Down and Deep

This all happened over a century ago and the fields grew corn and bullocks before much of it was turned into an aerodrome. Ernest Hemingway spent some time here as a war correspondent and I expect shot ducks on the Great Deep, between flying as passenger in a Mosquito fighter/bomber chasing Doodlebugs.

Wellington bombers crashed here, so did Hastings transports, and latterly the Hercules tunneled into the sky. Poor little Dylan Thomas hated the place and said it was all so beastly, with planes grazing the roofs, bombs coming by night, police by day, and there were furies in the bottom of his garden with bayonets, with Canadians in the bushes and Americans in the hair, and a damned banned area altogether. The crew of a Beverley crashed into the mudflats in the 1950s but go out to tell the tale.

For me, the place is as packed with memories and history as it is with birds and wildlife, and gives waking dreams as you watch. The Great Deep has a daily flush by the sea and again by night, the tide pouring in a tunnel under the bank. This widens into a pool you can see here and is the winter home of many of the county's dabchicks or little grebes. They bob under the foam and pop up again like corks.

The meadows here are not open to walkers and have no need to be, for you can see all you want from this grandstand view on the seawall. Along the muddy shore either side of Eames Farm creek is the place in Autumn to look for greenshank. These are tall, grey, elegant waders with very long legs and a triple-pipe as they rise and fly away, svelte and silver as Concorde used to be.

You will see little egrets walking with the same gravure as they did among the Pharoes on the Nile, in ancient time. You will see, as well, little trips of dunlin creeping like white mice along the edge of the tide, rising with a husky skirl as the tide falls and they can return again to the wider muds of Emsworth channel.

On that dark shore to the right is a favourite place for snipe which hide among the tufts of long grass for shelter in a wind. If you sat very still from where I took the photograph, you would eventually see them creeping about and preening those long feathers down their backs with their even longer beaks.

When they fly up they become small black arrow heads in the sky, hurtling on parabolic journeys to far places, only to return and fall again back to the ground with the speed of rushing air in their wings.

Teal dibble along this creek, discreetly distant. Except that on a moonlit night, many of which I have spent huddled into that warm blanket of long grass on the bank, these tiny ducks will come close, paddling over the tide, whistling to each other for comradeship, the ducks making little quacks like whinnies, the cocks answering to say their ancient name: te-le, te-le, as told to us by the medieval Dutch decoy men who were as adroit as those from Egypt.

Shelducks scudder down the long wind of winter, white and black as china cups. Shoals of oyster-catchers skim the seawall at dropping tide: half a thousand redshank flick above your head at that exact moment when the channel muds wave green wands of weed for the last time as the tide goes.

Are their otters in the tide, or seals? Overall, the brooding black forest of Kingley Vale, with its own secrets of life now and battles long fought, from D-Day to eternity of the Stone Age. The Deeps form part of one of my own walks which I hope to publish soon in book form. It is another extraordinary part of our county.

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