a lost village. The list of lost settlements in the United Kingdom includes deserted medieval villages (DMVs), shrunken villages, abandoned villages and other settlements known to have been lost, depopulated or significantly reduced in size over the centuries. There are estimated to be as many as 3,000 DMVs in England. All that remains today is a small 12th Century church, today used as a quaint, quiet wedding venue and changed very little in 900 years. Most of Britain’s ghost towns were abandoned after a previous pandemic – the Black Death – wiped out entire populations from hundreds of villages. 

The church is small and simple, with a stone arch and an oak roof. Ambling around it on this quiet summer morning it was staggering to think that it had already stood silent and abandoned for 150 years by the time Columbus sailed the Atlantic. Quiet valleys such as this carry the centuries very lightly.

Meanwhile builders were hard at work outside the church, bringing some 21st Century development into the valley with their modern cement mixers and Magic FM. But they were doing so in an extremely antiquated way, by constructing a new Columbarium in the ground of the church. A Columbarium? Me neither. Fortunately one of the builders enlightened me.

A columbarium is a structure for the respectful and usually public storage of funerary urns, holding cremated remains of the deceased. The term can also mean the nesting boxes of pigeons. The term comes from the Latin “columba” (dove) and, originally, solely referred to compartmentalized housing for doves and pigeons.

Google images shows me that these are fairly common around the world, but what was unusual about this one is that it is being constructed in the form of a Neolithic long barrow, dug down under the ground. Generations of families will be able to store urns of their ashes in their private niche. The hope is that the excavations may reveal more secrets of this ancient site, as well as resulting in a construction (with 180 tonnes of concrete) that may well stand for another thousand years of local history.

I ride on to the other side of the valley, tackling a sharp hill with a 25% gradient. Halfway up I stop to turn off onto a footpath through the woods. The first unripe green conkers of the season have already fallen from a big old chestnut tree. A car stops on the steep hill and the driver winds down his window to tell me of other “fantastic” steep hills to tackle nearby. Everyone is in a relaxed and friendly mood on beautiful mornings such as this.

I pedal into the beech wood which is airy, light and open beneath the canopy. Every so often I catch a glimpse of the old church down in the valley. Beech nuts are starting to fall from the trees. Squirrels leap through the branches high overhead. It seems that I don’t see so many squirrels in summertime. I wonder if they are less active, less frantic and urgent, or whether they are just harder to spot in the thick green summer canopy.

The path meanders for a long way through the woodland before narrowing into an area of hawthorn thickets, the path like a tunnel through impenetrable lands. It opens out eventually, depositing me at the top of a hill with beautiful views back across the grid square I have been zig zagging around. This is beautiful, rural, tranquil countryside and I feel filled with a deep gratitude for England’s perfect but rare summer mornings.