The Secret History of Here

by Alistair Moffat

  In a hill town in southern Tuscany this umbilical connection still survives and its history has recently been commemorated by an evocative and beautifully formed bronze sculpture in the main piazza. I know Pitigliano very well and used to stay there, sometimes to work. In 2008 a dignified and attractive ceremony unveiled Il Villano e il suo asino, the countryman (or peasant) with his donkey. He is putting a wooden pack saddle on the little donkey (whose head is down, looking a little weary) before going out to work in the fields around the town. His hat and clothes are post-war in style, and until the end of the 1950s townsmen led their donkeys under the medieval archway every morning. Their fields are still there, a pattern of lush cultivation, rows of vines, tomato plants, zucchini beds, dreels of potatoes. All of that glorious profusion, well-watered and glowing in the sunshine, can be seen at the foot of the cliffs the town perches on. Now, the donkeys have been replaced with little three-wheeled trucks known as Piaggio Ape that sound like bronchitic lawnmowers.

  In the narrow and shaded medieval streets of Pitigliano, houses have what are known as cantine, cellars cut into the soft volcanic rock called tufa. These long tunnels often burrow underground for several metres. Very cool, even in the midday Tuscan sun, some were used to stable the donkeys and many as stores for the food grown in the fields. Hams hang from hooks and the excellent local white wine matures in huge barrels called botte. I remember seeing an old lady going into her cantina with two empty two-litre plastic bottles and coming out with both filled to the neck with the characteristic greenish wine. It had a white, frothy head. I wished her good morning and, as we chatted, she put the bottles back in the shade of the old oak doors of the cantina to keep them cool. Shelves were lined with rows of large jars full of preserved fruit and vegetables, and several rounds of pecorino cheese were stored well beyond the reach of mice, waiting for winter. There were apples set on what looked like brown-papered shelves and a basket of large tomatoes that looked like pumpkins. The summer harvest around Pitigliano is long, lasting from June to early October, and its fruits keep well in the cool cantine.

  Small medieval Scottish towns worked in the same way. Early in the morning donkeys and sometimes carts were trundled out of Selkirk’s West Port and onto the fields of the common around our farm. Buckets were brought to milk the cows and probably carried back suspended from milkmaids’ yokes. If each bucket was a similar size and filled with roughly the same volume, these yokes not only helped with the heavy weight, they were remarkably stable, rarely spilling a drop. Other sorts of food, such as barley and oats, were harvested and stored in the townspeople’s cellars as long as possible, sealed tight to keep out vermin. Winter forage was also essential to keep a cow fed. And so when the Hartwoodburn men came up before the sheriff and were convicted of illegally grazing our fields, I hope their fines were hefty.

  3 May

  This morning I was much moved by a trivial, simple detail. Amongst the birches on the margins of the Bottom Track, one with a rich, red bark took a terrible beating in last year’s summer storms. About halfway up its peeling trunk, a major limb had almost been torn off and come to rest not on the ground but on the branches of a sitka spruce that stands beside it. To my great surprise, the bough had kept enough of a connection with the trunk to come into leaf this spring and help the birch to photosynthesise and grow. I liked that – mutual support amongst the community of the trees.

  4 May

  It is very cold this morning, a bitter wind blowing out of the north-east that feels as though it has come straight off the wastes of Siberia. Even though the sun is brilliant in a cloudless, cerulean blue sky, the eye-blearing, ear-nipping cold means it does not feel like a May morning. The buds are closed tight against the overnight frost and, having been out all night in it, the horses in the Tile Field stand motionless, side on to the rising sun, soaking up its warmth across as much of their body area as possible. Maidie and I hurry on down the Long Track.

  I read yesterday that by 2050 two-thirds of the world’s population will live in large cities. Even now there are hundreds in China and India that are so new I don’t recognise their names. These migrations mean that a mass consciousness of the natural rhythms of the planet will be much reduced and most people will cease to observe the cycle of growth through the seasons. There are satellite photos taken in darkness that show dense concentrations of light in Western Europe, the USA, India and China. That means many fewer people can see the stars and planets of the night sky. Far from being cosmopolitan, cities close down the world and the cosmos, shrink horizons and diminish our sense of how the world’s seasons change.

