Then, once the bus stopped at Thurlby crossroads, we would walk up the High Street with its variegated mix of houses and gardens to the Green where our new house was being built two doors down from the village post office. Over the summer, it progressed from its box-like origins until that day in early September when we moved in and it became home.

My sister started at Bourne Grammar School while I went to the village primary school whose Victorian façade greeted me every time I looked out of my bedroom window. When not in school, there were friends to play with and the village to explore, and this made Thurlby my main horizon for the next three years. One of my favourite haunts was Obthorpe Lane where, in the spring, I would search for the elusive pale-yellow flash of the primroses in the dykes.

There was stitchwort too, its tiny white flowers reaching towards the light. But I also loved the autumn view, standing on the slight advantage that the ridge had over the fen, and looking out over the patchwork of fields, irregular squares melded together by the dark lines of the dykes, sloping away to the edge of the horizon

My teacher in the last two years at primary school was a keen ornithologist and some afternoons, in pre-National Curriculum freedom, would march us in a crocodile along Obthorpe Lane’s dusty whiteness to Dole Wood. My sister told me this was ancient woodland and certainly there was something awe inspiring about its approach from the lane, especially the way in which the trees deadened sounds as we crossed the borders of the wood. The dark trunks stretched up to a canopy of green, the grass was lush around our ankles and there were nettles and brambles to catch the unwary in skirts and short socks.

Froggy, our teacher, always warned us to be quiet so as not to disturb the birds but somehow this felt like a place in which to be hushed, like a cathedral perhaps, or some temple to nature. Even whether the weather was hot, the temperature beneath the canopy was cool and we wandered about, conversing in low tones, doing whatever nature activities had been assigned to us. Then, at the end of the afternoon, Froggy would gather us all together and send us to the top of a natural stairway formed by the incline of Swallow Hill and the ancient tree roots. We were allowed to pelt down this formation at breakneck speed, whooping and squawking in atavistic fashion, as a reward for our co-operation before trooping back to school.

At the other side of the village lay Wood Lane, another route out into nature, and here a neighbour and I experienced a genuine moment of panic, that is, an awareness of the god Pan in his dominion. It was autumn and we had gone to the thicket halfway along its length to look for blackberries. This was a place we were familiar with. During the summer when the bushes were clothed in green, we had searched for creatures in the dyke with jam jars and fishing nets.

But now the leaves were falling away and the wind set the thicket rustling. A low sun danced through the bare branches, and both of us had the uncomfortable feeling that we were being watched. Without too much discussion we began to walk back towards the village; our pace quickened until we were running and I glanced behind to see the thicket, secret and quiet as if we had never been there.

I followed my sister to Bourne Grammar School at eleven, and this, and the advent of my teenage years, widened my scope for observation and exploration. I gauged the progress of the year by the stately horse chestnuts lining the southern edge of the playing fields, the reds and golds of autumn, the spiky outstretched arms of winter, the green mist of spring, the shadiness of summer. I also dreaded having to thud past them during cross-country before stumbling across the deep ruts of the next field and then passing into the Spinney. Here the mud seemed peculiarly sticky, as if it was trying to catch and hold you, and the air, once smelt, was never forgotten, a musty, muddy, old odour, which also clung to you.

On sharp frosty mornings, the days when cross-country was most terrifying, I could draw some small comfort from riding the bus from Thurlby to school. The sky was barely blue, the turned soil of the fields fringed with white frost, the trees standing stark and black against the skyline. Even seen through fogged-up windows with shrill chatter all around, this was a view I loved with a passion. I also loved to watch the snow fall and coat the school field, ready to be scraped into missiles when the bell released us from lessons.

On spring days, I sometimes took my bike out through the back lanes, either with a friend or on my own. I remember once riding past the rape fields towards Braceborough, the crop rising above my head, bright yellow against a clear blue sky. I am not particularly religious now, but I felt closer to whatever deity when surrounded by the fen and being made to feel the truth of my insignificance in terms of the planet. There was another day when a family of stoats crossed the road ahead of me and I slapped on my brakes to watch from a distance as they tumbled their way across from one lush green tree lined verge to another.

Even the nights were something to watch. I often caught the sunset from my parents’ bedroom with layers of crimsons and deep pinks settling over Swallow Hill as the sun crept westwards. There were nights when the moon was a copper disc as it climbed towards the zenith of a velvety midnight blue sky, and the stars peered out of the fuzziness. At other times, they shone bright and hard in a totally black heaven and the moon was silvery-white, its light lending a strangeness to familiar things.

When I left home to go to University in Plymouth, I missed it all enormously. I returned to Lincolnshire to do my PGCE [Post Graduate Certificate of Education] at the Grot in Lincoln [the Bishop Grosseteste College] but then moved back south to Essex and now I am further south again, once more living in glorious Devon. I love this place and the scenery it offers but only the top of the moors has a sky vista like that of the place where I grew up and learned to love nature. I am sure that my appreciation of all the wonders on offer was tuned and refined by the solid grounding I was given in the gentle scenes and byways of South Lincolnshire.

WRITTEN JUNE 2006