Gog Magog Hills ~ Wandlebury and Magog Down

In the flatlands, hills draw history to them. Where the layers of chalk bulge up south of Cambridge, giving a green roll to the fields and beech groves and feeding flowers in chalk meadows, history crowns the 75-meter hilltops at Wandlebury and Magog Down. Legends call the Gog Magog hills a sleeping giant (see my post on Beechwoods), but there are plenty of other stories still observable on the chalk here: Iron Age ring hillfort, Roman road, 17^th-century thoroughbred stables, country estate, and rescue from bulldozing as nature reserve. Portals, paths, layers.

Wandlebury

I was introduced to Wandlebury Country Park and to the Cambridge writer Robert Macfarlane on the same occasion, that is, at a talk he gave about finding wonder in local landscapes in which Wandlebury was the focal point. I had been in Cambridge for a month or two and was spellbound. I immediately went out and bought Macfarlane’s latest book (Landmarks) and made plans to go find Wandlebury. That November I made the 30-minute cycle out into the hills with a friend and found a circular path through coppery beech woodland flanked by expansive fields, which we followed out and away several miles to Fulbourn Fen. We cycled home in the dark, coasting long and fast down the Gog Magog slope.

Somehow, I didn’t go back again until this April. I brought a flatmate and a neighbor along to find spring in the hills and delve a little deeper into the Wandlebury Ring and its wonder.

April: We cycle southeast, past Addenbrookes Hospital and uphill, emerging onto the curve of the hills as they rise between rolling spring-green fields. It would be idyllic if not for heavy traffic rushing alongside us and road construction cluttering the view with glaring orange. The Gog Magog Golf Club tells us we’re close—though the greens shaved onto the hillside take up more space than Wandlebury itself. Right when the hill reaches its steepest pitch, The Gog Farm Shop advertises its farm-boutique wares, so we capitulate and take a pit stop. We buy ginger biscuits at the deli and peek out the open Staff Only door by the produce stand, which looks tantalizingly onto open field and the edge of Wandlebury’s woodland beyond.

• 

• 

The entrance to Wandlebury Country Park is at the crest of the hill. The carpark is full, families abound, and there are sandwich boards featuring the dog of the month. The tree-lined paths are inviting and familiar from my last visit even though it’s been over a year and it’s a different season. There are some white blossoms but it’s still a bit early for greening in the beeches that make up the bulk of the wood, mostly grey at a glance—but on closer inspection the buds are breaking, just starting to spill their shiny green pleats. We take the Ring path.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Soon the woods meet fields, where highland cattle, shaggy and brown with hefty horns, loll under a cluster of incongruous pine trees. In another patch of field, one of the gentle giants is lying near the fence, where a sign informs us she has an injured leg and is resting. The highland cattle stay through the winter; some of them are old and arthritic; all are gentle. They’re here to keep the wildflowers happy by grazing the grass down. This one looks lazily at us but mostly stares ahead through its thick fringe. Meanwhile pheasants stroll through every field and scatter their raspy calls through the park.

• 

• 

• 

The Ring takes us round until we find an opening deeper into the circle. First: a ditch dipping down from the path, the outer ring of the Iron Age hillfort defenses. The Iceni, they were called, or have been named since, the tribal people who dug it over 2000 years ago. Today’s people can scramble down and play and walk along it. Then there’s a high brick wall that was built over another filled-in Iron Age ditch much later by the 17^th century landowners building their estate. Our path leads to a turquoise-framed doorway cut into the wall, only a fragment of lawn and trees visible on the other side. I can feel my inner child-self shivering with the delicious thrill of a door in a wall; to her there’s no doubt the place inside has some magic about it.

• 

• 

• 

What’s inside? A big grassy courtyard with a blossoming white tree in the center; picknickers spread over the grass; an orchard; the old brick stables with a brass turret and old clock; under this, an echoey cobble passageway where the Godolphin Arabian (died 1753, aged 29) is entombed across from the loos. A ripe old age for a horse, which is what the Godolphin Arabian was—one of the three stallions from which all thoroughbred racehorses are descended, apparently (though he never ran a race himself; I wonder how they decided he should sire so many racehorses). At the other end of the passage are private residences where the stables used to be.

• 

• 

• 

• 

My child-self would have lingered, tracing around the wall for its secrets, but as adults we only have so much time, and we have our eye on the signs for “View of Ely.” We leave the Ring for a path into open woods, trees tall and quiet and new leaves catching the sun. We stop at a two-story bird blind to watch an abundance of blue tits at the bird feeders. Not far is the edge of the woods where the fields start up again, where the view stretches out to Fulbourn village, and a faint rectangular spike on the horizon that we take to be Ely Cathedral, 15 miles away. We’re not sure, though. The hill’s pride to be above sea level at all goes to its head a bit, we think.

