Deep Country

by Neil Ansell

  The bank became virtually impassable beyond this point, so I would cross a field on to the route once taken by the railway. I started in a deep cutting, overarched by trees, dark and boggy and filled with nettles. There was the ancient, rusted wreck of a car here that must have been rolled down the bank well over fifty years ago; I couldn’t tell the make but it had running boards. It felt as though I was walking through a tunnel. There was a tangible sense of history here, but soon the trees gave way and the sun came in. Here in the cutting walls I once saw a pair of weasels popping their heads in and out of a niche in the rocks. I always looked out for them every time I passed this way, but I never saw them here again. The ground fell away and I was on a bridge, not a tunnel, with the fields twenty feet below me to either side. But the real bridge over the river was long gone. The river here turned sharply, and tumbling over rocks it had gouged out a sheer bank perhaps forty feet high. I crossed one last stream, on a bridge of two logs, and the last part of my journey was through dense woodland high over the river. First mixed woodland, then stands of old conifers where the sparrowhawks nested. I would watch out for them here, and sometimes I would even see them over the village. Finally I would emerge from the woods and, after crossing one field of head-high corn, come to the road-bridge that led to the village.

  Just past the bridge was a fine beach with a swimming hole, and I would often pause here for a while if the weather was good. In spite of its proximity to the village there was almost never anyone else here. As I stepped into the water thousands of tiny fish would dart away from the shallows, and before long there would be a loud chikeee and a lightning bolt in neon blue would flash past. The kingfishers nested in the bank here every year without fail, even though the village boys would sometimes stopper their holes with stones as a game. It was a good place to bring guests; even people with no real interest in birds like to see a kingfisher — they are just so glamorous and unexpectedly tiny, and the sighting was almost guaranteed.

  After loading up with supplies, I would need to make a decision; whether to retrace my steps along the riverbank or walk back along the lanes. Almost anyone who lived along these lanes and who passed by would stop and give me a lift, but there were not many of them, and I could easily find myself walking the whole way back without a car passing. And it was a lot further. About a quarter of the way home from the village was my local telephone box, but I wouldn’t stop. This would be a separate trip, on a Sunday when people would not be at work, but of course then the shop would not be open either.

  I remember once walking to the village shop, collecting up my few basic requirements and taking them up to the counter, and as I spoke to the shopkeeper my voice cracked. It was only then that I realized I hadn’t spoken a word in at least two weeks. It also made me aware that I never talked to myself, never sang to myself, not ever.

  Going down to cross the river one day after I had already been at the cottage a year or two, I came upon a team of men renovating the old footbridge. It was probably not before time; I was used to it, but my visitors would sometimes be alarmed by how it swayed and rocked. If you walked fast, it would roll like a wave under your feet, and the suspension would creak and groan. And it was a long way down to the rocky waters below. I got chatting to the foreman of the gang, and found that his family was the last to live at Penlan. He had lived there until he was seven, when the family had decanted to town. He asked me if I snared many rabbits up there, and I said none at all, as I was vegetarian. Then he asked the route I followed into the village, and was delighted to discover that my chosen path was almost identical to his daily walk to the village school. The railway bridge was still standing then, which would have cut out that final dog-leg, and reduced the journey time a little, but even so it was an astonishing distance for a five-year-old to cover twice a day. And he had to be there at seven o’clock sharp, or face the consequences. I asked him if he could conceive of living that life now, and he said absolutely, he loved it, except … except for one thing. He could not imagine life without a television.

  Less often I travelled into town, which had a health-food shop where I could stock up on dried pulses for my one-pot stews and fine-ground flour for the unleavened bread I made on a griddle over the fire. There was a hardware store for paraffin for my lamps and seeds for the garden, and a library. Occasionally I would take the daily postbus, but usually I hitchhiked. These were not busy roads, but I got lifts from regulars. The Travellers from a nearby site would stop for me without fail, as did a retired man who lived up-valley opposite the quarry. He would always tell me when the peregrines had returned to their eyrie. He’d spent his entire working life researching foxes for the Ministry of Agriculture, and was now spending his entire retirement travelling to and from the nearest golf course. In view of his wealth of experience, I asked him his opinion on whether or not foxes are pests. After some consideration he said: No, foxes are not pests, the foxes were here first. People are pests.

