Cookham Idyll

A couple of weekends ago now (how quickly the summer goes) R and I caught the train to Cookham to spend an afternoon walking along the drowsy bank of the River Thames and climb Winter Hill, where we would picnic in honour of the fullness of summer. Follow the Thames west of London up towards it’s source and you will barely recognise it as the murky waterway that bisects the city’s heart; indeed, follow it as far west as Oxford and it has another name – the Isis.

The day was hot and sunny with a refreshing breeze as we approached the flank of the Hill along a towpath riotous with wildflowers. The breeze however kept dragonflies and damselflies to a minimum, though we did get to see this little marvel, a female Beautiful Damoiselle.

Cookham is famous as the home of the visionary artist Stanley Spencer, who painted biblical scenes as if they had occurred in his native village. After viewing some of his oddly hallucinatory work in the Stanley Spencer Museum the landscape, already vivid in the summer heat took on a strange intensity as if I were looking directly through the artists eyes. Cookham is also a home to the arcane practice of Swan Upping, the ceremonial rounding up of mute swans by the Queen’s Swan Markers, the Worshipful Company of Vintners and the Worshipful Company of Dyers. Cookham, in short,  is as beautifully English as it gets, and more than mildly eccentric to boot.

One of the best reasons to visit this part of the world (apart from it’s singular beauty) is the chance to see Red Kites. Once almost extinct in the UK and still globally threatened, these spectacular birds ride the skies like no other bird I’ve ever seen, and around Cookham and Winter Hill there is a sizeable local population. On a previous visit we’d been startled by a tawny flash erupting from a wheat field right in front of us as one of these birds shot into the sky, leaving us gasping with disbelief. On that occasion we didn’t know that these birds were locally common, and while eating our picnic on the hill’s crest we shook our heads in wonder while watching more than one bird flirting with the breeze at eye level no more than twenty yards away. On this visit we got our first sighting while in the beer garden of the Bounty Pub,  taking turns with the binoculars to watch a soaring pair while we slapped on sun cream, drank a sustaining coffee and prepared for our climb.

Don’t get me wrong; the climb is hardly arduous – I don’t know for sure but I’d be surprised if Winter Hill tops two hundred feet. It’s steep though, and the sun was bright and harsh. Lush vivid green meadows nodding with wildflowers clung to the slope and as we climbed it’s steepest point our hot faces drew level with Harebells, Clustered Bellflowers,  Scabious. Butterflies commute busily between patches of flowers and at the top rabbits, unafraid, graze near the sheltering brambles.

The view from the top of Winter Hill on a beautiful late summer day repays the modest effort a thousandfold – the flat lands of the Thames roll out like a richly patterned carpet, and in the dancing shade of oak and ash we sat down to drink it all in.

No picture could do justice to the panorama of many coloured patchwork fields, the toy like train on it’s track, the subtle glint of the Thames below. We unpacked our picnic of strawberries and wine and toasted the sun dazed landscape.

Exploring the crest of the hill I was delighted to find some fat new Parasol Mushrooms growing up through dried out cow pats – Parasol mushrooms are good eating, but I’m always a little nervous about id’ing mushrooms in the field so we left them unmolested.

Further along I found this beastie gorging it’s-self on Ragwort. It’s the gaudy caterpillar of the just as gaudy Cinnabar moth, and it’s football jersey colouration serves as a warning to predators – keep away, I taste bad, I will make you very sick! It’s food plant – Ragwort – is full of poisonous alkaloids which the caterpillar stores safely in it’s body, rendering it, too, poisonous. They have a voracious appetite and will completely devour their host plant down to the ground, which will sometimes result in the caterpillars turning cannibal in the absence of anything else to eat. As this was the only Ragwort plant to be seen, and as it had already been quite comprehensively munched, and as there was only one caterpillar doing the munching… well I have to come to the conclusion that this greedy creature may well have been the sole survivor of a cannibal feast.  Enough of the grisly nature lesson – don’t you think our stripy friend would look well sitting on a fully opened parasol mushroom – just like the caterpillar in Alice In Wonderland? The landscape may be full of gentle beauty, but just a quick glimpse of it at a different scale reveals a strangeness to match anything Lewis Carrol dreamed up.

Eventually it was time to dawdle our way back down and catch the train back to London. We thought we’d seen everything we could possibly want to see as we strolled along the river, scanning the waters with our binoculars for nothing in particular. Then I spotted this Great Crested Grebe diving, and soon it had a plump fish in it’s beak. Curious as to why it did not eat it’s prize immediately I kept the binoculars trained on the bird and was lucky to see it swim to it’s mate and give the fish to her – she could not dive for her own dinner because their chicks were riding upon her back, their fuzzy grey heads peeking out between her wings.

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