by Rob Cowen
Intrigued, Varley abandoned gardening for the day and began asking around. Pottering from neighbour to neighbour, he quickly established that not a single person on the street had clapped eyes on one. It was the same story on the next street, and the two after that. It soon preoccupied him enough that he bought a notepad and started to keep records. Daily diaries. His search grew into a kind of obsession, the sort that often sprouts into the mind of a recent retiree who suddenly finds himself set adrift and devoid of the rigours and responsibilities of the nine-to-five. He started enquiring further afield – his neighbours, at the Post Office, the bar at Bilton Cricket Club and the regular coffee mornings and jumble sales his wife dragged him along to at St John The Evangelist’s. Eventually he bought some advertising space in the Harrogate Advertiser, titling his entry for 8 July 1980 ‘The Strange Disappearance of the Red Admiral’. Residents of Bilton! – it began – Have You Seen The Red Admiral Butterfly This Year? Image below. If So, Please Contact Mr B. Varley. Harrogate 601436. He received one response. It was from a lady living in Keats Walk, but they soon established a case of mistaken identity. The butterfly she had freed from her bathroom the day before had undoubtedly been a tortoiseshell.
After swotting up on the subject (cricket was his primary focus outside insurance for forty years), Varley suspected the red admiral’s decline was probably down to the conversion of the land into housing. Properties like his own well-kept bungalow had completely covered the proliferation of flower-rich pasture and hay meadow that had existed in this spot thirty years before. Neat, manicured gardens patrolled by the allied forces of lawnmower and weedkiller ensured nettles had largely become a plant of the past. He also suspected – quite rightly – that the butterfly had been squeezed from the other direction too. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, the farms to the north had turned over all available ground to intensive agricultural methods. Hawthorn and blackthorn hedges had been treated, grubbed up and ploughed in to clear the way for new irrigation systems. Areas where stinging nettles, dogwood and nectar-rich wildflowers grew were lost as one field bled into the next and were sprayed with organo-chlorides to produce high-yield, monoculture crops. Varley reasoned that, if thus pressed on two fronts, the red admiral’s last hope of refuge had to be in the space in-between.
He visited the edge-land on eight occasions that late summer before conceding defeat. Each immersion returned him home more dejected than the last. Sandwiches untouched. Notebook filled with scribblings. Perspiration thick and stinking. ‘It’s appalling down there,’ he told his wife Vanessa, heeling off his wellies at the back door. ‘Frightful.’ As he stewed in the bath, she gathered up his clothes for the machine and listened at the door. His behaviour was not exactly concerning her, but it was different. A change. She’d worried about this happening when he retired. Gladys, a friend at church, had had the same with her Ian. ‘Humour him,’ she’d advised. ‘Let him know you’re interested. Otherwise you’ll lose him. He’ll secrete himself away and then one day, you’ll wake up and you won’t recognise him any more.’
And so she did. It was there on the dinner table when he came down for his beef stew, the flyer she’d picked up after having her hair set in the salon up the road. Typed across its top was, THE BILTON CONSERVATION GROUP.
‘They’re looking for volunteers,’ she said. ‘Thought you might be interested.’
‘I certainly am,’ he said, reading it twice. ‘Thank you, dear.’
A peck on the cheek too, over the washing-up. Good old Gladys.
Contrary to what the name might suggest, there was no real conservation plan at first. It was more a feeling among a growing group of Bilton’s more proactive (and largely senior) residents that something, anything, should be done to address the decline. The marginal land lying broken and burned beyond the back fences was intolerably damaged and increasingly dangerous; it was an eyesore for locals and a headache for the police. But as Varley found out at the regular Wednesday-night meetings, the first hurdle was trying to understand who had responsibility for this liminal space. The speed of development had shifted and blurred the lines of ownership. The edge-land was as undecided and unacknowledged as it was unloved, presenting both a physical and a philosophical challenge to the group. Where was it? What was it? Who owned it? Technically the council had claim over much of the neglected area, but it showed little interest in preventing its ongoing destruction. It did, however, do the paperwork. Sections of land were prospected and reclassified, inadvertently recalling what was buried beneath. Descriptors such as ‘common land’ appeared on the new maps where commons had existed before, like old wounds leaching blood through new linen. One patch was even designated ‘waste’, reverting it a thousand years to when the Domesday Book had written off all Bilton with the same word.
