Meadowland

by John Lewis-Stempel

  The rain is still pouring uncontrollably from the sky, and the library is closing for the night. When I return home, I tog up in my Barbour, battening down every zip and button, and slop down to Lower Meadow, my shoulder a prow into the spray. The clay base of the field is again saturated, and holding a good half-inch of water on its surface. It is dark, the way only a January night in a rainy, lightless valley in the middle of nowhere can be dark. Thick, cellar-dark. I cannot see the water on the surface of the earth. I can tell its depth by the plash of my wellingtons.

  24 JANUARY No bird is less of the meadow than the kingfisher; in five years I have never seen it deviate in its flight from the river bed, its sole route-finder. But it is often there in the periphery of the field and of my vision, a neon-turquoise spark, which leaves an iridescent flash in the atmosphere, to die away slowly. A radioactive particle decaying.

  Now the kingfisher comes, flying on a perfect horizontal plane, suspended equally between the river and the sky.

  This is the halcyon bird of mythology, which allegedly laid its eggs on the ocean, an act by which the sea was calmed. Hence the ‘halcyon days’ of poets and Shakespeare. Some believed that a kingfisher could divine the weather as well as determine it; a dead kingfisher, suspended by its head, would turn its beak to the wind like a multicoloured weathercock.

  A field is a landscape is a soundscape. The ‘zeep zeep’ of the kingfisher is an occasional contribution at the edge of consciousness.

  I’m in the promontory, where the alder logs are spread with a caramel layer of velvet shank mushrooms. Flammulina velutipes is one of the few mushrooms that fruits in winter; it is also edible. In Japan it is the prized culinary delight Enokitake. Only the Jew’s ears on the elders which are lolling an arm’s length into the field rival the velvet shanks for hardiness.

  26 JANUARY I’m out when Roy Phillips the contractor comes to cut the farm’s hedges with a flail cutter on the back of his Ford County tractor. The hedges should be ‘laid’, slit and woven by hand, but this is one of those time-consuming jobs that is on the end of an endless list. Because Lower Meadow is suppurating water Roy has only been able to get the tractor into part of the field; only one and a half hedges have been trimmed, giving the field a dissolute, half-shaven look. The flailed hedges are stark and square. Scalped to the skull. The serpentine ivy seems to be the only thing holding the bushes together. On the uncut hedges, drooping claws of alder catkins and bunches of plum ivy berries pose in flaunting juxta-position. But the intoxicating melon aroma of the shorn hedges makes them beautiful to the nose.

  There is evening sky to delight a shepherd. The vapour trail of a microscopic jet catches the crimson light so that the aircraft is illusorily powered by flame.

  27 JANUARY Snowdrops and dog’s mercury are out in the hedge along the farm track. The days are perceptibly lighter and longer.

  I climb into the copse; in the centre, amid the sombre trees, the fox’s earth has been undergoing renovation, and there is evidence of digging around the muddied main entrance. Aside from bits of dead animal (rabbit, song thrush) lying around, there is that unforgettable proof of fox habitation: a sour, pungent odour when one sniffs over the dungeon hole.

  By now the foxes will have mated. Assuming successful implantation, the vixen will begin a gestation of about fifty-two days. Red foxes have the shortest gestation of the dog family.

  On the floor of the dripping copse lies a dead blue tit, a startling jolt of colour amid the darkening leaves. I doubt if the fox, as per folklore, hypnotized the blue tit to come down from its tree. The arctic blast and the relentless after-party rain murdered many a bird.

  Low winter sun comes strobing through the coppiced hazels.

  FEBRUARY

  Jackdaw

  CANDLEMAS, 2 FEBRUARY. A morning of stultifying mist, which cloys like sweat on my face. At the far end of the field the unseen raven voices a mindless metronome of croaks. She is sitting tight on her eggs in the triangle of firs across the dull stream, and has been for the last week. Ravens are famously early nesters. Perhaps she is complaining about the badgers’ housekeeping; they have done a spring clean of the sett and dumped armfuls of stale, fetid moss bedding beneath her tree.

  The dew, trapped in the webs of countless money spiders, has skeined the entire field in tiny silken pocket squares, gnomes’ handkerchiefs dropped in the sward. Or it has where the Ryeland ewes have not relentlessly mowed their way through the grass.

