Meadowland

by John Lewis-Stempel

  Famously, the idea for ‘drowning’ grass came to Vaughan when he was walking his estate to check on the miller (a notably shifty species). As he strode along he noticed that a mole had burrowed into the millstream bank, and where the water oozed out through the molehill the grass was luscious.

  Vaughan spent twenty years constructing an irrigation system in the Golden Valley – approximately from 1584 to 1604 – whereby his grass could be flooded to promote its growth. His main artificial channel was the three-mile-long Trench Royal, which diverted water from the Dore on to the fields, then away again via a sluice gate. The use of flooding increased the yearly value of the land from £40 to £300 per year.

  Although many thought Vaughan mad, his method was demonstrably successful and attracted great acclaim. A ‘panegyricke’ written by the poet John Davies praised Vaughan’s drownings of meadows in effusive rural imagery:

  His royall TRENCH (that all the rest commands

  And holds the Sperme of Herbage by a Spring)

  Infuseth in the wombe of sterile Lands,

  The Liquid seede that makes them Plenty bring.

  Here, two of the inferior Elements

  (Joyning in Coïtu) Water on the Leaze

  (Like Sperme most active in such complements)

  Begets the full-panche Foison of Increase:

  For, through Earths rifts into her hollow wombe,

  (Where Nature doth her Twyning-Issue frame)

  The water soakes, whereof doth kindly come

  Full-Barnes, to joy the Lords that hold the same:

  For, as all Womens wombes do barren seeme,

  That never had societie of Men;

  So fertill Grounds we often barren deeme,

  Whose Bowells, Water fills not now and then.

  Mind you, John Davies was a kinsman.

  Six years later, in 1610, Rowland published his book describing the system. In it he claimed that the Trench Royal was navigable, and was being used to ship goods from one end of the estate to the other. The book also claimed that he established an ideal community for two thousand workers, who were all decked out with fetching scarlet caps.

  Water meadows became fairly common in Herefordshire. The temporary diversion of water (ideally an inch deep) over grassland in winter encouraged the growth of grass before the growing season and provided stock with an early ‘bite’. In some cases, a further period of irrigation allowed a second or even third hay crop to be taken. Summer flooding simply stimulated grass growth by compensating for any water deficit in the soil.

  Today Turnastone Court is farmed by the charity the Countryside Restoration Trust. Although the irrigation system is long gone, the water meadows are still a flora haven. They remained unploughed even during the Second World War. Locals say that Mr Watkins stood at the gate of his main floodplain meadow and told the War Agricultural Executive that the field would be ploughed only over his dead body.

  I have long been amused by the fact that the broken ditch that leaks over Lower Meadow makes a sort of poor man’s irrigation system. The grass in that quarter of an acre is always greener. A sort of unintentional water meadow.

  OCTOBER

  Goldfinch

  I LOOK FOR the changes in nature more closely in October than in any other month. Do many red haws on the hawthorn in the hedge really mean, as folklore says, there will be ‘many snaws’? If the fieldfares arrive early will the winter be especially hard? Even though a profusion of berries indicates only the plant’s past health I am hooked on weather divination. It is partly, I suspect, a primordial anxiety – shared with wildlife – that I need to prepare for the worst.

  So of course the month begins with a diverting Indian summer, with morning sun-shafts in mist, and hoverfly (Episyrphus balteatus) on late-appearing buttercups. Starlings come up from the village with their party whistles to look for worms in the aftermath on the meadow.

  I love everything about riding Zeb; the sea-deck motion, the creak of the saddle, the laughing excitement of cantering and galloping – and his pleasure in the same. I love the new perspective on old things one gets from the back of the horse. And above even this, I love that we are one, a unity; when American Indians first saw Spanish conquistadors on horses they believed them to be a single being.

  The wild birds and animals of the meadow, for the most part, believe the same. We, the two-headed beast, amble around the perimeter and the fleet of rooks trawling the sea-green grass barely notices us.

