Meadowland (8 page)

Remembrance of those times lingers in the folk mind. Anything well built, from the studded oak door at Clodock church to a well-strung fence, still earns the accolade ‘That will keep the Welsh out.’ By law, it is still permissible to shoot Welshmen in the cathedral precincts of Hereford with a bow and arrow.

The violence of humans lessened after the centuries of the thieving Welsh, as the border was brought within the proper ambit of England. But bloodshed did not wholly leave the land. During the Civil War a Scots Parliamentarian army camped locally before besieging Hereford. (The Parrys, unusually for a Herefordshire family, were solid for Cromwell; one of them became a colonel of horse in the New Model Army.)

There are days in a desolate November when you still hear the hollering of fighting men, of horses’ hooves pounding on the shingle of the Escley. And where are the dead men buried? In this brookside field, probably, where the clay is relatively easy to dig into, and the impenetrable sandstone is deeper than the bottom of a grave.

The gentle pasture of England is tomb after tomb of animals and man, roofed with green.

In this blood-red earth the little miner today is going about his business with gusto. About a quarter of an acre on the upper side is splattered with heaves, and I am reminded of the poet Cowper’s line on a mole infestation in a field, where

at ev’ry step

Our foot half sunk in hillocks green and soft

By going on tippity-toes I get to within ten feet of where a mole is digging, volcanically spewing up soil from the centre of a mound. Once, when I was small, I lay with my ear over a mole run in my grandparents’ orchard; a small lifetime of waiting ear-to-the-ground was rewarded by the sound of scuttling claws and a distant squeak. Today I momentarily see those claws as they thrust a load of soil up through the hole; they are outsize, splayed, human in their pink nakedness, but with nails from a Halloween witch. A twitchy, fleshy snout follows them into daylight. The mole is probably a male. Male moles suffer a kind of OCD where they make straight galleries. This one is throwing up mounds that run a ruler-straight line towards the centre of the field. There is a great deal of method in his madness; he is digging parallel to where the ditch-water leaks into the field. He is digging exactly where the ground is softly malleable yet not so wet his tunnels will flood. Since March is the beginning of the breeding season he is tunnelling so frenziedly because he is searching for a mate. Moles breed between March and May, when the sows make oestrus to attract boars, the pheromones being switched on by either the lengthening of daylight or the warming of the earth. Gestation is forty-two days, with between three and six hairless pups born in a chamber lined with grass.

After mating, boars go on the hunt for other,
unmated females. If they encounter males in their tunnels they fight, gladiatorially. So there is violence in a field below and above ground.

If I am honest, I am mole-watching because it is easier than my intended purpose in the field, which is a labour Sisyphus would moan at. I am trying to rake some of the heaves flat, because at hay-cutting time they will get chopped into the grass and contaminate it.

I could of course call the mole-catcher, but I quite like moles, and am convinced they do a worthy job of drainage and aeration. Less nobly, I suspect that if you get rid of one mole another will merely take over his or her territory.

Since the banning of strychnine as a mole-killer in 2006, the old-fashioned mole-catcher has made a comeback. One has called here; his gleaming plainclothes black Merc van was not sufficient to disguise the Shakespearian rusticity of his calling; he killed moles, he told me in a Welsh Valleys accent, with a shillelagh. The dried skins went for 50p to fly fishermen for ties. So, not quite the trade of the 1920s, when mole-catchers wore moleskin breeches and twelve million moleskins a year were shipped to the USA for high-end clothing.

What I do not tell the mole-catcher in his hitman van is that I have always got mole-catchers and the child-catcher in
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
hopelessly
conflated in my head. Or that the mere mention of his trade summons up the four most terrifying lines of English pastoral poetry:

While I see the little mouldywharps hang sweeing to the wind

On the only aged willow that in all the field remains

And nature hides her face where they’re sweeing in their chains

In ‘Remembrances’, John Clare directly likened the cruelty of catching moles in gin traps and displaying their corpses on trees to the pain inflicted on the English rural poor by the enclosure of the fields.

And I know where my sympathies lie.

Anyway, what need have we for mole-catchers? We have Snoopy the Jack Russell. Snoopy has trained the Labradors and the Border Terrier to dig out moles. Their digging, of course, causes more damage to the sward than the moles. Sometimes the dogs bring the dead moles to the house as gifts, little parcels of muscle wrapped in black velvet.

