Meadowland (5 page)

27 J
ANUARY
Snowdrops and dog’s mercury are out in the hedge along the farm track. The days are perceptibly lighter and longer.

I climb into the copse; in the centre, amid the sombre trees, the fox’s earth has been undergoing renovation, and there is evidence of digging around
the muddied main entrance. Aside from bits of dead animal (rabbit, song thrush) lying around, there is that unforgettable proof of fox habitation: a sour, pungent odour when one sniffs over the dungeon hole.

By now the foxes will have mated. Assuming successful implantation, the vixen will begin a gestation of about fifty-two days. Red foxes have the shortest gestation of the dog family.

On the floor of the dripping copse lies a dead blue tit, a startling jolt of colour amid the darkening leaves. I doubt if the fox, as per folklore, hypnotized the blue tit to come down from its tree. The arctic blast and the relentless after-party rain murdered many a bird.

Low winter sun comes strobing through the coppiced hazels.

Jackdaw

CANDLEMAS, 2 FEBRUARY.
A morning of stultifying mist, which cloys like sweat on my face. At the far end of the field the unseen raven voices a mindless metronome of croaks. She is sitting tight on her eggs in the triangle of firs across the dull stream, and has been for the last week. Ravens are famously early nesters. Perhaps she is complaining about the badgers’ housekeeping; they have done a spring clean of the sett and dumped armfuls of stale, fetid moss bedding beneath her tree.

The dew, trapped in the webs of countless money spiders, has skeined the entire field in tiny silken pocket squares, gnomes’ handkerchiefs dropped in the sward. Or it has where the Ryeland ewes have not relentlessly mowed their way through the grass.

The thirty Ryelands spread out before me in the white silence are the direct descendants of the sheep that made the field in the early 1400s. Unlike the primitive sheep which dominated the English landscape until the Middle Ages, Ryelands were – are – systematic grazers of grass and not half-goats who yearn to browse trees and bushes. By their unthinking, indiscriminate eating, Ryelands suppress the more
prolific grasses, and allow the more delicate grasses and flora to survive and flourish. One reason that English meadows, like Lower Meadow, boast a display range of grasses and flowers is because of Ryeland sheep. Lower Meadow has, of grasses alone, timothy, meadow fescue, cock’s foot, meadow foxtail, woodrush, sweet vernal, tufted hair-grass, crested dog’s tail and meadow grass. Of the grass family, the Gramineae, this is a reasonable selection in the twenty-first century; there are, though, 150 species of grass growing wild in Britain.

The thirty ewes are oblivious to my environmental design. They have eaten hard because they are heavy and round with lamb. They exude self-satisfied fecundity, which the wet lying thick on their coats does nothing to dampen. One stands square, and spins its alabaster torso so the water sprays off in a brief abdominal halo.

We have looked at one another a lot, Ryeland sheep and my family, on mornings like this over the years, because Ryelands and I are the dangling ends of dynasties long familiar to each other. My mother’s maternal line, the Parrys, were the feudal stewards of Ewyas Lacy – as this valley used to be called – and helped develop the breed. The Parrys had Ryelands grazing here in these meadows under the Black Mountains five hundred years ago. And I like to think it was cousin Blanche Parry who gave Elizabeth I the
stockings made from fine, white Ryeland wool which so impressed the Queen she would thereafter have no other material on her virginal legs. Blanche Parry served Elizabeth for fifty-six years as lady-in-waiting. Then again, it might have been any of the other Parrys at court who were the nominatives in the fable of the white fleece; there was Dr Henry Parry, Elizabeth’s chaplain, James Parry, her Huntsman, Sir Thomas, her Cofferer, John Parry, her Clerk of the Green Cloth, Frances, her maid of honour, Katherine, her lady-in-waiting, Lady Troy, yet another of her ladies-in-waiting, or perhaps Catherine, her Lady of the Bedchamber. Or maybe it was Blanche’s great-nephew, the aforementioned Rowland Vaughan, another courtier, or her cousin John Dee, the Queen’s astrologer. Or perhaps it was Blanche’s most illustrious cousin, Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s Chief Minister, whose ancestral seat, Allt-yr-Ynys, still stands at the lowland bottom of Ewyas Lacy valley.

The Parrys, you feel, had a bit of an armlock on the Elizabethan court.

