It started to rain. The camper van roof became a drum skin, droplets falling in patterings, the only sound we could hear. We closed the door and I sat at the open window instead, listening to the rain fall across the heather as it released the scent of damp earth into the air. It was peaceful, but then I thought of the cyhyraeth moving across the moor, somewhere beyond the window frame, just out of sight. Suddenly I felt exposed, and I imagined a maniac running at me in the dark, out of the wilderness. I thought of the wolves that must have lived here once, and wondered what I would do if I heard one howling on the horizon. How would I feel if I suddenly heard an animal that I knew was extinct in Britain, crying out into the night nearby? It’s an unmistakable sound – you couldn’t convince yourself it was a fox or an owl. How would the brain reconcile such a noise here in the middle of twenty-first-century Snowdonia?
In a flash of paranoia, I slammed the window shut and drew down all the blinds, blocking out the moor and the secrets it kept. I retreated to the bed, buried myself under the duvets with Dave and a fresh cup of tea, and pledged not to look out at the moor again until dawn and the reassuring glow of sunrise.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Wickerman
Early May, the dusk was falling and the air around me was pregnant with the aroma of blackthorn flowers that had twisted themselves deep into the hedgerow. I had come back to Butser Ancient Farm, as I did every May, and I was now mildly inebriated, cradling a large pint of cider while I stood beneath a 9-metre wickerman looming into the sky. He stared, mighty and cantankerous across the gloaming, his thick limbs made of hazel hurdles lashed together, with red cedar shingles laid out in rows to form chainmail over his chest. Propped against his arm was a black axe that, the week before, I had painted with a serpentine pattern that was once excavated from some artefact in a Danish tomb.
Behind it all, the dwindling light cast shadows on the forest that bordered the land, home to a nest of buzzards and their mewing young. Between the trees lay a carpet of wild garlic that had begun to unfurl its creamy-white flowers, their aromatic presence floating out of the woods, heralding spring. When we walked in those trees at night, the darkness settled on everything but the flowers and they seemed to glow like stars, a reflection of the sky above the canopy. Once I set my trail camera to film the entrance to the woods, intrigued by what might emerge from the trees. I knew there were badgers and foxes that made their home there, badger setts composed of interlocking tunnels and nesting chambers that might have been passed down over centuries, all hidden away beneath our feet. I caught nothing for days, and then, one blustery night in the early hours, a badger appeared from the gloom – a huge, lumbering beast of a creature with a glint in each eye. He stopped, sniffed at the air, his head turning in every direction until he thought it safe to proceed. Out he trotted, away from the cover of the trees, and stopped again. Sniffed. Ears twitched. Sniffed. Flinched. Startled. Retreat! Back he trotted, into the woods, enveloped by grainy darkness on my computer screen.
There are around 290,000 badgers in Britain, which seems like a lot until you hear that 45,000 are killed on our roads every year. In the 1970s, wildlife protection groups lobbied parliament to make it an offence to attempt to kill, take or injure badgers or to interfere with their setts without a licence. These laws are now contained in the Protection of Badgers Act 1992. Despite this, for the last few decades a number of reactive and proactive badger culls have been launched as part of government initiatives to reduce the spread of bovine tuberculosis (bTB), a highly infectious disease that devastates thousands of beef and dairy farms every year. In 2003, a series of independent trials revealed that reactive culling, in which badgers were culled in the areas where bTB was already present in cattle, actually resulted in a 27 per cent increase in bTB outbreaks compared to those areas where no culling took place. In 2005, a second series of trials then revealed that proactive culling, in which badgers were culled in strategic areas without cattle infection, reduced outbreaks of bTB by 19 per cent within the cull zone but increased them by 29 per cent within a 2km radius. This was because the culling led to changes in the badgers’ behaviour, increasing infections within the colonies and leading to the migration of infected badgers away from their usual territories.
In the meantime, wildlife groups had already been searching for alternatives to destroying a protected species and casting the ecosystem into potentially devastating imbalance. In the last few years badger-vaccination programmes have seen success in partnership with vets, farmers and landowners, particularly as scientific research has now shown that cow-to-cow contact – rather than badgers – is the primary cause of the spread of bTB in cattle. Organisations like the Wildlife Trust have been petitioning the government to develop a cattle vaccine and to invest in badger vaccinations, which cost significantly less than the current culling scheme and recognises the fact that 83 per cent of badgers culled between 2002 and 2005 didn’t even carry bTB in the first place. Independent experts appointed by DEFRA have been put in place to assess the effectiveness, humaneness and safety of the culls, and deemed them ‘ineffective’ and ‘inhumane’, with no significant improvement and further failures year on year.
Despite the science, logic and humanity opposing the badger cull, in 2013 DEFRA announced a further cull in Gloucester shire and Somerset amid intense opposition, with the areas increased in 2015 and 2016 to include seven new licences across Cornwall, Devon and Herefordshire. According to a report in the Independent in 2015, the cull is costing taxpayers £6,775 per badger killed, with almost no reduction in bTB outbreaks in Britain, and the often-inhumane killing of 20,000 badgers in 2013 alone.
