THE sun was shining and the wind was whistling, chasing the shadows of clouds across the sides of the dales and exfoliating my face after a winter indoors. We had a walk amid the wild elements of Penhill in Wensleydale last Sunday, and afterwards, my face felt as if it had been sandblasted – it was glowing like a grill for days afterwards.

But so was my heart.

Although the name “pen hill” is pretty poor – “pen” is Welsh for “hill” so this is the unimaginative “hill hill” – the views are worth the long haul. Behind us were the heights of the Pennines, still shrouded in snow; across from us were the crags, quarries and castle of the dale with the shadows flickering fast across them, and in front of us was the vast expanse of the flat vale, fringed in the distance by the smoky outline of the Cleveland Hills – Roseberry Topping, a small triangle on the horizon, was the next beacon from Penhill in the chain that was lit to warn of the threat of the Spanish Armada more than 500 years ago.

We averted our eyes from the industrial haze that hung over Teesside, and concentrated on the large birds that were soaring and spiralling in the dale below us: two, definitely three, possibly even four buzzards.

Everywhere I have gone this spring, I’ve been buzzed by buzzards: a buzzard up Bullamoor, near Northallerton, another swooping over Sedgefield, one staring from a tree near Barton. When I recently drove to address the Teesdale U3A in Barnard Castle, a slow-moving buzzard gave me an aerial escort, like a heavy bomber, along the A67 for several hundreds of yards.

Yet it was only in 2009 that I – admittedly not the best bird spotter – noticed my first buzzard in the Darlington area. That was at Gainford, and now seven years later, they are crowding the skies everywhere. Indeed, in the early 1990s, there were just 1,000 breeding pairs in the country; now there are at least 68,000.

Hanging and hovering, motionless wings outstretched, they are a sight to see, yet we haven’t always thought so. The name is from an old French word “buisart”, which means “an inferior hawk” – many words that end with “ard” are derogatory, like bastard, coward, drunkard, niggard, haggard, sluggard. If you are an “old buzzard”, you’re not very nice.

This is because of the buzzard’s slow flight – a group of buzzards is called a wake – and because, rather than search out and kill its prey with cunning and panache like a hawk, it sits for hours waiting for some poor defenceless creature to stumble beneath its talons.

One 19th Century writer described the buzzard as a "dull stupid heavy bird…a lazy, sleepy, cowardly fellow who dozes away half his time on some rotten old stump". There used to be a common saying about being caught between a hawk and a buzzard – a rock and a hard place are not much of a choice, but the hawk and the buzzard are polar opposites, the good and bad extremes of the same kind.

Still, Victorian gamekeepers thought they were enough of a threat to young pheasants and partridges to persecute them, although the arrival of myxomatosis in 1953 proved what they preferred to eat. Within two years, 95 per cent of the rabbit population was dead and the buzzard starved away.

Since 1981, buzzards have been protected by law, and they are recovering. My amateurish observations from the top of hill hill suggest that there is a veritable wake of them in Wensleydale.