Meadowland (24 page)

4 A
UGUST
After nine days I am done, the hay-cutting is finished. Four and a half acres are as smooth as baize, with two long-haired islands floating in them. I
think I can genuinely say I know every blade of grass in this meadow.

Roy Phillips has cut and baled the Road Field, and thirty or more black sheathed bales are lying around. Freda and Tristram are delighted. They like jumping and climbing on the bales; there is something of the playground or school gym about a round bale. Best of all, as far as my son is concerned, is that I will allow him to move the bales down from Road Field when needed by pushing them along with the jeep, in a sort of automobile football dribble.

5 A
UGUST
I am not sure whether I am inspired by Collis, or thrown into competition across the decades. With the last thirty hauls of hay, I build another rick; it is hardly a skyscraper, but for a bungalow it is, I venture, rather neat.

7 A
UGUST
The day blows up black. House martins spark over the field. The rain comes swarming over the mountain from the west. (The Scandinavian forecaster was correct to the day.)

According to folklore, the purple foxglove is so called because Reynard dons its flowers on his feet, so
as to be able to creep in magical silence up to hens and nab them. Perhaps the fox which stole the fluorescent white chicken used such guile. Lying slap in the middle of the meadow is a yobbish scattering of feathers, and the hollowed-out corpse of a fowl. For one mad moment I think someone has put a joke-shop rubber chicken in the field.

No, on close acquaintance the body is real. I leave it for the rain and buzzards.

The Herefordshire name for foxglove is bloody man’s fingers. The plant grows haphazardly along the exsiccated back bank of the Grove ditch.

The chicken is not ours but our neighbour’s. Our chickens are surrounded by an electric fence, which is a reasonable although not infallible deterrent. The foxes yelp when their wet noses touch it.

There is something more the foxes may have in their memory, genetically passed down the generations. I am an Old Testament poultry-keeper. I say a life for a life, and have a gun that speaks death.

And how many of the mallard young have cheated the fox’s snare-trap jaws? I have not seen the wild ducks for a fortnight or more.

12 A
UGUST
The evening is ‘close’, humid. Down in the meadow, where I take a rest from trimming sheep’s
feet, a can of Ruddles for reward, I touch the aftermath pea-green grass. It is fine, tender, new.

A stertorous old man disturbs my peace. Well, for one second at least, I believed it to be an old man.

Hedgehogs are the quintessential mammals of the hedgerow, fossicking around the bottom for slugs, beetles and other invertebrates, and using its secret dark heart for hibernation in winter. In summertime, they will sometimes make a daytime nest in the hedge bottom for a snooze. Although resident in Britain since the last ice age, the hedgehog has declined by as much as 25 per cent in ten years, according to surveys by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species. They wander as much as a mile and a half a night.

It is not an exaggeration that hedgehogs snore; he is wheezing away under the brambles in my broken-down wild corner.

That night: a veil of cloud keeps the huge moon at bay, which retorts by dousing the cloud with an oil-on-water rainbow sheen. The tawny owls are hunting over the meadow, like giant, dimly perceived moths. July and August are the months of the second diaspora of mouldywarp young, when they travel the great distance of five hundred yards or so from their birth burrow. One crawls childishly along in my torch beam, the locomotive power almost entirely provided by the back legs. The long nose sniffs ceaselessly for danger.

13 A
UGUST
A typical sultry August ‘dog-day’, named for Sirius, the Dog Star, which now rises and sets with the sun. I see the first brimstone butterfly of the year, a flitting shock of sulphur in and out of the hazel hedge. Brimstones are one of the few butterflies that pass the winter as an adult; they emerge from their pupa cabinet at the end of July. She flutters up high, and an unnoticed male launches after her. They transport themselves on a breath of air to the shady thicket, where she dives down, the male (and I) in hot pursuit. On the ivy wrapped around an alder she disports herself, and there she mates.

Coition was still in progress the next afternoon.

14 A
UGUST
An anaconda of fog comes slithering up the narrow valley bottom in the evening, on, on, following precisely every turn of the river, to lie suffocatingly on top of us.

A herd of weaned calves have been put in the field next to the paddock. Our girls sing to them, heads flat out, a tuneful lowing.

17 A
UGUST
Penny and I have a sort of busman’s day off, and go for a walk around The Parks, the wildflower nature reserve at Dulas, three miles away. For about five hundred years The Parks used to belong to Dulas Court, the home of the Dulas branch of the Parry family, until they sold it in 1840. The new owners demolished the old house and chapel, and built afresh. Clearly the Fieldens did not want the great Victorian unwashed within sniffing distance, and relocated the chapel in a field across the lane. This turned out to be a favour to botany; the grassland between the graves is the finest species-rich grassland in the valley, and home to the common spotted orchid. God’s acre is one of the few places safe from HS2 and Bovis.

The Parks is always a bit of a revelation. Lower Meadow is a fairly traditionally maintained hay field, whereas The Parks is, as we say in Herefordshire, ‘the proper job’. The flowers seem to outnumber the grasses.

18 A
UGUST
In the newt ditch I spot baby palmate newts, an inch long, gills like fins. Chameleon frogs too, water boatmen, pond skaters. The air whines with mosquitoes; their name comes from the Greek
muia
, an onomatopoeic rendering of the noise they make when flying.

The grass in the uncut islands is so bronzed it looks like ripe wheat. In the belt of thistles the heads are white and ripe and explode at the touch, unless you are very gentle; they could be used as make-up brushes for a woman’s skin. There’s a languor on the scene; a peacock butterfly dries its wings on hogweed by the river, much as a dog stretches out in self-satisfaction before a fire.

The badgers like the green baize of my mown areas; three of them appear late, around midnight, and waddle along slurping up worms in the moonlight.