  It was not a large garden. I say garden, but perhaps I should say the area around the cottage enclosed by a fence, for it had few attributes to distinguish it from the fields across that fence, although in February there would be a drift of snowdrops under my fruit tree, soon to be followed first by crocuses and then by huge numbers of daffodils. Long ago, someone had planted a scattering of bulbs, and over the years they had divided and divided so that each bulb became a cluster, and now in March the cottage would be surrounded by hundreds of nodding golden heads. Without the sheep coming in to trim it, the grass grew in rank tussocks that I had to hack back with a sickle. Besides the fruit tree, the jackdaw ash and the cotoneaster next to the porch, there was one small rhododendron and a clump of blackthorn by the gate. Once, before my time, a solitary pine had stood guard over the house from above the quarry wall, but it had been unlucky. The landlords, fearing that the ash balanced on the rocks would come crashing down on the cottage roof, had sent up a man to fell it, and he had mistakenly taken out the pine instead. The ash lived on to teeter another day, and teeters still, twenty years later. All that remains of the pine is its stump, a favoured perch for the green woodpeckers when they visit. I planted out a larch to stand in for the lonesome pine, and in the south-west corner of the garden a beech, which will one day afford the cottage a little shelter from the prevailing wind. Then a couple of rowans, for berries for the birds, and a buddleia for the butterflies. Apart from a row of poppies and wild flowers along the fence, I didn’t trouble with flowers. I needed the land for food.

  Although I planted a patch of herbs — coriander, dill and parsley, which were unavailable locally — my priority was the heavy vegetables. I didn’t want to be hauling sackfuls of potatoes up the mountainside when I could be growing them myself. Preparing the land was hard work; the roots of the grass grew deep and tangled. Then I had to pick out all the rocks, carefully lift any daffodil bulbs for transplant-ation elsewhere, and lime the soil. Each year I would dig an extra patch, and prepare another for the next year by pegging down a sheet of tarpaulin with bricks to kill off the grass. I didn’t want to use any pesticides, and besides the lime I bought no fertilizer. Each winter, when the bats were long gone to their hibernation roost, I would clamber up into the loft and shovel up bagfuls of guano. It was dry and powdery and odourless, and it seemed somehow appropriate that the bats who shared my home with me should help me grow my food.

  I had never grown anything before, I had never stayed in one place long enough to even think about it, and had no idea what would grow well at this altitude, and in a location so exposed to the elements, so it was a process of trial and error. Each year I would try a few new things; if they grew well they would become a fixture; if they failed I would abandon them and try something else. I had a small patch of early potatoes, and a larger patch of main crops. I got a metal dustbin which I kept in the pantry and would fill it to the top with these, enough to last the whole year. Onions and garlic I hung on strings on the woodshed wall, as the mice didn’t ever bother th
em. Garlic was the only thing I planted in autumn; growing garlic seems magical in its simplicity. Take a head of garlic, break it into cloves and plant them in a row. By the next year each clove will have turned into a new head.