  The thirty Ryelands spread out before me in the white silence are the direct descendants of the sheep that made the field in the early 1400s. Unlike the primitive sheep which dominated the English landscape until the Middle Ages, Ryelands were – are – systematic grazers of grass and not half-goats who yearn to browse trees and bushes. By their unthinking, indiscriminate eating, Ryelands suppress the more prolific grasses, and allow the more delicate grasses and flora to survive and flourish. One reason that English meadows, like Lower Meadow, boast a display range of grasses and flowers is because of Ryeland sheep. Lower Meadow has, of grasses alone, timothy, meadow fescue, cock’s foot, meadow foxtail, woodrush, sweet vernal, tufted hair-grass, crested dog’s tail and meadow grass. Of the grass family, the Gramineae, this is a reasonable selection in the twenty-first century; there are, though, 150 species of grass growing wild in Britain.

  The thirty ewes are oblivious to my environmental design. They have eaten hard because they are heavy and round with lamb. They exude self-satisfied fecundity, which the wet lying thick on their coats does nothing to dampen. One stands square, and spins its alabaster torso so the water sprays off in a brief abdominal halo.

  We have looked at one another a lot, Ryeland sheep and my family, on mornings like this over the years, because Ryelands and I are the dangling ends of dynasties long familiar to each other. My mother’s maternal line, the Parrys, were the feudal stewards of Ewyas Lacy – as this valley used to be called – and helped develop the breed. The Parrys had Ryelands grazing here in these meadows under the Black Mountains five hundred years ago. And I like to think it was cousin Blanche Parry who gave Elizabeth I the stockings made from fine, white Ryeland wool which so impressed the Queen she would thereafter have no other material on her virginal legs. Blanche Parry served Elizabeth for fifty-six years as lady-in-waiting. Then again, it might have been any of the other Parrys at court who were the nominatives in the fable of the white fleece; there was Dr Henry Parry, Elizabeth’s chaplain, James Parry, her Huntsman, Sir Thomas, her Cofferer, John Parry, her Clerk of the Green Cloth, Frances, her maid of honour, Katherine, her lady-in-waiting, Lady Troy, yet another of her ladies-in-waiting, or perhaps Catherine, her Lady of the Bedchamber. Or maybe it was Blanche’s great-nephew, the aforementioned Rowland Vaughan, another courtier, or her cousin John Dee, the Queen’s astrologer. Or perhaps it was Blanche’s most illustrious cousin, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s Chief Minister, whose ancestral seat, Allt-yr-Ynys, still stands at the lowland bottom of Ewyas Lacy valley.

  The Parrys, you feel, had a bit of an armlock on the Elizabethan court.

  The Parrys, though, were more than royal flunkeys. They were part of a historical phenomenon, the swing to sheep farming in Tudor times, which came about, not least, because someone noticed that grassland manured by sheep retained its fertility.

  I am counting the sheep. They are all present and correct, and now it is time to go.

  Candlemas, 2 February, is the day by ancient rite when the hay field is ‘stopped’ or ‘locked up’, the day when all livestock is removed.

  The expectant Ryelands do not need a dog to move them out. A sheepish call of ‘Sheep!’ and they follow at my heels. Pavlov in his grave should applaud. The sheep know that if I call out their species, food surely follows. I do not cheat; when they are through the gate into Bank Field they find a feast of beet nuts in their long troughs.

  I close the galvanized gate on Lower Meadow. Now the grass can grow unmolested until mechanical cutters come one fine summer’s day. Then
they will shear it down in great swathes, and it will be turned into hay for winter feeding.

  Grass, the keeper of us all.

  And a line comes floating back from a lesson I read in church at Christmas as a boy. Isaiah XL, vi–vii: ‘All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the LORD bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.’

  Mooching along the winter-bare Marsh Field hedge I espy the domed nest of a long-tailed tit, an extraordinary construction of moss, plated in lichen. It looks like a verdigris egg. Or maybe a tarnished-copper Cyclops’ helmet. For all their dainty artistry, the long-tailed tits have anchored the nest to the willow branchlets with stevedore stoutness. Despite my most careful disentangling, the nest bursts as I pull it free, exploding pigeon feathers from the lining as though we are having a pillow fight.

