Within Walking Distance...

... of our home, there is a plethora of open land which, whilst undoubtedly not designed with the objective of keeping small boys and their canine companions occupied and entertained, certainly manages to do both. Right behind our house, we're very fortunate to have this...

An Iron Age hill-fort whose presence in the landscape has dominated the vast majority of my life. When I was a child, I would be taken on long dog walks up to its summit, when I was a teenager I would hike up there by myself with my own dogs in tow and now that I have a child, a teenager and a dog who (on days like yesterday) all require copious amounts of fresh air and exercise? 

The hill-fort is usually a good place to hike with them.

There are interesting bits of concrete and machinery left behind by the Army to carefully examine...

There are steep paths of scree for The Offspring to race one another up (although I don't think The Girl was actually racing so much as simply strolling)...

There are flat places to sit and look at the view...

... like this, which is the other side of the hill-fort...

There are trees for little boys to scramble up...

There are plenty of stones for insane dogs to carry around in their mouths (The Dog *has* to be carrying something in his mouth at all times, if possible, whilst we're out and, when he was a pup, started to cart huge stones around - although he'll still "borrow" any other dog's tennis balls in passing for a while if he thinks he can get away with it)...

Sometimes, if we're very lucky, we catch sight of one or both of the Red Kites who have a nest somewhere nearby...

... whilst The Dog splashes in muddy puddles and makes The Offspring giggle when he splashes them...

Sometimes, if we're very unlucky, we get to watch the local fire brigade put out fires on the side of the hill-fort and damp down the surrounding area so that it doesn't happen again (this time, we were the ones who had to call them out due to the size of the flames and the amount of dry wood and dead foliage catching light)...

On the way back from the hill-fort, there is also a pond (look closely and you can see The Dog splashing around in the shallows)...

... where ducks like these Mallards like to swim and build their nests...

... and The Dog likes to plunge in and serenely swim in pursuit of floating sticks.

There are also tree-root tunnels (they used to be rabbit warrens until erosion took over) for The Boy to wriggle his way through (note the stone in The Dog's mouth)...

... and at the end of the hike, another flat area for a very tired boy to sit and have a brief breather.

When I stand on top of the hill-fort and cast my eye across the vista of three towns, two villages and a wonderfully large expanse of undeveloped land, I realise two things.

1. How very fortunate we actually are to have this historically significant part of the landscape within easy access, and
2. How small we, as people, actually are.

It doesn't seem like much, really, but for thousands of years people have occupied the same land that The Village now stands upon. There have been a minimum of three battles fought upon the land shown in the photographs above - and those only the ones recorded by documented history - and Cromwell's troops mustered on the land now taken up with 19th and 20th century houses. On top of the hill-fort itself, an entire community lived in times of trouble - although common thought now is that they may have settled there all year round - and their animals grazed the grass at its foot. Maybe they even grew crops there. Thousands of years of human occupation... of unlimited amounts of changes, of houses being built and destroyed, rebuilt and altered, of different families continuously coming into the area and leaving it again - or staying in some cases - and yet the one thing that hasn't changed? That hasn't altered?

The hill-fort.

That will still be there, hopefully untouched, in another thousand years when me and mine are all long gone from the landscape it stands guard over...