A stertorous old man disturbs my peace. Well, for one second at least, I believed it to be an old man.
Hedgehogs are the quintessential mammals of the hedgerow, fossicking around the bottom for slugs, beetles and other invertebrates, and using its secret dark heart for hibernation in winter. In summertime, they will sometimes make a daytime nest in the hedge bottom for a snooze. Although resident in Britain since the last ice age, the hedgehog has declined by as much as 25 per cent in ten years, according to surveys by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species. They wander as much as a mile and a half a night.
It is not an exaggeration that hedgehogs snore; he is wheezing away under the brambles in my broken-down wild corner.
That night: a veil of cloud keeps the huge moon at bay, which retorts by dousing the cloud with an oil-on-water rainbow sheen. The tawny owls are hunting over the meadow, like giant, dimly perceived moths. July and August are the months of the second diaspora of mouldywarp young, when they travel the great distance of five hundred yards or so from their birth burrow. One crawls childishly along in my torch beam, the locomotive power almost entirely provided by the back legs. The long nose sniffs ceaselessly for danger.
13 AUGUST A typical sultry August ‘dog-day’, named for Sirius, the Dog Star, which now rises and sets with the sun. I see the first brimstone butterfly of the year, a flitting shock of sulphur in and out of the hazel hedge. Brimstones are one of the few butterflies that pass the winter as an adult; they emerge from their pupa cabinet at the end of July. She flutters up high, and an unnoticed male launches after her. They transport themselves on a breath of air to the shady thicket, where she dives down, the male (and I) in hot pursuit. On the ivy wrapped around an alder she disports herself, and there she mates.
Coition was still in progress the next afternoon.
14 AUGUST An anaconda of fog comes slithering up the narrow valley bottom in the evening, on, on, following precisely every turn of the river, to lie suffocatingly on top of us.
A herd of weaned calves have been put in the field next to the paddock. Our girls sing to them, heads flat out, a tuneful lowing.
17 AUGUST Penny and I have a sort of busman’s day off, and go for a walk around The Parks, the wildflower nature reserve at Dulas, three miles away. For about five hundred years The Parks used to belong to Dulas Court, the home of the Dulas branch of the Parry family, until they sold it in 1840. The new owners demolished the old house and chapel, and built afresh. Clearly the Fieldens did not want the great Victorian unwashed within sniffing distance, and relocated the chapel in a field across the lane. This turned out to be a favour to botany; the grassland between the graves is the finest species-rich grassland in the valley, and home to the common spotted orchid. God’s acre is one of the few places safe from HS2 and Bovis.
The Parks is always a bit of a revelation. Lower Meadow is a fairly traditionally maintained hay field, whereas The Parks is, as we say in Herefordshire, ‘the proper job’. The flowers seem to outnumber the grasses.
18 AUGUST In the newt ditch I spot baby palmate newts, an inch long, gills like fins. Chameleon frogs too, water boatmen, pond skaters. The air whines with mosquitoes; their name comes from the Greek muia, an onomatopoeic rendering of the noise they make when flying.
The grass in the uncut islands is so bronzed it looks like ripe wheat. In the belt of thistles the heads are white and ripe and explode at the touch, unless you are very gentle; they could be used as make-up brushes for a woman’s skin. There’s a languor on the scene; a peacock butterfly dries its wings on hogweed by the river, much as a dog stretches out in self-satisfaction before a fire.
The badgers like the green baize of my mown areas; three of them appear late, around midnight, and waddle along slurping up worms in the moonlight.
22 AUGUST Evening. The hills and mountain are smoked white by haze. I am standing in the field with my shotgun, eyeing the rabbits. There are about twelve of them, mostly grazing, one or two cleaning their faces with their paws. One of the first to come out, a heavy buck, has defecated on top of the ant mound closest to the warren, a signal of territorial intent.
I am unsure about the current kinship pattern in the warren, or its relation to other warrens nearby. There is quite a lot of rabbit fur around the anthills, the residue of rabbit in-fighting. In a Gerald Ratner moment Richard Adams, the author of Watership Down, declared that real rabbits were ‘boring’. Animals have what I term a ‘danger diameter’; the rabbits consider that at forty yards I am too far away to kill. Animals can also detect motive; as soon as I level the shotgun, they will be alert, then they will scram.
