FINE WINE
yards, I could see the silhouette of a raptor
standing on a solitary Dutch barn. Before I
could centre my binoculars it had gone.
At the base of this black barn I found
pieces of a pigeon. The breasts had been
stripped from the sternum; not a morsel of
meat was left. Nothing but wings and shoul-
ders remained, and though twisted they
were intact. It was, unequivocally, a pere-
grine’s lunch. Happy with the day’s hunting,
I set off into the wilderness again, indulging
in the silence and seclusion, before turning
home to reflect on a day well spent.J
. A. Baker, an arthritic and short-sighted
birdwatcher from Chelmsford, compared
the British wilderness to ‘the goaded bull
at bay, pierced by the lance of the picador’.
Baker found solace in the unblemished sol-
itude of the Dengie Hundred, where he
wrote one of the strangest and most influ-
ential nature books ever written, The Per-
egrine, which tracks the daily lives of a pair
of peregrine falcons. He died in the 1980s
but the wilderness of the Dengie Peninsu-
la, 50 miles east of London, where Essex
marshland meets the Northern main, is still
largely as it was.
Here, wildfowl still come and go in their
thousands. Waders take refuge in the glass-
wort and sea aster, and starlings flit through
the sky like airborne sardines. Ploughs still
chime against cockleshells and Roman flint
beneath the heavy blue silt. But there are a
few changes from Baker’s day, some almost
sacrilegious. Here stand 26 wind turbines,
icons of rural vandalism overshadowing
one of England’s oldest churches, the Saxon
St Peter-on-the-Wall. Behind them disused
pylons walk west from a decommissioned
power station — barbs on the skyline.
Many condemn the saltings as bleak or
empty, but the coastline has an eerie charm.
Here, in big sky country, your eyes lose per-
spective. Apart from the poplar tops, elm
stumps and swaths of blackthorn, the land is
flat and unbroken. ‘Sea and sky lose them-
selves together’ (wrote Baker) and ‘the grey
and white horizons are moored on rafts’.
One afternoon in April, I followed in the
footsteps of my namesake, along the seawall
between St Peter’s Chapel and Burnham-
on-Crouch. Like him, I was in pursuit of
the peregrine. I saw dunlin, redshank, little
ringed plover, teal, wigeon, brent geese and
shelduck in abundance. I was about to give
up on the peregrine, when, from a thousandSt Peter-on-the-Wall, one of England’s oldest churchesNOTES ON ...
The Dengie Hundred
By Fred Baker
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