RICHARD WILLIAMSON Nature Trails December 2

One year they blocked it up and at the first fire in autumn the smoke billowed into the living room and we relieved our lungs under the stars for half an hour.

I cut a long hazel pole and poked it amid a shower of soot until at last a pile of twigs and sheep’s wool tumbled across the carpet. That wasn’t very popular.

There was enough kindling to light three fires on following nights.

Then an old friend from my school days came to visit and told me how he had once explored the attics of our gothic prison at pain of beating, and his fear of being caught was nothing to his amazement at what he found in that dark sequestered gloom.

A pile of sticks, he said, that was higher than his 12-year head and wider at the base than three of his age decumbent. We had become interested in Egyptology because of a more moderate master who had seen the world and not just that one small segment of England with its atmosphere of Wuthering Heights.

So the words ‘I can see wonderful things’ crossed our hero’s mind as he perceived the pyramid before him. Scrambling to the top he found what looked like a lapis lazuli jewel fit for Pharaohs.

Of course it was only a jackdaw’s egg but the moment cemented the mystique of the netherworld in ancient civilisations.

Presumably the birds had just built and built every year for decades in this lost tomb among the towers.

Jackdaws do have this uncanny knack of communicating with us. They like to be near us, in or around our houses, especially our castles and cathedrals, our ruins and our outbuildings.

In my picture here they are a common sight at West Dean College near Chichester. They are in Cowdray ruins, Chilgrove Park, and all along the Seven Sisters, an immemorial nesting place amid the caves and cornices, crannies and cliffs, especially that once-dreaded overhang known as Suicide’s Leap.

They seem jolly and carefree, scattering glad cries to the high winds as they sail openly across the clouds and blue onwards to see friends in defiance of that falling angel of destruction, the peregrine.

Sometimes they gather like football crowds in winter, more than 1,000 often in the Arun Valley from their breeding nooks in the quarries at Amberley and Arundel.

Apparently they have seven clearly different calls, jock for joy and darr for dread, which together gives their name. They are thieves of other’s eggs, troubadours, travellers.

Country folk have always been made bipolar by the jackdaw, have always had a sneaking regard for this tumbler down the chimneys and hidden places of our lives.