Meadowland (4 page)

We are snowbound. To get up the farm track to the lane requires clearing a path with a shovel on the front loader of the tractor.

I resume the sledging of hay and beet pellets down to the sheep in the field; around their troughs and hayracks they have trodden the snow down into the mud. A grateful blackbird is probing the exposed earth, and house sparrows are seeking the vestiges of grass seed heads and beet bits in the bottom of the covered feeder.

Another blackbird is pecking at the globe of mistletoe hanging in the gateway hazels; most of the farm’s thrushes, together with the migrant redwings and fieldfares, have retreated before the west winds and gone to the villages and lowlands. The sea-wrack leaves of the mistletoe give the plant the appearance of being stranded by an invisible oceanic flood.

At night a fox somewhere across the river yips at the moon. I am unable to resist a go down the Cresta run; the slough of the sledge is the only slander in the moonlight.

21 J
ANUARY
I count Edward Thomas among my favourite poets. In fact, ‘Adlestrop’ is one of the only two poems I know by heart. (The other being Shelley’s ‘Masque of Anarchy’, learned in a punky rebellious
teenage phase.) When Thomas was asked by Robert Frost why, at the age of thirty-five, he was going off to fight in the First World War, he bent down and kissed the earth of England. ‘Literally, for this,’ he said. I would do the same if asked. Thomas thought the greatest gift he could give his children would be the English countryside. In ‘Household Poems’ he wrote that his bequest for his son Merfyn was:

If I were to own this countryside

As far as a man could ride,

And the Tyes were mine for giving or letting, –

Wingle Tye and Margaretting

Tye, – and Skreens, Gooshays, and Cockerells,

Shellow, Rochetts, Bandish, and Pickerells,

Martins, Lambkins, and Lillyputs,

Their copses, ponds, roads, and ruts,

Fields where plough-horses steam and plovers

Fling and whimper, hedges that lovers

Love, and orchards, shrubberies, walls

Where the sun untroubled by north wind falls,

And single trees where the thrush sings well

His proverbs untranslatable,

I would give them all to my son

If he would let me any one

For a song, a blackbird’s song, at dawn.

. . .

Then unless I could pay, for rent, a song

As sweet as a blackbird’s, and as long –

No more – he should have the house, not I:

Margaretting or Wingle Tye,

Or it might be Skreens, Gooshays, or Cockerells,

Shellow, Rochetts, Bandish, or Pickerells,

Martins, Lambkins, or Lillyputs,

Field names rarely match the romance of village names (Wingle Tye!, Margaretting!); hardly ever do they lift themselves above the ultra-prosaic. We always called the meadow ‘Copse Field’ or ‘Finger Field’; the neighbours on arrival told us it was ‘Bottom Field’. I take advantage of a dreary day to look up records in Hereford Reference Library, where some assiduous and civic-minded amateur historians have compiled a volume of local field names. Almost alone among the books – everyone under forty being on a computer – I uncover the field’s historic, official title, as given by the Tithe Survey of 1840. Lower Meadow. This is next to Bank Field. Nearby fields include Big Field, Sheep Shed Field, Long Pasture, Cow Pasture, Eight Acres, Field Down the Road, Far Field, Big Meadow and Flat Field.

Field names are not the only uninspired descriptors in the English countryside. Farm names are invariably utilitarian, as the same source confirms. The nadir resides about four miles away. Farmhouse Farm.

The tithe survey was carried out following the passing of the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836, which was designed to rationalize the system of financial support for parish priests, which by that date had become bogged in confusion and evasion. The act was designed to codify formally the practice of paying tithes in cash (the ‘commutation’ of tithes), rather than in animals or agricultural produce, and was based on the amount of land which people owned. For the system to be effective, maps had to be produced, together with lists of landowners and how much land they held. Looking at the maps though, I realize what a memorial field names are. Any field name that includes ‘Stubbs’ or ‘Stocking’ refers to it having been cleared from woodland, ‘Butts’ may well have been the place the medieval locals practised archery, and ‘Walk’ indicates land formerly given to the common grazing (‘walking’) of sheep.

The field names also crystallize Herefordshire dialect: ‘The Tumpy’ is a bumpy or steep field, a ‘tump’ being the vernacular for hill. And surely ‘Sour Meadow’ was a place of bad grazing? You can see too the pattern of former village settlement: ‘Butcher’s Shop’ was adjoining the local meat emporium, long since gone.

One name sits on the Tithe Map with the mien of a gravestone: ‘Cuckoo Patch’. There are hardly any cuckoos in the valley now.

People needed to know field names, which were their places of work. Children and wives needed to know where to take men their ‘elevenses’ and ‘fourses’, their cider or tea, their bread and cheese.

Outside, a seeping rain is still coming down, so I vote for warmth and rummage along the shelves of the local history section, where I find a reproduction of the 1664 Militia Returns for the village. (The returns were a form of taxation.) There listed halfway down the page is one Sam Landon, liable to pay tax on £6 of income.