  On our farm, I have learned that the weather and not the calendar turns time. At the beginning of May last year, a long, warm and dry period began with average temperatures double this morning’s values at over seventy degrees Fahrenheit (about twenty-one degrees Celsius). These conditions created a different landscape. A year ago I could smell the sweet scent of the stand of poplars at the gate into the Deer Park and the strawberries-and-cream blossom of the geans was everywhere. In the raised beds, my early potatoes had pushed up into the light (only to be earthed over) and the plum and apple trees were white with the flowers that would become fruit. The well-worn and much misunderstood phrase advising caution, ‘Ne’er cast a clout till May is out’, has nothing to do with the calendar. Winter clothes should only go back in the wardrobe when the blossom on the May Tree is out, a sign that the year has turned and the weather warmed.

  5 May

  Potatoes are much cheaper to buy than to grow when the cost of labour is taken into account, but last year’s earlies tasted sweet and earthy at the same time, a subtlety not available in the shops. And when they were cut prior to cooking, the juice shot out as though they were lemons. Even so, their clean, fresh taste is not why I grow the humble potato. I want to be involved in the cycle, have an annual harvest of some small sort and feel that our land could be productive. As the years roll on, I hope to plant more vegetables, rotate crops and build more raised beds. In the windless warmth of the old conservatory, the tomatoes are a riot of burgeoning greenery that will soon need support. Like me.

  6 May

  Illness prevented the planned survey of the area of the Doocot Field where Rory dug out the piece of lead that was suggestive of a structure of some sort. We hope to get out next weekend. But meanwhile the mystery has deepened. Using baby oil to clean the piece of lead and show up any detail, Rory has discovered a surprising series of markings along the thickest edge. A row of vertical and precisely horizontal straight lines cut with a chisel, a burin or some other sharp tool, they are not accidental. But what do they mean?

  At first Rory thought they might be a line of Ogham, the tree language I found on the inscribed stone in the Deer Park, but they don’t look right to me. Ogham is usually arranged on either side of an edge, an analogy for the trunk of a tree, and the stones sometimes have two flat planes. Or the inscriptions can be vertical, often cut into stones carved for other uses, such as standing stones, tombstones or crosses. Many that were carved on flat planes have a clear stemline that the letters cross or are attached to. These marks on the lead are not arranged in any of those patterns. I wonder if they are tally marks, a sequence of early arithmetic. In an age before paper, workmen made notes on all sorts of surfaces, including stone and lead. The marks look a little like five-bar gates, a common method of tallying I still sometimes use.

  Which leads to another question. What was being counted? Quantities in a building project? And if so, where was the building? It could have stood some distance from the find-spot. As it is now, lead was valuable and Rory might have retrieved a chunk of stolen property.

  Enigmas like this are exhilarating and they prompt the past to come racing back across the centuries, make a grass field nibbled by ewes and their lambs come alive, reminding us that we are only one of many, the most recent generation to walk our lives under the big skies of the Borders. The dozens of silver pennies Rory has discovered rem
ember the workings of a money economy based on precious metals, carried in pouches and lost on a forgotten journey up the Long Track. They are resonant echoes of transactions we can understand, and sometimes they are very surprising, like the imperial coin of Otto IV from Germany. But the piece of lead is different, perhaps impossible to understand. Is it evidence of a crime, the coldest of cold cases, or a tantalising fragment of an important building long lost in the grass? The wooden houses of our medieval ancestors were almost entirely built from organic, perishable materials. They did not use lead to keep their roofs watertight or their windows draught-proof. Somewhere important, a building of high status, is hiding from us and so is its story.