  To find the archaeological artefacts of twentieth-century agriculture is not difficult. Farmers have the habit of throwing anything dead and useless out of the way, which means the cellar-dank bottom of the hedge.

  I start poking with a hazel stick by the gateway. Out in the field are a handful of chaffinches, desolately picking at the sward for the stray fallen seeds of grasses and flowers. The three pairs of chaffinches that nested in the field’s hedges will not wander far from them all winter. They will be joined by females from Scandinavia; the males will stay behind. The Latin name of this bird, Fringilla coelebs, coelebs, deriving from the Latin for bachelor, was given by Linnaeus, who saw only male chaffinches in his native Sweden, the females from its northern breeding grounds having flown south. Chaffinches were originally birds of the woodland. But what is a hedge other than linear woodland?

  Within two minutes of hunting through the moss and layers of bog-black leaves, I find the first treasure, a long metal band, dulled by time, but not so old that it has lost all its red Massey Ferguson paint. I’ve removed enough of these to know one instantly; it’s the guard for the belt drive on a 1970s-era baler.

  As I bend down in the leaf detritus, my stick strikes a dull, tomb note: an empty brown cider flagon. ‘Bulmer’s Strongbow. Please Return’. There’s another nearby. Then a bone-white piece of clay pipe stem.

  This is the shaded, west side of the hedge. And it is exactly where we too rest while having our lunch when ‘on the hay’. We have been sitting in the reclining shadows of generations of farm workers. There really is nothing new under the sun.

  The field is in a mood. Sombre. Dull. The alders along the river a chill purple scrabble. Nothing to see, except three pied wagtails. A small measure of joy. The only living thing in sight.

  Of course it is me that is gloomy. The field reflects the weather and the human mood.

  9 FEBRUARY Blue tits whistling in the afternoon sun, a squeaky seesaw noise. Hazel catkins shagged out. Midges in Brownian motion across a golden field.

  In the night I shine a mega-torch across the field, and catch the pink eyes of rabbits eating close to the Grove ditch. The rabbits are not unduly disturbed; one is ‘chinning’ the ground, marking it as ‘me-me’ territory with the scent gland under its jaws; February is the beginning of the main rabbit mating season.

  But the warren in the bank is never populous; I have never seen more than seven adult rabbits emerge from it. It is a warren for the low-status, the excommunicated, the pariahs, and is foolishly close to the fox earth in the copse. A mere fifty yards separate them.

  Like straight roads, central heating and pear trees, the rabbit came over with the Romans, and has been eating his way through the British countryside ever since. The reduction of the rabbit population – which reached 50 million by the 1950s – was the aim of the scientifically introduced disease myxomatosis. Pockets of the disease still fester locally, leaving the afflicted rabbits to bumble around with bulging, bleeding eyes, as though they emerged from the mind of Edgar Allan Poe.

  But it is not ‘myxy’ that performs eugenics on the Grove bank rabbits; it is predation and elemental weather.

  13 FEBRUARY Flurries of snow in the morning.

  A raven flies over, emitting its basso profundo croak. The wingspan of a raven is four feet, and the bird always chills the land with its Gothic shadow. When I walk past the copse a jay screams at me from within. (I jump, confirming Chaucer’s observation in The Man of Law’s Tale, ‘Thou janglest as a Jay’.) A wren starts up with its staccato alarm calls, the ‘tecks’ rattling off the hard, bare branches.

  I watch it fly off into the sheltering mass of holly in the hedge. Another grateful wren joins it. And another. They are clubbing together their body warmth in a bid for life.

  14 FEBRUARY St Valentine’s Day, the day that Geoffrey Chaucer was convinced that the birds became betrothed. In his Parlement of Foules, written c.1381, he visioned that on this day of love the birds met and Nature:

  This noble emperesse, ful of grace

  Bad[e] every foul to take his owne place,

  As they were woned alwey fro yer to yeere,

  Seynt Valentynes day, to stonden theere . . .

  Of foules every kynde

  That in this world han fetheres and stature

  Men myghten in that place assembled fynde

  Byfore the noble goddesse Nature,

  And ech of hem dide his besy cure

  Benygnely to chese or for to take,

  By hire acord, his formel or his make [mate].

