The most dramatic change of all in the natural history of the area has been the astonishing reversal in the fortunes of the red kite. When I first moved to Penlan it must have been a couple of weeks before I saw my first, high in the hills over the open sheepwalk, even though this was their heartland. In the whole of my first year at the cottage I only twice saw one from my window. Now I think that if you took any random skyscape viewed at any time, in any direction, from my hillside, it would be more likely to contain a kite than anything else — more likely a kite than a buzzard or even a crow. The kites spend so much of their lives aloft, hanging in the wind. The buzzards may be out in force when the sun shines, but the bad weather will ground them. Not so the kites. Their recovery has been incremental, unstoppable, and due in good part to the adoption of feeding stations. You can go and visit them; at the appointed time you wait in a hide while a tractor scatters butchers’ offal over the field before you, turning a whole field into a giant bird table. Overhead, the waiting kites will be circling, a hundred or two hundred of them. A single scan across the sky will reveal more kites than the entire British kite population those few years ago when I first moved into Penlan. There will be other birds waiting too, buzzards and ravens and magpies, but none of them has taken to this daily feeding by appointment as successfully as the kites. As the tractor that has brought the trailer full of meat scraps departs, the kites descend en masse. It is an extraordinary sight, for they do not settle to feed, but swoop and snatch with consummate grace. It is a trick they pull off extravagantly welclass="underline" to look so beautiful and stylish, while feeding on carrion.
So, as the years of my stay at the cottage passed, seeing a kite sail by my window became gradually less and less remarkable, and a good walk into the mountains would almost inevitably come with several sightings. Then a pair overwintered on my hillside. That winter an hour or two’s ramble around my local patch would always turn them up, even in the unusual event that they were perching. They were so big, and so conspicuous, and always seemed to choose to perch at the top of a solitary tree in full view on those infrequent occasions when they drifted down from their home in the sky. The next spring they stayed on and bred in a copse of trees high up on the steep hillside, close to the edge of the sheepwalk and looking out over miles of open air, and they have nested there ever since.
Nowadays a second pair nests lower down the hill too, their big untidy nest balanced conspicuously on an oak bough. Their chosen tree is festooned with sheeps’ wool, which hangs in drapes from the branches like Spanish moss. The ranges of these two local pairs of kites seem to meet above the oaks that fringe the bottom of my front fields, so that I can see up to four of them almost continually just down the hill before me. For the most part they don’t bicker and squabble like the buzzards do. This is more of a cold war; they sail up and down above the treetops as if on border patrol, facing each other off, looking but not touching, not crossing the invisible line.
But there have been less welcome changes in these hills too, most notably the gradual retreat of our moorland nesting species. It feels like a marginal habitat up there in the mountains at the best of times; it is a hard and barren place to make your home. The skylarks still call all spring — their song is the background music of the hills — but their numbers are visibly, or rather audibly, dropping, year on year. The grouse have retreated to smaller and smaller pockets where the grazing is light enough for the heather still to survive, and the whinchats seem to reduce their range a little further every year, disappearing completely from one valley at a time. Most of all I fear for our few nesting waders; we are at the southern limits of their range here and I doubt we shall have their company for much longer. The mountains will be a poorer place without the chance to stumble upon them and hear the sky ringing with their wild cries.
I spent my final week paying an almost ritual visit to some of my favourite spots, key places in the iconography of my life in the hills. Of course I spent a day by the river, down by my swimming hole, just watching the water sparkle. Always changing, but always the same. On my way there I stopped off and sat on the drystone wall looking up the flank of the mountain to the copse of cedars where the ravens had nested, every single year without fail, and were nesting still, and waited until the pair appeared, cronking and flipping on to their backs. Even after all those years, the strange optical effect that a raven has on the landscape still held the power of surprise. You look up at a mountain, and, the moment a raven appears, find yourself looking at a hill. Their seemingly unnatural bulk can make an entire landscape contract around them in an instant. My last evenings were busy: with the bats emerging from my loft and the badgers on the edge of the moor. And with the woodcock too, for of course I went down over the old stone bridge to my clearing in the woods. The character of these fields had begun to change over the years as they became more overgrown by scrub, but they still retained their magic; this was still a place that no one would find reason to visit but me.
On my last day I headed for the hills, on a full day’s walk to the peatbog and back. There were two pairs of curlews calling from the black hill as usual, one at each end where the peat pools were and where the ground was soft enough for them to feed. It was a slightly overcast day and the tops felt a little bleak and lifeless as they often do. I made my way across the blasted landscape of the peatbog towards the little tarn that would be my furthest destination that day, then sat to rest on the grassy ridge that overlooked the tarn and took off my army-surplus boots and boot-socks. I stood on the brilliant — almost fluorescent — green fringe of sphagnum moss that bordered the tarn, and cold water, icy all year round, oozed between my toes. I rolled up my jeans and waded out into the red pool. A golden plover called from near by but out of sight: just one single plaintive call, the loneliest sound in the world. I didn’t feel the need to go and look for it. It was enough to know that it was there.
Leftover dried foods mouse-proofed to the best of my ability. Floors mopped and dried. Beds stripped and bedding packed away. I didn’t know when the cottage would next be used, though I was sure it wouldn’t be long. I left just as I had arrived: with a single bag of belongings. I slammed the door shut behind me but didn’t bother to lock it, though I did tie the garden gate shut with baling twine to make sure the sheep wouldn’t be able to get into the garden and nibble away at the trees that I had planted. Then I headed off down the hill to the river, over the footbridge, and along my short cut to the main road, through the pine woods along the old logging trail that was becoming steadily more overgrown. I crossed the road, looked up the valley, and waited for a lift.