Meadowland Read online

  The frogs that reach the house still have three hundred yards to go to the ditch-cum-pond in Lower Meadow where they habitually breed.

  22 FEBRUARY The ditch in Lower Meadow sounds like a steelworks in the evening, so loud is the noise of mating frogs.

  23 FEBRUARY The toads are also on the move to their ancestral spawning grounds.

  In ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’ George Orwell posited the emergence of Bufo bufo, frog’s cousin the toad, from its winter hibernation, after some awakening shudder in the earth or rise in temperature, as the most appealing sign of the coming of spring. The toad, he noted, unlike the skylark and the primrose, ‘has never had much of a boost from poets’ and added that fasting gave the toad ‘a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent’. Whether it’s high-mindedness or light-headedness, toads, as they crawl to their spawning grounds, are more maddeningly careless of their lives than frogs.

  In the morning, there is the squashed body of a warty toad every yard on the lane. But away from cars toads have a good chance of life; they emit a poison, bufotoxin, from their skin to deter predators.

  A share of the toad survivors heads with unstoppable, will-not-be-diverted fervour for the shallow flood ponds at the bottom of Bank Field. Haughtily, they do not share the ditch in Lower Meadow with the frogs and newts.

  With some squeamish caution I go down at night to the grassy watery depressions. I turn on the torch; there are roaming gangs of toads everywhere. There is nothing pleasant about toad sex: the males are wantonly copulating with each other, five or more fighting for one female in a so-called ‘mating-ball’, and a dozen are straddling a stone. I push a stick into the water; one toad lurches at it, embraces it and does not let go when I raise the stick in the air.

  Next morning the bodies of two female toads are lifeless in the water. They have been drowned in the mating frenzy.

  More successful couplings have produced jelly-coated strings of black eggs.

  An underrated writer on nature, George Orwell. It is there in the books, if you care to look, such as the detail on woodland plants in Coming Up for Air. He was surely right on the democracy of spring:

  The point is that the pleasures of spring are available to everybody, and cost nothing. Even in the most sordid street the coming of spring will register itself by some sign or other, if it is only a brighter blue between the chimney pots or the vivid green of an elder sprouting on a blitzed site.

  Fields are not natural, although they have natural precursors, the glades of the forest and the grassy uplands. They are man-made with wild materials.

  How to make a meadow: the first fields were hacked from woods with stone axes, trees burned out or ring-barked to die a lingering death. Neolithic farmers in this oak-covered valley, as elsewhere, tended to first make meadows on high ground (where the wild-wood that had covered Britain in the wake of the retreating ice sheets at the end of the Ice Age c. 10,000 BC was lightest) or from the glades that erupted where trees fell down. These Stone Age farmers, though, were gypsies, moving their primitive cattle and sheep on to pastures new as soon as grazing was exhausted.

  The trees have not given up; they are still trying to re-forest by sending up blackthorn and hawthorn shoots into the grass, or dropping pips and nuts as fifth columns.

  Little in this marginal valley changed for twenty thousand years, although the Romans, who just succeeded in bringing it within their pale with a fort in the village of Longtown, may have tackled the alders of the trident parallel rivers, the Olchon, the Monnow and the Escley. In 1086 the valley made its bow in history, with a brief entry in the Domesday Book: ‘Roger of Lacy also has one land called Longtown within the boundary of Ewias. The land does not belong to the castellery nor to the Hundred. From this land Roger has 11 sesters of honey, 15 pigs when men are there and [administers] justice over them.’

  In other words, pigs running in oak woodland was the main farming enterprise in the valley.

  To date the field, or at least its beginnings, is not difficult. By Hooper’s rule the hedge dividing the field from the Grove farm next door is 600 years old; which is the same date as the thicket along the river bank. For two hundred years the field was part of a larger space, until it was divided again; the Marsh Field hedge is 350 years old. The enigma is the scrawny northern hedge, which is just 100 years old.

  Animals made the fields, as much as men: the sheep and oxen of medieval farmers prevented the fields from re-establishing themselves as forests. And nourished the soil with their excrement.

  24 FEBRUARY The first clumps of frogspawn are laid in the ‘newt ditch’, as we call the demi-pond in Lower Meadow.

  Few will hatch and survive. The site is known to the heron, fox and other predators.

  The luckless day for frogspawn soon arrives. Some time in the night of the 27th a fox pulls clumps of the speckled wallpaper paste that is frogspawn out on to the bank. Yet there are so many clumps of spawn – thirty-four of them, which have congealed into one continental mass – that some frogs will emerge from the predations.