  Carrots and parsnips I stored in the ground and lifted when I needed them. The carrots in particular were a revelation; they are hard to grow in most places because of the depredations of the carrot fly, but the altitude here kept my crop pest-free. They grew to over a pound in weight without becoming woody, were such a deep orange they were almost red, and tasted better than any others I have had before or since. My first year I grew a fine crop of broad beans, but the next year and the one after they were infested by blackfly just as the pods were beginning to swell. The blackfly brought a fungal infection that wiped out the entire crop, so reluctantly I had to give up on them. My biggest problem was finding the right green vegetable. I could pick wild greens in season — sorrel and nettle tops, occasionally watercress from the mountain streams — but I needed something that I could rely on. Cabbages were destroyed by flea beetles, and though I managed a small crop of kale it was riddled with holes. Spinach was too inclined to bolt and had a short season. Then I found spinach beet, untroubled by pests and hardy enough to survive the worst of the winter’s frosts. I could dust away the snow and pluck the fresh leaves below, so I had a supply of greens year-round. But if there is a satisfaction to be had from selecting and picking food you have grown yourself as and when it is time to eat, I found far more pleasure in foraging for wild food. Perhaps I am more in touch with my inner hunter-gatherer than my inner pastoralist.

  The mushroom season began in late summer. These Welsh hills are renowned for their hallucinogenic psilo-cybin mushrooms. In a good year they would be hidden under every tussock of grass, their potency belied by how drab and inconspicuous they were. But I am talking here about edible mushrooms. Not so much the familiar field mushroom, which I seldom came across, though I would often find horse mushrooms in the fields, bigger and firmer and with a whiff of aniseed. A ring of them would always appear under the old ash just across the fence from my fruit tree, so I didn’t have far to go for them. One year though, there was an incredible glut of field mushrooms, the year the farmer decided to plough and reseed the top field. This field had last been ploughed over twenty years ago, and I would be told the full story by the farmer.

  In my front field just over the track lay an old harrow. It had been there so long it had sunk into the ground with only a few tines emerging through the grass to catch out the unwary. This is the way here; there seemed to be rusting pieces of farming equipment in the corner of every field, apparently forgotten but actually not, just waiting until they were next required. Even if that wait was twenty years or more. The farmer came up the track with his tractor and a chain and dragged the harrow out of the ground, then called me out to see the voles’ nest he had unearthed. The nest was a soft ball of finely cut grass, and the baby voles were pink and blind and hairless. I held the nest in my hands, then we replaced it carefully under a sod of turf.

  The hillside here was steep, extremely steep in places, and when it had last been ploughed the tractor had tipped right over and trapped the farmer beneath it. He lay pinned there all day, until he was missed at dinner time and his relatives came looking for him. His pelvis had been crushed and he never walked freely again. Once the top field had been ploughed and harrowed again, without incident this time, and before the new seed had started to sprout, while the field was still seemingly lifeless, bare brown earth, the mushrooms appeared during the night. Great drifts of white, as if there had been a snowfall. In a single trip I collected ten to fifteen pounds of them without making much visible difference. The smaller ones, their gills still pale pink, I reserved for cooking; the bigger ones with blackened gills I chopped up and salted down in buckets. In a few days this produced over two litres of mushroom ketchup, seasoning that would last me for years.

  There is not much of a tradition in Britain of collecting forest mushrooms, people seem wary of them, but I had lived in Sweden, where foraging in the woods in autumn is practically a national pastime, so I knew my mushrooms. The first to come into season, in August or even sometimes July, were the chanterelles. They grew in the dingle by my stream, though only on the north bank. I never found a single one on the southern bank, where instead there were forest orchids, narrow-leaved helleborines, which never crossed the stream either. Chanterelles are beautiful mushrooms, glowing apricot in colour, and many of mine were a variety tinged with a dusting of amethyst. It was like finding precious jewels shining in the leaf litter, in the darkness under the thick trees. And they are a great mushroom to pick, both for flavour and for the fact that they are completely untroubled by the mushroom flies, whose worms ruin many species of mushroom before they are big enough to eat. There would be more than I could eat so I would preserve them to extend their short season. It is easy enough to dry mushrooms, but they lose so much of their flavour in the process. Instead, I would cook them in their own juices and a little vinegar, then drain and pack them in jars with dill and coriander seeds from the garden, then fill the jars to the brim with olive oil, taking care to shake out any trapped bubbles of air. And that way they would last me until their season began again.