There were other aspects of this new edge-land for the group to contend with: the scruffy farm fields, the lanes, the pylons and the viaduct. Perhaps most significant was the wood that contained the wide sweep of the River Nidd and its litter-clogged tributary, Bilton Beck. Varley offered to do the research and discovered that the wood had been sold off along with the rest of Bilton Hall when the estate was broken up in the years after the Great War, its sole male heir having been killed in 1917. Legally it was in the care of private hands. But, as Varley related to the meeting that week: ‘Clearly they are hands unwilling or unable to take on the restoration work it so desperately requires.’
Exasperated by the process, the locals eventually staged an intervention. Over the long summer of 1982, the Bilton Conservation Group removed more than forty tonnes of rubbish from the edge-land’s meadows, woods and waters. Then its volunteers tackled its numerous burnt-out cars and motorbikes. The unlikely-sounding ‘Harrogate Sub Aqua Club’ was roped in to attach underwater cables to three saloons dumped in the Nidd. After some gentle badgering the army provided the apprentices and kit to haul them up the gorge’s steep sides. Vanessa had come down on that afternoon unannounced, turning up with Gladys and bringing welcome Thermoses of tea, mugs and bags of scones for the troops. Watching his wife handing out the cakes on paper plates, all red-faced in the syrupy air, flustered by compliments, her husband had beamed with pride.
‘Any red admirals yet?’ she’d asked him, handing over a scone in a napkin then straightening the tie beneath his green tank top with a pat.
‘Oh, I think we have to wait a while yet,’ he said. ‘But I’m hopeful now.’
Then, suddenly, catching himself by surprise, he kissed her. Equally surprised, she blushed and smiled. The Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta). A derivation from the eighteenth-century common name ‘Red Admirable’. That’s you, my dear, Varley thought. My admirable Vanessa.
The clearing of edge-land was completed around the middle of August, whereupon the priority became ensuring there could be no future fly-tipping or stolen vehicles dumped and firebombed. ‘The cancer is gone,’ said Varley to the group, ‘but we must now turn our attention to preventing its return.’ And all harrumphed in agreement. So, by letter and in person, the group lobbied for adequate barricades that could stop motor traffic invading along the old railway, while permitting the open-foot access to those who wanted it. Impressed with the surprising strength of local conviction, not to mention the dramatic and cost-free improvement to its lands, the council duly obliged, installing concrete-footed fencing and a padlocked gate at the junction where the old railway intersects Bilton Lane. The earth stirred. Another inadvertent echo: a gated crossing point constructed where one had stood before.
As Varley leaned on it one evening, he took in the open waste ground beyond. Green shoots of dandelion, fat hen, shepherd’s purse and stinging nettle were beginning to scab over the mud and burned earth. Even in the vanishing days of summer the new was already emerging through the old. An invisible membrane had formed itself beyond the fence. Although he would never admit to anyone, each time he passed through it he felt he was somehow experiencing a transformation.
Precisely how long
it took for the edge-land to assume its current form is difficult to determine, but the healing happened relatively ‘naturally’. The Bilton Conservation Group possessed neither the funding nor the experience to launch the kinds of conservation or preservation strategies employed with landscape today. There was no appetite to locate the ground in some nostalgic frame of yesteryear, no rigid profiling of flora and fauna allowing only that which had thrived here when it was a royal hunting park. Nor was there a restoration of its rubbled flax mill into a visitor attraction. This was not prime countryside by anyone’s definition but still a sweep of scrappy land where, even in its most remote spots, the shadow of the sprawl breathed down its neck. No, what happened was largely a letting-go, an end to the human interference or management, aside from the few still-worked farm fields and the council’s yearly cutting of its hay meadows. And, left to its own devices, the land reassembled itself, repairing its DNA and becoming wild, lush, untidy and beguiling. Out of the ashes, its trees shooted and spread; the wood thickened and bloomed. Bacterias bloomed. Air and insect propagated its pollens. Brambles, bindweeds and cleavers crept. Blackthorns and hawthorns budded. Thickets tangled. Grasses and wildflowers seeded and carpeted. Native and non-native plants abounded and contested. Nature’s rebellious children found their own balance, reclaiming wood and meadow and railway and river, the colonisers, the opportunists and the crawlers evolved into ecosystems unhindered, luring back life in its many forms.
