I’m two hours outside Bridport making my way around Dottery. It’s hard going. It’s overcast and there’s been a cold northerly blowing since I started yesterday. I did well to shelter from it last night although sometimes it found me out and felt its way into my sleeping bag and around my neck.
I woke up a few times in the night as is normally the way when I sleep out. I’ve walked seven kilometres since six o’clock and I’m starting to flag. On Bilshay Lane I stop by the gate next to a farm track and opposite a barn. It’s halfway down the dead end road to Bilshay Farm (see map). There is a corner gate which rises up into some long grass. The ground is flat and soft enough and I am under a big beech which shooshes me, its branches swinging in the wind lulling me into semi sleep and rest.
The Japanese have a name for the sound of the wind in pine trees. ‘Kigi ni fukukaze’ apparently ‘expresses a feeling of exquisite melancholy and solitude.’ It’s true that there is something more haunting about the sound of the wind through pines. Perhaps it’s the lack of leaves.
The English name for the wind in trees is Psithurism, from the Greek ‘psithyros’, to whisper meaning ‘a rustling or whispering sound such as leaves in a wind’. A brief journey around the internet takes me to a tree consultant’s website which has high praise for psithurism and refers to how ‘The naturalist author and founding member of the RSPB, W.H. Hudson, suggests in Birds and Man (1901), that psithurism is salubrious. He describes the sound of wind in the trees as “very restorative”’.
At this moment in time – perhaps more than ever before – I couldn’t agree more.
I am here almost an hour resting and looking up into the branches and the heart shaped leaves dance while the grass stems around me nod and bees pass overhead and a tiny spider crawls over my sleeve. At moments like these sometimes I feel like I could be in the grip of a strong hallucinogenic. I drift. I lose track of time. And I stay where I am while the whoosh of the leaves washes over me.
A well built man walks past wearing heavy boots and comes back half an hour later going back down the farm track. He has a Mediterranean appearance like the campesinos I used to see in the south of Spain. He wears an olive coloured jacket and heavy boots like a modern day Heathcliff. Ten minutes later I see him crossing through the green sea of a barley field. Only the top half of his body is visible as he floats through the greenness like a ghost, his hands held up as if gesturing to someone far away.
The walk from Bilshay Farm down to the river and up the winding chalk track the other side makes all the waiting worthwhile. The clouds start to break up. Patches of sunlight come and go on the green of the barley and pale brown of the earthy squares.
On the top I look back to the chalk track, the farm beyond. I am just able to see the side of the barn and the beech where I rested and came across the strange figure, the only person I’ve seen since Bridport. Now part of me wonders if it was a dream or vision. Then I think about these brief moments that come and go never to be repeated. And then I’m over the hill and into another valley.


The Slow Walker 