Till the Cows Come Home

by Philip Walling

  One school friend told me he envied my success in having my own farm, whereas I saw it as coming to terms with academic failure. Another friend who had gone to Cambridge and become a solicitor couldn’t understand why I wanted to give up farming. When I told him I rather fancied becoming a lawyer and farming on the side, he was incredulous: ‘The law’s just a job like any other; there’s no magic to it!’

  But what neither of them understood was that I felt I had missed out on an essential rite of passage that they had gone through and I hadn’t. I needed that academic initiation to develop into adulthood, otherwise I would be stuck at an unformed stage for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to give up the farm, however, and I had a vague idea that once I had been to university I would go back home and resume farming, maybe combined with practising law.

  But once I got to university, I found myself on a path that led away from the land and from my Cumbrian roots to the bar and London and eventually to selling the farm. I suppose I wanted the money, but also I fondly thought I would always be able to buy it back, or another one like it, in the future. I had loved my time farming and had been good at it, but it was more than farming itself that tapped deep emotions; there were spiritual reasons that made it a vocation that matched my true nature. And in giving up farming and selling the farm, I came to feel that I had turned my back on something that really mattered to me. I had rebuffed that tutelary spirit the Romans called genius and the Greeks daemon; that personal guide that comes to everyone at birth and carries with it the fullness of our undeveloped powers. These it offers to us as we grow, and we can choose whether or not to accept and develop them in service to our genius, or turn our back on it.

  Apuleius, the Roman author of The Golden Ass, wrote a treatise on the genius/daemon. He tells us that in Rome, on his birthday, it was traditional for a man to give something to his genius. In return, it would make him ‘genial’ – sexually potent, artistically creative and spiritually fertile. If a man cultivated through sacrifice and labour the gifts offered to him, his genius would eventually be liberated and, when he died, become a lar, a protective household god. But if a man ignored his genius because he felt no gratitude to it for its gifts, or he ignored its promptings, it would become a larva or a lemur when he died: a troublesome restless spirit left in bondage to prey on the living.

  The farm was the most important thing in my life. My most prized possession. I can still close my eyes and visit every part of it. Doubtless the images are out of date, but I can see every hedge and wall, ditch and watering place, and every undulation in the land across every field on its 240 acres. I know where all the drains were, which were the walls with bad foundations that were liable to ‘rush’, the gates that swung and those that had to be lifted to open them. I had fenced the whole farm and laid most of the hedges while I was there, and rebuilt many of the dry-stone walls, so I knew the farm like a lover traces his love over every part of his beloved’s body.

  And then I threw it all away. Was it an act of great folly or a necessary sacrifice to my genius/daemon as I passed from one stage of life to another? The Celts understood sacrifice, both symbolic and actual. They practised it with determination, particularly in those liminal places at the threshold between this world and the next where the veil that divides the two is at its thinnest. Marshy places, neither land nor water, were places of transition where sacrificing their most precious possessions would have greatest effect. That is why Celtic artefacts, including magnificent swords, have been recovered from bogs and fens all across Europe.

  In Le Morte d’Arthur, Excalibur, the fabulous sword given to King Arthur by the Lady of the Lake as a symbol of his status, had to be returned to the waters by Sir Bedivere at the direction of the dying king. Bedivere thought it ‘sin and shame to cast away such a noble sword’. But his sovereign knew better. The sacrifice was necessary to mark his passage over the limen, the threshold, from life to death. And the lake represented a watery place of transition between this world and the next, where the sword could pass from the mortal knight to the immortal hand that rose from the waters to grasp it. One such beautifully forged sword, with jewelled and decorated pommel and now in the British Museum, was found at Embleton, in a boggy place, five miles from where I was born.

  Since I parted with the farm and cast myself into exile from my roots in Cumberland, I have been trying to come to terms with my loss. Writing this book has been one way to attempt to get to the bottom of it all. Was it in defiance of my genius, or a necessary sacrifice as part of a rite of passage from one stage to the next? Why I couldn’t have settled for a tattoo, as many people do nowadays, rather than giving away my most treasured possession, I will probably never understand. And if it was a sacrifice, has it done justice to my genius? Whatever it was, this book is written in the earnest hope that it will be acceptable as just gratitude for the gifts I received at birth and in proper homage to my tutelary spirit.

  Introduction

  Modern history has been much too sparing in its prose pictures of pastoral life. A great general or statesman has never lacked the love of a biographer; but the thoughts and labours of men who lived remote from cities, and silently built up an improved race of sheep or cattle, whose influence was to be felt in every market, have no adequate record.

  H. H. Dixon (1869–1953)

  ‘WHO KNOWS ANYTHING about wild flowers?’ asked Mr Bacon at the start of my very first botany lesson at grammar school. We were outside the biology lab and he was holding up the flower on the end of a stem of silverweed.

  I put up my hand enthusiastically.

  ‘What is this called?’

  ‘Silverweed, sir,’ I replied.

  ‘No. I want to know the name of this part of the flower.’ And he pinched the pistil between his finger and thumb and held it in front of my face.

