Meadowland (26 page)

10 S
EPTEMBER
Along the luxuriant river bank, underneath the alders, it could be the green time of spring; one has to look hard for the signals of autumn. They are there, though: the burs from the burdock which stick to the dog, the empty seed envelopes of the hemlock, and the solitary willow warbler poking about perplexedly in the goat willow. (Of course.) The willow warbler is passing through; but then we are all passing through.

When I walk up the bank into the field the meadow pipit fledgling is making tentative ascents into the golden air. I do not know what became of its siblings.

Bizarrely, a skylark launches up too, as if to give a flight masterclass.

Yesterday’s rain and today’s warmth have brought the slugs out; a pair of black slugs (
Arion ate
) circle and lick each other, their mucus-covered bodies as moist as the green grass on which they lie. Slugs are hermaphrodite; entwined, each releases its
penis, a white tentacle which clasps the penis of the other.

14 S
EPTEMBER
This silent void is a shock. No evening chorus, no universal hum of insects, and the lambs, now grown up, no longer bleat, they only eat, heads permanently fixed to the ground. Children’s plastic farm toys would be more real.

The chiffchaff has flown.

17 S
EPTEMBER
I move the cattle out of the field and into a pen for their annual, government-ordered tuberculosis test. They smell divine, of buttercups, of vernal, of grasses galore, as good cows should. Sunshine glints off their backs, full of summer bloom.

This is my least favourite day of the year. Lined up in the race, a narrow metal-railed corridor, the cows are injected, by the vet, in the neck with an instrument that looks suspiciously like a staple gun. If they test positive to the reagent they are to be slaughtered. No ifs, no buts. I have to wait four days for the vet, dressed top to toe in green plastic and rubber, to return and pronounce.

The days of James Herriot, of tweed and a bacon
sandwich over a cup of tea in a farmhouse kitchen, are long gone. Vets today dress like forensic scientists at the scene of a crime.

20 S
EPTEMBER
I watch a ladybird climbing a skyscraper of grass.
Propylaea punctata
: a perfect black-and-yellow chequerboard that should have been designed by Issigonis in the 1960s.

Underneath the hedge a family of pied wagtails runs through the glistening grass. The moment of minimalist art is improved by two equally black-and-white magpies strutting through the sward. And the hedgerow is burgeoning with red and purple: rose hips, elderberries, sloes, blackberries, honeysuckle, and the luxurious forbidden berries of bryony and deadly nightshade.

A magpie halts to look quizzically at the jumble of grey feathers below the oak tree; some predator has killed and plucked the two wood pigeon squabs.

In the pen, I feed the cows hay and cattle cake; while they are otherwise engaged I run my hands over their thick, muscular necks to feel for a reactive lump.

One has a swelling.

23 S
EPTEMBER
A morning in which the field is garrotted by mist. This moist warm weather brings on the autumn flush of grass, and the mushrooms; in the sward there are bronze turf mottlegill mushrooms and rare yellow waxcaps (
Hygrocybe chlorophana
). Growing out of the cow pats are liberty caps.

The ivy on the elder is in bloom, though its unostentatious, spherical greeny-yellow flowers hardly qualify, I feel, as flowers in the visual sense. Nonetheless they are an important source of autumn nectar for the last bees, moths and butterflies of the year.

Some juvenile house martins are still here. The adults went yesterday. From the dead elm in Bank Field a great spotted woodpecker ‘tschicks’ territorially.

This is all happening somewhere far off, as though I am looking at a hushed English pastoral scene down the wrong end of a telescope. The cows are back in the race waiting. They are listless; the dominant cows in the herd order, Margot and her daughter, Mirabelle, are butting those in front, and the metal barriers are starting to screech alarmingly under the pressure. This is my fault; the cattle are sensitive to my anxiety. I am so wired up about the TB check, I can hardly breathe.

The veterinary surgery rings. The vet, Will Jacobs, is going to be late. Some time about three o’clock Jacobs comes wearily down the track. The usual clambering into the protective suit. His hand running
over each cow’s neck. All good until he gets to Melissa, Melissa with the bump. Out come the measuring callipers.

