Over the last few weeks I have been immersing myself in the Herefordshire countryside courtesy of the writings of John Lewis-Stempel who farms in the border hills (Merrily country, for fans of the late Phil Rickman) and who writes beautiful prose about the most prosaic of things. Who would have thought – speaking as someone bored rigid by the few Young Farmers Club meetings I attended – that the life of a wood or a year in a field would be so interesting? I admit my original interest was piqued by the fact that he’d written a book with a picture of a hare on the front, but that’s me…
His books are pragmatic but interspersed with poetry by people like Edward Thomas and Robert Frost, both of whom spent a lot of time in the area before the First World War. He delves into local language and folklore and in Woodston he traces the history of the land from the earliest hunter-gatherers onwards.. He’s realistic about what it takes to conserve a wood or a field; he shoots grey squirrels (non-native) to allow native birds to thrive as the squirrels steal whole clutches of eggs. There are no ‘oh no, my sheep broke its legs in a ditch, the vet must work miracles!’ moments – the sheep gets shot too.
There’s no woolly ‘rewilding’ although there is an experimental love of traditional methods which bring back wildlife to the area – not by adding beavers but by farming without pesticides for a year, for example, or by managing woods through coppicing, and allowing sheep, pigs and cows to forage and in doing so fertilise and turn over the land, bringing back insects and the larger animals that feed on them. It reminded me very much of the old lady that swallowed the fly, in fact. There is no anthropomorphization of trees and animals – Tolkien’s Ents don’t come into his equation. Trees are trees are trees. Animals do what animals do, and this is right. I get the feeling that Lewis-Stempel genuinely loves the land and cares for it in much the same way as his ancestors – who also farmed in the area – have done for the past seven centuries. He describes himself as a countryside writer rather than a nature writer as he’s writing about the land and the life it supports.
Eyes down, a shadow giantess
traverses faultlines
mapped into Essex clay.
Hooves have printed fossils in the tilth.
She looms over bean trees,
scattering spiders as she goes
while plough-shattered flints
heliograph the sun.
I’ve been doing a lot of field trails in the last couple of months as I’ve been training for various walks – at least once they dried out a bit – and I’ve found myself more interested in the hedges and edges as a result of this reading. A local site on the north of Epping Forest has been bought by Nattergal to be restored as wildlands, and at some point I’ll get round to visiting and hopefully learning a bit more. I may even try to walk there. I have one of those custom OS maps which is proving very useful indeed – where we live is inconveniently placed on the official maps so putting North Weald at the centre allows me to plot walks in advance so I know roughly where I want to go. Last week I traced a footpath I’d spotted when we were on our way to collect Thing 3.
I’ve also been listening to Tom Cox on Audible. I first encountered Cox via his Twitter account which featured his sad cat, The Bear, and then I found one of his extremely funny books in our local Oxfam. I’ve since read all his cat (and golf and music) books. He began to write about walking and the countryside about ten years ago – still with added cats and his VERY LOUD DAD – but in a psychogeography mode as he wasn’t attempting to farm the land; only to live in it. His 21st Century Yokel, Ring the Hill and Notebook are non-fiction, and Help the Witch is sometimes a weird blur of short story and semi-autobiography. He’s graduated into strangely psychedelic novels which I also enjoy, but I do prefer his walking books.
I think my love of reading about nature probably stemmed from Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies books, which were botanically extremely realistic – well, probably not the fairies, but definitely the flowers. These allowed me to identify flowers confidently, if not accurately as my mother insists on saying 40+ years later. This, by the way, is a very useful skill for both teachers and parents, and has even been known to work on my Beloved who is now very suspicious of all my pronouncements.
To be fair – and almost certainly as a result of spending way too much time on trains, the top of buses and roaming the streets of the city – I’m also equally likely to be reading books about the history or psychogeography of London (Iain Sinclair is a favourite). Right now my work reading at lunchtime is Sandi Toksvig’s Between the Stops, which is as much about the history of Dulwich and wider London as it is about herself. People are interesting, and so are places. The stories of people in places are even better.
Other things making me happy this week
- Delivering the last of the sea creatures to the British Library – now making mini jellies and looking forward to making some new stock for summer stalls
- A gorgeous swim with the ladies last Sunday
- A ten-mile trek exploring a new footpath on Monday
- Our first Access Panel on Friday morning
- Dinner out with quite a lot of the family on Friday
- The library reserves and loans system
This morning I may get out for a walk but GT2 is staying over while his Mama TT2 and Thing 1 are off at a festival. I have not missed being woken up by a small foot in my face, I can tell you. He is a very mobile sleeper, this one, but at least we have a new airbed and I’m not trying to share the sofa with him this time. I may be forced to wake up Thing 2 and hand the little octopus over for the morning…
See you next week!
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
The Wood/Woodston – John Lewis-Stempel
Vianne – Joanne Harris
21st Century Yokel/Ring the Hill – Tom Cox (Audible)
Between the Stops – Sandi Toksvig
O Caledonia – Elspeth Barker
What Kirsty did next 