  Over the previous five years, from the age of about seven, I had put together a considerable collection of pressed wild flowers, which I had pasted into three big scrapbooks. Wherever we travelled – and my parents were inveterate travellers all over Europe – I collected every wild flower I could find, identified them and pressed them between sheets of blotting paper, which I kept underneath the mats in the car until we got home. The first thing I did when we stopped for a picnic was to scour the immediate area to see if there was a flower I hadn’t got. I knew all their common names and could identify almost any wild plant on sight. My parents could do that for garden plants, but I had no interest in those.

  It wasn’t a scientific interest. I was drawn to their beauty – and their names. Not their Latin names, but their traditional English ones. I didn’t care what the parts of the plant were called, or what they did. And I didn’t know, when Mr Bacon asked me to identify the constituent parts of a flower, that it was important.

  ‘What’s this part called?’ he asked, this time lifting a sepal with his forefinger. ‘Silverweed, sir!’ shouted out a sharp little boy whose name I didn’t yet know, but who would later become a comrade in rebellion. The whole class laughed and I was mortified.

  I think that was the day I lost my passion for pressing flowers. I didn’t then know that it would be transmuted into something else – delight for the land.

  It’s been a long time since ordinary people in industrial countries have had much idea where their food comes from. They’ve become increasingly isolated from its production and increasingly disdainful of the people who produce it. But it wasn’t always like this. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, farmers were valued as practical, intelligent and enterprising men who rose to the challenge of feeding an ever-expanding nation. They transformed England’s acres into some of the most productive land in Europe, despite the often unfavourable climate and poverty of the soil.

  Farming under George III – ‘Farmer George’ – became the pursuit of kings. Landowners and gentry threw themselves enthusiastically into breeding livestock and farming, and granted secure tenancies on their estates to able and
improving tenants on long leases protected under the common law, good against the whole world, including the landlord.

  This, and more, meant that as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace and the population burgeoned, British farming took on the task of feeding the nation. As the British climate and terrain is more suited to growing grass than almost any other plant, it was livestock farming, particularly with cattle, that turned that grass into the energy and productivity needed.

  It was not only food that the nation required in ever-increasing quantities. It also needed leather, for a vast range of essential uses from horse harness to pulley belts; tallow (candles were the main source of light); and oxen and later horses for nearly all the motive power. Without the concurrent revolution in farming, Britain would never have been able to turn itself into the first global powerhouse, whose ideas and inventions spread across the world. And at the heart of this were cattle. Without the fertility created by cow muck (farmyard manure, as it’s known euphemistically; FYM for short), none of it would have been possible.

  Cattle are noble animals and their keeping is a noble endeavour. But in tune with the strange topsy-turvy world we currently inhabit, we have come to disdain the domestic animals upon which we depend and instead to revere the ‘natural’ world. We mostly treat our domestic animals with indifference, denying the extent of our dependence and consigning them to short, utilitarian, industrial lives, scientifically fed and efficiently slaughtered out of sight. We cannot reconcile their beauty with their necessary killing, so we no longer mark the death of an animal with ritual or thanksgiving, but keep it hidden, as if we are ashamed. We seem to find it hard to be capable of respect and gratitude for the lives of animals that have been given to us as a gift. Ironically, one of the few uses to which we put cattle where we do treat them with the respect due is the bullfight. Every bull is given a name, his life and death in the arena are dedicated to someone important to the matador, and sometimes his head is preserved and displayed.

  Until recently, most domestic cattle had a triple purpose: traction, milk and meat (at the end of their lives), as well as all the other uses to which their carcases were put when they were dead. But as cattle have been forced to be more productive, the breeds have become more specialized and are now divided into either beef or dairy, depending on the animal’s dominant purpose, although there is some crossover because the males bred from dairy cows do supply a large proportion of our beef. There is a third category that are neither dairy nor beef, but are kept for some other purpose, even though they may well be eaten at the end; these include parkland cattle, such as the Chillingham; fighting bulls; Texas Longhorns, now kept for the length of their horn; and Heck cattle, which are bred to try to recreate the aurochs, in order to prove that domestic cattle came from a primitive ancestor. There are also those millions of cattle in India that will never be eaten because they are seen as avatars of a deity and protected by law from harm.

  Wherever humans have migrated they have taken their cattle with them. They are our longest-serving domestic animals, which since the beginning have tilled our soil, borne our burdens, fed us, clothed us and been our uncomplaining servants in the work of taming the wilderness and wresting a living from it. There has never been a time when we have not depended on cattle. And even though many people have migrated from the land to the city and the things we need from cattle have changed, that fundamental dependence remains. Yet as people both in the West and across the developing world retreat further into a virtual world, isolated from the real one, where fantasy becomes reality generated by computers and electronic games, they come into contact less and less with the life of the land that underpins everything they depend on. In the space of three or four generations, we have lost touch with the source of our food.