The Bilton Conservation Group continued to keep a close eye on things. Volunteers like Varley walked the old tracks and attended to the edge-land’s details through field notes. The group even drew from these to produce regular typewritten and hand-illustrated newsletters for distribution among its members. Today these read like short dispatches from inside some newly forming state, which in many ways, of course, they were. Each an astute phenological document, far more than the mere list of weather conditions and species it appears at first glance. In context, these acts of recording and veneration captured the development of this unplanned, unburdened and largely unnoticed realm as its shape emerged.
Sadly most of these reports were lost in the intervening decades. As the group’s original members aged, downsized, moved into nursing homes or died, files and boxes containing these treasures became rubbish clogging up the corners of spidery lofts. Detritus to be cleared on Sundays by mourning families. The earliest surviving newsletter (No. 17) dates from winter 1985/6. Even so, being written only three years after the clean-up, it testifies to the speed and spontaneity with which nature had reclaimed the ground:
A biting east wind brought the temperature down to -1°C and snow flurries encouraged us all to trudge briskly through 4” of soft snow.2 Six traps produced two sleeping Field Voles (Microtus agrestis) a hyperactive Common Shrew (Sorbex araneus), a Wood mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus) and, surprisingly, a stray house mouse (Mus domesticus). Fox and rabbit tracks in the fields near the rim of the Gorge. A gibbet of Grey Squirrels and Woodpigeons reminded us of the endless battle the farmer has to control vermin. Time and again we were to catch Bank Voles (Clethrionomys glareolous) – a larger cousin of the more common Field Vole distinguished by its longer body (8″) and tail (1″). Few birds were on the wing apart from Robin, Blue Tits, and Finches skulking in the thickest scrub, and an occasional Crow. With chattering teeth we examined the last traps of the woodland fringe before descending to the riverside. Here the steep slopes were shrouded with dormant hazel, beneath which our last captives – Wood Mice, Bank Voles and Common Shrew – blinked in the daylight before bounding away from the sharp eyes of predators such as Kestrel or Fox. The river was grey, cold and in spate. Alders trailed icicles in the current. Someone remarked, ‘Who’d be a trout in winter?’ and no one braved the flood to check for crayfish hibernating under the banks. Ducks and wildfowl have become less common and a wet, sandy spit provided evidence of Mink footprints, which might explain why. The Mink may fill that ecological gap left by The Otter, which is thought to have become extinct in The [Nidd] Gorge sometime in the 1950s. Escaped Mink wreak havoc amongst the native waterfowl and mammals. More encouraging though were the prints of Roe Deer, Rabbit, Fox, Stoat, and even a Common Hare, which we were fortunate enough to encounter before the walk was over.
If not an exact description of the edge-land I found on New Year’s Eve, it is a damn close likeness. An instar.
These long days. These late-summer days, drowsy, immense and golden. It’s Tuesday. I walk up the lane at lunchtime troubled by the thought that I may have been lax in my own recordings of this place. The microscopic details of the here and now seem to possess an inexpressible value that I’m worried I’ve overlooked. I wish I’d kept more rigorous data. More snapshots. The changes in a single leaf in a single location from day to day. The biodegradation of a discarded fag butt on the stone track. The minute-by-minute movement of a single bird through the wood. Maybe these are the things of true importance.