The European badger is a keystone species, which means it plays such a vital role in the ecosystem that without it, that entire ecosystem could change or collapse with catastrophic consequences. It happened when we removed all the wolves from Britain around the seventeenth century. Wolves were considered vermin, savage killers and a threat to society, and they were persecuted for centuries until the last wolf is believed to have been shot in the Scottish Highlands in 1680. Fast-forward 350 years, and there are now 350,000 red deer roaming through our commercial forests, damaging young trees, crops and habitats. These are animals that would have once been preyed on by our native wolves. Official reports from the Forestry Commission, DEFRA and the University of East Anglia suggest that the cost of damage caused by deer to plantations and commercial woodlands is around £4.5 million a year, while the cost of damage to crops is around £4.3 million. Around 8,000 hectares of woodland with Site of Special Scientific Interest status is currently classed as ‘unfavourable’ or ‘recovering’ due to deer impacts, and there has been a 50 per cent decline in woodland bird numbers where deer are present, as the deer eat shrub layers that are crucial habitats for nightingales, willow warblers, chiffchaffs and blackcaps.
The current rewilding debate, in which wolves might be reintroduced into Britain, is a complex one (although I like the idea in theory). But before discussing which animals to bring back into our ecosystem, it is imperative that we recognise the importance of the ones still with us. The European badger feeds primarily on earthworms, but they also help to control populations of mice, rats, squirrels and rabbits, as well as feeding on apples, pears, plums and elderberries and helping to distribute their seeds. Their shaggy fur is also perfect for distributing the hooked seeds of plants like goosegrass and burdock, and they eat competitive plants like the bulbs of wild garlic that might otherwise spread out of control. Badger dung will host its own delicious cocktail of invaluable invertebrates, and as badgers use the same trails over and over again to move between territories, these miniature pathways may create microclimates for butterflies and other pollinators. Their intricate underground setts will also be home to a number of other small creatures, who in turn provide sustenance for their own corners of the ecosystem.
It is impossible to predict how the removal or decline of such a species might affect our environment, but when 60 per cen
t of our wild species have declined in the last 30 years alone, according to the 2016 State of Nature report, can it be ethical or intelligent to eradicate anything that has a natural right to be there? The modern badger, Meles meles, is thought to have evolved in the early Middle Pleistocene, existing within the British ecosystem for thousands and thousands of years alongside other species. In the meantime, agricultural practices have intensified, more land has been taken up for farming, and badger nutrition and habitat is constantly shifting. Is it actually true that badgers need to adapt, be culled, persecuted and disappear from our woodlands? Or is it more likely that, through our own habits, we are making our ecosystems unworkable for ourselves and other creatures?
Tonight, on Butser Ancient Farm as our badgers started to creep out of the cobwebbed earth, I was celebrating Beltain – or Beltane – one of the Gaelic fire festivals that takes place midway between the spring equinox and summer solstice. According to ancient lore, Beltain was a celebration of life and fertility, hailing the start of summer and warmer days to come. It was said that if you bathed in the first dawn dewdrops of Beltain, your year would blossom with beauty and youthful spirit. On the night in question, the Celtic people would traditionally build two large fires using wood from the nine sacred trees: birch, rowan, ash, alder, hawthorn, oak, holly, hazel and willow. Herds of startled cattle were then driven between the two flames as part of a cleansing ritual, purifying the beasts and promoting their fruitfulness. Thousands of years after our ancestors first celebrated these ancient rituals, the fire festival continued in this small pocket of England, a curious event reincarnated for those who wished to forget the turbulent jumble of modern Britain and slip back into the primitive shadows of our past.
The wickerman was thought to be another Beltain tradition, made famous by those grisly horror films starring Edward Woodward or Nicholas Cage (depending on your taste in cinema). The concept of a giant man made of timber and straw was first recorded by Julius Caesar in his Commentary on the Gallic War around 58bc. He claimed ancient Druids used the giant effigy to perform human sacrifices to appease the gods, although Caesar wasn’t exactly balanced in his view; the Romans saw the Celts as barbarians and regularly exaggerated their behaviour. In truth, there is no archaeological evidence to suggest the Celts carried out these sacrifices. The flames most likely represented the same cleansing force behind the rest of the festival, believed to welcome in the summer and encourage abundance at harvest time. Now, as then, the burn was a sight to inspire and enthuse the crowds as the long, dark winter came to a close.
The evening had drawn in, and I settled down shoeless in the grass, feeling the warm blades between my palms and toes. To my right, Dave watched the titanic figure of the wickerman, and to my left, a city worker and his family sat together on a blanket, exchanging hastily drunk macchiatos on the Piccadilly line for a weekend in the countryside. They’d dined on hog roast and danced with morris men, and now they were waiting for the great display. A few metres away, children fed dusty pellets to a flock of sheep, while a clan of neopagan friends watched the darkening sky with delight, their wrists adorned with charms and pendants. It was time for the burn.