I have been here before. Everything depends on the size of the bump. Measured once. Measured twice. Measured three times.

‘She’s just inside the limit.’ I could jump for joy. ‘They’re all yours for another year.’

I let the cows out. We run around together.

25 S
EPTEMBER
Amid the dew-laden webs of millions of
Linyphiid
spiders, which medieval shepherds believed caused braxy (a digestive disorder of sheep), a grey squirrel is picking up hazel nuts. There is a palpable urgency to his or her action. Although grey squirrels do not hibernate they need to larder up against hard times.

At the end of the day: on this night of a waxing moon my shadow is giant across the field.

Another busman’s day out. We drive over in the drizzle to Turnastone Court at Vowchurch, six miles away in the broad, flat Golden Valley. This is the Parry heartland. There is an effigy of Blanche herself in Bacton church, on a hill that always seems to be in cold shadow. The effigy has a minor footnote
in history because it incorporates the first image of Elizabeth I as Gloriana. Of more interest to me: Blanche looks remarkably like my grandmother.

The meadows at Turnastone are the remnants of a utopian agricultural project set up beside the Dore river by Rowland Vaughan, who wrote a book published in 1610 on ‘his Most Approved and Long experienced Water Workes containing the manner of Winter and Summer drowning’.

Vaughan is usually credited with the invention of downward-floated water meadows or bedworks, although some scholarship suggests he merely developed an extant system. (The field name ‘le Flote’ at Kimbolton in Herefordshire pre-dates Vaughan’s book by a generous historical margin.) To an extent, this is pharisaical stuff; what Vaughan did and popularized was the temporary flooding of grassland via water diversion, channels and sluice gates.

Vaughan was the great-nephew of Blanche Parry. (He complained that his spirit was too tender to endure the ‘bitterness’ of Dame Blanche’s ‘humor’ and that he was forced by her ‘crabbed authority’ to fight in the Irish war.) The Parrys and the Vaughans had intermarried for at least a hundred years, and Rowland did not buck the habit. He married the Parry girl who inherited the main family estate, Newcourt, giving him ownership of all the land on the west bank of the Dore from Peterchurch to Bacton.

Famously, the idea for ‘drowning’ grass came to Vaughan when he was walking his estate to check on the miller (a notably shifty species). As he strode along he noticed that a mole had burrowed into the millstream bank, and where the water oozed out through the molehill the grass was luscious.

Vaughan spent twenty years constructing an irrigation system in the Golden Valley – approximately from 1584 to 1604 – whereby his grass could be flooded to promote its growth. His main artificial channel was the three-mile-long Trench Royal, which diverted water from the Dore on to the fields, then away again via a sluice gate. The use of flooding increased the yearly value of the land from £40 to £300 per year.

Although many thought Vaughan mad, his method was demonstrably successful and attracted great acclaim. A ‘panegyricke’ written by the poet John Davies praised Vaughan’s drownings of meadows in effusive rural imagery:

His royall TRENCH (that all the rest commands

And holds the Sperme of Herbage by a Spring)

Infuseth in the wombe of sterile Lands,

Here, two of the inferior Elements

(Joyning in Coïtu) Water on the Leaze

(Like Sperme most active in such complements)

For, through Earths rifts into her hollow wombe,

(Where Nature doth her Twyning-Issue frame)

The water soakes, whereof doth kindly come

For, as all Womens wombes do barren seeme,

That never had societie of Men;

So fertill Grounds we often barren deeme,

Mind you, John Davies was a kinsman.

Six years later, in 1610, Rowland published his book describing the system. In it he claimed that the Trench Royal was navigable, and was being used to ship goods from one end of the estate to the other. The book also claimed that he established an ideal community for two thousand workers, who were all decked out with fetching scarlet caps.

Water meadows became fairly common in Herefordshire. The temporary diversion of water (ideally an inch deep) over grassland in winter encouraged the growth of grass before the growing season and provided stock with an early ‘bite’. In some cases, a further period of irrigation allowed a second or even third hay crop to be taken. Summer flooding simply
stimulated grass growth by compensating for any water deficit in the soil.