  The meadow seems stuck in winter stasis. But then an empty meadow is always in a state of waiting, of anticipation. A wood gets on with things by itself, naturally.

  MARCH

  Badger

  5 MARCH All the birds have burst out singing. A woodpecker is drumming the dead elm in the valley bottom, as if it has been wound up on elastic, and let go. A skylark flutters up over the meadow in its first territorial song of the year, a kite on an invisible thread.

  6 MARCH A buzzard flies over me with a twig in its mouth.

  More snow, which comes in stinging and horizontal from the north to lie in streaks on the red heather hair of the mountain. Even under the hedges, only the dog’s mercury can be bothered to flower (pallidly, at that) and the field returns to its winter sleep.

  Not quite. The badger has been digging up the dog’s mercury roots; it has also tried to break into the top of the warren, seeking the kittens in its hunger.

  At the close of the day I stand and listen to the wind scurrying over the surface of the white field.

  9 MARCH The first primrose blossoms, through the dregs of snow, to sit enchanting by the Grove ditch, a guiding beacon for the sun.

  Primula vulgaris is the first plant to flower in the sward proper. I know what today felt like. It felt like the first day of spring. I can smell it. Under the hedges the ground elder and nettles are coming up.

  But there are more reliable guides to the advent of spring than my nose. Such as moles:

  Anthropomorphizing moles is an ancient meme. Out riding at Hampton Court, the staunchly Protestant William III was thrown from his horse when it stumbled over a molehill; the king broke his collar bone and died three weeks later, in February 1702. The delighted pro-Catholic Jacobites raised a glass to ‘The Little Gentleman in Black Velvet’. Kenneth Grahame with Wind in the Willows and Alison Uttley with Moldy Warp, the Mole are only two of the children’s authors to have found Talpa europaea irresistible to humanize. Uttley’s Moldy Warp took his name from moldwerp, the Old Saxon word for the animal, which means earth mover; and moles do shift earth, about 10kg every hour. The spoil is pushed up vertical shafts, to make the familiar mole ‘heaves’ or heaps. (Not properly vertical: they come out of the earth at 45 degrees, as do colliers’ drift mines.) Moles work in four-hour shifts of Stakhanovite endeavour. See, I too have fallen into anthropomorphism.

  What storybooks fail to convey is the violent greed of the mole, which scuttles along its tunnels eating the worms, bugs and grubs that fall haplessly in. There is nothing cute about a mole tunnel. It is a vast pipeline trap. And for a gentleman dressed in a velvet smoking jacket, mole is the most violent diner; he bites off the worm’s head, then with his claws squeezes out any earth left in the worm, before sucking it down like spaghetti. Any surplus of worms mole stores in a larder. The worms, beheaded and additionally incapacitated by a toxin in mole drool, are alive but unable to move.<
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  In this field, two years ago, I dug out a hole for a new gatepost. As the steel spade cleaved down through the red clay – so dense that the sides of the hole glistened smooth – it unveiled a chamber of horrors about two feet down: a mole pantry with hundreds of entwined worms. The weather had long been dry, so I presume the meat larder was an insurance against worms going too far down into the earth for the mole to find.

  Some of the worms were in that state of incapacity known as death. You think of a field as a place of life and growth. And so it is. But it is also a giant graveyard. I have buried dead sheep in the field, as I know, from digging holes for fence posts, others have before me. And then there are all the wild animals that die in their burrows.

  This borderland, and quite likely this meadow, saw thousands of years of skirmishing between invaders and settlers, between law-upholders and rustlers. (You need a bit of space for a decent scrap, thus the field of battle.) The Saxons, initially, gave up colonization six miles to the east; but burned the halls and hovels of Longtown in 743 then pushed beyond Offa’s Dyke in the tenth century. The Vikings harried the valley in 915; the Vikings and the Welsh under Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, Prince of North Wales, rampaged through in 1055; it took the Normans three years to subdue the area’s Mercian king, Edric; the Normans in turn gave the unquiet land to Walter de Lacy, who gave his name to Ewyas Lacy, later to be called Longtown after its distinctive one-street style of settlement. The castle built by de Lacy and his heirs was one of ninety the so-called marcher lords constructed to keep the borderland in check; not that they were entirely successful, for the valley became synonymous with cattle and sheep rustling by the Welsh.

  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

  Raised by the mole.

  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

  And in a silent murmuring complains

  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 MARCH 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

  And seem to share no sympathy with Spring.

  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.