I have returned to the razing of the molehills. As I approach the field, two Canada geese fly overhead,
their fruity call confusing the raven in her far fir tree, who calls back. On the field, oblivious in the drizzle, is a young buzzard, one of last summer’s hatch. How the mighty have fallen. He or she is eating earthworms, and I do not think it a human presumption to suggest that the buzzard looks none too pleased to be scavenging for so lowly a form of life – the same diet indeed as the mole. Gobble, gobble, quick run to the next worm. Gobble, gobble. Look around. Run. Gobble, gobble. As a style of dining it is more turkey than raptor. Yet appearances are deceptive; inside the buzzard’s speckled chest, as streaked and dashed as a thrush’s, is a gut, by bird-of-prey standard, of quite unusual length. This means that
Buteo buteo
can extract maximum nutrition from a meagre diet such as the earthworm.

They say that buzzards share with lapwings the trick of jiving on fields so their footsteps sound like raindrops. And duped earthworms come to the surface to be eaten by ‘the dancing hawk’. All I know is that two other buzzards fly out of the quarry and stoop to eat worms.

The collective noun for buzzards is, fittingly I feel, ‘a wake’.

13 M
ARCH
The frogspawn in the ditch starts to hatch into tadpoles or ‘polliwogs’. The latter name for the
larval stage of the frog is derived from the Middle English
polwygle
, made up of the same
pol
, ‘head’ and
wiglen
, ‘to wiggle’ – an accurate enough descriptor for these spermy beings.

Like the sea, the red soil of Herefordshire is never constant in its colour. In the banks of the ditch, at the dry top under the lea of the hedge, it is the pink of poached salmon; in the rose haze of another springy, uplifting March afternoon the effervescent mole heaps are the purple of berries, as though the earth is in fruit.

Despite the clenching cold the temperature must be edging towards the 6 degrees centigrade that grass needs to ‘flush’, to grow with uncontrollable abandon.

Some of the signs of spring are negatives, less about what is a-coming in, more about what is a-going out. The fieldfares are heading north in the evening, the birds, as John Clare declared:

That come and go on winter’s chilling wing

From now until October the sward of the field will never be constant in its colour. Another belting of snow on 11 March is not enough to hide the emergent celestial wood anemones in the copse, or
three plucky dandelions in the field proper. Three days later a red-tailed bumblebee (
Bombus pratorum
) flies grass-top height, winding in and out of the fast-multiplying dandelions. I run after it, and see it disappear into a mouse hole in the base of the Marsh Field hedge, down between the leaf litter, the snags of black wool, the upright green of the dog’s mercury. The hairiness of the red-tailed bees acts as a fur coat, enabling them to fly when other winged insects cannot bear the chill.

Blackthorn blossom is tight on the branches ready to burst; the thorns that wound round Christ’s head are still brutally visible.

For nearly a week I do not visit Lower Meadow, although it is only four hundred yards from the house. My horizon has been reduced to the paddock in front of the house, where the sixty ewes have been gathered for lambing.

Lambing only comes in two ways; either swimmingly well, or drowningly bad, and this year I have spent more time with my hands inside ewes’ wombs than either the sheep or I are comfortable with. I have made L-shaped shelters of straw bales or corrugated iron for the ewes to have cover from the driving rain. I like the shelter too when, befuddled at
five in the morning (by experience a sheep’s favourite time to lamb), I play the live-or-die game, of trying to sort out, inside a ewe, which bony leglet belongs to which lamb. De-tangled, repositioned, the Ryeland lambs emerge in yellow slimy pods, to be rubbed with straw or rags. When they do not raise their heads and bleat . . . a blurred flurry of rubbing, air blown up noses, red stomach tubes delivering colostrum, purple spray on hanging navels.

Our sheep have names, the names a rough-hand mnemonic to colour, type, date of birth, or an imagined resemblance to a character, real or fictional, or to a personality trait: Chocolate, Sooty, Soo, Tiddlywink, Shortbread, Cardigan, Jumper (of course), Valentine, Tess . . . You come to live with us, you get a name.

One runt lamb is born dead, another dies within hours, and for both I grieve with clenched eyes for the life never lived. There is nothing so innocent as a newborn lamb; the scion of the sheep was not appropriated as the Christian symbol for Jesus for nothing. The lamb of God.

All the Shetland and Hebridean ewes birth with a feral ease, the curly black lambs ‘sharp’ and walking within minutes. No, the wearing habit of primitive sheep is not their birthing technique; it is the flightiness of the ewes when mothers.

Something comes into the paddock at night, sending the ewes and lambs into a baaing delirium. Within minutes I am out with a torch. The intruder has gone. One Hebridean ewe, who has just lambed, runs off, leaving her twins behind; over the course of a greasy grey day I try to reconnect her with her offspring, finally resorting to catching her and penning her so tight she cannot turn, and then put the lambs in to suckle. All she does is jump up and down on them; before they are murdered I let her go, and put them on the bottle.

They live in the sitting room in a dog-crate. Sheep tamed by being bottle fed are no bad thing, since it means they will, when grown, come to food. And the rest of the flock will follow.