Untamed Pockets: The Rough Hill

I found Rubery Hill by accident; it slowly appeared in my peripheral vision as I walked through the council estate. The estate is dominated, along Cock Hill Lane, by five eight storey tower blocks, their original open balconies now covered by tacked-on extensions of blue-grey. Music trickled from some of the windows, a stocky man tinkered with his car, and two teenage girls hopped over the boundary wall, immaculately made up. I was immersed in life at Birmingham’s most southern edges when, initially, I realised that there was an old stone wall lining the grass verge on the opposite side of the road. Smooth sandstone blocks, moss-covered and crowned with a tall hedge, and an awareness of something else, something not housing estate, was how Rubery Hill first emerged. And then, slowly, the steep hillside pulled my gaze up to the sky. 

 I was on my way to the Waseley Hills, so I should not have been surprised by a slope, but this was a craggy, umber-tinged, rock-scuffed creature, wrapped in gorse. It wasn’t the gently undulating, green crests of the Waseley Hills. It’s not that it’s a particularly impressive mound – the Lickey Hills have similarly sun-scorched slopes – it’s just an oddity opposite the 1950s council houses. 

 Of course, as Birmingham grew out into the surrounding countryside, it met obstacles: rivers, marshes, pools, marl pits and steep hills – all of them in the way. When Birmingham met Rubery Hill, it was already being chipped away at, with quarries at both its northern and southern ends, but not enough stone had been removed to flatten the mound. So, it was built around. And consequently, from the tame footpaths of a Birmingham council estate, I found myself winding through gorse, traversing a rocky ridge, and up the hillside to the flat top, tinged purple with a runway of heather. Bustled by the wind. The placename 'Rubery' translates from the Old English ruh beorg or Middle English row berwe - meaning rough hill(s) - with this one living up to the name. 

It was late summer, so there was no buzz of yellow from the thorny scrub – only muted brown and hues of grey: dead flowers and seed pods. And swallows. A whole flight of them, weaving through the sky catching sun-weary bugs and, occasionally, kissing mid-air. They seemed to notice me, and several swooped nearby, almost touching the ground where I'd chosen to sit. Then, beaks to the sky, they rose up again, chittering. Dextrous wild-sky acrobats. 

In other untamed pockets of the city, you find yourself alone, separate, but although no-one else was on the hill, I was aware of the city all around me. The suburbs stretched out in every direction, only interrupted by other peaks in the distance. The summit of Rubery Hill, though, is at eyeline with the top floors of the high rises, and although there was enough distance to feel solitary on the hill with the swallows, I also knew that I was a silhouetted figure, alone in the distance, gazing at an empty sky.