But where do you begin? At the entrance to the holloway the hedgerow is dense and wild and inscrutable; it is almost impossible to make out the rotted stumps of fence, the animal runs, the tumbledown wall stones concealed within. I can smell wheat and death and sweetness. Meadowsweet, perhaps – the scent of the back of old cupboards and ground almonds. There’s a scorched, fumy-blue sky crossed with wires. Starlings whistle. Dog roses (white). Foxgloves (pink). Shrivelled sloes. Hawthorns heavy with berries. A skyline of soft hills. Plane contrails crossing the pylons. A million things. The time is 1:54 p.m. I kneel and try to imagine a rough metre square in this section of the hedge and begin to document what would fall within its borders. My eyes get lost in the spectacular variety and I fill three pages in scribbled shorthand. When you take down the world in this way, it feels as much about holding onto something as understanding it; in some small sense you are always trying to save a moment. An indirect preservation. But by the time you finish each word or sentence, that world has already gone. Then a thought comes: perhaps in the future someone, something, will scour back through such records, read them for clues, try to decode the point where it all went wrong. They will celebrate nerdy field notes precisely for their banal lists and lament where description is trimmed and tailored in favour of style. By trawling the records of such microcosms, they may unlock the mysteries of incomprehensible macroscopic human behaviour. The interzones will serve as a legend to the wider map, testifying to our collective denial, our ruinations, restorations, contradictions and wilful amnesia towards our environment. Unearthed sometime in 3000 AD, a few pages about a single patch of edge-land might prove as vital and telling as all the scientific data on melting ice sheets and rising sea levels.
Down the holloway, just where the banks rise and the path feels suddenly cocooned by the earth and silver birch, a tawny pool of sun. I stand there with the place to myself and listen. The sound of the weir and the rusty call of a woodpecker. The air smells of coming rain. I descend the track towards the river, going deeper into the wood, passing the exposed gunnels, the mined pits and the quarried stone. Here, where the mill once stood, drift the ghosts of industries gone back to green. The ash circle of Sir Hare’s fire is lost now under a mat of ground ivy. A place where I watched him wake and wash in the river, all bony and long-limbed, is a mass of flowering honeysuckle. Dog’s mercury furs the rutted millers’ paths as the ground swallows the last of their pebbles. Foliage prints new, exotic patterns on the earth. Bursting balsam pods fling their seeds through the undergrowth and into the folds of my clothes. Crunched between teeth, their tiny black or cream dots taste of water chestnuts. Across the river, the punky shock of a skunk cabbage sticks out among a bed of nettles. Its huge yellow flower looks both prehistoric and from a time beyond our own. Like the wildly re-grown meadows and the re-colonised old railway, these things point not only to a past, but a future. In them you can see a world without us when nature calmly repossesses whatever we have left.
I’m watching a heron stand statuesque in the shallows of the N
idd when there is a crash behind me. I spin and see what looks like a clod of soil hurtling through the canopy, separating into two. As I scramble up the bank for a closer look, the larger section moves from its position in a beech – a kestrel. It flaps away through a rift in the leaves back into open air. The second projectile smashed into a large holly at the top of a bank and looking up into its heart I see a blue tit, fluffed and shaken but not injured. It looks down at me from its high branch. Did you see that? written all over its face. Bloody hell!
‘You’ll be all right,’ I tell it and off it shoots, dipping low and twittering.
The rain will be here soon so I cut across the meadow to join up with the old railway. A man looms out of the trees. He’s old and grey-haired, but youthful in step and with a trendy T-shirt – a Union Jack made up of ripped and sewn garment fragments. He leads a fat, butter-coloured Labrador, which limps along behind. As they draw closer I see the man is holding a takeaway coffee cup and wonder where he could have got it. Then I see clamped between his side and his arm are three cans of fizzy pop, a crisp packet and a half-filled bottle of mineral water. He slows to talk with a shake of his head.
‘I can’t understand how some people think this is acceptable.’ His accent is broad – South Yorkshire. He thrusts his litter collection at me. ‘Thoughtless bastards, the lot of them. I’ve just picked this up from the verges. Can you believe it? And don’t even get me started on the dog shit.’
I don’t, but he’s off again anyway.
‘Every day I take at least two bags home. And that’s not including my own.’
‘That’s terrible,’ I reply, hoping that by ‘my own’ he’s referring to his dog.
He shrugs. ‘Yeah, well, I can’t stand seeing the stuff. It ruins the place. Have you seen much today?’