Red Kite

Small tarn on Bryn y Maen

We came back from a week in the Welsh Borders at the weekend, looked up into the sky over suburban Southampton, and saw the very first Red Kite ever circling directly over our house. Once, it would have seemed like it might have followed us home... But let's back up a bit. In fact, let's go back forty-plus years.

My partner and I first met at university around 1974, had an on-again, off-again relationship for a few years, gradually coming to the realisation that there was probably no-one else out there for either of us who would be less annoying to spend time with in between our not infrequent moments of profound and occasionally transcendent pleasure and mutual understanding, punctuated by fierce and fiery rows. If Shakespeare is your reference for romantic relationships, then we're talking Beatrice and Benedick rather more than Romeo and Juliet. Frankly, apart from, say, the sort of arranged dynastic marriages that ensured the continuity of the royal bloodlines of mediaeval Europe, there is no better basis for a successful long-term relationship. We've been together ever since, raised two children and paid off a couple of mortgages, but have never married, though the prospect of a civil partnership is increasingly tempting in these uncertain days.

Anyway, it must have been somewhere around 1978 that we started making use of a cottage her parents owned near Presteigne, a town in the Welsh Borders, as a handy (and free) weekend and holiday bolthole, just a couple of hour's drive from our working lives in Bristol, me as a librarian cataloguing German and Russian books in the university library, she as a secondary school English teacher. It was far from luxurious: situated next to the constant babble of a stream, it was damp and cold even in summer, with slate floors set directly onto the ground, and no heating other than a single traditional fireplace and a couple of two-bar electric heaters. On arrival we would prop up the mattress and warm it up with one of the heaters so as to steam it off a bit. Wood would need to be chopped for the fire. It was a bit like camping, but with the convenience of a cooker, a fridge, and an indoor toilet. I suppose there must have been a bath, too, but I don't remember using it; neither of us has ever been big on bathing, anyway.

The Welsh Borders are still quite remote, despite their proximity to the lush farmlands of Herefordshire and Shropshire: a phone-signal "dead zone" where the beep of a mobile coming briefly and feebly back to one-bar life in one's pocket on some hilltop is a cause for rejoicing. In those days, however, it was like travelling decades back into the past, a past where eccentric old hill-farmers lived alone in one wing of ancient farmhouses with no electricity, and the high streets of market towns like Presteigne, Knighton, or Llandrindod Wells looked like the film-set for an Agatha Christie adaptation. The area also had a certain pull for artists, craft-folk, and New Age and alternative lifestyle enthusiasts of various sorts looking for a quiet life away from censorious eyes. The luxury of having no neighbours has long been a privilege of wealth in most of England: in mid-Wales it comes as standard.

The forty years we have been visiting the area have seen many changes. Now there are out-of-town superstores and industrial estates accommodating some surprising industries; for example, Llandrindod now hosts a pioneer in hydrogen fuel cell technology. Farmers ride quad-bikes up to their hill-pastures, and the factory-like barns of intensive livestock-rearing are appearing everywhere. But the native young continue to flee to the cities, tourists are few, and elderly incomers contribute little to local economies; "prosperity" is not the word that springs to mind when you observe the human inhabitants of this beautiful backwater.

However, one striking success story has been the unstoppable spread of the Red Kite. Back in the 1970s and 80s, the uplands of the Marches were where the last few kites were making their stand against persecution and extinction. If you went to certain remote spots, with a bit of luck you might spot one of these striking birds doing its graceful sky-dance over the corner of a field. If you were very fortunate indeed, around Easter time you'd see a pair doing their extraordinary mating ritual, which involves locking claws and cartwheeling through the sky: it looks more like mortal combat than anything else (did somebody mention Beatrice and Benedick?). A long-term programme of reintroduction by the RSPB and others since the 1990s has had spectacular results: in 2004, on my way home by train from a reunion with some old friends in Oxford, I was astonished to see a couple of Red Kites circling above Reading railway station. Since then they've become a common sight in Wales and England, especially up the M3 and M4 motorway "corridors", where substantial road-kill victims – pheasants, foxes, badgers, and the occasional deer – litter the hard shoulder and central reservation of main roads: rich pickings for scavengers.

So that a kite should appear above our house in Southampton, having finally made our annual trip to Wales, cancelled in 2020 for the first time in 40-odd years due to Covid restrictions, seems highly appropriate. I wonder if it's got its eye on the yappy little dog next door? Or maybe the ancient tomcat that sprays its daily news bulletin all over our garden... We can only hope.

Fire in the valley below Llandegley Rocks