  My morning walk with Maidie through a soft drizzle revealed an image of cheer, of hope. In a moss-covered old tree trunk by the edges of the Bottom Track that I had thought was a boulder, two birch saplings have seeded, their leaves bright lime-green and flushed with vigour. Inside that old stump lies a store of ancient goodness. And the sight of such unlikely fecundity sparked another thought. The underground web of thread-like connections between trees – old, young and even apparently dead – that is so memorably described in Peter Wohlleben’s magical book The Hidden Life of Trees may suggest an alternative to Darwinian evolution. Perhaps there is co-operation as well as competition in the natural world. The fittest trees survive with the help of their ancestors.

  10 May

  After three days away for work, when I took Maidie out this morning she greeted me as though she had seen me yesterday and not last Monday. I imagine that is how canine memory works; habits of life trump the ticking of the calendar. As we walked up the Bottom Track, it was strewn with blossom snow. The small, white flowers of the geans had been falling in the overnight breeze. On the Top Track there were welcome puddles in the potholes from two rainy days when I had been in Ireland. It surprised me how quickly I could switch from thinking about making television to the concerns of our farm.

  Up in the Deer Park, the western vistas were lit by a cold sun and I began to make plans for the summer, listing what needed to be done. Potatoes should be earthed over to keep the tender leaves from overnight frosts, tomatoes need to be trained, lettuces planted in the old conservatory and a winter store of logs cut. The circle turns constantly.

  12 May

  On this windless morning the land lay still under an open sky, the sun brilliant and warming. The buds of the big gean at Windy Gates are slowly unclenching and even the spindly birch near it is putting out shoots and leaves. It has always been a sickly little tree, its roots probably wrapped around a big stone. While it has reached only half the height of the avenue of trees by the side of the Top Track, I sympathise with its gameness as it struggles for life and I like the yellow lichen on its lower limbs. It looks to me like the little kid in the corner of the playground, hoping to evade the notice of the big bruisers making all that noise.

  We have many fewer swallows this spring and so far no house martins have come north to us from Africa. I fear that the crash of insect populations is beginning to shudder through the food chain and climate change may be claiming more early casualties before its effects really begin to bite. But the sparrows, once under threat, have come back and they have colonised the martins’ old nests above the porch. Plump, pleased with themselves, bold and bossy, I like their attitude.

  13 May

  Up early, Grace banged on the window as Maidie and I passed, on our way up the Bottom Track on another sun-flushed morning. In a red Minnie Mouse dress, warm tights, blue wellies, a quilted jacket with important pockets and an orange baseball cap, the three-year-old splashed colour in the green landscape and I began to see it through her eyes. First we watched the wee Westie sniff the tracks of the naughty rabbits as they wiggled between the trees into the deep, dark wood. Where there are pixies . . . On the Top Track we sang a nonsense song and at Windy Gates turned to look for the Dangerous Brothers, the lambs careering around the fields at Huppanova.

  Maidie did a poop and was given a treat by Grace. And then we walked off together into the sunlit Deer Park. Grace took my middle finger in her hand, still too small to grasp any more of mine, and I felt tears prickle. I’m not sure why. These moments are precious, I know, and I realise that I will probably not live to see the little one fully flower into a sparkling young woman. But I often think that my control of my emotions, never tight at the best of times, is slackening, close to embarrassing.

  14 May

  To those who lived through the wet, frost and snow of the Little Ice Age and who survived the Black Death of the fourteenth century, it must have seemed that God was often angry. Plague returned to the Borders in the early sixteenth century and a sustained period of poor summers produced meagre harvests. Hunger sharpened attitudes in ways we no long experience. Food was eked out and nothing thrown away. My grannie Bina remembered a life when there were occasional shortages, if harvests had been disappointing, and she was horrified if my sisters and I did not clean our plates. A little chubbiness around the middle was seen as good insurance.

