Over the next few months I will be walking around the outskirts of Berlin, starting each walk where I finished the last, until I complete a loop of the edge of the city. These walks will be written up for a new book project, and here on Under a Grey Sky I will publish some postcards from along the way…

For what feels like hours I have been walking alone. Blankenfelde is Berlin’s most sparsely populated locality, once dominated by a wide expanse of sewage fields which are now farmed beneath big skies, all combining to make the solitary walker following the path between the monochrome fields and the iced-up drainage ditches feel small and insignificant. On the horizon, faded in the mist, a collection of tall structures that all help us keep warm and connected in this second decade of the 21st century: windfarms and electricity pylons, telephone wires and mobile phone masts. Some bare trees in the distance. A moody-looking church steeple. Otherwise, not much at all.

This is probably going to be the longest of my walks around the edge of Berlin, and probably the loneliest. There is little sound out here in the fields. The odd bird. The distant rubble of the cross-continental trucks on the motorway. A plane high and invisible above me. And then, all of a sudden, I get the sense that I am being watched. Observed. I turn and look behind me, across a rutted and snow-mottled field. Three deer have stopped in the open and are looking at me. They are standing about a hundred metres away, and the four of us stand frozen, staring at each other for a moment or two. Then I lift my camera from the bag and that is enough. They turn tail and run for cover, aiming for a small copse not far from where they had been standing. I watch the go through the lens, trying to capture their escape. Once they are out of sight I continue my walk, but this brief encounter is a reminder that when walking the outskirts I am never truly alone, not even in the emptiest corner of Berlin.