It is Sam Landon from whom the farm takes its name, Trelandon, being Welsh for house of the Landon family. He rented from the co-heirs of ‘Ye Lorde Hopton’; the Hoptons would own the farm for another hundred years, until they sold to the Marquis of Abergavenny. The Marquis’s family retained the farm until 1921, when they, like so many other landowners in the shadow of the Great War, sold up. Between 1918 and 1922 a quarter of the land mass of Britain changed hands, including Lower Meadow. It was a sale of land unprecedented since the dissolution of the monasteries.

When Sam Landon took on the farm he brought with him a newfangled idea, which was to live on site. Previously, the prevailing pattern of rural settlement was that all toilers of the land, labourer and farmer alike, would live in a village and walk to work. There
was nothing quaint about Herefordshire medieval villages, which largely consisted of lots of tumbledown hovels of sticks and clay, in which yokels insisted on burning elder wood, and wondered why they died at night. (Burning elder releases cyanide.) So poor were country people in these valleys under the Black Mountains that one seventeenth-century local gentleman, Rowland Vaughan, declared them ‘the plentifullest place of poore in the Kingdome . . . I have seene three hundred Leazers or Gleaners in one Gentleman’s cornfield at once’; the great impoverished were scratching around in the dirt for the ‘gleanings’, the left-over grains.

One assumes Sam Landon was glad to leave the madding throng and build his own house in splendid isolation. He was certainly a man of notions. By Hooper’s rule of dating hedges (age = number of species in a 30-yard stretch × 110 + 30) I have estimated the western hedge of Lower Meadow to be 350 years old. This hedge divided off Lower Meadow from the wetland above it; the ditch dug at the same time dried the bottom land. More, by dividing off Lower Meadow, Landon was able to stop stock grazing this drier, better land over the spring and summer.

He turned a field into a hay meadow proper.

Of course, rummaging around in forgotten documents entails the same risk as going through someone’s diary. You may discover information you
had no wish to know. A flick through the pages of a book on Herefordshire informs me that the rainfall on this far western edge next to Wales averages 30–40 inches a year. Amusingly, the same shelf has the history of the school my paternal grandfather attended, and which is also situated bang on the English–Welsh border. In the eighteenth century this establishment advertised in London for boys to come and learn Latin and Greek in the temperate, healthy climate of Herefordshire’s borderland.

I almost laugh aloud.

The rain is still pouring uncontrollably from the sky, and the library is closing for the night. When I return home, I tog up in my Barbour, battening down every zip and button, and slop down to Lower Meadow, my shoulder a prow into the spray. The clay base of the field is again saturated, and holding a good half-inch of water on its surface. It is dark, the way only a January night in a rainy, lightless valley in the middle of nowhere can be dark. Thick, cellar-dark. I cannot see the water on the surface of the earth. I can tell its depth by the plash of my wellingtons.

24 J
ANUARY
No bird is less of the meadow than the kingfisher; in five years I have never seen it deviate in its flight from the river bed, its sole route-finder. But it
is often there in the periphery of the field and of my vision, a neon-turquoise spark, which leaves an iridescent flash in the atmosphere, to die away slowly. A radioactive particle decaying.

Now the kingfisher comes, flying on a perfect horizontal plane, suspended equally between the river and the sky.

This is the halcyon bird of mythology, which allegedly laid its eggs on the ocean, an act by which the sea was calmed. Hence the ‘halcyon days’ of poets and Shakespeare. Some believed that a kingfisher could divine the weather as well as determine it; a dead kingfisher, suspended by its head, would turn its beak to the wind like a multicoloured weathercock.

A field is a landscape is a soundscape. The ‘zeep zeep’ of the kingfisher is an occasional contribution at the edge of consciousness.

I’m in the promontory, where the alder logs are spread with a caramel layer of velvet shank mushrooms.
Flammulina velutipes
is one of the few mushrooms that fruits in winter; it is also edible. In Japan it is the prized culinary delight
Enokitake
. Only the Jew’s ears on the elders which are lolling an arm’s length into the field rival the velvet shanks for hardiness.

26 J
ANUARY
I’m out when Roy Phillips the contractor comes to cut the farm’s hedges with a flail cutter on the back of his Ford County tractor. The hedges should be ‘laid’, slit and woven by hand, but this is one of those time-consuming jobs that is on the end of an endless list. Because Lower Meadow is suppurating water Roy has only been able to get the tractor into part of the field; only one and a half hedges have been trimmed, giving the field a dissolute, half-shaven look. The flailed hedges are stark and square. Scalped to the skull. The serpentine ivy seems to be the only thing holding the bushes together. On the uncut hedges, drooping claws of alder catkins and bunches of plum ivy berries pose in flaunting juxta-position. But the intoxicating melon aroma of the shorn hedges makes them beautiful to the nose.

There is evening sky to delight a shepherd. The vapour trail of a microscopic jet catches the crimson light so that the aircraft is illusorily powered by flame.