The gate is already open, leaning a little on its lower hinge, and you step through into grass that comes nearly to your waist. The seed-heads brush the inside of your wrist. Underfoot, the path is only a slight parting of stems where other feet have gone before, days or weeks ago, the grass beginning already to lift back into place behind you. The light is the long honey-coloured light of late afternoon in June, slanting low across the field from the west, and where it strikes the seed-heads they hold it for a moment before letting it pass through. You walk slowly. There is nowhere to be.
The meadow tips very gently down toward the far hedge, so gently you only feel it in the give of your knees. Ox-eye daisies stand at chest height in loose drifts, their white petals slightly cupped, their yellow centres deepening as the sun lowers. Among them the yellow rattle is going over, its seed-cases brown and papery, and when your hip nudges a stand of it you hear the small dry sound that gives the plant its name, the seeds shifting inside their husks like grain in a sack held lightly. Vetch climbs through everything, purple and curling, finding the taller grasses and using them. You let your fingers trail through the tops of the timothy and cock's-foot, and the pollen comes off pale on your skin.
Above you, far up, a skylark is singing. The song is high and even, a long unbroken run of notes that thins and threads itself through the upper air without pause. You stop for a moment and look up, and it takes some time to find the bird, which is only a flickering dot against the pale enamel of the sky, holding itself there on rapid wings. The song goes on. It comes down through the air to you, undimmed, the way water comes down through clear air from a great height. After a while you walk on, and the song follows you, or you carry it, or it stays where it was and reaches you anyway. The distinction does not matter. The notes lay themselves over the meadow like a fine weather.
Down at ground level the meadow has its own quieter sound. The breeze is light and irregular, and the grasses move with it in long unhurried passes, the heavier seed-heads bending later than the lighter ones, so that the field shows you its weight by how it answers the air. There is the dry whisper of stem against stem, and beneath that something almost too low to hear, the soft accumulating hum of bees working the vetch and the clover. A bumblebee passes close to your ear with the deep thrumming note of its kind, slow and laden, and goes on toward the hedge. Somewhere a grasshopper begins its ratcheting, stops, starts again. The sound carries no urgency. It is the meadow speaking in its summer voice, which is the voice of many things at once, none of them raising itself above the others.
You bend a little and put your palm flat against the side of a tussock of grass. It is warm. The sun has been on it all day, and the warmth has gone down into the lower stems and the thatch beneath, the years of old growth pressed into a slow soft mat at the base of the new. Your hand comes away smelling green, with that particular dry sweetness of grass that is past flowering and starting to cure, the smell that will deepen and darken when the field is cut and turned. There is meadowsweet somewhere nearby, you can tell, that almond-and-honey note threading through. And under everything the faint mineral smell of the soil, cool even now, the chalk close beneath. You straighten and walk on, the warmth of the grass still on your palm, fading slowly as you move.
The hedge at the far edge is closer now. It runs east to west along the bottom of the field, hawthorn mostly, with blackthorn knitted into it and elder pushing up at intervals, and along its near face the dog rose has come into full flower. The blooms are pale, almost white, with the faintest blush at the centre, and they are scattered through the dark green of the hawthorn like a long uneven snowfall caught on the branches. There must be hundreds of them. From this distance they soften the whole line of the hedge, blurring its edge against the sky, so that the hedge looks less like a wall than like a slow pale weather settled along the bottom of the meadow. A blackbird is somewhere inside it, turning over leaf-litter, and you can hear the small dry rustle of its searching, then a pause, then the rustle again.
A red kite turns once, very high and far off, over the wood beyond the hedge. You watch it without lifting your hand to shade your eyes. It tilts, the fork of its tail clear against the paler sky, and the rust-red of its underwings shows for a moment as the light catches it. Then it slides sideways on the air and is gone behind the crown of an oak, and does not come back. The skylark is still singing. You realise you have been hearing it all this while without listening, the way you hear a stream when you have been beside one for an hour. The song has become part of the shape of the afternoon, part of the warm air and the bending grass and the slow westering of the light, and you take it in again now, freshly, and walk on toward the hedge.
The path bends a little to follow a shallow rise where the ground is drier, and here the flowers change. Bird's-foot trefoil along the verge, low and yellow and ember-coloured at the tips. Self-heal, small and purple, close to the soil. A few late buttercups still holding their varnish. You pass a thistle just coming into flower, its head a tight green knot tipped with the first mauve, and a meadow brown butterfly lifts from it and settles again a yard further on, opening and closing its wings in the slow rhythm butterflies use when the sun is on them. The grass here is shorter, cropped at some earlier season by something, rabbits perhaps, and you can see between the stems to the dry crumb of the earth and the pale threads of root running through it. Ants are at work on a small mound, carrying pale grains. You step around them and walk on.
The light is changing by quiet degrees. The honey deepens toward amber, and the shadows of the taller flower-heads lengthen across the grass, each ox-eye laying down a thin grey echo of itself to the east. The breeze drops further. The skylark has come down at last, or another has taken its place in silence, and what fills the air now is the bees and the grasshoppers and the slow occasional creak of the hedge settling as its warmed wood cools by the smallest fraction. You reach the hedge and stand under the spill of the dog rose. Up close the flowers are simple, five-petalled, their stamens a soft gold crown, and one of them holds a small beetle moving slowly across the pale ground of a petal, going about whatever it is going about. The hawthorn behind smells faintly of itself, that musky green smell, and the earth at the foot of the hedge is cooler, darker, kept by the shade.
You turn and look back the way you came. The meadow lies open in the lowering light, the path you walked already half closed behind you, the grass leaning gently east now as the air begins its evening drift down off the slope. The kite does not come back. The sky over the wood goes from pale blue to a paler gold, and somewhere a wood pigeon begins its soft repeated note, three syllables and a pause, three syllables and a pause. The warmth is still in the ground and in the seed-heads and in your hand where you rested it on the tussock. A moth lifts from the grass near your feet and settles again, pale against the pale stems. The light loosens. The meadow holds its colours a little longer, and then a little longer, and the song of the pigeon goes on, unhurried, into the slow blue thickening at the edge of the field.