The Burgh

The morning is cold and getting colder. A Grey Wagtail is foraging disconsolately by the river path, its normal haunts frozen over. This weather will displace more birds, I think, and am proved right when a Grey Partridge whirs from the adjacent field edge.

Partridges aren’t common here, but they’re plentiful on the downs that rise enticingly above Burpham, a couple of miles up the valley from where I’m standing. I was there a couple of afternoons back, looking for owls.

It was a long walk in, following the track running north past Burpham High Barn and the dewpond, then northwest up to the Burgh. These downs always involve long walks, rewarded by large skies and a subtly-changing landscape.

It’s an old landscape, words on the map like Camp Hill, Burgh, earthworks and field systems telling of Romans, Saxons and later folk. Earlier peoples, too. An inconspicuous mound at the Burgh is the remnant of a Bronze Age round barrow.

The mound is by a gate that provides one of the best vantage points for raptors in this section of the downs. But there were no Short-eared Owls quartering the area as I stood there. They may have been resting, I thought, or have moved on, disturbed by a tractor ploughing the fields by the dewpond. There were plenty of other birds, though, the tractor attracting a growing entourage of Red Kites, Lapwings and Common Gulls, even a couple of Golden Plovers.

After a while I retraced my footsteps, on the way down noting some scrub had been cleared from an area by the path, revealing a circular banked enclosure. Some archaeologists claim this is a medieval siege work, others a dried-up dewpond. I don’t know who is right, but do know the area is often good for passerines, and less scrub means reduced cover. Then again, the area can now be viewed better, with the remaining bushes that day holding a few Reed Buntings and Yellowhammers.

I’d been walking for three hours and still no Short-eared Owls when suddenly four of them erupted from a patch of vegetation, a frenzied blizzard of angular and twisting wings. They must have been there all along, roosting together, yards from where I’d passed over two hours before. Within seconds they’d gone again, though a few minutes later I saw two of them hunting along a hedgerow.

The walk back to Arundel was quiet, and it was getting dark by the time I reached the bend of the river opposite where I stand today. And here, on the outskirts of the town, another owl was on show. Silent and purposeful in the fading light, a Barn Owl was hunting the river bank.