A lonely walk on the Berkshire Downs: a country diary from 1951

An archive entry from The Guardian's Country diary column, in which writers describe nature and rural life, dated 31 October 1951, recounts a walk on the Berkshire Downs in southern England. The writer says there are few places in the south of England lonelier than these hills in October.

Few sheep, few farmworkers

Sheep are slowly returning, but there are still very few. Wandering all day over the sheep-walks, the author sees no more than a single shepherd and his flock. Where much of the land has been turned over to arable, an occasional ploughman appears, as comfortable with a tractor as his predecessor was with horses when the author first began walking these downs 20 years earlier.

Birdlife on the downs

Birds are far fewer than in the valleys. A survey carried out on the downs in 1940 found that in the breeding season there were roughly as many birds per acre as on heath or moorland, and the writer believes the same held for the rest of the year. In his observation, the move to arable during and since the war has not materially changed this.

Recently, on a three-mile walk between Wantage and Lambourn, he saw only a flock of rooks, a few skylarks and meadow-pipits, a flight of linnets and a couple of wood-pigeons. The ground was divided fairly evenly between arable land, sheep-walks and racing gallops.