Meadowland Read online

  On a drive into Hereford I take the cross-country route, hoping to avoid the traffic bottleneck. (Some hope.) Despite the sparsity of population, I count at least five houses where the inhabitants have strimmed their roadside verge to within a centimetre of its life. Internally I rail at the suburbanity of such an aesthetic (why move to the country if you want to turn it into Hyacinth Bucket’s Blossom Avenue?), and rather more honourably deplore the ecological holocaust. Roadside verges are often remnants of ancient meadow – and in some areas, the only remnants of ancient meadow – and are flora rich, and the sanctuary of wild animals. There is a rust-covered kestrel hovering over an uncut swathe at Wormelow.

  11 JANUARY 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 JANUARY 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

  Grows no more all the year.

  15 JANUARY 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 JANUARY 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

  You many a plum, and many a pear.

  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 JANUARY 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, ar
e 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.

  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 JANUARY 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,

  Should be his till the cart tracks had no ruts.

  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 wal
k 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.