  It is different with the ewes, who stand rigid and watch me, then glance for a line of escape. When we near them on our walk, they lighten the load by squatting and peeing. Then run, bouncy-bottomed, to the far side.

  Friar Tuck the ram strolls after them. Man-horse or horse-man he could not care, for he has a one-track mind. Fornication. October is the month of ovine sex in the country.

  Friar Tuck stops and sniffs the ground where the ewes have pissed. Then he curls back his upper lip to show his teeth in a cartoon grimace. The flehmen response is not a male come-on but a means of closing his nostrils so he can suck air into the vomeronasal organ in the roof of his mouth. He is trying to detect the chemicals to know whether she is on heat. He himself is oozing so much testosterone that it hangs nidorous in the air.

  One fat ewe with a ripped ear is clearly producing oestrogen by the pint. He licks her obscenely with a flicking tongue, then paws at her with a front leg, butts and bites her flank.

  There are some try-out mountings.

  She does not quite stand still; but then she does not run away either. He’ll stay with her for the rest of the day, and cover her properly in the dark, the original one-night stand.

  Tomorrow it will be a new girl.

  Friar Tuck is not a wholly indiscriminate lecher. He likes his own Ryeland breed best. The Shetlands and Hebrideans will get covered last.

  Rooks do not often visit the field, as they prefer the grain land at the bottom of the valley. Perhaps once or twice in autumn, boredom or a hungry memory of where bountiful worms are to be found brings them up here. There are twenty-three of them, garbed (or so it seems) in black cloaks. They feed into the brisk north wind, which blows over them, aerodynamically fixing them to the ground, as they stab it with their bone-white beaks. If they fed backside to the wind it would lift them up, and over.

  The meadow is home; it is also a picnic site for visitors, and a stopping place for migrants on passage.

  A place, too, for humans to reflect.

  Humphry Repton in his Observations on the Theory & Practice of Landscape Gardening declared that ‘the beauty of pleasure-ground, and the profit of a farm, are incompatible . . . I disclaim all idea of making that which is most beautiful also most profitable: a ploughed field and a field of grass are as distinct objects as a flower-garden and a potato ground.’ Repton, along with Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, made the land into pictures instead of painting landscapes on canvas. Herefordshire was long a bastion of the gentry, and gentrified ideas about parkland percolated down to yeoman farmers. There’s a Georgian farmhouse in Ewyas Harold with a ha-ha to the front, so the view over the rolling meadow is unbesmirched by a stock fence.

  Tsar Alexander always considered that the next best thing to being the Tsar of all Russia was to be an English country gentleman. You can see why. They had the loveliest views in the world.

  4 OCTOBER A magpie sits on the Ryeland’s back, pecking at its neck. This is biological symbiosis, ovine-corvine mutuality, despite appearances to the contrary; the magpie is picking ticks off the sheep’s ears. The magpie gets a meal, the sheep gets cleaned.

  The evenings are drawing in; in greyscale light I watch a black-eyed wood mouse lean up from a swaying hazel twig and pull a rose hip down, which it saws from its base with a flash of teeth. The rose hip tumbles down through the hedge to the ground, the mouse scrambling after it.

  7 OCTOBER The last swallows on the telephone wires, chattering crotchets on a stave, the young ones gathering to await the nerve for the gre
at voyage south. People used to think swallows hibernated in bubbles of air in ponds or down holes. In the early sixteenth century the Bishop of Uppsala, Olaus Magnus, in his Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus claimed that

  in the northern water, fishermen oftentimes by chance draw up in their nets an abundance of Swallows, hanging together like a conglomerated mass . . . In the beginning of autumn, they assemble together among the reeds; where, allowing themselves to sink into the water, they join bill to bill, wing to wing, and foot to foot.

  His text was illustrated with a woodcut showing fishermen pulling the birds out of the water in their nets. Although Gilbert White proposed migration rather than hibernation (his brother, a chaplain in Gibraltar, saw swallows flying south over his head) he wondered about the very late broods, some of which were not sufficiently feathered to fly until mid-September: ‘Are not these late hatchlings more in favour of hiding than migration?’ White kept an open mind on torpidity, and hunted around the thatch of cottage roofs to find slumbering overwintering birds. To laugh at White is mere hubris; no one to this day is exactly sure where all the martin family overwinter.

