The Running Hare

I WOKE UP with a guilty start from the day-dreaming, thinking I had slept too long, and scrabbled for my phone but found I had only catnapped for minutes. I looked again at the view, at the immense spread of fields, a watercolour paintbox of solid blocks of green and gold. There is a pleasant land before me, but I know when I descend into those fields they are silent, sterile, open-roofed factories for agribusiness. Units of production.

At this point, full disclosure: I farm.

I change the subject in my head to something more agreeable and get in touch with my inner teenage Eng Lit student. Somewhere on these same slopes, William Langland, the fourteenth-century poet, had his character Will fall ‘into a slepyng’ and meet a spiritual guide, Piers Plowman, who showed him a vision of a just society. I wonder where on the slopes exactly Will slumbered?

I must have dozed off again . . .

Dream II

Piers Plowman is holding the reins of oxen while declaiming to a group of snaggle-toothed peasants about a good society. I am at the back, taller than the rest, leaning over . . . and he points at me . . . then I see myself back in the cornfield with the corncrake but now I’m middle-aged . . .

I’M WIDE, WIDE awake now. There is no sophisticated, writerly way to put this: I have had a gutsful of chemical farming. If the chemicals dousing the land are so fantastically safe, why do crop-sprayers have sealed cabs? By law, specifically European normative 15695-1:2009, the carbon filtration system on a crop-sprayer must be 99 per cent efficient in preventing any ingress into the cab of toxic dust and vapours. If pesticides and herbicides are dangerous to farmers, they are dangerous. Period.

Now I’ve got a vision of my own. Piers ploughed in order to ameliorate society’s evil. Why don’t I take a modern, conventionally farmed arable field, plough it, and husband it in the old-fashioned, chemical-free way, and make it into a traditional wheatfield? Bring back the flowers that have all but disappeared from British ploughlands, such as corncockle, Venus’s looking-glass, shepherd’s needle, corn marigold and the cornflower, with its bloom as brilliant as June sky? And the birds and animals that loved such land – grey partridges, quail, harvest mice.

And hares. Could I entice in a hare? A corncrake is an impossibility because they are extinct in England except for a small introduced colony in Cambridgeshire. But perhaps I could manage a hare.

Such is the vision of John the Plowman.

There is a problem. We farm in the hills of the far distance under the black wall of Wales, where nothing but grass and sheep grow. I need to find an arable field. A field to plough to grow crops.

Another confession: I grew up with arable farming. And I miss it so.

The moon lies back and reddens.

In the valley a corncrake calls

Monotonously,

With a plaintive, unalterable voice, that deadens

My confident activity;

With a hoarse, insistent request that falls

Unweariedly, unweariedly,

Asking something more of me,

Yet more of me.

D. H. Lawrence, from ‘End of Another Home Holiday’

BUT NOBODY WANTS to rent me an arable field to turn into a traditional wheatfield. I advertise, I tweet, I put up cards in village shops from Ross to Ledbury.

There is the problem of taking a field out of crop rotation, there is the bigger problem of the ‘W’ word. As soon as I mention, to the handful of bites that I do get, that I wish to sow wildflowers in with the wheat I get the same response: ‘Those are weeds, they might contaminate our crop.’

One arable farmer of my acquaintance is more succinct still; I’m on my egg delivery round (we have free-range chickens, lots of free-range chickens . . . Light Sussex, Cream Legbars, Araucanas, Marans, Minorcas, Wyandottes, Speckledys, Barnevelders, Warrens, Old English Game) on the narrow back lane at Wormbridge when I have to slow the Land Rover down to pass an oncoming black Nissan Warrior 4x4, which is only slightly bigger than a battleship. I wind down the window, we chat for a moment, I pop the arable field question, he replies: ‘Weeds? You want weeds? I’ll show you some f****** weeds . . .’

Eventually, through a friend of ours, Joanna, I’m put in touch with Philip Miller, an advertising executive, who owns some land at St Weonards in south Herefordshire. ‘He’s a keen birdwatcher,’ says Joanna.

A decade ago, on a fancy, Phil Miller bought a three-acre wood; with the woodland came three fields, two permanent pasture, one arable, plus a derelict cottage garden. He lives in St Albans, and rents the fields out. The present tenancy ends in December. Eventually, after some haggling, I take on all the land, fifteen acres in total, on a two-year Farm Business Tenancy. Little of this is ideal, and the least-good aspect is that I can only have wildflowers in the arable field for a year. After that, I have to put the field down to grass.