• 

• 

• 

Another layer of history is calling: the Roman Road. When Robert Macfarlane referred to the Roman Road in his Wandlebury talk, it sounded to me almost like the stuff of legend. I realize now that this is actually quite a generic name, and the road a simple, though well-engineered, country lane like many of the other roads the Romans built when this was their territory. Nevertheless, the fact that it’s still so firmly here, tracing a route that ancient people’s feet passed over, gives the road real enchantment. We find the beaten dirt track perpendicular to the end of the long Beech Avenue, stretching wide and straight in either direction, blooming hedgerows on one end and people receding along the other. There’s a moment of quiet filled with birdsong and it feels like the road could lead anywhere in time or space.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

We don’t walk the Roman Road today, but we visit another turnstile along the Beech Avenue that delivers us through the edge of the trees to a vision: a perfect swell of green field under blue feathered with mare’s tail cirrus clouds. When we look straight ahead, the curve of the hill blocks anything but the sky and the field where pheasants roam, popping their red heads up periodically like periscopes. Yet again, we’ve been placed in some other timeless dimension (or, as my friend put it, into the Windows XP wallpaper—I prefer a dream). The wind turbines visible above the trees to the northeast only add to the surreal effect. Everywhere in these hills there are portals, it seems.

• 

• 

• 

We eat our ginger biscuits and cigar cookies on a bench under the beech trees. Then we walk back through the buds, birds, and overbright sun. I’m ready to return here when the green is full and I have more time to choose and explore one of the many directions one can travel inward or outward from Wandlebury.

• 

• 

• 

Magog Down

But I must beg one more stop: Magog Down, the hill across the rushing A1307 from Wandlebury. I didn’t realize it was there the last time I came. We nose up the paths edging fields and onto the open meadow-hill with a crowning copse promising a view. The others decide to head home but I can’t let this golden hour go, so I stay behind to hike upward through the meadow yellow with cowslips and last year’s grass and upward. The hill delivers a view as pastorally spectacular as I hoped. I can’t tear my eyes from the woven and layered colors: one field a silky glowing golden taupe (didn’t know this color could be so beautiful); green stripes the essence of new growth, nearly neon; more mature green of hedges and trees; rafts of rapeseed blooming yellow; fallow brown; horizon blue; bare-branch grey. In another direction is Cambridge, nearly unrecognizable from this angle—only one spiky church tower is visible behind the high-rises and industrial buildings of the biomedical campus. A two-pronged chimney dominates the skyline, which I later learn is part of the hospital waste disposal system and was built from a single pour of concrete in the mid-20^th century. A counterpoint to the 16^th-century prongs of King’s College Chapel.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

I walk up and down the ridge, looking until I’ve had my fill and turn to go. On my way down the hill, though, I slow again. I can hear the looping twitter that I recognize as the song of skylarks, and I remember there were signs on the entrance gates asking for respect for nesting sklyarks in the meadow. I only learned to identify the song a day or two before when I matched the sound I was hearing in the fields near Newnham to the birdsong on the track of Pink Floyd’s “Grantchester Meadows” (remember that? See also Vaughan Williams’ Lark Ascending, the beauty of which I understand even more deeply now.) As it was in the fields that day, the skylark song on Magog Down is ubiquitous, impossible to pin down. That’s because, I learned online, this is song-flight: they hover a hundred feet up and sing out their territory. I start to look for the hovering.  I find a black speck in the sky, lose it again. I keep looking and listening and when I’ve waited long enough, I see one start up out of the field just beside me on quivering, fluttering wings, rising with its song, filling the sky with it, ecstatic, disappearing in and out of the sun, flowing through the blue between cirrus and moon sliver, until finally its wings go still, curved and pointed for a breathless moment, and it glides back down; the song dies as it touches the ground. Another one nearby takes up the sky. My eyes have filled with tears, and not just because of the brightness of the sun. I feel like the witness of a sacred rite.

It’s important to know that skylarks, woven in by their nesting to farmland and managed grassland, are in trouble. Their numbers have dropped so much as farming intensifies that they’re on the red list of endangered species. Their song filling the skies of Cambridge is all the more precious.

I also see rooks and crows black and glinting through the grass and tuneful birds in the hill copse. People too, peaceful on the mown paths crisscrossing the hill. They belong in the landscape too, give it scope for my human mind. The birds, though, belong the most, singing the hill into its many dimensions, making the grass home.

• 

• 

• 

• 

---

~ Second map shows extent of Roman Road; Wandlebury intersects it southeast of the golf course ~