The Parrys, though, were more than royal flunkeys. They were part of a historical phenomenon, the swing to sheep farming in Tudor times, which came about, not least, because someone noticed that grassland manured by sheep retained its fertility.

I am counting the sheep. They are all present and correct, and now it is time to go.

Candlemas, 2 February, is the day by ancient rite when the hay field is ‘stopped’ or ‘locked up’, the day when all livestock is removed.

The expectant Ryelands do not need a dog to move them out. A sheepish call of ‘Sheep!’ and they follow at my heels. Pavlov in his grave should applaud. The sheep know that if I call out their species, food surely follows. I do not cheat; when they are through the gate into Bank Field they find a feast of beet nuts in their long troughs.

I close the galvanized gate on Lower Meadow. Now the grass can grow unmolested until mechanical cutters come one fine summer’s day. Then they will shear it down in great swathes, and it will be turned into hay for winter feeding.

Grass, the keeper of us all.

And a line comes floating back from a lesson I read in church at Christmas as a boy. Isaiah XL, vi–vii: ‘All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the LORD bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.’

Mooching along the winter-bare Marsh Field hedge I espy the domed nest of a long-tailed tit, an extraordinary construction of moss, plated in lichen. It
looks like a verdigris egg. Or maybe a tarnished-copper Cyclops’ helmet. For all their dainty artistry, the long-tailed tits have anchored the nest to the willow branchlets with stevedore stoutness. Despite my most careful disentangling, the nest bursts as I pull it free, exploding pigeon feathers from the lining as though we are having a pillow fight.

To find the archaeological artefacts of twentieth-century agriculture is not difficult. Farmers have the habit of throwing anything dead and useless out of the way, which means the cellar-dank bottom of the hedge.

I start poking with a hazel stick by the gateway. Out in the field are a handful of chaffinches, desolately picking at the sward for the stray fallen seeds of grasses and flowers. The three pairs of chaffinches that nested in the field’s hedges will not wander far from them all winter. They will be joined by females from Scandinavia; the males will stay behind. The Latin name of this bird,
Fringilla coelebs, coelebs
, deriving from the Latin for bachelor, was given by Linnaeus, who saw only male chaffinches in his native Sweden, the females from its northern breeding grounds having flown south. Chaffinches were originally birds of the woodland. But what is a hedge other than linear woodland?

Within two minutes of hunting through the moss and layers of bog-black leaves, I find the first treasure, a long metal band, dulled by time, but not so old that
it has lost all its red Massey Ferguson paint. I’ve removed enough of these to know one instantly; it’s the guard for the belt drive on a 1970s-era baler.

As I bend down in the leaf detritus, my stick strikes a dull, tomb note: an empty brown cider flagon. ‘Bulmer’s Strongbow. Please Return’. There’s another nearby. Then a bone-white piece of clay pipe stem.

This is the shaded, west side of the hedge. And it is exactly where we too rest while having our lunch when ‘on the hay’. We have been sitting in the reclining shadows of generations of farm workers. There really is nothing new under the sun.

The field is in a mood. Sombre. Dull. The alders along the river a chill purple scrabble. Nothing to see, except three pied wagtails. A small measure of joy. The only living thing in sight.

Of course it is me that is gloomy. The field reflects the weather and the human mood.

9 F
EBRUARY
Blue tits whistling in the afternoon sun, a squeaky seesaw noise. Hazel catkins shagged out. Midges in Brownian motion across a golden field.

In the night I shine a mega-torch across the field, and catch the pink eyes of rabbits eating close to the Grove ditch. The rabbits are not unduly disturbed;
one is ‘chinning’ the ground, marking it as ‘me-me’ territory with the scent gland under its jaws; February is the beginning of the main rabbit mating season.

But the warren in the bank is never populous; I have never seen more than seven adult rabbits emerge from it. It is a warren for the low-status, the excommunicated, the pariahs, and is foolishly close to the fox earth in the copse. A mere fifty yards separate them.

Like straight roads, central heating and pear trees, the rabbit came over with the Romans, and has been eating his way through the British countryside ever since. The reduction of the rabbit population – which reached 50 million by the 1950s – was the aim of the scientifically introduced disease myxomatosis. Pockets of the disease still fester locally, leaving the afflicted rabbits to bumble around with bulging, bleeding eyes, as though they emerged from the mind of Edgar Allan Poe.

But it is not ‘myxy’ that performs eugenics on the Grove bank rabbits; it is predation and elemental weather.