Playing God with a gun is not always fun; I settle on a luckless young rabbit (but not a baby) nearest me, push the safety catch off, advance five yards and fire. Whether it has been with a bow and arrow, a falcon or a gun, killing game in a meadow is as old as the meadows.
27 AUGUST Note on paper, scrawled during the day. ‘Squirrel in hazels pulling the trees apart to get at the not yet ripe nuts. Not very eco.’ I should have added that the chandeliers of elderberries are almost blackly ripe. Plants are a calendar marking the days, the seasons.
In the afternoon, driving down the lane, I get a fright when a polecat pokes its head out of the ditch to give me a malevolent look. I stop the car. Through the open window the rosebay willow herbs tremble under the weight of the sucking bees, and a hidden yellowhammer raps out its hard call of ‘little bit of bread and no cheese’. For a minute the ferret-faced polecat and I are lost in mutual suspicion. There is no need for me to observe the Jefferies rule of observation; at two feet in length the polecat is all too aware of its own power. I tire first, and drive off. In the rear-view mirror I see the polecat staring after me. Despite the heat, I shiver.
29 AUGUST The distance is veiled in amaranth vapour; the mountain heather an inferno. After a day in the tractor topping weeds on some land we rent about six miles away, I lie for five minutes’ bliss in the field. I see a fox (one of the young from the den) eat a blackberry in Marsh Field, by standing on its legs and plucking with its mouth. A lovely moment for a lazy man.
30 AUGUST A robin is singing in the copse. Past the August moult, it is laying early if wistful claim to a winter territory. A great tit provides accompaniment, with its ‘teacher, teacher’ refrain. There’s a tiredness in the air.
SEPTEMBER
Damselfly
THE MONTH OF half summer, half autumn. Half sophistication, half barbarity.
I have put the cows in the simmering field. Under the shade of the Grove hazels, only their candy Ermintrude noses betray them. When the Red Poll deign to advance into the meadow to graze on the aftermath, their coats shine like conkers. Cattle are good for flowery meadows because their grazing creates a variety of sward heights, important for providing suitable nesting and feeding conditions for birds.
Despite the lingering tones of summer, you can tell autumn is on its way. The thistles and nettles along the Marsh Field hedge are bowing over, elderly and huddled, unable to support their own weight.
A crow rows through the sky.
Wasps soporifically suck on blackberries.
3 SEPTEMBER I suddenly realize that the swifts have gone. No fanfare. Just a prestidigitator’s trick, a disappearance into the morning’s mist. Inside I sigh a little. One of life’s allotment of summers is over.
As I take the morning walk to check the sheep, three mallard whistle down out of the sky and alight, skidding on the river; I stalk them later with binoculars. I am near certain it is the mallard mother with two of her offspring; the pair have the grey beak of youth.
6 SEPTEMBER An azure damselfly in the meadow, a slender jewel kept aloft on the gauze wings of fairies. Damselflies, along with their cousins the dragonflies, make up the scientific order Odonata and are almost unchanged since prehistoric times. They are marvels of engineering, able to alter the angle and beat of each of their four wings so they can fly up, down, sideways or backwards and hover for up to a minut
e. Some dragonflies can reach speeds in excess of 30mph. Voracious predators, the adults locate their flying meat meal by use of their bulbous outsize eyes, which can see in almost all directions at once. They will eat almost any insect with wings, even bees. And crane flies.
Masses of crane flies or daddy-long-legs are now hatching in the field, their jerky, marionette motion a constant loathsome intrusion. One flies into my face, its limbs trailing across my cheek. I’d like to brush it away, but know the movement would scare the adolescent fox across the field. Her coat has lost its baby grey, and she is a resplendent starlet in her red fur.
She is sitting, transfixed.
A female spotted flycatcher (a notoriously late nester) is repetitively launching herself off the top strand of barbed wire under the copse, seizing a gangling crane fly from the air before returning to her vantage point on the fence. She is a shooting sylph of silver. Her solitary offspring, also sitting between the barbs, is Bunteresque, with a silent, insistent sense of entitlement.
