by Stephen Moss
EVENTUALLY, OF COURSE, the cold spell does come to an end, and the snow retreats as rapidly as it arrived. The first weekend after the thaw, the landscape is back to its normal winter state: soggy mush. The rhynes are full to the brim, the layer of ice now replaced with a thin film of duckweed, punctured only by the occasional discarded drinks can.
The birds are back, too. A song thrush, the first I have heard this year, sings his famously repetitive tune in the tall trees by the village stores. Blackbirds feed beneath the hedgerows, while jackdaws, rooks and crows grub up worms in the muddy fields, just as they did before the snow came.
As I cycle along River Road, towards the southern boundary of the parish, I hear a familiar high-pitched note. There is a movement in the corner of my vision, and I spy a grey wagtail as it flies away, the telltale lemon patch beneath its tail reflecting the morning sun. Despite my fears this individual, at least, has managed to survive.
I hide my bicycle behind a convenient hedge, and walk across a muddy field; deeply rutted with tractor tracks, and dotted with patches of standing water. A familiar sound – perhaps the sound of the countryside – comes from somewhere ahead of me, but with the sun shining straight into my eyes I cannot see the bird that is making it. I skirt around to get a better view, past a clump of molehills, and realise, to my surprise, that there are more than a hundred birds feeding here. Most are redwings, with their usual companions, a dozen or so fieldfares; and a couple of meadow pipits.
Then I see what I am looking for, a short way from the main flock: three sandy-coloured birds, their paleness standing out against the dark, loamy soil. They are skylarks, the iconic British farmland bird; yet here in the parish, hardly a common sight. This is partly because the ground is almost permanently soggy, unsuitable for arable crops. But it is also because like so many of our familiar countryside birds, the skylark has suffered a catastrophic decline, numbers falling by more than half in my own lifetime.
When amateur birders all over Britain took part in the British Trust for Ornithology’s first Atlas survey, back in the late 1960s, the skylark was Britain’s most widespread bird. Today, both its population and range have contracted dramatically. Modern farming methods – industrial processes that have no place for, or concern with, nature – are largely responsible. But those of us who enjoy cheap food, and the convenience of supermarkets, must also bear our share of the blame. For if we cannot safeguard a bird as intrinsic to our landscape as the skylark, what hope is there for rest of the countryside and its wildlife?
On sunny days in early spring, I do occasionally hear the song of the skylark, as it flies high in the skies above the parish fields. Straining my eyes to find this almost invisible dot, I marvel at its ability to sing constantly for hours on end. But my pleasure is tinged by sadness, as I think about the two million or more pairs of skylarks we have lost in the short time that I have been on this earth.
BY THE END of the month, the snow is but a distant memory, though patches of ice still persist in the shadier corners of the parish. On fine, sunny days the sky now glows blue with the distant promise of spring. Just above the Mendips, there is a long, thin layer of smoky cloud, as a lone hot-air balloon drifts upwards, and an easyJet plane descends slowly towards Bristol airport.
Just like the snow, the mud along the droves reveals what has passed by: the paw-prints and horseshoes of the local hunt, whose hounds, horses and green-clad riders entertained the village children as they came past earlier in the day, in pursuit of a local fox.
Until I came to Somerset, my experience of foxes was confined to those I saw in Bristol or London. There, if I came across a fox it would stand its ground, facing me defiantly until I gave in and walked away. How very different from Somerset foxes, which have developed the art of self-preservation not needed by their city cousins.
When I wander down to the end of my garden and find a fox asleep in a sheltered, sunny corner, the sheer sense of panic as it wakes is extraordinary. Even during the heavy snow, when I watched a large dog fox padding purposefully across a field, I knew that when he caught sight of me he would head off in the opposite direction – which is exactly what he did.