One year. One opportunity.

THE FIELD HAS a name: Flinders, after an owner of long ago, so I am told. It is four acres in extent, now crammed with kale for livestock to eat in situ. (I have to buy the pert green forage from the last tenant.) Winter comes out in January’s false sunshine as I walk around the edge of my new, if temporary, possession, mapping the field in my head.

The field is almost square, crew-cut hedges on three sides, wire stock fence on the other, a bit of ditch underneath this; the ditch then ‘dog-legs’ to run deep under the western hedge and is swollen thick with red topsoil running off Flinders and the twenty-acre wheatfield belonging to next door. A few spavined nettles hang over the silt snake, a fern or two cling to the ditch side. At first glance, Flinders is a disappointment, an unremarkable field, featureless, an ager rasus.

Gnats vortex in the untimely heat. A gang of discordant jackdaws plays some juvenile game in the sky. Otherwise the field is silent; a mausoleum with invisible walls and roof.

I walk around the field again, and peer closer, at everything: the kale, the ditch, the hedges, the two-foot grass margin, muted by winter, which edges the field in a hairy fawn frame. In the west hedge, two trees, alders, have recently been felled, sawdust splattered everywhere. Why? Probably because they were shading the crop. This is a field without a single tree in the hedges. In the top, northwest corner sits a pleasantly stubborn elm stump, sufficiently into the field that the kale is forced to swerve around it.

‘Tram tracks’, the wheel marks from a crop-sprayer, are ghost lines in the kale. Once upon a time the countryside was criss-crossed by roads, paths and bridleways; the new tracks across the landscape are guides for machinery.

At second glance, Flinders is a greater disappointment still. As I close the gate behind me, a crop-sprayer trundles past. You may see a fine day; a conventional farmer sees a day to go a-spraying with ‘a post-emergence herbicide’.

Only in one respect is Flinders unusual: it is a runt of an arable field. The fields next to it are twenty acres minimum.

I suppose the wide open landscape south and east towards Ross is pleasant enough, as it rises and falls in long swells, and spires of poplar somewhat disrupt the regularized grid of big fields, which replicates endlessly into the eastern distance. In the unseasonal sun alders along a far brook appear as a port-wine stain.

You know how squinting enables you to see a pixelated picture clearly? On some inexplicable impulse I narrow my eyes at the view, and for a passing second I see the faint indentations in the earth where hedges were before the great sixties rip-up. I see the beautiful past.

The farmer-politician William Cobbett travelled this way in 1821 on his Rural Rides and averred: ‘Everything here is good, arable land, pastures, orchards, coppices, and timber trees, especially the elms, many scores of which approach nearly to a hundred feet in height.’

The elms are long gone; the orchards too. But Cobbett was right; the heavy clay land, given a chance, likes plants and trees to grow upon it. Following the last ice age the earth here gave rise to thick oak forests, and the area’s first farmers, the Neolithic people, began their arable farming by wearily cutting down the oaks with their polished axes to make small allotments. Humans have been growing food here for five thousand years. It is small wonder, I think, that the word human and the word humus, meaning ‘soil’, come from the same root in Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral language of the Indo-European family. That root is (dh)ghomon, meaning ‘earthly being’. The Hebrew adam, meaning ‘man’, is from adamah, ground.

We live off the earth, and when we die we go back to it. To add to the humus.

Within a mile to the west of Flinders the hills begin, and the roads worsen. ‘God help us’ is the Herefordshire saying about the village of Orcop, partly in relation to the potholed primitiveness of its lanes, partly because it is the first village of the Welsh Borders, that dubious, disputed edgeland.

Flinders is within, by ten clod’s throws, the arable Midlands, safe within the pale of civilization. The Romans were here, the Saxons too. Neither of them much fancied the dark wet hills and the Welsh.

Farming is about rain. For arable farming, one needs twenty-five or so inches of rain per annum; thirty-five inches is too much. Up in the mountains where we live, the year’s rainfall can easily top fifty sodden inches.

Go west, young man? Hardly. In Herefordshire if you had made money you progressed eastwards, to the good, dry lands. It is not just a trick of my memory that my 1970s childhood in east Herefordshire was golden; it was actually, physically, meteorologically 50 per cent drier than where I now live, though the distance across the surface of the planet is just twenty miles.

