An alternative hill walk II

For a long time, when I turn, I can see the farm in the valley. The hill is more steep, and suddenly the path stops, disappears in a young field with grass-like crops growing on it. A ridge in the landscape like a wall, do I have two choices: to the left climbing that wall, or to the right walk around it. I choose the last option.

Follow the wall and pass a foxhole, and it is occupied as I notice the fresh hair around the edges. I stand still, but no sound, no nothing hidden between the roots of shallow bushes in the white marl-sand of the wall.

At the end I have to climb anyhow to reach a path on higher ground that I cross. On the other side is a fence that is meant to avoid access, but behind it is a trail uphill, and I decide  to step over the fence, which is not as easy as it looks for a 60 year old whose limps are not as elastic anymore as they used to be.

What is there that forbids entrance in a nature reserve, while there is a path? I’m curious; climb up, follow the hedge and bushes on the other side. It looks a long way, but the trail bends to the left and suddenly ends at a small pond.

Dark, frog-like water, but I don’t hear, can’t see; not even insects, that is how quite it is on the ridge, at the edge of a wood: Millennium forest, as I know it is called. It is part old: Cannerwood and part new, at the far end even newer, just planted as a compensation for the highway that is still be worked on.

To me it is double feeling. Men destroy something and at the same time give nature back to where already nature is. It is not new nature this reserve, only fresh trees. It is like green-certificates to buy off pollution. How hypocrite can one be? We are just too many in comparison with all the rest on this globe. It is not fair to nature, to Flora, to Fauna, and we think to put our conscious asleep with money. But nature, nor Flora or Fauna knows what money is. It has no value to them...

But the pond is there, not natural, diged, as it is to round, to much shaped by machines. Still I don’t know why the path up is blocked, until I notice some groups of trees in the open landscape; circles of trees, and something concrete in the middle.

I know here was a Nato base once; hidden in the marl caves of Mount Canne, and the leftovers are still camouflaged. It is hard to find the, though. Just bomb the tree-groups in a further empty landscape. I take pictures before I disappear in the Millennium forest That will lead me downhill as I know....

To be continued…