The thaw has revealed signs of another, even more elusive mammal, the mole, with masses of molehills appearing at the edges of grassy fields. I recall my grandmother telling me that her father – my great-grandfather – was the proud owner of a genuine moleskin waistcoat; which he presumably obtained from the local mole-catcher. But nobody bothers to trap moles any more – they either put up with the damage to their fields and lawns, or call in the pest controllers to poison them.
As we wait for February to arrive, the lengthening days and imperceptible rising of the sun in the sky signal that spring is, if not quite around the corner, nevertheless on its way. The birds sense this too: increased day length triggers sensors in their tiny brains, prompting them to embark on one of the most wasteful and dangerous, yet most vital and beautiful, aspects of their behaviour: birdsong.
Wasteful because they can ill-afford to expend so much energy; dangerous because singing draws attention to their presence, making them vulnerable to predators. Yet vital, because if a male bird does not sing, he will be unable to defend his territory and win a mate; and if he cannot do that, he will not be able to breed this year. If he fails to breed, he may never get a second chance.
And beautiful? Yes: because even though we now understand the scientific reasons for this behaviour, we cannot help but be overwhelmed by its sheer beauty.
January sees the early starters in the breeding race begin to sing. In my garden, robins lead the way: sometimes uttering their sweet, deliberate and tuneful song on New Year’s Day itself. During mild winters, robins are joined by a chorus of other garden birds, each determined to get a head start on their rivals. So great tits sing their brash ‘tea-cher, tea-cher’ from the bare branches of the apple trees, while goldfinches twitter in the hawthorn hedge.
Later in the year, as spring finally takes hold, these early birds will be joined by new arrivals: the migrants currently spending our winter thousands of miles away in Africa. And day by day, week by week and month by month, other creatures will emerge: insects and mammals, reptiles and amphibians, and the panoply of wild flowers that will grace the parish fields and byways all summer long.
It is a gradual process, an unseen hand weaving a complex tapestry of sight and sound, smell and colour, by which the nature of this parish – and of country parishes all over Britain – begins to reveal itself. As each day, week, month and season passes by, the picture finally takes shape, reaching its full glory with the approach of the summer solstice. Then, as the year begins to turn, and the days imperceptibly shorten, an equally gradual retreat will begin. Little by little, we shall witness the decline, departure and disappearance of the plants and animals that make up the natural history of our little part of the world.
Like a film being run backwards, the tapestry will start to unravel; slowly at first, then more rapidly, as we head towards autumn, then winter. Finally, at the close of the year, we return to how things were; seemingly unchanged, yet subtly different from where we began. But for now, at the end of the first month of the year, the annual cycle has yet to run its course, with all the joy, wonder and surprise this will bring.
FEBRUARY
OUR VILLAGE FIRST appears in the historical record more than a thousand years ago, in AD 973. Almost a century later Queen Edith, the wife of King Edward the Confessor, granted this little patch of land to the church at Wells. She is commemorated in the name of a hamlet just outside the parish: Edithmead.
Another local place name suggests that people may have settled here even earlier. Totney, a farm at the eastern end of the village, means ‘look-out island’ in Anglo-Saxon. It rests on a narrow tongue of higher ground, rising a few yards above the surrounding land, meaning that our ancestors could have kept their feet dry here. For like those other great English wetlands, the Fens and the Broads, the landscape o
f the Somerset Levels is both made up of and defined by water.
Today, as I gaze out from the top of the church tower, the surrounding land gives every impression of being as solid and permanent as anywhere else in lowland England. But this is an illusion, for these green fields were once beneath the waves. At the time Queen Edith made her gift, much of this ‘landscape’ was essentially a seascape: saltmarsh, inundated twice a day by the tides.
The story of how saltmarsh was gradually turned into brackish marsh, then freshwater grazing meadows, and finally dry land, is an extraordinary one. It involved hard work, of course, but also vision: the vision to realise that the land could, with time and effort, be reclaimed from the sea. Like all great human achievements, it also required a degree of arrogance; as one writer has noted, ‘men have played God with water on the levels for more years than can be comprehended’. Or, as one local told me: ‘we couldn’t raise the land, so we lowered the water instead’.