  ‘Kitchen your meat!’ was her motto, and by that she meant that any morsel of ham or beef should be well padded out with various sorts of carbohydrates. On a round, thick, black, cast-iron griddle (which she pronounced ‘girdle’, an example of metathesis, the shifting of consonants, common amongst country people – Bina talked of pattrens and new things were modren) that she set directly on the highest flame the old, grey gas cooker could muster, all sorts of old-fashioned, filling foods were made.

  After mixing a paste of oatmeal, flour, fat and some water, she rolled out thick oatcakes and laid them on the griddle to sizzle and pop. A much more runny dough was poured on in dollops to make sweet dropscones and she also made buttery, crunchy, hard biscuits. Into the oven went scones and bannocks. Very little bread was eaten, and Bina told me that in the cottage at Cliftonhill where she was born and raised it was a treat to have what she called ‘wheaten’ bread. Shop-bought and white, it was eaten on special occasions with butter and jam. Dumplings called doughboys were dropped into stews to bulk them out and in Bina’s kitchen absolutely nothing was wasted. Anything she could not immediately think of a use for was tipped into the ever-simmering soup pan.

  15 May

  Blearily making tea in the kitchen at about 6 a.m. after a restless, tossing, sultry night, a flash of rapid flight flickered on the edge of my field of vision and made me turn my head quickly. And suddenly they were here. Four house martins, unmistakable with the distinctive white bands across their tails, were flying in and out of the corner of the terrace where they built last year’s nests. I think they had just arrived, found their way back home after a six thousand-mile journey from Africa, crossing deserts, seas, mountains and up the length of Britain. Sparrows have been investigating the old pods of mud that clung to the eaves through the winter and so these four weary travellers might seek another site to settle and raise their broods. But they are here, wherever they nest, and I am much cheered.

  Out early on another sun-blessed morning, I felt that warmth and light make the world a room, a place to linger, to sit down on a grassy bank, the dew long dried, and watch and listen. There was a peace on our place this morning, only birdsong to be heard, and all of the animals seemed content: the ewes moving slowly, nibbling the sweet spring grass and their lambs for once not on springs. We turned along the Deer Park track and past the badger setts. Mounds of excavated earth and several well-worn entrances and exits on the edge of the wood suggest an underground complex of tunnels and many chambers. I thought of the little grey bears curled up in the cool, full of last night’s hunting and scavenging, sleeping sound while the world’s room warmed above them.

  Thinking that we were bringing food, Suzie and Rosie, our two old mares, came walking up an old track, past a bank of egg-yolk yellow gorse. The sun was behind them as they plodded unhurried towards us. As I rubbed their velvet noses, their breath smelled of fresh morning grass and, without their rugs in the
heat, I could see that the good weather after last week’s rain had helped them put on glossy condition.

  At the foot of the western flanks of the Deer Park we buried Tom, my daughter Beth’s old pony and the first horse we bought and learned from. Full of feisty character and talent, Tom was much loved and we planted a rowan for remembrance over his grave. Like he did, it exudes life and vigour.

  Summer storms two years ago brought down two major limbs from a stately old chestnut tree near where I found the Ogham stone. Most of the fallen wood has been off the ground and, with the bark beginning to flake off, I could see that it was well seasoned. When I get round to organising a logging weekend with Adam, Beth and her husband Ross, we will harvest that dense wood, and all its years of growing will burn bright in the winter fires. Last spring I noticed a sapling growing where we dumped many tons of topsoil (after digging out an arena next to the stables) by the Deer Park track. Now I see it is a tall, leggy tree, a child of the chestnut with the fallen limbs. Its roots will reach down into the goodness of the topsoil and soon grow to an established maturity. I hope to see it.

  18 May

  After welcome overnight rain followed by a soft drizzle this morning, the land has come alive. Leaves have unfurled and are almost fully out, the warmth and the wet having worked their magic. The scent of fresh is everywhere. The last big tree near the farmhouse to come out is the ash I planted by our boundary fence, and its shoots are now showing. More showers are forecast for the next few days, and when the sun returns the hundred shades of green will once more colour the landscape.