Meadowland (27 page)

Today Turnastone Court is farmed by the charity the Countryside Restoration Trust. Although the irrigation system is long gone, the water meadows are still a flora haven. They remained unploughed even during the Second World War. Locals say that Mr Watkins stood at the gate of his main floodplain meadow and told the War Agricultural Executive that the field would be ploughed only over his dead body.

I have long been amused by the fact that the broken ditch that leaks over Lower Meadow makes a sort of poor man’s irrigation system. The grass in that quarter of an acre is always greener. A sort of unintentional water meadow.

Goldfinch

I LOOK FOR
the changes in nature more closely in October than in any other month. Do many red haws on the hawthorn in the hedge really mean, as folklore says, there will be ‘many snaws’? If the fieldfares arrive early will the winter be especially hard? Even though a profusion of berries indicates only the plant’s past health I am hooked on weather divination. It is partly, I suspect, a primordial anxiety – shared with wildlife – that I need to prepare for the worst.

So of course the month begins with a diverting Indian summer, with morning sun-shafts in mist, and hoverfly (
Episyrphus balteatus
) on late-appearing buttercups. Starlings come up from the village with their party whistles to look for worms in the aftermath on the meadow.

I love everything about riding Zeb; the sea-deck motion, the creak of the saddle, the laughing excitement of cantering and galloping – and his pleasure in the same. I love the new perspective on old things one gets from the back of the horse. And above even this, I love that we are one, a unity; when American Indians
first saw Spanish conquistadors on horses they believed them to be a single being.

The wild birds and animals of the meadow, for the most part, believe the same. We, the two-headed beast, amble around the perimeter and the fleet of rooks trawling the sea-green grass barely notices us.

It is different with the ewes, who stand rigid and watch me, then glance for a line of escape. When we near them on our walk, they lighten the load by squatting and peeing. Then run, bouncy-bottomed, to the far side.

Friar Tuck the ram strolls after them. Man-horse or horse-man he could not care, for he has a one-track mind. Fornication. October is the month of ovine sex in the country.

Friar Tuck stops and sniffs the ground where the ewes have pissed. Then he curls back his upper lip to show his teeth in a cartoon grimace. The flehmen response is not a male come-on but a means of closing his nostrils so he can suck air into the vomeronasal organ in the roof of his mouth. He is trying to detect the chemicals to know whether she is on heat. He himself is oozing so much testosterone that it hangs nidorous in the air.

One fat ewe with a ripped ear is clearly producing oestrogen by the pint. He licks her obscenely with a flicking tongue, then paws at her with a front leg, butts and bites her flank.

There are some try-out mountings.

She does not quite stand still; but then she does not run away either. He’ll stay with her for the rest of the day, and cover her properly in the dark, the original one-night stand.

Tomorrow it will be a new girl.

Friar Tuck is not a wholly indiscriminate lecher. He likes his own Ryeland breed best. The Shetlands and Hebrideans will get covered last.

Rooks do not often visit the field, as they prefer the grain land at the bottom of the valley. Perhaps once or twice in autumn, boredom or a hungry memory of where bountiful worms are to be found brings them up here. There are twenty-three of them, garbed (or so it seems) in black cloaks. They feed into the brisk north wind, which blows over them, aerodynamically fixing them to the ground, as they stab it with their bone-white beaks. If they fed backside to the wind it would lift them up, and over.

The meadow is home; it is also a picnic site for visitors, and a stopping place for migrants on passage.

A place, too, for humans to reflect.

Humphry Repton in his
Observations on the Theory & Practice of Landscape Gardening
declared that ‘the beauty of pleasure-ground, and the profit of a farm, are incompatible . . . I disclaim all idea of making that which is most beautiful also most profitable: a ploughed field and a field of grass are as
distinct objects as a flower-garden and a potato ground.’ Repton, along with Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, made the land into pictures instead of painting landscapes on canvas. Herefordshire was long a bastion of the gentry, and gentrified ideas about parkland percolated down to yeoman farmers. There’s a Georgian farmhouse in Ewyas Harold with a ha-ha to the front, so the view over the rolling meadow is unbesmirched by a stock fence.

