The growl of high-street traffic had barely faded as we walked uphill, away from the town centre, when we saw the kestrel. She was sitting on a leafless branch of a cherry tree, feathers fluffed, her back turned towards the icy wind. She seemed reluctant to fly as we drew closer. Cautiously sidling around her, we could see that her pale eyelids were closed; dozing in the early morning sunshine, perhaps digesting her last meal. Then her head swivelled and our eyes met; mirrors of polished jet glared down at us. A shimmy of plumage, to smooth ruffled feathers, and she was away, chestnut wings scything across the grassy hillside. Willington grew around a coalmine that closed in 1967. For 120 years, a jagged mountain of colliery waste, known locally as Twin Peaks, stood on this spot. Earlier generations called it Dante’s, a reference, some say, to coal spoil tips’ potential to spontaneously combust and become an inferno. Many would have experienced hellish conditions, hewing coal in labyrinthine mine tunnels under it. Miner and poet Richard Watson’s words, “Large rubbish heaps along the hillside show / the vast extent of hollow ground below”, chiselled into a commemorative stone, testify to their toil. In the early 70s, Twin Peaks was reduced to a gently regraded grassy hill, creating an open public space, a pleasant place to spend a morning watching birds or even, in summer, enjoying a picnic, just 10 minutes’ walk from the town centre. Now it’s known as Willington Woods. Oaks and hawthorns were planted by community groups and schoolchildren in 2005, more trees added later by a local hospice. This morning a noisy flock of fieldfares plundered a fine crop of haws. Much of the hillside remains open grassland, clothed in winter with a deep thatch of dead grass, riddled with tunnels of field voles; a land of opportunity for a hunting kestrel. From our kestrel’s-eye view on the hilltop we had a vast, panoramic view of the Wear valley beyond. Below, in the town, sunlight glinted from solar panels on house roofs that would once have been wreathed in coal smoke, rising from chimneys on winter mornings like this.