IoW.

There are no motorways here, no enormous monoculture fields, no depressed goth kids skulking round the village green (well, not many). Instead, there are hedgerows deep and full of song, bustling with the colours of celandine and vetch, cow parsley and primroses, dandelions and forget-me-nots. I’ve seen field mice hopping along the path in front of me, thrushes and blackbirds exploding out of bushes, fritillaries spiralling up into the flawless blue of afternoon as little freshets pour down off the fields into a brook beside which snowdrops and blue bells grow out of the cool black loam beneath the trees. In the woods there are chestnut saplings pushing up among the nettles and laurel candles nodding from among waxed leaves, and full-grown trees whose names I don’t know showing off great diadems of white flowers thirty or forty feet up their slender mossy trunks. In the banks of the brook I saw a ford criss-crossed with the tracks of animals. Here all paths lead eventually to the sea, where the sweet green smell of blossom and the sharp, fennel tang of sap rising give way gradually to ozone and seaweed, dreams of salt instead of soil. You can walk out along a rickety, storm-beaten pier and watch the white isosceles of sail boats tacking across the Solent while cruise ships and oil tankers inch their prostrate shadows across the horizon. Back inland you come across an old churchyard which has a yew tree in one corner and a giant pink magnolia in the other that sheds its petals over drunkenly subsided gravestones. Once ornate with mourning, today they’re chipped and faded and lost beneath thick growths of moss. Alongside the churchyard there’s a Victorian manor house with gouges in the chimneystack and slates in the gutter. Plastic and ripped drapes cover the windows. It looks the perfect setting for a gothic ghost story. Inside the church, there are several jars of marmalade made by a local woman and sold for £1.20, all proceeds going to the restoration fund, one of which you buy, leaving the money in the basket provided, feeling oddly enriched by the experience. As you progress homewards, first by paths and then by roads, as you feel the peopled world part to reabsorb you with all its motion and noise, you realise that this was the first time in years you’ve been completely filled with silence.