Feeling on top of the world (From Gazette Series)

Feeling on top of the world

THESE are observations/thoughts of my 17-year-old niece, Angela Chilton, which were sent in a letter to her grandmother, living in Cornwall. Angela was born in Sydney, Australia, and moved to England with her family in 1997. She lived in the Dursley area for four years and, with her two brothers, attended Rednock School. The family returned to Australia in 2002 but, as you will see from her writing, Dursley, and Stinchcombe Hill in particular, had a great impact on her.

Kate Thompson, Berkeley Road, Cam

UP on top of Stinchcombe Hill is the place which, I think, has made the biggest impression on me. It took the ticking of the last six months of a five-year stay for me to realise it, but I have now.

It's a golf course on top of a hill, which may be hard to imagine but is possible due to the fact that it is really a series of three hills whose sides collide in order to form a semi-flat top.

The steep sides are drenched in woods and filled with the winding and criss-crossing of paths all eventually leading and meeting at the top to form, with the help of the tree-line, a rather unusually shaped crown around the golf course.

Following this co-operation of paths would take you a good two hours. You would be forced to every so often plunge into the tree line or to cross a neatly cut green. Eventually though, you will come across a little stone hut.

To be specific, I can even put the whole 'place that has made an impact on me' to this little shelter built from the very ground it stood on. However, I would also have to admit that only with my best friend sitting beside me am I able to say that.

Just to be able to sit there. To sit there and take in the surroundings which simply indulged the senses to the point of becoming them, a collaboration of sight, sound, smell, touch and taste in a single being.

Being England, the clouds hung low in their usual way and combined with the fact that you were above the normal level, you felt very close to the sky. The rain was so delicate it fell like a settling mist, touching the petals of the proud standing flocks of rose-bay willow herb with jewels of glistening light. They stood there almost as if they too, were spectators to the beauty of the land that stretched out beneath their roots. Under the shelter of carved stone I watched with them.

Looking out you could see the great strength the prehistoric glacial forms must have had to carve the land into running hills and flat land. There are, however, new creatures etching the landscape. Humans. Their activity unmissable and their influence seen everywhere. The motorways of cars chasing each other like silver ribbons of lights carving new paths through the landscape, finding the easier path to run, just like a river would.

And the little whitewashed cottages hugging the base of the hills as if they were too scared to venture out into the open and exposed flat land. Only the farmers lived out there in their houses surrounded by their own little piece of patchwork. I could see my own farm, only just though, as it lay miles away. To an untrained eye it would just be another smudged-in blemish within the green of the banks of the great River Severn.

The sounds you had to listen carefully for, and only when they were ready could you hear them. In summer it was the crickets and in winter the wind through the trees. They weren't intrusive, just there enough so the place didn't ring with silence.

This can be said for smell too. Usually your nose was filled with the dew on the freshly mowed grass of greens but searching further, faint scents of decay and new growth existed at the same time. Always there, although not always taken notice of.

Taste came within the form of blackberries which ripened every year at the precise time when summer was turning over to autumn, as if by some unknown appointment with nature.

As for the case of touch, the whole atmosphere of the place saturated your skin and seeped into your blood. However, in order for this to happen, you had to stand around and actually acknowledge and make a connection with it and not just be passing through like some temporary thing. And I think that's what happened to me as I sat and just took in what was around me.