Why an everyday English field is my tranquillity base

Our writer’s special spot in a timeless corner of southern England holds a sense of deep peace and isolation

Last January I started a new part-time job on a landscape scheme in the medieval hunting forest of Cranborne Chase, a designated area of outstanding natural beauty (AONB) that straddles the borders of Wiltshire, Dorset, Hampshire and a sliver of Somerset.

By day it was all chalk, sheep and beech trees, big skies and isolated villages; at night the bright ribbon of the Milky Way arched above, soft moonlight bathing the fields, earning the AONB a Dark Sky Reserve designation. I’d stand in the garden in midsummer blackness, watching the dusty dart of the unromantically named C/2020 F3 Comet (AKA Neowise) while it was visible in the northern hemisphere, and unlocking an old obsession with constellations, our solar system and the Apollo missions.