I'll say again, the thing about Norfolk being flat is not true, it undulates. But it is true what they say about Norfolk skies. They are huge and over-arching. The effect is enhanced by the desecration of our field systems into mono-crop acreages. I don’t blame the farmers; they do what they do to earn their living and we consumers what we do to stretch ours. We are all in this together. Smaller fields = higher foodprices. There is no getting around that. I wonder though, if we understood the true costs of cheap food, in terms of the production of it, the damage to the land, and also in terms of the degrading of what we’re sold, the ever lowering of food quality, the loss of culinary knowledge and creativity, the ever-increasing divide between town and country, nature and plate, if we really
understood, would we still think anyone was getting a good deal?
These are my first thoughts as I step off the road and into the fields. Field is too small a word for what the East Anglia enclosures are growing into. They’re not prairies as such but perhaps there is a word that has that sense of expanse. Field is too homely, too bounded. Contrariwise, it also sounds to my ear like something I might want a ‘guide’ to understand, a field guide to common flowers for instance. Not here. Here there are just regimented rows of wheat, still in the dark green of springtime. Not a buzz above them, not a flower among them. And the tramline tracks of the public footpath across the acreage. And a darker green of a distant line of trees.
Then, abruptly, an unmarked demarcation. Wheat gives way to brighter green of ripening barley. Still mono, still relentless in its lines, but somehow more pleasant to walk through…my
dangling hand is caressed by the gentle fronds that protect the ripening seeds. Surprising softness. And then…
…attention is called skywards. A strange thing about these wide open skies, we shrink before them. It takes a conscious decision to focus on the sky and the cloudscapes – and it’s a wonderful thing to do, but we cannot look both up and down at the same time. I am drawn upwards, by the trilling lark. I catch its song and it draws me up, like a theatre performer on a wire…ascending.
I love how words and phrases become part of our subconscious description of things. The Lark Ascending – George Meredith’s poem, Vaughan Williams' musical composition – they have entered our subconscious… we watch the trilling lark ascend. And it is only larks and angels who do so. Other birds take the air, or take flight, or fall into the sky like a heron, or fall from their perches into the wind, or any manner of thing: but only the lark ascends, like an angel.
I look upwards, following the silent arc of a much higher con-trail, following the sound, until I catch sight of the shimmer wings and the joyful little feathered one continues to sing his song. I stop and rest until he reaches his exist line and drops back down the barley.
But now my eye has been drawn skywards. Gentle blue and kindly white don’t own the whole of it. Over to the south west, flat-topped thunder-heads are threatening.
At the end of the field a sorry clump of ox-eye daisies looks up hopefully, but by the drying pond, the iris bow down in defeat at the drying land. We might feel it's been a dull spring, but truth be told it hasn’t really been a wet one. I welcome thehedgerow though, for here there is more colour: buttercups, umbellifers, campion and dog-rose, grasses of wild and different hues.
Usually, when I see the red tinges of wild grasses through my sun-glass lenses, I remind myself that I am not seeing true colour, but today I wonder. These lenses are shading and polarising light for sure, but that merely changes the colour to my eye. Who is to say that what I see through these lenses isn’t the deeper colours that insects see? Or birds or other animals? Who is to say that it isn’t what you see? We call a thing by a common name, say, green, but we cannot know that your green is the same as mine. Do you see the reddish tinge to wild grass heads? Do th einsects or the birds?
Insects catch my eye. Strange goings on in a buttercup, I fear that there is something being eaten here, or perhaps some interspecies copulation. I move away bemused towards the simplicity of a hover fly supping from the cup…a soldier beetle on a denuded cow parsley head…a bumble bee claiming centre stage on a dog rose.
Whenever I catch myself doing this, sneaking up on insects, I am reminded of how I have changed.
When I started walking, and trying to learn how to use a camera (before I gave up and went digital), I was all about landscape, the big open expanses, the wow moments on cresting a hill-top. While they still thrill me, I see fewer of them these days, and rather than lamenting that, I seem to have seamlessly switched my attention to the smaller worlds, to look at the detail of an insect’s wing,
the veining on a leaf or petal.
