In July

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
--Antonio Machado

There’s a period in a hot English July when the year is balanced, poised between the crescendo through spring into early summer and the diminuendo of autumn. Growing, hatching, sprouting seem to have stopped, and seeding and falling have not yet started. The grass by roadsides may be yellow with thirst, but the fields are lined with green corn and butterflies hang on the buddleia. I always feel that August is the year’s long Sunday evening, and May and June are busy mornings. July is the month of work done but there still being things to look forward to.

My journeys to and from London for work give me plenty of time to look from train windows onto this apparent (and it is only apparent) stasis. I see groups of roe deer browsing through great fields of brassica in the morning light, red kites seeming still against the sky, jackdaws clapping their feathers through ivy-thick trees. Everything, even the light itself, looks touched with the faintest moisture – imagine a layer of minute droplets refracting from each surface.

In the evenings, the land appears empty of animal life. Hedges stretch as though part of an alphabet far too vast to read. Between, the fields are curved around gentle contours in their various colours – green, yellow, gold. The gradualness of the landscape is brought out by the low sun, whose beams run close to the ground, casting every rise and indentation into a shadow infiltrated by light reflected from the crops.

These shadows make the trees into giants. Where they stand alone each branch is intricately inscribed in a line of darkness on the ground. The leaves in groups of trees manage softly to mix reds and yellows with the green. On top of Wittenham Clumps – two hills that rise some way from the railway, near Dorchester-on-Thames – they crowd into an indistinct unity. The eye jumps to them from the church tower at Cholsey by way of the single trunk on top of Barrow Hill.

Nothing seems more tempting than to step down from the train – halted “Adlestrop” style, ticking quietly to itself – move out from its shadow into the still-steady heat, and begin walking that landscape. I imagine passing through the colours smoothly, untiring, head filled with beauty. I’d be as the playwright Ben Jonson is sometimes written of on his walk from London to Hawthornden Castle near Edinburgh in 1618 – all mind experiencing.

Though I’ve never done a trek like Jonson’s, I know my dreamed walk into July would really involve sweat, scrapings from rough-stemmed crops, and legs looking forward to the pub long before it’s in sight. But for all that, every new view, every flicker of a bird, every insect on a flower head would be more intense, for having pulled my attention outward, away from me.

Dream walking is one thing. Actual walking is better. After an early finish to work on a July Wednesday, my wife and I took a rare opportunity to get a good stride in. It’s about 14 kilometres, mainly along the Thames, from our house to our favourite pub in Abingdon, the next town downstream from Oxford. We’ve walked there and back a few times, but this was a one-way journey (back in the bus) on a warm evening, with the sun diluted by a thin layer of cloud.

The terrain isn’t challenging, so the body quickly settles into the rhythm of the walk. The Thames is always gleaming on the left, rippled by geese, ducks and swans. Sometimes it all but disappears behind thick bushes or stands of willowherb, even Himalayan balsam. On our July walk the third element was dust – this path can be slippy and sticky after rain, but this time it was greyed, cracked wide open by the dry preceding weeks. Indentations from feet and bike tyres were fossilised into the surface. This is where fertiliser and pesticide-filled rainwater runs from fields into the river, leaving the fields parched, ever more cracked open.

But this was July, when things are as they are, there’s no breeze, and the feel of the ground underfoot is of solidity. The grass brushing legs is still supple, not yet dried to brittleness, butterflies appear like occasional signposts on the brambles and bindweed flowers.

It’s not a walk with much visible history, except a few glimpses of the big house at Nuneham Courtney and a long view of the Carfax Conduit. This baroque construction looks down on the river path from a small hill on the far side. In the seventeenth century it stood in Carfax in the centre of central Oxford, and the citizens would take their drinking water, piped in from the west, from it. It was moved in the eighteenth century when the streets were widened.

Preserved among the trees, it looks at home in the July evening light – intricate as snailshells, almost matching colour with the dry grass at its foot. To my modern eye it would look far more out of place among the buses and tourists of its original location.

Not so much visible history, but lots of personal – my wife and I have been walking this route for more than 10 years, and any minor change strikes our eyes, and we reminisce in snatches about people seen, wildlife encountered. There’s a lot of land-use history too – fields industrially farmed and tautly fenced plantations, but also stretches of what the Domesday Book might have classified as “waste”. This isn’t barren land so much as disused, except by the willowherb and bees, the small brown birds and the spiders.

Walkers are kept out by fences, but the slow work of succession, from worked earth to scrub, eventually to woodland, is going on. If this July returns for me a few more hundred times I’ll watch the change. The span doesn’t feel impossible on this walk. A good walk makes me think about the past and the future, but turns everything to the present.

As we close in on Abingdon, eerie shrieks resound somewhere ahead. Ghosts? Surely not. Someone playing up? that’s unlikely too. A little further on, a tree above us fills with shaking, and a red kite – once common, once extinct in England, reintroduced and now top non-human predator along the Thames for some time to come – drops into flight. It’s almost close enough to jump and touch. It’s feathers are a deeper colour than the fields around. It drifts and calls again, and two others cruise into view. We watch them, and don’t count the time.