THERE is something heavy about the Oxfordshire countryside. Its mounds and ditches and its inundated fields do not lift the spirits as the nearby Cotswolds do. I went walking there last week in search of the mood and mind of the man whom all of Britain always saw from the start — and Lord Hutton found the candour to name yesterday — as responsible for the death of David Kelly.

No inquiry was needed to discover him. His name was David Kelly. Lord Hutton was right. Without good cause this gentle person committed against himself an act of such violence, suddenness and cruelty that no reasonable person among the legion whom the judge examined could have expected it. From nothing anyone did or failed to do could this spasm of selfhatred have been a likely consequence.

Who was David Kelly, and what was in his mind that June afternoon? I set out quite early in the morning, in the village of Southmoor, from the gate of the house where he and his wife, Janice, had lived for nearly 30 years.

She had met him at university in Leeds where she was training to be a teacher. He had gone to university in Birmingham, then Oxford, then Warwick, then back to Oxford. Mrs Kelly was asked at the inquiry whether she knew the subject of his doctorate there.

“Not entirely. It was something to do with viruses and insect viruses.”

Forming already is a picture of an intensely academic and self-contained man, whose interior world even when courting was too deep and difficult to share. “Terribly sorry,” said Janice in evidence, “but I do not know the details of what he was doing.”

She never really had. After they moved to Southmoor and her husband became involved in weapons-monitoring, “he began to become extremely dedicated to his work. He became more of — what shall I say? — more of a workaholic than he had before.”

With three children born within two years, Mrs Kelly had her own work cut out. “I was never quite aware of who he worked for.” He joined the Baha’i faith. “He kept it very privately to himself,” she said.

Dr Kelly was a proud and private man, Lord Hutton found, but their cottage, Westfield, is not as exclusive-looking as television pictures make it appear. Their village is not quite as smart as neighbouring Longworth, where Dr Kelly liked to walk and where a knighthood, for which he had hoped, and once believed to be just around the corner, would have fitted in well. His wife found in his desk a copy of a note scrawled by a colleague in the margins of a list of possible new knights: “How about David Kelly? Iraq is topical.”

I took the path towards Longworth, as Dr Kelly had done, pills and knife in his pockets, on that final walk about three on the afternoon of July 17, two days after his gruelling encounter with the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs.

“Someone from the MoD had just rung,” Janice told the inquiry. Her husband said a routine goodbye, walked out of his cottage gates, crossed the road and headed north. His knighthood had evaporated; hopes of promotion had evaporated; in his own tormented imagination he had come to fear he would be dismissed, the inquiry was told.

This was a favourite walk, to Harrowdown Hill, and even in winter it is a pleasant one. You pass the flower-potted Waggon and Horses pub, and take a bridleway. Horses and ponies peer over the fence.

Dr Kelly will have known them well enough. When you are not coming back, do you start saying goodbye to things? From some distance the noise of traffic on the big, fast, four-lane A420 begins to grow. This you must cross. There will have been no going back, he may have reflected, after that.

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