Walk & Talk: Martha Kearney

Is walking a big part of your life?

My favourite thing is to go walking on holiday in Italy. I’ve been learning Italian for years and have explored mountains in Piedmont. An ideal day would be to get up and have a delicious, huge Italian breakfast, with cake and different breads and jams, then head off into the mountains in the sunshine, and then have a picnic somewhere I can see out over the hills, having walked through wildflower meadows to get there. I’m very interested in wildflowers and used to spend ages with a little book trying to work out what they all were. Now we have excellent apps for learning. I’ve found technology a wonderful tool – I use apps to identify birdsong, too.

Your historian father Hugh’s academic career involved lots of relocations during your childhood. Did these shape your love of nature?

When we lived in Rathfarnham, a suburb of Dublin, we used to go to the River Dodder a lot. I was quite young when we left, but I discovered nature when we lived in Ditchling [East Sussex], where I recall a really idyllic childhood. My brothers and I used to go off on our bikes, making dens. We lived in the shadow of the South Downs. You could see Ditchling Beacon from our garden. In later life, there are sounds that come back to you. When my husband and I moved to Suffolk, the sound of wood pigeons reminded me so strongly of summer evenings in Ditchling. Countryside names for things came back to me, too – we used to call hawthorn leaves bread and cheese, and birdsfoot trefoil was eggs and bacon. In Edinburgh, we lived on Calton Hill, so from my bedroom I could see Arthur’s Seat. My schoolfriend Gillian and her family were great nature lovers and birdwatchers. They used to take me on outings most weekends to go walking. In the holidays, they would take me to the island of Colonsay, which I keep meaning to go back to because it had amazing scenery: a beautiful Hebridean landscape with beaches of white sand and blue sea. The gardens of the big house there were very overgrown and had lots of palm trees, and we explored that strange, very wet, Gulf Stream jungly vegetation.

Did studying classics at university bring the landscape alive?

I wish I’d known more about nature when I was studying. When I look back on poems like Virgil’s Eclogues or Georgics talking about farming, when poets were describing the landscape and naming plants, it was like terrible lists of vocabulary. But there were wonderful descriptions of nature that I can appreciate more now I’m older. I like a path where there is some history along the way. I like the idea of being able to learn something as you go. When I was walking on the North York Moors, in the middle of nowhere, there was a piece of Roman road that wasn’t on our map, which was very exciting. We have walked along Hadrian’s Wall, which I really enjoyed, and there are Roman sites near Suffolk – Burgh Castle and Castor Praetorium. They’re not huge Roman ruins, but there’s something atmospheric about tracing an ancient route.

Is access to the countryside important to you?

Around us in Suffolk, our local farmer makes a big effort to keep the footpaths well maintained and that does make a big difference. It can be very frustrating when you are out on a walk and suddenly all the signposts are gone, and you have no sense of where the path is. (Although, nowadays, the apps do help you!) I’ve gone walking on various coastal paths and I think they are a wonderful addition to our countryside and path network.

What’s your favourite walk in Suffolk?

Near where we live there’s a wetland landscape called Redgrave and Lopham Fen, owned by the Suffolk Wildlife Trust. Most weeks I go for a walk there. There’s spectacular marshland and you can see marsh harriers, barn owls and sometimes hobbies going after the dragonflies. There’s something meaningful about a place you can go to again and again, and see at different times of year.

Have you noticed changes in the landscape?

In Suffolk, there’s definitely been more flooding, which is diffcult for the farmers. Our local farmer had 10 cars stuck in water last winter – that’s definitely a change. In Piedmont, people say there’s far less snow in winter and it’s far wetter. Something that’s definitely improved is a movement in Italy for creating better walks and more information for walkers. Last year, we did a walk called the Cammino dei Briganti (Walk of the Brigands) in Abruzzo. There was a helpful website that told you all the different stages of the walk, with information about the area and suggested places to stay.

You used to keep bees. Why did you stop?

We had got to the stage where we had seven hives. We’d just finished making a television series [2014’s The Wonder of Bees], so we had our own hives and there were hives left over from the TV programme that we took on as well. I was walking in the garden one day and a bee got into my hair and stung me on the head. I’d known I was a little bit allergic, but I had a very bad reaction, which landed me in hospital, so I had to give up beekeeping. Since then I’ve had a course of immunotherapy at Guy’s Hospital. They microdose you with bee venom every week for three months, and then every month for three years, and then you are safe to go back to beekeeping. But by that stage we’d given away our beekeeping equipment, and I’d become interested in other bees besides honey bees. There are many different species of bee, including bumblebees and solitary bees. I love butterflies and moths, too, so we put all our energy into creating a wildflower meadow and that’s become my passion. I do miss the honey, and I miss standing near the beehives and watching the bees go in and out – you can waste hours mesmerised by them.

What was the inspiration for your new Radio 4 series This Natural Life?

I’d noticed that if you interview somebody in a place that means something to them, you get a much more interesting interview. So I had an idea that I wanted to interview people on location. Then I thought: why not combine it with my love of nature?

What were some of the series highlights?

For the first series, I interviewed [actor] Cate Blanchett, who had just become ambassador for Wakehurst, the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sussex. We had a wonderful day exploring Wakehurst, talking about how she became interested in nature growing up in Australia. She does beekeeping at home, so we both put on bee suits and looked at the Wakehurst bees. [Celebrity chef] Hugh Fearnley- Whittingstall was at the Abergavenny Food Festival. I like asking people about how they became interested in nature and their childhood. He said he was going for a walk and found a lizard and begged his father to take it home in a box. His father said OK, but you’ve got to release it the following day. But Hugh wanted to bring it into school for a show and tell. His friends were getting too interested and kept prodding the lizard so he decided to hide it away, but he squished it putting it back in the metal box and the lizard was dead by the time he got it home. His memory was of getting up close to nature and it all going wrong. There were quite a few stories from people who got interested in nature from an early age, but were rather too hands on!