I once contemplated a small hop yard on our hill farm, calculating that I had enough farmyard manure (FYM in the jargon, FYI) to nourish the soil and those sky-seeking hungry bines. ‘You’ll never sustain it, John,’ said Leslie Rees, our neighbouring farmer and knocking on the door of seventy-five. He was right, of course, because he had come from Stretton Sugwas in the east of the county as a farm labourer, and worked (and worked again) to become a farmer and set his own four sons up. You could do that as late as the 1990s, before the City boys started to speculate in agriculture. Gold down? Land up!

Leslie was right. The damp would have blighted the hops, plagued them with mould. I knew it too, because my maternal grandfather was a hop farmer at Much Cowarne. Among my earliest memories is being in a winter hop yard, helping headscarved women pull down the brittle dead bines from towering wires. The bines were put on a ceaseless bonfire; lunch was a potato baked in the ashes.

To have my own hop yard was a dream, just a dream. For years I thought my longing for hops was about the personal sanctuary of childhood, that time before bills and responsibility; and then one toss-turny night I revisited the hop yard of memory, stood in the middle of the place, and swivelled the full 360 degrees. I saw past the people and the wooden pillars to the birds. There were coveys of grey partridge scuttling through.

As I climb into the Land Rover cab, I glance north. The view is blocked by the heavily wooded Aconbury Hill where my father’s family, who were Norman come-latelies, started farming in 1450. I cannot escape the shadow of the past, and I do not wish to.

On the drive home, I keep running the word ‘Flinders’ around my head. Does it not mean something?

Then there is the weather: like others who work land, I am prone to believing folkloric adages. Science works wonderfully in an electric-lit laboratory; the real world is less test-tube certain. It is never a good omen in farming if January begins warm.

January, eh? ‘The blackest month in all the year / Is the month of Janiveer.’

ON 4 JANUARY I ship sheep over to Flinders to eat the kale. Backwards and forwards with the Land Rover and trailer, until I’ve sixty sheep in the field, a ‘mob stock’ to eat the forage down so I can plough when the weather turns right. Overnight the weather has gone to ice so of course the heater in the cab of the Land Rover breaks down en route. I pull our Jack Russell terrier across my lap as a hot-water bottle.

Sheep: won’t go into a trailer, and once in won’t go out. I enter through the ‘jockey door’ to push the last three black Hebridean ewes out, slip over in the effluent so my blue Dickies boiler suit, which is the farmer’s onesie, is soaked in ovine urine. Hebrideans have the devil’s horns and it is with an evil grin that they bounce away.

After unloading these last sheep from the trailer, I begin a cadastral survey: I take stock of the local state of nature by having a nosey wander along the lane, which is thin and slick with red mud from tractors and field run-off. The Far East had a Silk Road; this region of Western farming has a Silt Lane.

A flint wind, no good for man or beast, cuts in from the east, so I hug the near hedge, which shivers naked and is no comfort at all. Magpies, those proofs of desolation, flap beside me. Magpies were not created, they were manufactured in some fantastical factory; after the nuclear winter, there will still be magpies clacking, still be magpies on dubious missions borne by mechanical wings.

There is a constant stream of outsize JCB Fastrac tractors, requiring me to walk on the verge. Only one thing outdoes the yellow brightness of the Fastracs: the green of winter wheat pumped by artificial fertilizer, which creeps across the land in a low neon vapour.

A pebble handful of wood pigeons is thrown by the wind across the sky; a fat tick of a grey squirrel, stuffed with acorn or mast, grips the trunk of an oak, and indolently watches me pass. In fifteen minutes of walking I’ve seen magpies, a squirrel and wood pigeons. My ears are overfull with the seashell noise of wind, and the diesel bass of £60,000 super-tractors.

Then, a comma in the loud sentence of my perambulating: three-quarters of a mile to the south, there is a farm that hosts a game shoot. ‘Thorneycroft’ says the wooden laneside sign in scooped-out letters. Think what you like about game shooting, this farm has biodiversity; there is ground cover and there is food. In a field of spiky maize stubble I count twenty red-legged partridges. Dumpy, clownish-bright, they are a warming sight; next to the maize spears is a patch of white millet with a thousand bouquets of seeds, and these twing and twang with goldfinches and chatty house sparrows. Five little yellowhammers fly in.