Richard Williamson's Column, October 20 2005

At midday and on into the small hours of the early afternoon the heat petrifies this landscape. The trees stand firm as if frozen from the depths of a Russian winter. Olive leaves turn silver in this brilliant light and the cork forest, stretching as if to eternity to the horizon that is Spain, settles to a dark, forbidding green that has a kind of implacable resolution to survive.

Underneath the forest and the groves, and scent shedding varnish-dripping twigs of the cistus and the grey trunks of the eucalyptus, it is the ground that shows the real strain of summertime in the south.

It is the dead, red brown of cardboard, maybe with tinges of yellow where the thistles have bloomed. These are the sheep pastures, with no blade of grass alive, where the spring flowers have long since been processed into pellets of sheep dung and returned to the dust;where only lizards and ants scurry. Over these heat-heavy hills a single Eleonora's falcon swings slowly across the sky gliding without a wingbeat, curving cooly in the terrible September sun, searching the bubbles of heat on which it could ride across the land.

Then, just as the heat becomes something dead that you know you're going to find unpleasant unless you stay in the shade, a wind springs up like that drawn into a volcano.

Nature Trails by Richard Williamson appears every week in the West Sussex Gazette. To read this column in full, see the issue of October 20.