Last Flight

I said I chose not to fly again , except in an emergency. This race to see and speak seems to be emergency enough. I look for the quickest way south. I choose to fly. As the little propellor-plane taxis along, I suppress thoughts of Indiana Jones films and think, this may be my last flight.

It turns out to be a flight like none I’ve had before, a child’s magical birds-eye flight, skimming over a clear, unusually cloud-free landscape at a height where details can readily be identified, and anything not visible is imaginable. I note the snow on the Stirlingshire hills as they retreat behind me. Snow puffs and scrapes across the highest hills of Galloway, and streaks the mountains of England’s lakeland.

I watch the strange, human patterns of fields and settlements. It all looks so much older from the air, like something that has grown organically; haphazard, unplanned. It is the random cracked glaze made by fire on an ancient cauldron, imprinted on glacial landscapes by millenia of human occupation.

I see how nearly bare native trees and unplanned woods snake along river valleys, and cluster beside routes that connect only in a roundabout way; wandering paths and roads that go round things. By contrast, the dark plantation forests of Sitka spruce are bald and angular and the reparations of modern forestry design have done little to alleviate their awkwardness. They still do not fit.

When I next look out, we are passing over Wales. Snowdon and its consort peaks are proud, triumphal, dazzling white and icy, but dark hills lie all around. An extinct Welsh volcano, crimped with snow, broods over a green plain of farms and fields. Its crater hides a cache of snow from all bar those who fly over it. On the Black Mountains, the snow seems to trace the contour lines. It’s like looking at a giant 3D map or one of these models you find in landscape interpretation centres.

Here is an Iron Age landscape, a Celtic domain. Hillforts rise above farmland, the timeless strongholds of Arthur, Merlyn, Caractacus and those who went before. This one has six ditches and ramparts, etched in snow. Its neighbour has only three. And there, quarries and open-cast mines with their working terraces create an optical illusion of hillforts turned inside out.

How green are the valleys, with their wandering rivers and the streams of towns and villages that run along them, made silver by the sun shining on roofs and streets, their buildings,  estates and conurbations making swirling patterns of dots and squares. Way off, Swansea nestles in hard among its cockles and laverbread and all its lovely words, and below lies the black, coal-rippled sand of the South Wales coast.

Crossing the Severn Estuary, the bird’s-eye landscape fades. Features become shadows, obscured, hazy. Cloud lies over Devon and Somerset, a ponderous, doubtful fog. But beyond the unknown, to the west, another landscape beckons. I cannot tell if it is sea or sky, dark streams of cloud or a distant land; lost Lyonesse or the islands of the blest.

(I didn’t take any photos on the flight. Even if I had, they’d not be of any use, since I’ve left my phone on a bus!)