  As the chanterelles came to an end, the mushroom season proper began. Most visible of all were the parasols. Tall and elegant in white and fawn, they seemed to fringe every field and every track. When fully grown their caps can be as big as a plate, and I would coat them in batter or breadcrumbs and fritter them whole. There were far more of them than could possibly be eaten. There must have been at least fifteen types of mushroom that I collected and ate regularly; to my tastes, the best of all was the cep, with a thick, bulging stalk and a rich chestnut cap with yellow gills. They also grew down at the dingle by the stream, but only in small numbers and they never seemed to appear in the same place twice, so finding one was always a pleasant surprise. I would break the cap in two to check for worms; if they were unaffected, one mushroom would be enough for a meal.

  And then there were the berries. I would make thirty jars of jam each year — not that I needed thirty jars for myself, but they made an appropriate gift for departing guests. There were brambles everywhere, especially along the lanes and the abandoned cart track by my stream, and blackberry jam would account for perhaps ten jars’ worth. Blackberrying had been a feature of my childhood; there is a sense of innocence to it, the prickles snagging on your clothes, the purple-stained fingers. There were a few wild strawberries along the lanes, but these were too small to be anything more than a treat in passing. On the steep hillside beyond my postbox was a mature plantation, five or ten times the size of my own little Penlan Wood, and in the very heart of it was a hidden clearing that I had stumbled upon. It was filled with wild raspberries. A few jars of raspberry jam, and plenty more for eating fresh. Halfway down the track to the farm were the remains of another farmhouse or labourer’s cottage. The barest trace of it remained, less even than of Penlan Farm, but there were two damson trees beside the ruins. It was ironic that the fruit trees they had planted had long outlived their home. I had to compete with the blackbirds and thrushes, but would always get enough for a few jars of plum jam to add to the store.

  Bilberry jam was the biggest treat, to be stirred into steaming hot porridge on a winter’s morning. Bilberries thrive where the heather grows deep and tall, and most of the hills here were far too heavily grazed for heather. If I found bilberry plants at all on my hill, they would be stunted and cropped to an inch high, and would seldom fruit at all. But there was one hillside that had been protected from heavy grazing, where the heather blazed purple as summer ended, and I would head here every year for a basket of berries. It was a longish walk upriver, through a tiny village with no shops at all where the swifts screamed all summer long. The hillside, waist-high in heather, was fringed by beautiful hanging oak woods and had a character all its own; more like a dry heath than the we
t, boggy moorland I was used to. Cuckoos called constantly here in season, and I once found the egg case of a grass snake, the only sign I ever saw of one. The land here was too cold and damp for reptiles; I would occasionally see a common lizard or a slow-worm sunning itself on a rock, but even these were a novelty.

  If there was a shortfall on my target figure of thirty jars, I would make up the difference with crab jelly. My top field had a scattering of crab apples on it; they didn’t fruit every year but seemed to take turns, so that every year one single tree would be laden with hard little apples. The jelly was quite plain so I would flavour the jars variously; with sloes from the blackthorns by my gate, with elderberries from the hedgerows, or with rowanberries from the mountain ashes in the hills.

  I experimented with making alcohol, using an old recipe I had found for elderflower champagne. It bubbled away for a month on the stone shelf in my pantry until it was time for bottling. I took a sip; it was foul, so in my disappointment I just shoved the bottles to the back of my shelves and forgot about them. A year later, I needed the bottles, so I took them out to tip the experiment away. Almost as an afterthought I decided to give it another try, and it was absolutely delicious. Some sort of alchemy had taken place over the year they had been left undisturbed. So that too became a part of my annual routine; elders were everywhere so I could make as much as I wanted.

  By the time the first frosts came in November, my shelves would be laden with jars of jam and pickled mushrooms, bottles of ketchup and wine, and whatever else I had preserved that year. What vegetables could not be left out to overwinter would be harvested and stored. I would be like a squirrel with my cache of nuts to keep me through the hard times to come. The hatches would be battened down; I was ready for the worst. Happiness is a full larder.