In its pristine, original state, this landscape must have been a precious haven for those creatures that depended on water, such as wading birds and wildfowl. People came here too, regularly visiting the area from higher ground, to catch fish, trap waterbirds for food, and kill otters and beavers for their fur.
We know this because of a remarkable discovery made in 1970 at Westhay, a short distance to the south-east of the parish. A man digging peat unearthed the remains of an ancient pathway, made from wooden poles and planks of oak, and later named (after its discoverer) the Sweet Track. Using the method of studying tree rings known as dendrochronology, its construction was dated to the year 3806 BC, making it almost six thousand years old – the oldest properly constructed roadway found so far anywhere in the world.
Later, around two centuries before the birth of Christ, archaeological deposits reveal that the inhabitants of Iron Age Glastonbury caught, killed and ate Dalmatian pelicans, a huge, now globally threatened bird, long extinct here in Britain.
THE LONG, SLOW process of reclaiming the land from the sea began in medieval times, when the monks of Glastonbury hired men to dig ditches across this bleak and treacherous land. Ditches and rhynes allowed water to drain into the three rivers that cross this part of Somerset: the Parrett, the Brue and the Axe. Later, sea walls were built to prevent storm surges and high tides from flooding the low-lying land behind the coast.
Today, a waterway still runs just west of due north past the White Horse Inn, between Vole Road and Kingsway. It is easy to miss from the road: a deep trench, 5 or 6 yards wide, edged with grass and reeds. In winter it often ices over, while during the summer it is carpeted with a thick, lime-green layer of duckweed.
This slow-moving body of water may not look very significant, yet it holds the key to the history of this parish. Without it the pubs, the shop, the church hall, the cricket ground, the homes, the gardens and the rest of village life simply wouldn’t exist. For this stagnant, neglected waterway was the key weapon in the battle to win land from sea.
Records from Glastonbury Abbey dating back to the middle of the thirteenth century refer to it as the Morditch. Today, the Ordnance Survey map shows it as the Pillrow Wall Rhyne, while the locals call it Mark Yeo. Finished in 1316, early in the reign of Edward II, it ran all the way from Glastonbury, via the River Axe, to Bridgwater Bay: a distance of some fifteen miles. Tidal along the whole of its length, it allowed seagoing barges to bring goods and people across the waterlogged land, until the early sixteenth century, when Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries led to its eventual decline.
But despite the draining and reclamation of the land, the battle was far from won. On 20 January 1607, observers reported seeing what appeared to be a bank of fog drifting in from the sea. In fact it was a vast wall of water, possibly a tsunami caused by an undersea earthquake, which breached the sea walls and poured over the land beyond. By the time the waters came to a stop, at the foot of Glastonbury Tor, hundreds of square miles of Somerset had been flooded, a score of villages devastated, and more than a thousand people were dead. Rabbits were seen floating on swimming sheep, while a baby in a wooden cradle was miraculously rescued from the floodwaters.
Less than a century later, an even more devastating event occurred. On the night of 26 November 1703, the worst storm ever to hit Britain swept up the Severn Estuary, pushing vast amounts of water upriver. As the estuary narrowed into a funnel, the water could no longer be contained, and just as it had in 1607, the sea burst through the coastal defences and onto the low-lying land. Once again, hundreds of people drowned, along with thousands of sheep and cattle; incredibly, one seagoing ship was found more than fifteen miles inland.
Following these disasters sea walls were strengthened, rivers straightened and rhynes dug, creating the landscape I see around me today. The lives of local people were transformed. Sheep could now be grazed without the constant problem of foot-rot, which had previously killed thousands of animals. The effects on the local wildlife are less easy to quantify: wetland species must inevitably have declined, while those that lived on farmland would have increased in numbers.