Deep in the base of my stomach, I sensed the drums begin. They started slowly, drawing the gaze of the crowd over to the great man who had just a fragment of time left on earth. Lighting the wickerman was a task allocated by raffle, and this year’s winner was a 10-year-old boy. As the drums quickened, he approached the paddock and was passed an Indiana-Jones-style flaming torch. With fear and elation he stepped forwards into the shadow of the giant figure. The torch extended and flames spread greedily, silent as a serpent’s tongue, and within seconds the wickerman was alight, and I smiled in the way only humans can in the face of such destruction.
As the blaze engulfed his feet and legs, the drums beat faster in frenzy. Tangerine ribbons of fire rippled into the sky like a whip, and soon the darkness above our heads was glowing with a 9-metre inferno. A veil of ash swarmed through the air and the drums beat louder. Cheers and roars erupted from the masses huddled around the wickerman; beer was drained from tankards, and faces were lit with an apricot bloom as the fire climbed higher. Soon, the body began its inevitable collapse. Those thick hurdles, once so hard and strong, started to crumble in the heat; one leg broke, and the Saxon man fell. Hot sparks showered across the crowd and a cacophony of joy escaped into the night sky.
I glanced around at the landscape, black beyond the flames. The fields and farmlands carved by the Celts over 2,000 years ago still held their shape, and the ancient woodlands from which the wickerman was built had stood for centuries before us. I grasped my cider tightly and stared up at the sky, stars shining through the cloak of hot ash drifting above us like some powdered aurora. Tomorrow, we would all return to our modern lives, our commutes and computers and plastic packaging. But for now I was just another star in the wide universe – and I wanted another cider.
Beltain is one of four Gaelic festivals in the ancient calendar, all of which hang on the natural rhythms of the season, the rising sun, the stars and glowing moon. Later in the summer, the festival of Lughnasadh marks the beginning of the harvest season, traditionally celebrated on the first day of August, with feasting, religious ceremonies, athletic contests, matchmaking, trading and visits to holy wells. The name originates from the Irish god Lugh, a young warrior associated with arts and crafts, truth and the law, the sun, storms and sky. According to Lebor Gabála Érenn, a collection of writing detailing the history of Ireland up to the Middle Ages, Lughnasadh takes some of its mythology from an athletic competition founded by Lugh as a mourning ceremony for the death of his foster mother, Tailtiu. The competition included the long jump, high jump, spear-throwing, boxing, archery, wrestling, swimming and chariot-racing, as well as less physical contests like singing, dancing, storytelling and jewellery-making. Archaeologists also believe that on the evening of the games, a mass arranged marriage would take place in which couples met for the first time, and were given one year and one day to request a no-strings divorce.
Of the four Gaelic feasting festivals, Lughnasadh is perhaps the least well known because, although the authorities of a progressively Christian nation did not object to a celebration of the harvest season, the dates shifted and harvest festivals became more associated with early September. With the autumn came Samhain, another Gaelic festival and one that is perhaps the best known in modern society for its likeness to the popular western celebration of Halloween. A festival to mark the end of the harvest season, Samhain took place on 31 October and 1 November, when the cattle were brought in from pasture and some sent to slaughter. A time of liminality, this was when the boundary between our world and that of the dead was at its thinnest, which meant that the spirits known as aos sí could pass between the two. Like Beltain, special bonfires were lit to purify the cattle and evoke protective, cleansing powers from the spiritual world, and the souls of the dead were thought to revisit their old homes for a place at the feasting table. Mumming and guising were common practice, in which people visited their neighbours dressed in costume and recited verses in exchange for food, and games were played involving divination, apples and nuts.
While Samhain dates back to the Neolithic period in Britain, you don’t have to look far to find other cultures celebrating a ‘Day of the Dead’ in one form or another. Perhaps the most famous is in Mexico, where the public holiday Día de los Muertos is a time for honouring the deceased by building private altars called ofrendas, decorating graves with sugar skulls called calaveras and bright Aztec marigolds, and inviting the spirits of the dead to spend the night with their families on earth. In Cambodia, Buddhist families gather together to celebrate Pchum Ben, a religious holiday on which people visit temples to remember the dead, offering fresh flowers and foods like sweet sticky rice and beans wrapped in banana leaves. Meanwhile in Hong Kong, the ‘Hungry Ghost’ or Yulan Festival takes place on the 15th day of the seventh lunar month, when many people in East Asia
believe the spirits get restless and begin to roam the mortal world. During the festival the spirits are offered both the food and money they might need for the afterlife.
Human civilisation evolved separately in Britain, Mexico, Cambodia and Hong Kong, yet the same patterns appear again and again, connecting our cultures together. Today, we still celebrate ancient festivals repackaged as religious or cultural events. Cynics of the world grumble about the commercialisation of Halloween, but the central idea has been the same for hundreds of years: dress up, eat sweets, get spooky. When I was in primary school my parents let me have an awesome Halloween party at home every year, complete with a range of low-budget costumes, pumpkin soup, ‘blood bites’ (jam sandwiches) made by my mum and a spine-tingling movie marathon of Hocus Pocus, The Witches and possibly Casper if we hadn’t fallen asleep by then. One year, my dad rigged up a line of thread to the fireguard and pulled it over when we were thoroughly engrossed in the telly, causing a roomful of eight-year-old girls to erupt into supersonic shrieks. My parties were the best.
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