TALES FROM THE HILLS

(Ashmansworth and Crux Easton)

One fine day in April 2010, a hot-air balloon with two men on board failed to clear the hilltop near the Three Legged Cross. Their basket began crashing through the trees above the cutting, threatening to tip the men out onto the Andover Road below. They finally broke free of the trees and cleared the hill, but by then it was too late: they had lost too much height, and there was no time for another burn. After the men had dragged the basket along the grass for a hundred yards, the balloon collapsed.

One of the crew came over to ask where they were, and whose field they were in. They’d set out from Basingstoke, he said, and how pleasant the trip had been without any airliners (all planes had been grounded that week because of a volcanic eruption in Iceland)!

At 3000 feet, he said, they could actually smell sulphur from the volcano. That seemed odd to me, because the wind that had brought them was from the east – from Basingstoke, not Iceland. The sulphur must have been swirled around the atmosphere by jet streams and anticyclones, certainly not from any volcano around here.

I noticed on his chart a large area coloured red. He explained that if you landed on the red areas you risked having your balloon impounded. I assured him he hadn’t landed on the red.

Four days later the airliners were back, filling our blue sky with noise and vapour trails after a week of bliss.

Another intrepid flyer, who’d also fallen from the sky, turned up on the Woodcott Road, carrying a large rucksack. It looked too large for a country stroll, so I offered him a lift. In fact it contained his paraglider. He’d taken off from somewhere in Wiltshire. He said he usually tried to fly a triangle of thirty or forty miles, landing back where he started, but this time he’d run out of height.

Yes, he said, he could simply phone a friend. But that was not the spirit of the thing. The aim was to get out and back under your own steam. He was doing it ‘alpine style,’ as mountaineers call it. If you’re going to climb a mountain, take no support team. Pack everything you need in your own rucksack and take the local bus to the start of the climb. That’s ‘alpine style.’

Otherwise, they say, what’s the point?

Agricola, March 2025