The land is having a moment here, alive after slumbering, with no turning back and blossom lighting the way. It is at its very peak as I am writing, in a week of blue skies, still days and moonlit nights, with frost so far staying to the hollows. Spring as you dream it to be. Onward and surging.

When I cast my mind back to our arrival fifteen years ago, the fields were very different. Grazed tightly to their very margins and hedgerows pared back to the bones. There was a curious silence with the land stripped to the essentials. Walk the fields now and you move in a soundscape enabled by the land having been relaxed and allowed to be more itself. In hedge trees rising from hedges that were once tightly trimmed and from spinneys of self-seeded hawthorns that step up the hill from the woods, bringing the birds with them. Follow the blossom trees or the willows in catkin and you walk into the drone of bees working or the chattering flurry of long-tailed tits, the very opposite of the stillness that we found when we first came here.