  Over the field two wood pigeons, as if on cue, fly up high with clappering wings, then glide down in school-time paper darts. This is their courtship flight. They repeat this four times, their white wing-bars electrifying the running black clouds.

  A lawn, when you come to think of it, is nothing but a meadow in captivity. When the British moved off the land in the nineteenth century to work in factories and towns, they could not quite bear to leave their rural roots and so created a patch of familiar green behind the house.

  Alas, modern lawns have little wildlife value. Most are green deserts, marinated in chemicals, comprised of only a couple of grass species, and shorn stupid once a week in summer. But in the Middle Ages, a lawn was more like a meadow; it was a ‘flowery mead’, bursting with perfumed wildflowers and herbs and grasses.

  These gorgeous, semi-wild acres were an integral part of medieval life, used to their full for walking in, dancing on, sitting in. And in houses and castles where privacy was hard to find, they were the perfect places for lovers to share secluded passion:

  He had made very beautifully a soft bed out of the flowers. Anybody who comes by there knowingly may smile to himself for by the upset roses he may see tandaradei! where my head lay.

  If anyone were to know how he lay with me (may God forbid it), I’d feel such shame. What we did together may no one ever know except us two one small bird excepted tandaradei! and it can keep a secret.

  Walther von der Vogelweide (c.1170–1230)

  In a flowery mead flowers had symbolism, as well as beauty. Cowslip was Our Lady’s keys; daisy was the emblem of purity; forget-me-not was Our Lady’s eyes; foxglove stood for Our Lady’s gloves.

  This I have to confess: there is nothing beautiful about Lower Meadow at the moment. The first flowers have not yet appeared, and the grass is thin and vapid, except for some rank wheaten tussocks where the horses dunged in the autumn. Even sheep will turn their noses up at the grass around a horse latrine. The field is a minor, lower-scale note of green. If that. And stubbly-short, and corrupted by the mud from the sheep’s cloven hooves, and by molehills and piles of horse shit which the weather has inexplicably failed to break and level down. The sunlight is spotlight cruel on the grass. Each blade is clearly discernible in its earth surround; a hair in the follicle of the planet. Few blades are longer than 3.25cm, and they are identical. In this season the grass species cannot really be told the one from the other. But why do a peculiar few blades catch the microscopic breezes and tremble – and others do not?

  It takes a moment of effort
to see the tiny doily-carte leaves of incipient buttercups, the miniature clubs of clover, the mini shields of docks and nettles. Across the valley are fields that are already fluorescent green and table-top smooth. These are the fields doused in nitrogen. Say what you like about artificial fertilizer: you do get a nice shade of green.

  I spend the morning, in the euphemism beloved of horse-owners, ‘poo-picking’, shovelling the excess of horse excrement into the link box on the back of the tractor to dump on the manure heap.

  A scattering of jackdaws plays a game of its own devising in the turquoise sky. Small spears of lords and ladies have pushed through the earth into daylight.

  15 FEBRUARY Dawn chorus at 6.45am. Thrushes going full steam; in the background at Little Trelandon, jackdaws.

  Then it rains with high wind. A sweet fierce rain song. The field is desolation, not a beast or a bird to be seen. The Escley roars in the night.

  17 FEBRUARY The Escley is quieter now; on the bank under the thicket the tunnels of the water voles have been cruelly exposed by the lately rampaging water. The river bottom, in long stretches, has been wire-brushed of all the silt, algae and detritus down to shining pink-and-green bedrock. Breathing in, I can almost smell pure, exhilarating oxygen coursing above the water.

  Beside the copse an oblivious male blackbird tosses aside leathery hazel leaves looking for morsels.

  A solitary male pheasant crows in the alders of Quarry Wood. The high dome of the evening sky is wiped free of cloud; a rose glow settles on the spreading girth of Merlin’s Hill.

  19 FEBRUARY On the lane at night driving home from Freda’s parents’ evening, the headlights of the car pick out scatterings of pale leaves. Except they are not leaves; they are the white throats of hundreds of silent gazing frogs. The track down to the farm is similarly littered with befuddled amphibians. Penny picks a cautious way around the potholes and the frogs; the four-hundred-yard track takes five minutes for the car to descend. Even so, it is impossible not to crush some of the Rana temporaria.