The teenage vixen moves closer to the flycatcher, and sits again.
I have presumed too evil an intention to the fox. She leaps not after a flycatcher but after a crane fly. For over twenty minutes of this sultry, languid evening fox and flycatcher leap at crane flies side by side.
Crane flies, the hatched adult of the leatherjacket, are not an entirely satisfactory meal for a fox. The vixen realizes this, and slopes off.
Crane flies are feast enough for a flycatcher. The next day, fuelled up, it flies south for winter. The youngster also disappears. Of the summer migrants only the chiffchaff, blackcap, house martins and swallows now remain.
Fish-scales of yellow moonlight fall on the river. The hedges have the unmistakable liquorice smell of dying leaves that signals autumn.
Cows might be domesticated, but wild habits die hard. They lie tonight in a circle, facing out, to see the danger that might come from any direction. Something about the angle of the moonlight increases both their antiquity and size. They might be mastodons, the black beasts I am crouching behind, hiding.
I have come down to the meadow, alarmed at the unholy noise in the night. But the cattle are quiet; the villain of the peace is twenty yards away on the silver sward. The old boar badger is in the meadow, making the throaty gargle that passes for wooing in the Meles meles species.
After an agony of cramp for me, the dominant sow, who has been his wife for two years now, deigns to make an appearance, coquettishly slinking under the wire.
A few moments of half-hearted kiss-chase follow; badgers, though, are not big on foreplay. Grunting furiously, the boar clambers on the back of the sow, clamps her neck between his teeth to keep her in place. The light is too indistinct to make out more; my mind, for reasons not difficult to fathom, recollects that Victorian fathers of the bride gave tie pins made of badger penis-bone to the new son-in-law to ensure fertility.
It is not the sight or sound of badgers mating that is remarkable. It is the cloud of rank musk, overpowering at even twenty yards downwind, that the act unleashes. If you have smelt it you will know why badgers are related to skunks.
10 SEPTEMBER Along the luxuriant river bank, underneath the alders, it could be the green time of spring; one has to look hard for the signals of autumn. They are there, though: the burs from the burdock which stick to the dog, the empty seed envelopes of the hemlock, and the solitary willow warbler poking about perplexedly in the goat willow. (Of course.) The willow warbler is passing through; but then we are all passing through.
When I walk up the bank into the field the meadow pipit fledgling is making tentative ascents into the golden air. I do not know what became of its siblings.
Bizarrely, a skylark launches up too, as if to give a flight masterclass.
Yesterday’s rain and today’s warmth have brought the slugs out; a pair of black slugs (Arion ate) circle and lick each other, their mucus-covered bodies as moist as the green grass on which they lie. Slugs are hermaphrodite; entwined, each releases its penis, a white tentacle which clasps the penis of the other.
14 SEPTEMBER This silent void is a shock. No evening chorus, no universal hum of insects, and the lambs, now grown up, no longer bleat, they only eat, heads permanently fixed to the ground. Children’s plastic farm toys would be more real.
The chiffchaff has flown.
17 SEPTEMBER I move the cattle out of the field and into a pen for their annual, government-ordered tuberculosis test. They smell divine, of buttercups, of vernal, of grasses galore, as good cows should. Sunshine glints off their backs, full of summer bloom.
This is my least favourite day of the year. Lined up in the race, a narrow metal-railed corridor, the cows are injected, by the vet, in the neck with an instrument that looks suspiciously like a staple gun. If they test positive to the reagent they are to be slaughtered. No ifs, no buts. I have to wait four days for the vet, dressed top to toe in green plastic and rubber, to return and pronounce.
The days of James Herriot, of tweed and a bacon sandwich over a cup of tea in a farmhouse kitchen, are long gone. Vets today dress like forensic scientists at the scene of a crime.
20 SEPTEMBER I watch a ladybird climbing a skyscraper of grass. Propylaea punctata: a perfect black-and-yellow chequerboard that should have been designed by Issigonis in the 1960s.
