Near the edge of Cambridge, in Cherry Hinton, is a stealthy nature reserve. The only hint of the place from the street is the fence threaded with green. That’s not such an uncommon sight in Cambridge, where hedges and trees screen a lot of things from view. These particular barriers don’t seem to hide much—there’s a narrow tangle of trees but no sense of deepening beyond them as you might expect in a nature reserve. Many people, I suspect, zoom past without an inkling that anything is there, as I would have despite attending church less than a block away every week.

But I’ve been tipped off. After church one Sunday I go looking for an entrance, a place to stash my bike, a wooden gate and descending steps into the green. I enter another dimension—one of several tucked into Cherry Hinton Chalk Pits.

I. Closed

Lime Kiln Close

Sunk into the chalk bed that drew quarriers here hundreds of years ago is now a woodland. The tops of mature maples and ash just skim the level of the ground outside. Down among the roots and undergrowth, narrow paths wind through the ivy-blanketed trees and brambles and out of sight. It’s impossible to know where they go or how big their domain is. I am instantly enchanted.

Following the path is a lesson in green—the bright jewel green of maple hanging over the path, the high narrow leaves of ash, the grass underfoot, the morning glory and ivy weaving heartily through and over it all—and, this first time, an indulgence of my obsession with the delicious unknown. I’m hungry for the next curve, the new fold in the tapestry of green or rise in the topography of the reclaimed quarry. I find and follow every fork in the web, through open grassy clearings and close corners, past other sets of stairs leading in from the above-ground world. I breathe fresh green air, ivy shadows and leaf light and earth spices. I find an interpretive sign that tells me to look for the protected plants—wild cherry, wild licorice, moon carrot. I find the wild cherry, with bright berries and smooth leaves right by the path, but the others remain mysteries.

This exploration doesn’t take more than half an hour. I realize, and later confirm on Google maps, that this is a very small pocket of wildness, dense as it is with turns and life. At the moment, this realization doesn’t diminish the delightfulness of the sanctuary, but it does make me wonder, how long would it take for the secret garden novelty to wear off, and for the place to seem truly small? Is the tingling sense of hiddenness and mystery I feel here entirely an illusion cast by quarry depth and layers of trees, easily dissolved by familiarity?

Life, of course, never runs out of complexity, and has had two hundred years to establish here since the last chalk and lime was carted away to Cambridge colleges and agricultural fields. The leaves certainly do make for good hiding places. I see squirrel scampers and hear bird twitters and I know these are only the smallest hints of the community secreted away here. On the other hand, the interpretive sign tells me that the reserve is carefully maintained by volunteers trimming ivy and pollarding trees. The paths are kept clear for neighborhood ramblers like me. Should this human involvement, human knowingness of the place, blunt that sense of beyond-known that I’m so hungry for and so often look for in the natural world? In England, where human presence has imbued the whole landscape for centuries, that dichotomy is useless (as it is everywhere, really—but it’s more obvious here). Can I unlearn it?

A recent visit: I come in the main entrance and notice a small, secret side-path, which I follow up along the flank of the pit. I find huge trees braided savagely with ivy and alcoves overlooking the woodland. A final scramble brings me up to the fence, the edge of the reserve, and in the fence is a narrow gap filled with light. It’s a portal to a parallel dimension: a vast, even-furrowed brown plain, glowing quietly with tender shoots and occupied only by a scattering of crows. Wind turbines poke over the horizon. It is the above-ground, ostensibly human world, and yet it is, in a different way, otherworldly, as abrupt and open and formless as the woodland is layered and dark. I feel myself standing on a fantastical map boundary, another swath of it populating before my eyes. Chalk, woodland, field; rock, human, time.

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II. Open

East Pit

If Lime Kiln Close, the oldest part of the quarry, is shrouded in tree-mystery, East Pit, the neighboring part of the complex, is a miracle of hidden open space. Rounding the corner of the entrance to this much larger pit is like reaching into Mary Poppins’ handbag and discovering the footprint of a medieval castle inside. This is nearly naked chalk quarry. You can see the whole wide, chalky scrape open before you, from the central grassland growing scantily in pebbly white soil reminiscent of geothermal sinter crust, to the white cliff edges, where chalk scrambles with brambles. Crows skim over the cliffs from the field—which, as it’s high and out of sight, I only know from the fence-portal—calling, falling away in a flock over the scooped-out space. Wind pushes through. Sun surges, glints white on chalk.

