Meadowland (3 page)

11 J
ANUARY
The snow still straggles and streaks the ground. Such is the mercurial nature of January that the wind drops, the sun startles between clouds, and midges dance in the columns of light. My most faithful companions in the field, the meadow pipits, lark about. I do not dance; there is something oddly unhealthy about balm in January.

By mid-afternoon the snow is melting rapidly. The soil under the grass is already saturated.

According to the Agricultural Research Council’s
Soil Survey of Great Britain
, Bulletin No. 2, 1964, the geology of the field is ‘Devonian marl with fine grained sandstone bands and, very locally, thin drift’.
I prod my fingers through the slushy grass into the soil and clutch a handful of this Devonian marl. To my hands, and those who work it, the soil of Herefordshire is thick, red, cold clay. Squeezed and balled in my hand, it rolls solid into a mini Earth.

Nature abhors easy classification. Strictly, the field is ‘neutral’ unimproved grassland, meaning the clay soil is neither strongly acidic nor alkaline, with a pH of around 7; actually parts of the field err to acid – pH 4.9 to 5.4. To the common-or-field botanist like me, this means the field is the abode of acid-thirsting plants such as sorrel, and I love sorrel, with its misty-red tops in summer, and its lance-leaves redolent with minerals and vitamins for beast and man.

Water does not easily drain through this Devonian marl which is neutral going on acid.

By the next day much of the field is glistening deep in an inch of water, and I have to move the sheep out temporarily. Water is seeping in a continuous sheet off the field into the river. The earth sucks at my feet, making my gait arthritically unsteady.

14 J
ANUARY
Overnight the Escley breaches its bank to flood across the bottom of the finger. By the time I go down at midday, the water has subsided, leaving a catastrophic carpet of broken branches, logs, trunks
and twigs. In the copse I can see that the flood has just missed the fox earth.

The level of the Escley may have gone down, but it is still roiling with wild sea-fury.

Late evening in the field; the unseasonal warmth and wet has pushed earthworms up to the surface, but they drown anyway in the pewter pools, each worm a silent white S. In a cloisters gloom I can see a fox paddling along, lapping up worms galore. The fox and that pioneering naturalist Gilbert White would be of one accord on earthworms: ‘though in appearance a small and despicable link in the chain of nature, yet, if lost, would make a lamentable chasm. Worms seem to be the great promoters of vegetation, which would proceed but lamely without them.’

Earthworms are not, generally, very active in winter, and leave the work of cultivation to the worms
Allolobophora nocturna
and
Allolobophora longa
. (And you thought all worms were the same.) Meanwhile, I take solace from the old weather saw:

The grass that grows in Janiveer

15 J
ANUARY
Snoopy, our miniature tri-coloured Jack Russell, yaps at something under the goat willow,
whose wands are aerials into the descending mist. When I get to the dog his nose is pierced with blood, which is also speckling his Chippendale front legs. He has attacked a hedgehog, which, confused by this faux spring, has lumbered out of hibernation. Rolled tight in a ball on the foul leaves, only a slight breathing reflex betrays that nature’s giant pin-cushion is alive.

Some stupid impulse makes me touch the hedgehog’s prickles to evaluate their sharpness. The trademark spines, all five thousand of them, can grow up to 2.5cm long. Kneeling, I go slightly off balance and apply more pressure than intended. A spine goes under my fingernail. Blooded, both dog and I withdraw; the defensive thorns keep most predators, as well as me, at bay. A badger, though, will unroll the hedgehog and eat it from the inside, discarding the coat as wrapping.

Behind me the river shouts with the abandon of a football crowd.

