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In the morning, I left the village where I'd spent the night,

the village where, in the ninth century, a famous king had beaten the army of a northern warlord.

I climbed a steep path to a high plateau and walked

along dusty tracks. There was gunfire in the distance. In the early afternoon, I rested on a hilltop,

on the ramparts of ancient fortifications whose shape was outlined in soft bulges and shadings on the slopes.

Down in the fertile flatlands, I could see rows of the armored behemoth's Britain bought

to protect its troops in Afghanistan from roadside bombs, painted the color of desert

sand, and crowded around the maintenance sheds of a military base.

There was a roar from the road below and the squeak of tank tracks.

A column of warriors clanked up the hill.

The warrior is a strong fighting vehicle.

It can protect a team of soldiers as it carries them into battle.

Bullets bounce off it. A single inch-thick shell from its cannon can do terrible damage to anything

unarmoured it hits. But these warriors look tired. They came into service in the late 1980s, just as the cold war they'd been

designed for was ending, and Afghanistan has a way of diminishing and humbling military technology.

I'd walked the same route last year, leaving Eddington after breakfast, walking round the edge of the military

exercise area on Salisbury Plain, and pausing at the Iron Age Fort on Battlesbury Hill,

which looks out over the British Army's Wiltshire estate. Since then, most of the army in Afghanistan

had come back to Britain, and an item of furniture

had been added to the Battlesbury ramparts among the cow parsley and purple clover, a bench.

I was glad to sit down as my pack was heavy, but the bench is also a shrine.

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