Meadowland (2 page)

When we moved to this farm, the field was my delight and my despair. No field has a finer aspect; only if I spin the full 360 degrees can I see houses, and then only three of them, one of which is ours. Such was the joy; the horror was the state of the sward. My head was stuck in conventional farming thinking, and I deplored the lack of clover for our cattle and sheep, and two patches of the field were devastated by wire-worm.

It became the field I did nothing with, the place I plonked livestock when nothing better was available. But then, nobody else had done much with the field either; there were stands of thistles of a density which suggested remarkable ancestry.

Sometimes neglect is good. In the city the rich folks live on the hill. In the country it’s the poor folk. The big beef farmers and the corn barons have the flat land. Hill farmers are frequently too capital-lacking to make big changes to the landscape. Or spray gallons of herbicide on to it. Nothing conserves like poverty. One summer I let the field go, instead of shuffling livestock on to it.

The peasant poet John Clare called plants ‘green memorials’. By late June the field had sprouted flowers I’d forgotten existed, flowers such as knapweed and bugle, which were testament to an agricultural usage other than animal parking lot.

Once upon a time the field had been a hay meadow.

7 J
ANUARY
Snow settles its medieval quiet on the land. Snow five inches deep, deep enough to sledge on, and Tris and Freda make a Cresta run down neighbouring Bank Field. Away in the unseen village other children’s voices shriek delight.

I too use a sledge, though not for such fun as hammering downhill at too many miles an hour. I tie a bale of bright hay to a storybook wooden sledge and haul it down to the field in a manner I romantically and vaingloriously imagine to be that of Scott of the Antarctic. The sheep are more interested in the accompanying half-sack of sugar beet, and crowd round me, the fearless and the hungry jumping up. The snow hangs in a deb’s delight of pearl beads around their necks. The snow suppresses the herbid smells of nature, and the musk of sheep is unbridled.

Vast shining tracts of the field are unspoiled by the sheep’s feet. In these virgin spaces I feel as though I am
exploring a new planet, which of course I am. The white planet. So cruelly bright is the sun off the quartz snow that I have to squint as though peering into the future.

Actually, not all of the field is white; there are two patches of green at the centre, where water oozing out of the ground has prevented the snow from settling. They are oases around which birds have flocked to drink and probe the ground for food. In the soft mud I can see the footprints of pheasants, and also the faint triangular marks of a smaller long-toed bird.

They come back briefly in the afternoon. Three lapwings.

Farming has changed beyond all recognition in the last seventy years. Population pressure means that farmers need to grow more, more quickly. In the 1930s, Britain’s farmers produced enough food to feed 16 million people; today they produce enough to feed 40 million people. Almost all grassland is now managed ‘intensively’, whereby selected species of grass have fertilizer and herbicides applied to them. On intensively cultivated grassland, grass yield has gone up by 150 per cent since the 1940s.

There is a cost. Ninety-seven per cent of traditional meadows have disappeared. Treatment
with artificial fertilizers did not benefit the more fragile meadow grasses, and the more vigorous types smothered them to death. Neither did the new regime of cutting for cured grass (silage) two or even three times a year help, because the first cut came in May before flower seeds had set, and while ground-nesting birds and mammals were still rearing their young. Some animal species have become extinct. I have not seen a corncrake since the 1970s, when I almost stepped on one in a hayfield when childishly shooting rats with an air rifle. The bird is extinct in England. It stands as a symbol of the untold damage we have wreaked on the British landscape and our natural heritage, through the drive to produce as much food as possible on our crowded little island.

Many of the plants in a traditional meadow, which was cut late and then grazed by small numbers of cattle and sheep, did not have a direct agricultural food value, but they preserved the balance of nutrients, and provided wildlife with sustenance. Didn’t they also make Britain special? When khaki men on the Somme or in Burmese jungles thought of their homeland, did they not picture wildflower-strewn meadows, with cottages and rolling hills?

