Something I saw on the Camino the other day reminded me of a line in one of my favourite poems, “The Windhover” by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The line is “Sheer plod makes plough-down sillion shine.”  And here, indeed, a rich dark soil had recently been ploughed, and the sun was catching the cut earth at a particular angle that meant light glowed from it. 

Expert critics have analysed the layers of meaning in Hopkins’s line.  Did he, for instance, invent the word “sillion”, which doesn’t have much of a pedigree in English, though sounds very much like the French word “sillon” meaning furrow?  The interpretation which strikes a chord with me is regarded by the experts as at least plausible – that Hopkins was arguing that hard work will make anything look and indeed be better.

“The Windhover” is subtitled “To Christ Our Lord”, and is fundamentally about how the beauty of a bird in flight prompted him to think about the greater beauty of Christ.  He saw the hand of God in all things – another poem begins “The world is charged with the grandeur of God”.  And he would have had plenty to enthuse about on the Camino.  My own favourite moments have actually been walking at sunrise – the picture shows Carrion de los Condes yesterday – but there have been mountains, valleys, and big skies to enjoy, for instance.  There hasn’t been so much wildlife, though we did see some of the windhovers or other birds of prey that enthused Hopkins the other day.  In terms of man-made beauty, Burgos Cathedral stands out with a series of magnificent pieces of work, and some of the smaller churches are very fine.

The same day as we saw the ploughed field, however, we also passed through an area linked more to other explanations of human progress.  Near the village of Atapuerca, archaeological excavations have uncovered remains of from over 400,000 years ago, the earliest evidence of humans in Europe.  These are changing our understanding of human development.  Some of the finds are housed in the Museo de la Evolucion Humana, which has excellent explanations in English as well as Spanish of both the theory of evolution, and the accumulating evidence as to how our species developed.  Fascinating stuff.

I owe my love of “The Windhover” to an English teacher at King Edward’s Birmingham, Tony Trott.  So do thousands of others.  He died a year or two ago – RIP, Mr Trott, and thank you.