A wide circular path ranges on either side of the grassland to stairs up the terraces of chalk at the other end. Here and there are milky puddles and patches of slick pale rock polished by rain and the feet of local ramblers; their dogs leave pawprints in the chalk mud. In the scrub borders are hidden twitters and rose hips like bold red lips entwined with dark secrets of blackcurrants. I see vivid autumn-colored petals in a puddle and snagging in bushes and realize they’re plastic, someone’s scattered artificial bouquet. An empty snail shell lies coiled in moss.

This chalk is what remains of Late Cretaceous sea debris: 100-million-year-old shells and algae, crushed. An interpretive sign points out a pink band, which I find amid the layers of brush and geometric chalk face, a few centimeters’ blush of one hundred thousand of years of marine history. More obvious here than in Lime Kiln Close is the recent history of removal, the negative space, both an erasure and a revelation. This part of the quarry has only been quiet for 20 years. Now volunteers are assisting the succession of thin soil and grassland. In the spring and summer, there are flowers. Moon carrots.

Not all is visible in one take. Tucked alongside the terrace is a recessed cove where people have left half-burned palettes and chalk-chunk fire rings.  I stand in the shadow of the chalk and look up. Clouds scud over the edge and leaves trace the space as they twirl down. The brush on the cliff is busy with birds: jay, robin, skirling magpie, blackbirds, jackdaw silhouettes, wood pigeon flaps; high above, a raptor—red kite—floats sideways and back on the billow of wind, forked tail and sculpted wings twitching. I hear sociable human voices on the terrace, but down here I’m hidden from view, alone with my cross section of history and sky.

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III. Closed

West Pit

My insatiable appetite for the unknown is whetted again when I notice a mention on the entry sign of a third piece of the complex, West Pit. An arrow points over the road on the map but stops there. Challenge accepted.  

I find the entrance to a caravan park. A big fumy motor home passes me in my way in. Immediately next door is a housing development construction site, announced on the fence banners as “Chalk Glade” and as yet only an empty white pit. I almost despair, but when I look closely at the fringes of the park I see inviting little paths into the green (despite the signs that say “This area not maintained by the caravan park, use at your own risk”). Indeed, the paths are less maintained than Lime Kiln Close, some of them scrambles growing over into dead ends, although I find recently cut deadwood that would have intercepted the path. The path seems to end for good at an alcove formed by a chunky white wall of chalk veiled with ivy.

I pause to resolve pieces of the tangle of details. Everywhere the ground is cushioned with wet yellow and brown leaves, moss, ivy, sticks, feathers, angular chunks of chalk that I can scratch and come away with white under my fingernail. Spiderweb weave in berryless holly. People playing soccer (indistinct yelling, hollow thwacks, whistle) somewhere on one side of the trees; rush of the road on the other. Voice of the breeze in ash trees; almost-sweet smell of freshness. Ditch where water used to run, now only sticks and ivy. Furry ivy fibers on trunks. Wood pigeons overhead.

Ivy tells stories. I notice some of them on my way back. I see a perfect arch of ivy inviting to a side spur—a young tree, snapped but held together by the ropes of ivy collectively thicker than the trunk. Did the ivy bring it down? Lucky ash trees manage to reach the sun; ivy trunks thick as arms have been cut at their bases, yet new ivy leaves cascade from the branches.

Later I cycle up the harrowingly narrow Lime Kiln Road toward a Google-Maps-red-pin promise of “View Point over Cambridge” and find instead the tucked-away official entrance to West Pit, complete with wooden gate and interpretive sign. I had come in the back door before, although this true entrance is comically inaccessible on a busy road with no shoulders. Switchbacks lead me to two old kilns—shadowy rings of brick sunk into the ground and green with life, nearly erased. The path goes on along the narrow swatch of quarry wall and does in fact connect to where I stopped before—the steep wooden steps were completely camouflaged by leaves and ivy from below.

West Pit may be even more of a conundrum than the other pieces of this puzzle. Most of it has been taken over by caravan parking, and yet this strip that remains, strung through with a single path and just dense and wide enough to feel self-contained, seems to be the most secret of all. Perhaps the novelty is all the more likely to wear off, and yet I feel a renewed sense of discovery and quiet ownership of this obscure patch, the chalk alcove and the ivy arch and the carpet of moss. It has its own stories to tell. Like the rest of Cherry Hinton Chalk Pits, sandwiched as they are between road and field and motorhomes, the place holds memory upon memory of the landscape. This story will only keep unfolding. I don’t think I’ll get bored.

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