Underneath the hedge a family of pied wagtails runs through the glistening grass. The moment of minimalist art is improved by two equally black-and-white magpies strutting through the sward. And the hedgerow is burgeoning with red and purple: rose hips, elderberries, sloes, blackberries, honeysuckle, and the luxurious forbidden berries of bryony and deadly nightshade.
A magpie halts to look quizzically at the jumble of grey feathers below the oak tree; some predator has killed and plucked the two wood pigeon squabs.
In the pen, I feed the cows hay and cattle cake; while they are otherwise engaged I run my hands over their thick, muscular necks to feel for a reactive lump.
One has a swelling.
23 SEPTEMBER A morning in which the field is garrotted by mist. This moist warm weather brings on the autumn flush of grass, and the mushrooms; in the sward there are bronze turf mottlegill mushrooms and rare yellow waxcaps (Hygrocybe chlorophana). Growing out of the cow pats are liberty caps.
The ivy on the elder is in bloom, though its unostentatious, spherical greeny-yellow flowers hardly qualify, I feel, as flowers in the visual sense. Nonetheless they are an important source of autumn nectar for the last bees, moths and butterflies of the year.
Some juvenile house martins are still here. The adults went yesterday. From the dead elm in Bank Field a great spotted woodpecker ‘tschicks’ territorially.
This is all happening somewhere far off, as though I am looking at a hushed English pastoral scene down the wrong end of a telescope. The cows are back in the race waiting. They are listless; the dominant cows in the herd order, Margot and her daughter, Mirabelle, are butting those in front, and the metal barriers are starting to screech alarmingly under the pressure. This is my fault; the cattle are sensitive to my anxiety. I am so wired up about the TB check, I can hardly breathe.
The veterinary surgery rings. The vet, Will Jacobs, is going to be late. Some time about three o’clock Jacobs comes wearily down the track. The usual clambering into the protective suit. His hand running over each cow’s neck. All good until he gets to Melissa, Melissa with the bump. Out come the measuring callipers.
I have been here before. Everything depends on the size of the bump. Measured once. Measured twice. Measured three times.
‘She’s just inside the limit.’ I could jump for joy. ‘They’re all yours for another year.’
I let the cows out. We run around together.
25 SEPTEMBER Amid the dew-laden webs of millions of Linyphiid spiders, which medieval shepherds believed caused braxy (a digestive disorder of sheep), a grey squirrel is picking up hazel nuts. There is a palpable urgency to his or her action. Although grey squirrels do not hi
bernate they need to larder up against hard times.
At the end of the day: on this night of a waxing moon my shadow is giant across the field.
Another busman’s day out. We drive over in the drizzle to Turnastone Court at Vowchurch, six miles away in the broad, flat Golden Valley. This is the Parry heartland. There is an effigy of Blanche herself in Bacton church, on a hill that always seems to be in cold shadow. The effigy has a minor footnote in history because it incorporates the first image of Elizabeth I as Gloriana. Of more interest to me: Blanche looks remarkably like my grandmother.
The meadows at Turnastone are the remnants of a utopian agricultural project set up beside the Dore river by Rowland Vaughan, who wrote a book published in 1610 on ‘his Most Approved and Long experienced Water Workes containing the manner of Winter and Summer drowning’.
Vaughan is usually credited with the invention of downward-floated water meadows or bedworks, although some scholarship suggests he merely developed an extant system. (The field name ‘le Flote’ at Kimbolton in Herefordshire pre-dates Vaughan’s book by a generous historical margin.) To an extent, this is pharisaical stuff; what Vaughan did and popularized was the temporary flooding of grassland via water diversion, channels and sluice gates.
Vaughan was the great-nephew of Blanche Parry. (He complained that his spirit was too tender to endure the ‘bitterness’ of Dame Blanche’s ‘humor’ and that he was forced by her ‘crabbed authority’ to fight in the Irish war.) The Parrys and the Vaughans had intermarried for at least a hundred years, and Rowland did not buck the habit. He married the Parry girl who inherited the main family estate, Newcourt, giving him ownership of all the land on the west bank of the Dore from Peterchurch to Bacton.
Meadowland Page 13
