The thrush held its prize in its beak, a worm plucked from the hedge, like a dog with a stick in its mouth. To me its gaze was defiant, ferocious and proud, but then I wondered if I was just reading into it what I wanted to see.

I had spent the day talking to writers wandering in Rectory Wood, in Church Stretton. The wood contains remnants of plantings influenced by Capability Brown, and relics of grottos and vistas of the Picturesque garden movement.

In the 18th and 19th centuries such landscapes were the height of taste and privilege, an idealised countryside that had a profound effect on what we still think of as natural beauty in Britain.

However fashionably bucolic and gothic the Rectory Wood was in its heyday, one critical commentator of the time described it as having “the taste of the savage about it”. This suggested the plantings were too much like nature, too wild for cultivated tastes. It may also have been a backhanded compliment in support of the “savage”; the rectory’s sylvan walks may have offered a frisson of excitement and danger for the perambulations of visiting ladies and gentlemen.

I wonder if they imagined savages hiding behind the carefully tended trees – people the Romantic poets described as called uncivilised, amoral, but with an inherent nobility, as wild and wonderful as the forests they inhabited in the colonies. I wonder if we’ve transferred the noble savage ideal on to wildlife, and our feelings for the conservation of wild places are not full of patronising suppositions about the nobility of wild animals?

Nights are drawing in now and as the sun sets over Rectory Wood the moon rises over Wenlock Edge. The thrush in the lane uses the last of the light to forage in the hedge. I am only 10 paces away when it grabs the worm. It does not fly but hops down the lane and turns to face me. We both stand for a couple of seconds watching each other. There’s something exciting about the return of the bird’s gaze and in it I see something both wild and comical. Although I try not to project my own prejudices I can’t help the “taste of the savage”.