Put me on a heath and I’m happy.

Put me on a heath as dusk descends and I come over all Thomas Hardy-like.

But put me on a heath at dusk almost a year to the day after the death of my dearest-ever friend Steve Piotrowski, with whom David Grimwood and I set up the Froize wildlife walks several years ago…well, it was then that Hardy’s poem Afterwards, a masterpiece that transcends mere wordly words, moved my heart as deeply as did the unearthly sounds of the Dew-fall Hawk we’d come to see.

I have a very strong admiration for Hardy. Always have. A Victorian novelist and poet, yes, but Hardy was also an attentive observer of nature, a man who was immersed in, and deeply moved by, the wonders of wildlife, be they represented by the tiniest invertebrates or the more obvious birds and beasts that shared the Dorset wilds with him. Not least, of course, the almost- mystical Dew-fall Hawk – the European Nightjar in modern parlance – which flits so beautifully into that poem Afterwards.

Heathland features strongly in Hardy’s works and I feel this Hardy-affinity at its deepest when I’m out in such habitat, be it in Hardy’s native Dorset, my native Hampshire or in the Sandlings of my adopted home county of Suffolk. On this particular evening, on a heath not distant from The Froize and with that sad anniversary still raw in my bones, I swear I could hear Hardy’s voice, my late mate Steve’s Suffolk twang and the hypnotic, rise-and-fall churring of the Dew-fall Hawk all speaking to me, intertwined as some celestial trio.

You may not be familiar with Afterwards. I recommend wholeheartedly that you become so. Just allow me here to say that it is almost an elegy. Hardy wonders what people will say of him after his death – not as a famous novelist or poet but as a man spiritually connected with nature’s endless intricacies…a man who ‘notices such things’. The poem’s beauty is, for me at least, beyond words.

I took the liberty of playing for our guests a Youtube recital of the poem after our Froize feast, before we set out to meet the Dew-fall Hawk. It was a recital I dedicated to the memory of Steve, a force of nature and a force for nature…a man more driven by the cause of nature conservation than anyone else I have ever met.  

In Afterwards, Hardy lyrically, incomparably, writes ‘….in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink, the dew-fall hawk comes crossing the shades to alight upon the wind-warped upland thorn…’ That one gets me every time. Every. Single. Time. And so too does the entire poem. Always.

We were thankfully far from the madding crowd out on this particular enclosed and peaceful heath. In fact, it was a case of the return of the native for me as I’d lived beside this very jewel of a place some years ago. And after we’d been serenaded by two Dartford Warblers, close by but invisible behind a bracken bank, it wasn’t long before the Dew-fall Hawk did indeed come ‘crossing the shades’. Spellbinding encounters with these buoyant birds, seemingly floating on zephyrs of the evening breeze, interacting with others of their kind and hawking for their airborne prey, held us in total thrall. It was, simply put, a mesmerising performance, accompanied by the near-constant, eerie ‘churring’ of males near and far. I have watched Nightjars over a period of about 55 years. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a moving experience with them as this. A Tawny Owl hooted, seeminging to wish us farewell and safe travels, and a tiny, greenish-yellow ‘fairy light’, a female Glow Worm, did her best to light our way back to civilisation as the beguiling heathland spell inevitably gave way. Afterwards, as it were.

Perhaps it had been the lovely company of our guests and the genial, welcome, presence of our Froize colleague Harry Read that made this such a special event. Perhaps it had been the stillness and warmth of the evening after a worryingly wild and windy day. Perhaps it had been the unforgettable show that the Dew-fall Hawks performed for us. 

Well, it was all of these, of course. And it had been, for sure, the soft, subtle and oh-so-meaningful words of the master Thomas Hardy. Moreover, it had been the memory of dear Steve too. A man who most certainly did ‘notice such things’….

Ends.

John Grant