  The stuttery chattering and quivery flight of the swallow led medieval medicine to believe that, by association, eating the bird could cure epilepsy and stammering. A broth of swallow was the favoured medicine. The swallow was always a bird of goodness. Did not the medieval rhyme claim:

  The robin and the wren

  Are God Almighty’s cock and hen.

  The martin and the swallow

  Are God Almighty’s bird to hollow [hallow].

  The swallows have gone; a chiffchaff passes through, stays for a day ‘phoeeet’-ing and goes, the last summer migrant. The avian winter visitors have not arrived. We are now in the interval, when only native birds are here in the meadow.

  This week of senile Indian summer heat underscores the sensuousness of the autumn world, its unaccustomed smells and fugitive scents. Gobstopper crab apples lie on the ground, rotting, vinegary.

  10 OCTOBER Suddenly the weather hardens, a gale crashes down branches in the night, and I can feel the urgency of the grey squirrel in the copse as he or she violently scrambles about in the hazel bushes for nuts. I put on two jumpers in the morning, although something has apparently set fire to the trees; the coppiced hazel along the copse is burning gold from the bottom up.

  12 OCTOBER The smell of woodsmoke from some distant fire. A blackbird gently ‘spink-spink’-ing until it sees me, when it goes into full alarm-call mode; nothing says go away quite so fluently, so elegantly as a blackbird. There are now five blackbirds living in and around the meadow, three of them winterers from another place.

  And there is frost already on the backs of the cows, at 5pm, their breath puffing white as they lie and chew the cud. Odd, and worrying, that the frost on the back of the venerable Margot, at twenty by far the oldest of our Red Poll, is thicker than on the hides of the rest of the herd.

  And tawny owls in the woods and thickets along the misty stream are declaiming their autumn territories. A tawny owl never calls ‘tu-twit-twoo’; the ‘tu-twit’ (actually, ‘ker-wick’) is the contact call; the ‘twoo’ (more accurately ‘hoo-hoo-oooo’) is the male’s territorial call. If you hear ‘ker-wickhoo’, ‘hoo-oooo’, it is a duet, not a solo performance.

  There are at least four owls calling in the declining of the day. September to November is when juvenile tawnies disperse, and tonight the young ones are trying to secure a fiefdom for food and for breeding. By wintertime pure they will either have succeeded or they will be dead.

  The Anglo-Saxons knew the little goldfinch as thisteltuige or thistle-tweaker. They have a slightly sharper bill than other finches, made by Nature as a precision tool for extracting the seeds of thistles and teasels. The Latin for thistle is carduus, and informs the bird’s scientific name, Carduelis carduelis.

  The craze for keeping caged goldfinches came to a peak in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1860, in Worthing alone, 132,000 birds were caught and the de-goldfinching of the countryside was an early concern of the Society for the Protection of Birds. Bedridden at the end of his life, John Keats also found himself in a sort of cage. One enjoyment in his life was watching goldfinches still at liberty, and he wrote in ‘I Stood Tip-toe upon a Little Hill’:

  Sometimes goldfinches one by one will drop

  From low-hung branches; little space they stop;

  But sip, and twitter, and their feathers sleek;

  Then off at once, as in a wanton freak:

  Or perhaps, to show their black and golden wings

  Pausing upon their yellow flutterings.

  In autumn, the goldfinch, long since set free, joins in sociable flocks. There are at least thirty on the thistle band in the meadow, which I have grown (or allowed to grow) for them. The collective noun for goldfinches, a charm, is derived from the Old English c’irm, describing the birds’ twittering song.

  The autumn hawkbit, which is almost as yellow as a goldfinch’s wing bar, has flowered in the promontory.

  15 OCTOBER It might be cold but it is dry. The ground is holding up unseasonably well and I put the horses in the meadow for a change of grazing regimen. At night I go to check them. I see a shooting star, and the Milky Way bands the celestial dome. The high stars are limitless, and surely it is impossible that such a staggering show is not for my benefit.

