countryside thoughts

My last day in England is blustery and autumnal. I hike up the lane behind my sister’s house and follow a Public Footpath sign across stubbly fields. The wind roars in a big ash tree and a flock of about a hundred rooks rises flapping and cawing into the air. I find a fragment of terracotta sticking out of the earth, and then a delicate chip of bone china with an elegant blue and white willow pattern. Who knows how old they are. Antique stuff is always getting ploughed up in Britain. It’s everywhere.

Some of my American friends have disparaged the European countryside for this reason. “We have wildernesss,” they say, “But in Europe there’s not an inch where humans haven’t been.”
I felt rather hangdog the first time this happened, unable to defend myself or my continent. It’s true. Everything has been touched by humans. But I realise now that actually this is one of the things I like about Europe.

There’s a relationship with the land here. It knows us. It has myths and legends enshrined in it, as well as ancient Britons, Gauls, Saxons and Romans buried in it. The place names tell the story, and lumps or troughs in the grass reveal historic sites. (Plus you can go camping without having to hide your food from bears.)

Closer to York, there's an area with field after field of pasture, the surface of which runs in wide, flat ridges like corduroy. These are the remnants of the old strip farming system, established over a thousand years ago in Saxon times. Every family had its strip. Villagers convened to decide how the crops would be rotated and which areas would be left fallow to regenerate. It’s amazing to see the system still there, now covered with sheep, casually grazing by the side of the track.

Up by where my parents live is an islet of trees and bushes, on a hummock in the middle of a field. The farmer ploughs neatly around it every year. If you look on the ordonnance survey map, you can see it’s marked as a barrow—an Iron Age burial mound. No big deal, they’re common up here in the north, where there aren’t so many people and urban sprawl hasn’t reached so far into the fields as it has in the south. I doubt it has ever been excavated.

The footpath in the field I’m in now ends in a ditch of nettles and brambles, so I stump along the hedgerow until I can get through to the lane on the other side. Most of these hedgerows are ancient too, and they provide a rich and undisturbed micro-habitat for everything from foxes and badgers, to knuckle-sized voles and shrews. In the old days a hedge was professionally maintained, by a Hedger, who pruned the new growth in the autumn, chopping neatly half way through the vertical branches so that he could bend them back down and weave them back into the hedge, strengthening and thickening it. Now hedges mostly just get lopped by a mechanical trimmer attached to a slowly moving tractor, and the result is gap-toothed hedges composed of trees and holes, and reinforced by barbed wire.

Further north, fields are separated not by hedges, but by dry stone walls. Miles and miles of neatly stacked pieces of stone. No mortar is used; the stones are secured only by the way they have been fitted together. The wind blows through the chinks so it doesn’t knock the wall down, even in winter gales. Sometimes it’s a cavity wall, with two neat outside edges and a filling of smaller rocks and rubble. Every few hundred yards a larger stone is left sticking out, making a step for a stile, so you can nip across the wall if you need to.

Dry stone walling is another craft teetering on the brink of oblivion, although artists like Andy Goldsworthy have helped encourage people to value the age-old skill.

Up by Robin Hood’s Bay I saw where the old walls had been filled in by people less than expert. The flat stones had been carefully stacked back on top of each other, but they didn’t all line up quite so smoothly as in the older pieces of wall, and they weren’t topped by a neat edge of vertically stacked toppers, like a row of stiff lace.

This lane is edged by rosebay willowherb, stretching its tall spikes of mauve flowers. Delicate purple vetch and pink clover bob among nettles underneath. I spot lady’s bedstraw, so named because it really was used to make beds for ladies, in the days when peasants bedded down on the floor, and ladies on beds stuffed with straw. Shiny blackberries bulge on the thorny brambles, and I taste a few. Tangy and sweet. Juicy.