Yet despite all these efforts, the people who live in these low-lying lands are well aware that their homes are still vulnerable to extreme weather and high tides. Only the maintenance of sea walls, the regular pumping of rainwater off the land each winter, and constant vigilance, keep us safe from flooding. This is still, essentially, a landscape dominated by water in all its forms, eloquently described by local poet William Diaper, writing soon after the Great Storm of 1703:
Eternal mists their dropping curse distill
And drizzly vapours all the ditches fill:
The swamp land’s a bog, the fields are seas
And too much moisture is the grand disease.
Unlike most properties in the village our home is well removed from any risk of flooding, being at the eastern end, a short distance from the boundary with the neighbouring parish of Wedmore, and about 50 feet above sea level. In this part of Somerset this qualifies as the uplands, and the wind certainly whips across our land with more ferocity than in the lower parts of the parish. Taking advantage of this, the mill which gives our property its name, Mill Batch, was built here in the early eighteenth century, though it was dismantled long before we arrived.
Viewed from the air, our 1½-acre plot is surprisingly long and narrow, approximately 300 yards long by 30 yards wide, running northwards alongside the lane to the hamlet of Perry. The house was once the main dwelling for the farm next door, whose yard is still in regular use.
Our garden is about as wooded as you get in these parts: with cider-apple trees along the west side, a row of pollarded willows along the east, and two majestic ash trees at the far end. It slopes downwards, becoming less like a garden and more like an unkempt meadow the further you go. At the very bottom there is a boggy area, with a small patch of shaded, stagnant water surrounded by bramble bushes and nettles.
The next-door garden has more mature ash trees, in the tops of which are a rookery, whose inhabitants provide the soundtrack to our lives from March through to August. Across the lane there is a large apple orchard: a mixture of cider-apple trees with their bitter yellow fruit, and fine eaters of a wonderfully deep shade of red. Sheep often graze here, wandering among the dappled light.
Overall, as with most gardens, the mixture of ‘mini-habitats’ combined with a plentiful supply of food – both natural and provided by us – creates a home for an extraordinary range of plants and animals. In our time here I have recorded almost eighty different species of bird, over a hundred different moths, and a score of butterflies – more than one third of all Britain’s species.
Badgers leave telltale trails across the meadow and deep holes on the lawn; foxes bask on the remains of a bonfire; voles and mice scurry through the long grass; and toads, slow-worms and grass snakes live unobtrusively in the hidden corners – occasionally revealing their presence, as when adventuring toads crawl purposefully into our hallway.
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p; It is no coincidence that the British are a nation of wildlife watchers as well as a nation of gardeners, as the two go hand in hand. Our obsession with not only owning but planting and nurturing our little piece of land has created a haven for wildlife, and enabled us to enjoy watching it. Natural curiosity plays its part – and as a result, many of us now know the fauna and flora of our own garden by heart.
EVERY YEAR, A song thrush holds territory in our front garden, starting to sing sometime between the middle of January and early February, depending on the severity of the winter. Even before I open the bedroom curtains each morning, I can hear him.
The annual switch between the opposing states of silence and song is like a light coming on. For once he starts singing, he seems unable to stop, like a cyclist careering downhill without any brakes. Every day, from dawn until dusk, he perches high in the branches of an ivy-covered ash sapling, its twigs just about to come into bud. Sitting out in the open, in full view, he simply opens his bill and lets the flow of notes and phrases emerge.
A hundred yards to the north, at the other end of the garden, another thrush answers him. From now onwards, as I cycle along the parish lanes, just as the song of one bird fades behind me so the next starts up ahead; a relay of thrushes, continuing for hundreds of miles in every direction, throughout the British countryside.
As its name suggests, the song thrush is justly famed for its musical ability. Both Thomas Hardy and Robert Browning wrote poems celebrating this: Hardy’s ‘Darkling Thrush’ and Browning’s ‘Home-thoughts, from Abroad’. Of the two, I prefer Browning’s, which uses the jagged metre of the verse to mimic the rhythm of the bird’s song:
