Meadowland Read online

  About the Book

  In exquisite prose, John Lewis-Stempel records the passing seasons in an ancient meadow on his farm. His unique and intimate account of the birth, life and death of the flora and fauna – from the pair of ravens who have lived there longer than he has to the minutiae underfoot – is threaded throughout with the history of the field, and recalls the literature of other observers of our natural history in a love song to the land that follows the tradition of Jeffries, Mabey and Deakin.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Preface

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  Flora

  Fauna

  A Meadowland Library

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by John Lewis-Stempel

  Copyright

  For Penny, Tristram and Freda. Of course.

  PREFACE

  I can only tell you how it felt. How it was to work and watch a field and be connected to everything that was in it, and ever had been. To rationalize it . . . is pointless. The Romantic poet William Wordsworth was not always the most reliable recorder of the British countryside, but this he got right:

  Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

  Our meddling intellect

  Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things

  We murder to dissect.

  JANUARY

  Meadow pipit

  THE ICE MOON is already rising over Merlin’s Hill as I go down to the field at late evening to watch for snipe. There is real cold on the back edge of the wind, which rattles the dead tin-foil leaves left clinging on the river oaks. As I open the gate, my heart performs its usual little leap at the magnificence of the view: the great flatness of the field, its picture-frame of hedgerows, the sloping smoothness of Merlin’s Hill to the left, then right around me the forbidding dam wall of the Black Mountains. There is snow along the top of the mountains, snow as smooth as wedding cake.

  Stepping into the field is to step on to a vast square stage in which I am the last person on earth. There is not a house or person or car to be seen. It is the sort of field where, as you step in, you breathe out.

  The snipe like the wet corner of the meadow, where the old ditch is broken, leaking out its contents, and where sharp sprigs of sedge have taken hegemony. The snipe have come in here late for the two nights past, where the ground is amiable to their dagger beaks and the sedge offers shelter.

  Frost already spectres the grass of the field. A small flock of brown meadow pipits rise up in front of me, as though hesitantly climbing invisible stairs, chattering as they go. The nondescript meadow pipit is gregarious in winter, and is a true bird of grassland. The bird’s Latin name is Anthus pratensis; pratensis is Latin for ‘of a meadow’. ‘Pipit’ is for the bird’s piping song; then again the bird is also known as cheeper, teetan and peeper in verbal reproduction of its call. All of which show how impossible it is to represent the complexity of birdsong in mere human words.

  I slither down into the ditch at the far side of the field, which borders Grove Farm. This is the far west of Herefordshire, where England runs out, and the rain falls. This ditch, built to take the run-off from the fields above, is deep enough to have served a soldier in Flanders a century ago.

  In the seeping red-walled ditch I wait with my arms propped on the top. I like waiting in the ditch, invisible. Sometimes I bring my shotgun, to shoot pigeons, pheasants and rabbits, but not snipe. The diminutive wader with the stiletto on its face is too rare a visitor to kill by my hand. It would be like murdering guests. A blackbird spinks in a far-away hedge.

  The snipe do not come. But snipe are always mysterious; their plumage is sorcery, a camouflage of earth-blending bars and flecks. After about forty minutes when I am old and stiff with cold, and about to clamber up the ditch side, I see, from the corner of my eye, a dim shape pushing under the fence wire, leaving yet more of his silver bristles on the bottom strand of barbs.

  We attribute almost supernatural olfactory powers to animals, but the truth is with the wind blowing towards me he is oblivious to my presence.

  I recognize him as he advances into the field by his dragging back leg. It’s the old boar badger. Badgers do not truly hibernate but he has been underground for days, avoiding the searing hoar frosts. Brock is a Nazi, a follower of Goering’s maxim ‘Guns Before Butter’. Although he must be hungry, he chooses first to patrol his territory.

  Amusingly, the eastern boundary of his territory is the same as ours; he has adopted the human’s stock fence as his national border. Along this the badger now shambles, black-and-white snout to the ground, stopping every five yards to squat and scent. The sun has long since perished, and in the quarter moonlight I can only make out his progress by the startling luminescence of the white bands on his head.

  Satisfied with his noisome defences, he starts to haul himself across the field towards me.

  For a sizeable mammal, badgers like the smallest morsel to eat. When he is within twenty yards I see he is flipping over old cow pats, with all the aplomb of a pizza chef. In this cold there can be few worms, but in late summer, when the grass has been cut for hay and it has rained lightly, I have seen the whole badger family out hoovering up earthworms by the hundred. A badger can easily eat 20,000 earthworms in a year. But then this 5.7-acre field probably hosts 6,000,000 Lumbricus terrestris; the badgers are unlikely to run out.

  Tonight, however, the pickings are poor and he shuffles off. I follow his lead. Which is as it should be. He has primacy. The badger is the oldest landowner in Britain, and roamed the deciduous forests of southern England long before the Channel cut us from the ‘Continent’. On the way across the field I push over some cow pats with my wellingtoned foot to see what the badger was eating. Small, glistening grey slugs.

  I was not right to say the field was flat, although it is unusually flat for hill country. The field has a gentle tilt, west to east. At first glance, like all fields, it seems one habitat, but like nearly all fields it is more than one. Look again. At the two gateways where the cows stand and stare, the ground is bare, making scars in the gathering moonlight. Where the western ditch, which takes all the water from the Marsh Field above, leaks, the ground is going to bog and snipe. Part of this ditch sweeps into the field and is deep and slow enough to be a rectangular pond; it is here that the frogs and newts breed. A finger of the field sticks untidily out and is walled by trees, and is never cut because there is no room to get a tractor (or, years ago, a horse) and mower in. Under most of the hedges which ring the field, the ground is dry, especially the north end of the west hedge; here the sheep like to sleep and shelter, leaving twists of their fleece in the hawthorns and their black-green dung pellets on the ground. They are doing so now, a flock of thirty Ryelands, fifteen Shetlands and ten Hebrideans, breathily chewing the cud. It is here the thistles grow, and the brilliant goldfinches descend in their charms to feed on the October seed heads.

  Lie down for a floor-across view in the frost, and the grey field is not so smooth after all, but bears the bumps and pockmarks of centuries of use. An arterial network of paths spreads across and just discernibly dents it, the trails of generations of sheep. Hoof marks from last year’s cattle have collected water, reflecting the moonlight, as though someone has scattered hundreds of pocket mirrors.

  The field has unseen contours too. Getting back up, I find the invisible point in the middle of the
field where the air temperature changes, enough to make me shiver.

  A narrow mountain river runs alongside the eastern edge of the field, finding its way to the sea. Over gravel shillets and into glass pools, and round an arching loop to leave the promontory, or finger as we call it. Most of the bankside is steep and covered in a thicket of holly, alder, hawthorn, hazel, field maple, ivy; it is the overgrown child of an antique parent hedge. There are two kingly oaks in the thicket, which in their dotage clutch the river bank, to lean precipitously over the river, on roots elephant-trunk thick and which swirl thrashingly into the ground, leaving nightmarish, dark troll holes. The oaks, which are around seven hundred years old, are remnants from the time when this isolated valley was wooded.

  Where the river leaves the field, the thicket grows out into a small copse; here, secreted in the bracken and scrub, is a fox’s earth. Foxes like to make their homes near water.

  The river has a name, the Escley. In his The Place Names of Herefordshire of 1916 the Reverend A. T. Bannister advised about the noun ‘Escley’: ‘Wise students refuse to discuss river-names; but one is tempted to connect the word with the Celtic root from which comes Exe, Usk, Ock, and Ax-ona.’ He is likely correct on the derivation, which would seem to come from a Brythonic root word meaning ‘abounding in fish’. Put more plainly, Escley is related to the Welsh for fish, a lexical reminder that national ownership of this borderland ebbed in the past, and the field today is just a mile inside England. The Escley does indeed have fish, and the patient person who can cast flies between the alders that line the river’s route may find trout. Tonight the Escley is chattering discreetly.

  As I leave the field the raven croaks, despite it being nighttime, to remind me that a pair of this species nest and roost in a small grove of fir trees just across the river and they have the best view of the field of all. Ravens mate for life, and this pair has been here since we have.

  When we moved to this farm, the field was my delight and my despair. No field has a finer aspect; only if I spin the full 360 degrees can I see houses, and then only three of them, one of which is ours. Such was the joy; the horror was the state of the sward. My head was stuck in conventional farming thinking, and I deplored the lack of clover for our cattle and sheep, and two patches of the field were devastated by wire-worm.

  It became the field I did nothing with, the place I plonked livestock when nothing better was available. But then, nobody else had done much with the field either; there were stands of thistles of a density which suggested remarkable ancestry.

  Sometimes neglect is good. In the city the rich folks live on the hill. In the country it’s the poor folk. The big beef farmers and the corn barons have the flat land. Hill farmers are frequently too capital-lacking to make big changes to the landscape. Or spray gallons of herbicide on to it. Nothing conserves like poverty. One summer I let the field go, instead of shuffling livestock on to it.

  The peasant poet John Clare called plants ‘green memorials’. By late June the field had sprouted flowers I’d forgotten existed, flowers such as knapweed and bugle, which were testament to an agricultural usage other than animal parking lot.

  Once upon a time the field had been a hay meadow.

  7 JANUARY Snow settles its medieval quiet on the land. Snow five inches deep, deep enough to sledge on, and Tris and Freda make a Cresta run down neighbouring Bank Field. Away in the unseen village other children’s voices shriek delight.

  I too use a sledge, though not for such fun as hammering downhill at too many miles an hour. I tie a bale of bright hay to a storybook wooden sledge and haul it down to the field in a manner I romantically and vaingloriously imagine to be that of Scott of the Antarctic. The sheep are more interested in the accompanying half-sack of sugar beet, and crowd round me, the fearless and the hungry jumping up. The snow hangs in a deb’s delight of pearl beads around their necks. The snow suppresses the herbid smells of nature, and the musk of sheep is unbridled.

  Vast shining tracts of the field are unspoiled by the sheep’s feet. In these virgin spaces I feel as though I am exploring a new planet, which of course I am. The white planet. So cruelly bright is the sun off the quartz snow that I have to squint as though peering into the future.

  Actually, not all of the field is white; there are two patches of green at the centre, where water oozing out of the ground has prevented the snow from settling. They are oases around which birds have flocked to drink and probe the ground for food. In the soft mud I can see the footprints of pheasants, and also the faint triangular marks of a smaller long-toed bird.

  They come back briefly in the afternoon. Three lapwings.

  Farming has changed beyond all recognition in the last seventy years. Population pressure means that farmers need to grow more, more quickly. In the 1930s, Britain’s farmers produced enough food to feed 16 million people; today they produce enough to feed 40 million people. Almost all grassland is now managed ‘intensively’, whereby selected species of grass have fertilizer and herbicides applied to them. On intensively cultivated grassland, grass yield has gone up by 150 per cent since the 1940s.

  There is a cost. Ninety-seven per cent of traditional meadows have disappeared. Treatment with artificial fertilizers did not benefit the more fragile meadow grasses, and the more vigorous types smothered them to death. Neither did the new regime of cutting for cured grass (silage) two or even three times a year help, because the first cut came in May before flower seeds had set, and while ground-nesting birds and mammals were still rearing their young. Some animal species have become extinct. I have not seen a corncrake since the 1970s, when I almost stepped on one in a hayfield when childishly shooting rats with an air rifle. The bird is extinct in England. It stands as a symbol of the untold damage we have wreaked on the British landscape and our natural heritage, through the drive to produce as much food as possible on our crowded little island.

  Many of the plants in a traditional meadow, which was cut late and then grazed by small numbers of cattle and sheep, did not have a direct agricultural food value, but they preserved the balance of nutrients, and provided wildlife with sustenance. Didn’t they also make Britain special? When khaki men on the Somme or in Burmese jungles thought of their homeland, did they not picture wildflower-strewn meadows, with cottages and rolling hills?

  ‘Meadow’ is surprisingly strict in its meaning, and is from the Old English mœdwe, being related to māwan – to mow. A meadow is a place where grass and flowers are grown for hay, the dry winter fodder for livestock. A meadow is not a natural habitat; it is a relationship between nature, man and beast. At its best, it is also equilibrium, artistry.

  9 JANUARY More snow comes, and a west wind with it, blowing the snow into ridges; the effect is as if a white tidal sea has been over the field and withdrawn. Some scruffy, wizened spikes of thistle pierce the snow, spoiling the illusion.

  The sheep paw at the sparkling spectacle for the grass underneath, and lurk for hours around the hayrack. The Shetlands gnaw at thick ivy tendrils in the hedge, back to the white bone, leaving the skin to weep orange at its edges. They have also pulled at the leaves of the bramble, a deciduous plant with a surprising tendency to the evergreen. The temperature reaches minus seven at night, and a sheet of ice forms over the slow stretches of the Escley. I watch it grow, a creeping, pale fungal invasion. The water in the pond is inch-thick plate glass. It groans and protests though it will bear my weight.

  By the Grove ditch I can see the wide paw marks of the badger, and where his shaggy coat has scuffed the snow’s surface. In the bank behind the Grove ditch there is a small rabbit warren; usually the rabbits graze into the Grove field, and use the burrows on our side as escape hatches. This morning they have come through into the field and scraped to get the grass under the sheltered side of Marsh Field hedge. Rabbit’s scientific name is Oryctolagus cuniculus, the ‘digging hare’. But the snow is deep and the ground iron; the rabbits have also been up on their back legs nibbling the sweet hazel bark. />
  The children are at school. The sheep are too defeated by the cold to bother baaing. Only the leathery creak of my feet in the snow disturbs the world. Even the river is quiet.

  There was once a sea over this land, and fishes swam in the meadow. The meadow then was south of the equator. During the early Devonian period, 425 million years ago, the place I am now standing in was covered by a shallow tropical estuary, the bed of which writhed with primitive fish and crustaceans – acanthodians, eurypterids, cephalaspids, pteraspids and the scientific like. I know exactly what would have swum around my feet because an old farm quarry half a mile upstream, Wayne Herbert, has divulged hundreds of fossil remains from its green siltstone, including one of an early lamprey, which was wonderfully named Errivaspis waynensis in honour of its place of finding. The same green siltstone lenticle in which Errivaspis waynensis was discovered runs under the field, whose geology is easy to determine: the river has cut away the side of the field, so a cross-section is handily on show. There is of course a good reason why hay meadows are traditionally located next to rivers; if grass is to grow lush and thick it needs all the water it can get. The river obliges by seeping its bounty into the depths of the field’s soil through trillions of subterranean capillaries.

  Standing in the river looking at the bank, I can see 450 million years of geological history before me, with the horizontal green layers of siltstone lenticle at the bottom. I spend the day chipping away with a chisel and hammer and, even in this bleak midwinter, it becomes warm work.

  Some time in the mid-afternoon, when a shard of sunlight plunges through the oak branches on to the green slab, I find what I have come for. A fragment of fossilized fish scales, almost certainly from an acanthodian. These 12-inch, heavily scaled vertebrates were the first jawed fish, the direct ancestor of the trout, loach and bullheads that live in the river today. And of the curious minnows that are investigating my wellingtons in the pellucid water.