A barn owl's rusty lair

Litchfield Down, Hampshire Just here the downs are a rolling sea of earth and flint - and the contraption sits atop the ridge like a ship run aground

Emerging from a stand of Scots pine at the crest of the down, I stumble across a silent monolith of steel and timber. On a base of low concrete walls there sits what was once a piece of clanking, many-chambered machinery. Much taller than I and metres long, it had riddled and sorted and spat under the power of the rusting engine embedded in a brickwork cradle at its side. But it has long since been disavowed of its agricultural purpose. Just here the downs are a rolling sea of earth and flint - "in fluctuation fixed", as WH Hudson saw it - and the contraption sits atop the ridge like a ship run aground. It's a wind harp, too; the spring breeze setting up a wicked music through the steel shutters and the maritime clang of a loose arm of iron knocking against its neighbour.

I circle the machine and run my hands along its smooth, weathered timber flanks. As I turn a corner, a hare bolts from the cover of the walls. At full pace it traces with exactness the arc of a furrow and disappears over the crest of the hill. Looking into where the hare had been settled, I see the collected debris of rodent skulls and small bones.