  And the stars come out tonight for me.

  The horses grind their teeth while eating, and take extraordinarily long pisses. The sheep’s eyes glisten green and jewel-like in torchlight.

  Back in the house, I hunt out a verse from Thomas Traherne (1636–74), the Hereford-born metaphysical poet, that has tried unsuccessfully to escape from the vaults of memory:

  The skies in their magnificence,

  The lively, lovely air;

  Oh how divine, how soft, how sweet, how fair!

  The stars did entertain my sense,

  And all the works of God, so bright and pure,

  So rich and great did seem,

  As if they ever must endure

  In my esteem.

  Traherne believed that man falls from a state of innocence because he turns from nature to a world of artificiality and invention. In Centuries of Meditations he advised: ‘You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars, till you so love the beauty of enjoying it you are earnest to persuade others to enjoy it too.’

  18 OCTOBER Now comes the full cruelty of autumn. The haws loom scarlet in the hedge like the blood-drops of my fingers, where I have caught them in the thorns of the bramble. I have picked about two pounds of blackberries from the eastern side of the hedge straddling Marsh Field, with the green bottle flies to guide me. Flies always sign the ripest fruits. Some of the on-the-turn blackberries are producing alcohol, and there are giddily drunk small tortoiseshell butterflies.

  Bryony threads through the hedge in glorious orange and green chains. The sloes are full, and the rose hips overhang in sprawling, tempting arms. There is a feast of hedge fruit for wintering birds. But where are they?

  Some familiar, overlooked friends are here beside me though. In flight, the pied wagtail utters a high-pitched two-note ‘chiss-ick’ sound; hence its joke-name of Chiswick fly-over for its habit of leaping past and calling as it goes.

  Like yellow wagtails, pied wagtails feed predominantly on insects that they find while searching lawns, fields and verges. The insects are typically flies and caterpillars. On a sunny day such as this the dung from the livestock offers a smorgasbord. The bird’s other names include molly washdish, nanny washtail and washerwoman, from its habit of feeding along the edge of ponds and streams. And, of course, because the tail bobs much like a laundress does when washing clothes. A finer or kinder eye describes their dainty femininity, and so they are lady dishwasher too. Their characteristic jerky gait rarely fails to bring a smile. As John Clare versed it:

>   little trotty wagtail, he went in the rain, and tittering, tottering sideways he ne’er got straight again.

  Pied wagtails are a peculiarly British bird. Their close kin, the white wagtail of northern Europe, Russia and Alaska, has a definitely paler back.

  21 OCTOBER Blowing an oceanic gale; it’s hard to walk upright, my breath is panickingly taken away from me. The wind strips the leaves off the willow so they lie in belly-up shoals across the far end of the meadow. Acorns from the oaks are bombing the ground. These are toxic to cattle and horses. In the storm I lead the white-eyed horses out to the calm of the stables.

  23 OCTOBER A marauding flock of wood pigeons roosts in the trees along the river at night, clappering out and back, as they settle. They feed on the acorns, including those of the twin oaks at the corner of the field. Although the flock is thirty or more strong it barely makes an impression on the shiny green mass of oak fruits lying on the field floor. I rake two barrow-loads up and feed them to the pigs.

  In the wind jackdaws scatter and blow away.

  As soon as I have left the field I see the jay fly in and pick up two acorns in its beak, then flit to the thicket, its progress signalled by its light-bulb rump. The jay is burying the acorns; it can bury hundreds a day as a precaution against inclemency. Some jays have been recorded as burying three thousand acorns and hazelnuts in a month. Probably half the oaks in Britain have been planted unintentionally by jays. The bird is a tree planter on a national scale. The bird’s call is the sound of chalk being pulled down a blackboard.

  26 OCTOBER While I seek shelter under the oaks from the rain, starlings fall like leaves on to the sodden earth, where the worms have been forced again to evacuate their burrows.