Purple Rain

I stood at the edge of the fen yesterday, listening. I didn't know if the sedge warbler was ticking off me or the cuckoo. The little bird bent the reed stems as it craned its neck to check me out. I was following the sound of the cuckoo, the first local bird I've heard. A clear evening after hailstones, and a pick n' mix of new arrivals sang.

This is the spot where I heard a snatch of nightingale song a few years back as I welcomed a 'fall' of incoming migrant warblers. I come back every year hoping for more. I met a local who told me this used to be their regular spot. No longer. So last week I visited Paxton Pits nature reserve, nightingale Mecca.

The 'Old North Road' is an eerie highway I seldom travel. I associate it with puppies, public hangings and the phrase "divine intervention". Last week it took me (via Royal Papworth Hospital) to one of the richest natural encounters of a lifetime. Formerly the Ermine Street Roman Road (now the A1198), it passes Caxton Gibbet. The replica of the hangman's cross now frames a McDonald's drive-through fast-food joint. We passed the gibbet on our way to pick our border collie pup when I was twelve. The route is dead straight but undulates with dips and blind-spots. One night returning from Wysing Arts Centre my family and I encountered some teenage racers. As their car jumped over the hill our lives flashed before us in dumb comprehension of the impending head-on collision. We still recount the moment of bewilderment when we found we were still in this world, the racers long gone.

I sped past The Red House Inn on the highway at Longstowe. Its doorstep is right on the edge of the road. In recent years artists from Wysing enjoyed lock-ins here and could stagger back to Bourn via ancient hedged tracks that are probably relics of the ancient forests whose traces are still visible. Two weeks ago in Hayley Wood champagne was poured in honour of legendary ecologist Oliver Rackham. Cambridge Conservation Forum members practice the coppicing he preached and celebrate a profusion of resulting oxlips, bluebells and anemonies. On my journey I noticed colonies of these woodland plants marooned on roadside verges, harking back.

Eventually I reached Paxton Pits, a working quarry. With people crowded around murmuring and brandishing high-spec equipment, it was a little bit like visiting a zoo. But the nightingale I saw was glorious, going full pelt. 'Mouth wide open to release her heart of its out-sobbing songs' wrote poet John Clare in 1832. I made a recording of the song as I stood, enraptured. A soothing way to while away the hours while my mother was in hospital for the day. Birders and photographers at nature reserves are kind and contented, and often like to share and inform.

On the return journey in the drizzle I saw a bouquet of purple balloons at the roadside. A sign pointed to a music studio. A memorial to a dead Prince (7/6/58 - 21//4/2016).

I collected my patient from Papworth's Cardiac Day Ward and drove our repaired hearts back home via the Roman artery.