Wandering a Wessex Holloway

There was a time, several years ago now, when I was walking the dogs along the northernmost edge of the woods.

These Wessex woodland paths are old, the land here has carried people for thousands of years, as a way through, a place to live, and a place to lay the dead. Pathways for getting from one place to another, but also ground that holds burials, settlements, and the long eroded traces of lives spent close to the trees.

You couldn’t be much further from other people, at least around here. The holloway is used, but most folk turn back long before this stretch.

Some of these paths are old enough to appear on the earliest maps, their lines barely changed. They pass low mounds half swallowed by bramble, curve where timber circles might once have stood, earthworks softened back into the woods.

Ways laid down long before lanes had names, worn deep by centuries of feet and hooves.

The path sinks between old banks, the trees closing in, the earth shaped by use so old it’s almost muscle memory in the ground. It’s a place that feels ancient.

As I wandered on, without warning, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Proper heebie jeebies. That cold, instinctive flicker that arrives before reason has a say.

Almost at the same moment, I became aware of footsteps behind me.

I spun round, adrenaline sharp and sudden, only for a gust of wind to move through the trees. I followed it as it went past in the canopy and faded. Leaves stirred but there was no one there.

The dogs were ahead of me, a little way up the holloway. Nothing behind. No sound but the woods settling again. I stood staring back, just waiting to see the slightest movement. Nothing.

I carried on walking, trying to shake it off, telling myself it was nothing. A few minutes passed.

Then my oldest dog stopped.

He sat down in the middle of the path, tail wagging steadily. Not excited. Not anxious. Just… pleased. He lifted his head and looked into the air ahead of me, tracking something slowly as it passed. His head turned, eyes following, tail still wagging.

It was exactly as if he was watching a person walk by. Someone moving towards me, then past me, unseen.

It lasted only seconds.

Then he stood up, picked up his ball, and walked on as though nothing at all had happened.

The other dog had stopped too, sitting slightly off the path, watching me rather than the space ahead. Quiet. Alert.

I won’t pretend I wasn’t shaken. Wound up isn’t quite the word for it, more unsettled, as if something had brushed close without ever fully showing itself.

We carried on along the holloway. The rest of the walk passed without incident. No more footsteps. No more pauses. Just trees, path, dogs, and the slow return of thoughts about different trees and sounds.

But that small moment has stayed with me.

Not as a story I can neatly explain, and not as something I’m trying to make into more than it was. Some moments leave their mark without explanation. Not everything that passes leaves a trace we can name.