‘Meadow’ is surprisingly strict in its meaning, and is from the Old English
mœdwe
, being related to
māwan
– to mow. A meadow is a place where grass and flowers are grown for hay, the dry winter fodder
for livestock. A meadow is not a natural habitat; it is a relationship between nature, man and beast. At its best, it is also equilibrium, artistry.

9 J
ANUARY
More snow comes, and a west wind with it, blowing the snow into ridges; the effect is as if a white tidal sea has been over the field and withdrawn. Some scruffy, wizened spikes of thistle pierce the snow, spoiling the illusion.

The sheep paw at the sparkling spectacle for the grass underneath, and lurk for hours around the hayrack. The Shetlands gnaw at thick ivy tendrils in the hedge, back to the white bone, leaving the skin to weep orange at its edges. They have also pulled at the leaves of the bramble, a deciduous plant with a surprising tendency to the evergreen. The temperature reaches minus seven at night, and a sheet of ice forms over the slow stretches of the Escley. I watch it grow, a creeping, pale fungal invasion. The water in the pond is inch-thick plate glass. It groans and protests though it will bear my weight.

By the Grove ditch I can see the wide paw marks of the badger, and where his shaggy coat has scuffed the snow’s surface. In the bank behind the Grove ditch there is a small rabbit warren; usually the rabbits graze into the Grove field, and use the burrows on our
side as escape hatches. This morning they have come through into the field and scraped to get the grass under the sheltered side of Marsh Field hedge. Rabbit’s scientific name is
Oryctolagus cuniculus
, the ‘digging hare’. But the snow is deep and the ground iron; the rabbits have also been up on their back legs nibbling the sweet hazel bark.

The children are at school. The sheep are too defeated by the cold to bother baaing. Only the leathery creak of my feet in the snow disturbs the world. Even the river is quiet.

There was once a sea over this land, and fishes swam in the meadow. The meadow then was south of the equator. During the early Devonian period, 425 million years ago, the place I am now standing in was covered by a shallow tropical estuary, the bed of which writhed with primitive fish and crustaceans – acanthodians, eurypterids, cephalaspids, pteraspids and the scientific like. I know exactly what would have swum around my feet because an old farm quarry half a mile upstream, Wayne Herbert, has divulged hundreds of fossil remains from its green siltstone, including one of an early lamprey, which was wonderfully named
Errivaspis waynensis
in honour of its place of finding. The same green siltstone lenticle in which
Errivaspis
waynensis
was discovered runs under the field, whose geology is easy to determine: the river has cut away the side of the field, so a cross-section is handily on show. There is of course a good reason why hay meadows are traditionally located next to rivers; if grass is to grow lush and thick it needs all the water it can get. The river obliges by seeping its bounty into the depths of the field’s soil through trillions of subterranean capillaries.

Standing in the river looking at the bank, I can see 450 million years of geological history before me, with the horizontal green layers of siltstone lenticle at the bottom. I spend the day chipping away with a chisel and hammer and, even in this bleak midwinter, it becomes warm work.

Some time in the mid-afternoon, when a shard of sunlight plunges through the oak branches on to the green slab, I find what I have come for. A fragment of fossilized fish scales, almost certainly from an acanthodian. These 12-inch, heavily scaled vertebrates were the first jawed fish, the direct ancestor of the trout, loach and bullheads that live in the river today. And of the curious minnows that are investigating my wellingtons in the pellucid water.

On a drive into Hereford I take the cross-country route, hoping to avoid the traffic bottleneck. (Some
hope.) Despite the sparsity of population, I count at least five houses where the inhabitants have strimmed their roadside verge to within a centimetre of its life. Internally I rail at the suburbanity of such an aesthetic (why move to the country if you want to turn it into Hyacinth Bucket’s Blossom Avenue?), and rather more honourably deplore the ecological holocaust. Roadside verges are often remnants of ancient meadow – and in some areas, the only remnants of ancient meadow – and are flora rich, and the sanctuary of wild animals. There is a rust-covered kestrel hovering over an uncut swathe at Wormelow.