17 J
ANUARY
Old Twelfth Night. I succumb to a bad case of tradition and go wassailing. Wassail is derived from the Middle English
waes hael
, meaning good health. In ‘social wassailing’, one has a drink with one’s neighbours; in the cider-producing counties of the west of England, there is also ‘orchard-wassailing’,
where the apple trees are awoken by being beaten with sticks, a piece of toast placed in the branches, and cider sprinkled around the roots. All to ensure a good crop in the year ahead. Ideally, one should sing a wassail song. Something like:

Wassail the trees, that they may bear

Wassail might be Middle English by way of Old Norse, but the custom is probably older, pre-Christian, even a relic of the sacrifice made to Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruits. Wassailing used to be big here in Herefordshire. According to
The Gentleman’s Magazine
, February 1791:

In Herefordshire, at the approach of the evening, the farmers with their friends and servants meet together, and about six o’clock walk out to a field . . . In the highest part of the ground, twelve small fires, and one large one, are lighted up. The attendants, headed by the master of the family, pledge the company in old cider, which circulates freely on these occasions. A circle is formed around the large fire, when a general shout or hallooing takes place, which you hear answered from all the adjacent villages and fields. Sometimes fifty or sixty of these fires may be seen all at once.

The fires represent the Saviour and His apostles.

Mysteriously, Penny and the children are too busy to join me in the wassailing, so it is just me, a piece of bread, a bottle of Westons, the shotgun and my black Labrador, Edith.

In groping blackness I toast the two vintage apple trees in the river bottom of Bank Field with the toast and the cider. Then like a vandal I fire off the shotgun into the dim treetops, to scare away the spirits.

If both barrels from a 12-bore do not deter malignant auras, nothing will.

The old ways do not seem so mad in an ancient landscape where I can barely see one electric light, and I can hold in my cupped hand the eternal peace of night. In these foothills of the Black Mountains more than half the farms have most of their historic footprint, and the small hedged fields result from medieval woodland clearance. Such as this field, such as the hay meadow.

18 J
ANUARY
The weather is sly. From behind windows it is overcast, damp, nothing special. I have let the sheep back into the field; only when I am halfway down to the field carrying a plastic tub of mineral lick to them do I feel the knife go through my coat and try to hollow out my being. My hands (I have
stupidly mislaid both my gloves and my spare gloves) are blackberry blobs; I pass a great tit, its eyes misted with hopelessness, lying on the wan grass under the Marsh Field hedge which is naked and useless and no home at all. The winter is taking its tithe; I determine to pick up the bird on my way home, and warm it and feed it.

There is no rain; even so the wind sculpts raindrops from my own eyes, so everything is opaque, fish-lensed, underwater. By the time I have deposited the mineral bucket and got back to the great tit, it has died. I hold it in my numb fist; it weighs nothing. The white patches under its eyes look like cartoon tears.

There is a kind of life in death. The winds, snows and floods of winter have scraped the countryside clean, ready for a new start. The last lingering leaves on the oak are down, trees and hedges are X-rays of their former selves, and the two grey squirrel dreys, one in the hazel in the copse and one in the pollarded oak in Marsh Field hedge, are blots in the fretwork of branches. A crowd of starlings moves along the fields in an avian Mexican wave. I like their company on this barren, skeletal day, when the only other sound is the pitiless mewing of a circling buzzard.

The snow has not finished with us. All night, flakes flitter down, so the snow is fully three inches deep by afternoon, when the wind crisps its surface and the velvety rabbit noses of the ash buds seem the
only soft things in the field. Along the rim of Grove ditch there are the tinkling paw marks of a weasel or stoat; then the signs of a flurrying gallop, a struggle, spots of brightening blood, then the broad scuff mark where the rabbit body was hauled into the hedge.

Small is the difference between the pad marks of the weasel and the stoat; I settle on stoat because of the length of the stride, the stoat being the bigger of the two
Mustelidae
cousins.

For an hour in the afternoon I sit on an empty plastic sugar-beet sack in the corner of the field where the hazel hedge has broken down. The liquorice aroma from the beet remains is childishly comforting. I am so intent on looking at the scene of the crime across the field that I fail to spot the stoat sitting up staring at me from five yards to my left. A stoat it is; weasels do not turn white in winter. A rather patchy white to be sure, with a brown blotch on the flank and shoulder.

I blink first, and the stoat lopes away, sending up small blizzards of snow.

Over in the copse a robin sings fortissimo. There is a wren, no bigger than a moth, working the leaf litter in the hedge along from me; wrens do not sing in midwinter, they are too busy foraging.

The fog comes down, and erases all the world beyond the field. The field is an island.