Twenty-seven years have passed since the last solar eclipse in the UK, and the world we inhabited then seems seismically different to the one we currently live in. This is, of course, largely down to ‘advances’ in technology, but sometimes it feels as if people have changed, becoming angrier, impatient, less tolerant of others, and, a lot of the time, more than a little stressed. The immediacy of life in the 2020s and pressures to organise and share every minutiae of our own and other people’s waking hours don’t appear to serve us well. For a few minutes on Wednesday evening, when the moon crept in front of the sun, it felt like a temporary leveller, a collective pause to observe something that was so far beyond human intervention that all we could do was watch in awe at the spectacle. In Platt, a small group of locals spontaneously gathered at Beechin Wood shortly before 7 pm, and for the best part of half an hour, what was primarily a chance to see an astrological occurrence (pics posted previously) felt more like a community event set against an eclipse. I have since heard friends make the same observation from where they were, and for a brief moment, it could almost have been 1999 again.

The following morning, just before dawn, I set off in the blue hour across the fields to see the sun make its first post-eclipse appearance from only a couple of hundred metres away from where we’d assembled the night before. Walking up Windmill Hill, a solitary robin heralded the new day, and before long was joined by numerous other birds. In the fields, small congregations of starlings rose and fell into the stubble, their wings catching the golden light bleeding over the horizon into a cloudless sky. In the paddock between Boneashe and Comp Lanes, gambling fox cubs leapt over logs, dashing in and out of the long grass and brambles. An oversized lamb suckled on its mother, maybe for the last time, and pheasants squawked in the distance. As the sun rose above Platt Woods, a warm, gentle breeze blew across Stonehouse field, accompanied by a swirling mist a few feet above the ground, imbued with hues of violet refracted light.

By the time I made it home, the world had woken up and the 21st century, with all its challenges and frustrations, picked up where it had left off. Despite these, every morning the natural world resets and carries on as it has done for millennia. It’s a fantastic place to be, if only for an hour or so. I highly recommend drinking it in.

This was Platt on the hottest day of 2026.