Hitchin Nub News aims to support our community, promoting shops, businesses, charities, clubs and sports groups.

We profile some of these businesses and organisations regularly in a feature called 'Up Close in Hitchin' while also encouraging opinion pieces from our readers and trusted contributors.

Here's our popular columnist 'Sparky', back with his wonderful nature column 'Sparky's View'

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Free access withdrawn from Deacon Hill, Pegsdon

The Pegsdon downs have long been the playground of Hitchin folk, (but) free access has, alas, had to be withdrawn, owing to misuse by picnic parties. The peace of these glorious downs is also sometimes broken by noisy motorcycles, whose riders use the grassy slopes of Beacon Hill (sic) for testing the climbing capacity of their machines'.

No, not today, fortunately: this was the geologist E.F.D. Bloom (MA B.Sc.) writing in Reginald Hine's book The Natural History of the Hitchin Region, published in 1934.

There had obviously been some very rowdy pre-war shenanigans on our beloved Deacon Hill, but access was eventually restored, allowing us good Hitchin folk to play there once again. But more quietly. And without our motorcycles, obviously.

Deacon Hill rightly deserves its magnet-like status, being an easily accessible and prominent outlier of the Chilterns AONB and is now a Site of Special Scientific Interest, covered in rich flora and fauna.

Standing at an impressive 173 metres (567 feet), it towers both above the village of Pegsdon far below and the flatness of the Bedfordshire plain lying to the north east.

The Icknield Way also passes nearby (more on this to come in the future) and Deacon Hill's summit is a fascinating lunar landscape pockmarked with the scars of ancient chalk and flint pits.

The hill's prominence also made it a natural choice for the site of a fire basket on a pole (the titular beacon) when a chain of these formed a national early warning system and its earlier name, Beacon Hill, celebrated this.

The name was formerly changed to Deacon Hill in the late 1700s but use of the original version did hang around for some time afterwards.

The site of the beacon is now the position of an Ordnance Survey trigonometry point plinth which interestingly sits a few hundred metres from the true summit, which is a whole one metre higher than this point.

But Deacon Hill's most impressive feature is not apparent from the summit or from the popular Icknield Way approach.

On the western flank the hillside is terraced, which can be clearly seen from the B655 Barton Road as you come around the corner from Hexton; and these are not a natural feature: they are man-made cultivation terraces from the late Neolithic period (and later) and are referred to as 'strip lynchets' on maps.

They are often found on hillsides near other ancient earthworks works, such as burial mounds, of which two exist nearby.

Various theories exist as to the how and why ancient man went to all of this trouble but it's likely that in the earliest days of farming the hillsides were far less wooded than the valleys so growing crops here was sometimes easier than in the valleys below.

Even just repeatedly ploughing a hillside laterally will eventually cause slumping and terraces to form, apparently.

There are now less motorcycles climbing the Deacon Hill, but you are still likely to see crowds of ramblers, picnickers and other happy urban escapees like me enjoying the view.

And while there please remember to look down the western side at our local ancestor's attempts at hillside farming that started some 10,000 years ago.

What a place. What a treasure.