  Cattle are our oldest form of wealth. Amongst many central African tribes, they are still currency. In ancient Greece, even after metal coinage superseded cattle as a means of exchange, the image of an ox was stamped on the new coins to give them authenticity. The Latin for cattle is pecus (Proto-Indo-European peku and Sanskrit pasu), which gives us ‘pecuniary’. In Old Saxon, cattle was fehu (with the same root), from which we get ‘fee’. The English word ‘cattle’ was borrowed from the Norman French catel, which had come via medieval Latin capitale, ‘principal sum of money or capital’, from the Latin caput meaning ‘head’. Moveable assets are still described in English law as chattels. The word ‘cow’ came via the Anglo-Saxon cū, from an Indo-European word gōus meaning a bovine animal. The plural, cȳ, became ki or kie in Middle English, and then acquired an added plural ending, giving the Old English kine.

  So where did they come from, these creatures upon which we depend so much? After Darwin, it became accepted wisdom that domestic European cattle – Bos taurus – are descended from the aurochs, the wild ox, Bos primigenius primigenius. Even its Latin taxonomic name, primigenius, the firstborn, supposes it to have been the original, the precursor, to the later Bos taurus. The words aurochs, urus and wisent have, in the past, been used interchangeably in English to describe this wild ox. The Romans borrowed the Germanic word ūr, compounded with ohso (‘ox’), giving ūrohso, to make urus (plural uri) in Latin to describe the wild beasts they found in central Europe. This then was borrowed back to become Aurochs in early modern German (singular and plural, meaning ‘primeval ox’ or ‘proto-ox’). It is directly parallel to the German plural Ochsen (singular Ochse) and echoes the English words ‘ox’ and ‘oxen’.

  In his Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar describes the wild cattle he encountered in central Europe (with perhaps a touch of literary licence) as being ‘a little below the elephant in size, and of the appearance, colour, and shape of a bull. Their strength and speed are extraordinary; they spare neither man nor wild beast which they have espied.’ When Caesar saw these formidable beasts, they had existed for millennia; their remains (fragments of bone and horn) have been found from the Pliocene (5.3 million to 2.5 million years ago) into the Pleistocene period (which ended about 11,500 years ago), tending to show that their range expanded and contracted as the climate grew warmer and colder with various climatic cycles. As the world entered its current warm period and the last ice retreated, these ferocious ruminants proliferated across almost the whole European landmass into Asia and Siberia, except northern Scandinavia and northern parts of Russia and Ireland.

  The last aurochs cow is said to have died in a wood in Poland in 1627. It was a separate species from the extant wisent, the European bison. The two have often been confused in the past, and some sixteenth-century illustrations show aurochs and wisents with similar features. People were less concerned with verisimilitude than the fact that these were large, dangerous and terrifying beasts of the European wildwood.

  It was because they appear to have been so ubiquitous in the wild state that it has been assumed that the aurochs must have been the ancestors of at least some of our domesticated European cattle. But recent research disavows widespread European domestication and says it started with a few wild cattle in the Near East tamed by some of the first settled farmers, who took their cattle with them as they spread outwards into Europe and Asia.

  Tracing their Levantine origin takes us to the Fertile Crescent, the ‘cradle of civilization’ that lies in a great arc from the lower valley of the Nile, up the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean and sweeping round to encompass the Tigris and Euphrates rivers down to their delta in the Persian Gulf. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, on the eastern edge of this region, at Jarmo, in the Zagros Mountains (now in Iraqi Kurdistan), Robert Braidwood (1907–2003) found evidence of farming with domestic livestock dating from about 7000 BC. Digging unearthed what were believed to have been cattle enclosures, complete with bones. Despite the best modern analysis, it is not clear whether these bones are of domestic cattle or what might have been their wild ancestors. Researchers have made assumptions from the size and age of the sample – the bigger and older the bone, the wilder the animal is assumed to ha
ve been – but they have been unable to determine what exactly was grazing the land all those years ago.

  However, in excavated kitchen debris Braidwood found that 95 per cent of the bones were of domestic animals – sheep, goats, cattle, pigs and dogs – while only 5 per cent were of wild animals. More recent digging at Chogha Golan, in the same Zagros Mountains, has revealed evidence of agriculture going back even further, to about 12,000 BC, showing that people had domestic cattle at least by this date – only a thousand years or so after the earth began to warm after the last ice retreated. It supports scholarly agreement that agriculture originated here and spread out across Europe and Asia over the ensuing millennia.

  The two sites where the earliest remains of what are believed to be domesticated cattle have been found, Dja’de and Çayönü, are less than 150 miles apart, which suggests a limited area of domestication in the Levant. Recent mitochondrial DNA analysis (descent from mother to child of both sexes) supports this theory that there was little or no wider domestication of western European aurochs. Yet more recent research1 tends to the view that there were very few cattle originally involved – at most 80 and probably fewer – and that these are the ancestors of all European cattle. If that is right, then every living cow will be descended from those original cows and no others.

  Other researchers will not concede this and assume there must have been other attempts at domestication across a wider area: early farmers must have tried to domesticate aurochs because they are believed to have been so ubiquitous. When it is pointed out that there is little or no evidence of any domestication of wild oxen in other places, they reply that early farmers could have tried and failed because the aurochs would have been too difficult to handle. This is a fine example of researchers looking for evidence to support a theory and not the other way round.