Tsar Alexander always considered that the next best thing to being the Tsar of all Russia was to be an English country gentleman. You can see why. They had the loveliest views in the world.

4 O
CTOBER
A magpie sits on the Ryeland’s back, pecking at its neck. This is biological symbiosis, ovine-corvine mutuality, despite appearances to the contrary; the magpie is picking ticks off the sheep’s ears. The magpie gets a meal, the sheep gets cleaned.

The evenings are drawing in; in greyscale light I watch a black-eyed wood mouse lean up from a swaying hazel twig and pull a rose hip down, which it saws from its base with a flash of teeth. The rose hip tumbles down through the hedge to the ground, the mouse scrambling after it.

7 O
CTOBER
The last swallows on the telephone wires, chattering crotchets on a stave, the young ones gathering to await the nerve for the great voyage south. People used to think swallows hibernated in bubbles of air in ponds or down holes. In the early sixteenth century the Bishop of Uppsala, Olaus Magnus, in his
Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus
claimed that

in the northern water, fishermen oftentimes by chance draw up in their nets an abundance of Swallows, hanging together like a conglomerated mass . . . In the beginning of autumn, they assemble together among the reeds; where, allowing themselves to sink into the water, they join bill to bill, wing to wing, and foot to foot.

His text was illustrated with a woodcut showing fishermen pulling the birds out of the water in their nets. Although Gilbert White proposed migration rather than hibernation (his brother, a chaplain in Gibraltar, saw swallows flying south over his head) he wondered about the very late broods, some of which were not sufficiently feathered to fly until mid-September: ‘Are not these late hatchlings more in favour of hiding than
migration?’ White kept an open mind on torpidity, and hunted around the thatch of cottage roofs to find slumbering overwintering birds. To laugh at White is mere hubris; no one to this day is exactly sure where all the martin family overwinter.

The stuttery chattering and quivery flight of the swallow led medieval medicine to believe that, by association, eating the bird could cure epilepsy and stammering. A broth of swallow was the favoured medicine. The swallow was always a bird of goodness. Did not the medieval rhyme claim:

The robin and the wren

Are God Almighty’s cock and hen.

The martin and the swallow

The swallows have gone; a chiffchaff passes through, stays for a day ‘phoeeet’-ing and goes, the last summer migrant. The avian winter visitors have not arrived. We are now in the interval, when only native birds are here in the meadow.

This week of senile Indian summer heat underscores the sensuousness of the autumn world, its unaccustomed smells and fugitive scents. Gobstopper crab apples lie on the ground, rotting, vinegary.

10 O
CTOBER
Suddenly the weather hardens, a gale crashes down branches in the night, and I can feel the urgency of the grey squirrel in the copse as he or she violently scrambles about in the hazel bushes for nuts. I put on two jumpers in the morning, although something has apparently set fire to the trees; the coppiced hazel along the copse is burning gold from the bottom up.

12 O
CTOBER
The smell of woodsmoke from some distant fire. A blackbird gently ‘spink-spink’-ing until it sees me, when it goes into full alarm-call mode; nothing says go away quite so fluently, so elegantly as a blackbird. There are now five blackbirds living in and around the meadow, three of them winterers from another place.

And there is frost already on the backs of the cows, at 5pm, their breath puffing white as they lie and chew the cud. Odd, and worrying, that the frost on the back of the venerable Margot, at twenty by far the oldest of our Red Poll, is thicker than on the hides of the rest of the herd.

And tawny owls in the woods and thickets along the misty stream are declaiming their autumn territories. A tawny owl never calls ‘tu-twit-twoo’; the ‘tu-twit’ (actually, ‘ker-wick’) is the contact call; the ‘twoo’ (more accurately ‘hoo-hoo-oooo’) is the
male’s territorial call. If you hear ‘ker-wickhoo’, ‘hoo-oooo’, it is a duet, not a solo performance.

There are at least four owls calling in the declining of the day. September to November is when juvenile tawnies disperse, and tonight the young ones are trying to secure a fiefdom for food and for breeding. By wintertime pure they will either have succeeded or they will be dead.