Common Ground (28 page)

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 Nidd 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?'

I tell him about the kestrel and the blue tit.

‘I meant litter.'

‘Oh, no. Not really. A cigarette butt …'

‘Yeah, well. There should be litterbins and dog bins all the way along this stretch. And a seat or two wouldn't go amiss, either. But you wait. It's going to be better when they put the cycleway in.'

I had half switched off but his words are like a jolt. Fingers stuck in my sides. ‘The what?'

‘The cycleway. It's going right along here.' He sweeps his arm side to side to denote the length of the old railway. ‘Didn't you know? It's been in the papers.'

No, I didn't know.
I follow his arm as he swings it again, pointing left then right, towards where the track runs into the wood and the gorge, where the reinforced metal shutters block off the viaduct and prickle with spikes.

‘Oh, they're going through all that,' he says, reading my mind. ‘Pulling it all down. Sorting the viaduct out and extending the cycle track all the way to Ripley.'

I must look shocked because he frowns and attempts to gee me up. ‘It's a
good
thing,' he says. ‘They're doing the place up.'

‘Who is?'

‘Council. And they're starting soon. Cutting all this back for a kick-off.'

I have a thousand questions, but can't get any of them out. I can smell meadowsweet again. And hear the linnets.

‘It's a
good
thing,' he says again. ‘It's so that all them kiddies and families can come down and ride here, y'know? So they can get outside and into nature. It's a
good
thing.'

The sky is blurring and shading grey.

Bored with me, the man wanders off. ‘Come on, Jess. It's gonna rain.'

But there's no need for the future tense. Specks are falling heavily on my coat. They thicken quickly into a downpour, worrying the leaves and shushing the fretting nettles.

Each rapid alteration in its size, colour and appearance has been profound. Moving from leaf to leaf, constructing and devouring, the caterpillar has changed entirely: the little body that emerged from its egg has swelled and thickened inside a succession of spun, silken nettle-wombs. Now, in a lull in the weather, it slips from its leaf tent in a final larval shape: a hefty, armoured, bullet-headed form that muscles over the nettle, weighing down the wet foliage. It is the same black as a male adder and trimmed likewise with zigzag yellow along its flanks. Each segment of its body bristles with defensive hairs, repellant hairs, thick, sharp tufts like gorse thorn. A chaffinch in the willow sees it, but doesn't move; of all birds, only a cuckoo would dare swoop and take it like this, but there's not been a cuckoo here for thirty years.

The air brightens, pearlescing the clinging damp that has dogged the old railway for days. A linnet sings hurriedly, as though thrust into a spotlight. The caterpillar continues to traverse its mutilated plant, winding down and down the central stem to reach the lower leaves of this sodden, hot clump. These are plumper leaves, but the caterpillar has no interest in eating them. Instead, it once again rolls up the edge of one and draws it together with another, binding them with wraiths of silk to form a cave of green. The sky darkens and a dog brushes past, shaking the stems. The rain begins again, drumming with increasing ferocity and running down the outside of the leaf cave to flood the shining mud. The caterpillar, a full three and half centimetres long, scales the sides to sew a small button of silk – a cremaster – between the leaf's veins, like a spider's web in the rafters of a barn. Into this it weaves its hooked hind feet and then slowly, as though testing its tensile strength, extends itself down, head first, until it comes to a twitching rest in a perfect ‘J' shape.