Milk Hill, Wiltshire’s highest point, stretched above and we found ‘bunches of keys’ of two kinds: the metallic, key-rattle of corn buntings (heads thrown back, lower bills unhinged) & the golden keys of cowslips. The horse was made on the instruction of Farmer Pile in 1812, who paid an advance sum of £20 to John Thorne, or ‘Jack the Painter’ who offered a drawing, sub-contracted the cutting and disappeared with the money. The wind hunted through it, moving it into a vast, rippling, emerald sea below the hooves of the Alton Barnes White Horse, giving the chalk-scoured animal movement. We walked The Hollow into Alton Barnes to Honeystreet, before returning to the ridge through all the silky, waist high barley. There were few people about, but we nodded and smiled at a walker, coming down the chalk path with a dark, canvas pack on his back and leather looking chaps or wraps on his legs.

Traffic noise drifted above the wind and skylarks, from the Herepath, or ‘War Road’ below, where the old name is still recorded at Harepath Farm. This intersection of The Ridgeway and Wansdyke trackways, was the site of two Anglo Saxon battles. The view was a far-reaching, 360degree panorama of farm and downland, pocked and bumped with barrows. We headed up Walker’s Hill, and a narrow chalk ribbon to the sky at the summit, over the dramatically poised Neolithic long barrow of Adam’s Grave. No picnic in Wiltshire is complete without such an event. We flattened ourselves on our backs in the buttercups and squealed as the beat of the double rotorblades thumped into our chests and the ground beneath us. High above the froth of hawthorn blossom and cow parsley, we idly watched the distant wasp of a Chinook helicopter drop lower and lower until it came right overhead, at airshow height.

On a Wedgewood-blue day, with the wonderfully floriferous Pewsey Downs still getting going after such a late, cold, spring, we began a long walk with a picnic against the warm, honey-coloured sarsens at the foot of Knap Hill and the Workaway Drove.

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