Perhaps that is a symptom of retiring. Withdrawing. Perhaps all those corporate years of being forced to look at “the big picture”, to “scan horizons”, to step back from the detail, have left me thirsting for the detail, wanting to step forward, and look closer. They say the devil is in the detail. Ah but the devil was a fallen angel, and other angels are right there with him.
Step forward. Look closer. Be awestruck by detail. And still also by the bigger pictures. I walk along the edge of a woodland. The path only briefly strays into its silence, its dimness, and it is like entering a cathedral. Tall columns of Scots pine arch overhead like vaulted ceilings.
Back outside, the path follows the boundary hedge. There are breaks in the foliage, like windows into that secret sacred world, or maybe for the folk who dwell there to look out. I’m so taken by peering into the wood that I’m surprised when I look fieldward to see the muntjac casually peering at me. They’re usually so skittish but this one is just watching. I stop and watch back. I’m not dressed to blend in at all, unless my blue / white plaid shirt works the way dazzle camouflage does on battleships,breaking up the outline.
The deer's beautiful chestnut flank reflects the sun. I inch slowly forward, stop, inch again. It gets bored of watching me and starts to stroll across the path in front of me. Hesitates at the boundary, giving me one last glance before focussing on trying its footing. It reaches forward, elongating like a cat, forelegs placed and then recoiling in its rear half, all in slow motion. Gone.
I think maybe not gone so very far, so I walk forward slowly, quietly, but I mis-judge the point at which it crossed into the wood, and the first I know of how close I was to it, is when I hear the unexpected thump of hooves on ground as it finally takes flight among the trees.
My way leads me on along tracks and lanes and disused lines. Speedwell and campion line the route. Occasional bursts of ragged robin. Unexpected stands of lupins. A black & white “Keep Out” sign, is echoed in the single magpie that flies behind it: one for sorrow.
Felmingham station is all shuttered and barred, but not as overgrown as it might be. Ox-eye daisies and nettles wait for non-existent trains. The Muddle &Go Nowhere went there a long time ago. Whenever I see one of these buildings I wish they could find another use. As a home maybe, or better as a holiday let where people could come and go, or better yet as a community space, an art
space, a teaching space, a café… abandoned stations are lonely places even in the middle of a sunny spring day. There are ghosts that fly on the wings of butterflies, wistful, whistling, along the
long-gone tracks.
In the tradition of such stations, Felmingham itself is fields away. Farm fields of rape seed, in seed now and ripening towards harvest, and beet crops, low and green. There are Leaf notices (Home Page | LEAF (Linking Environmentand Farming)) that talk about water usage and timing / speed of harvest. Reminders to those who do not know, exactly where their food comes from and what it takes to get it to them.
Only a week prior I was in a room full of writers condemning farmers for ploughing up the footpaths across their fields, when I spoke up for those I had seen tramping them back in again post
ploughing. Here was vindication. The broad space, devoid of crops, hard-packed earth had not been tramped back in under foot: a good plough-width wide, I feel it must have been machine rolled. Reinstated with intention. Due gratitude.
Approaching the village from the south, the church looks squat & dumpy. Only as I leave along the eastward path do I look back and see what must once have been. The tower does indeed look squat and somehow unfinished or slighted, truncated, but that is nothing to the nave. The single-storey height body of the church main building, brick-built with stone gothic arched windows and miniature unnecessary buttresses speaks to the modern village. Look closely at the tower and there are the marks of former glory: successively lower outlines of roofs no longer abutting the flint tower.
From this angle the modern church looks like a railway shed against a mediaeval castle keep.
A later internet search suggests that the original church dates back to the mid 1200s, and that “wills dating from 1485 to 1546 record that money was left “for the building of the finishing of the
steeple”. [FelminghamVillage History ] Unfinished then. That squat tower was intended to have a steeple to top it off. The presumption is that the Reformation intervened and who knows where the money went. The larger nave that clearly did exist fell victim to fire in the mid 18th century. By then the village itself had probably fallen on poorer times and diminishing congregations.
Leaving Felmingham behind I embark upon Bryant’s Heath and get completely befuddled. I cannot say lost. I know where I am to within half a mile or less, but…well, here’s my question: is there a rule that says way-marked routes shall cease to be signposted at precisely that point where the description of them ceases to align with the shapes of the land and paths on the ground?
Even when not exactly ‘lost’ there is that adrenalin rush that comes from not knowing where, exactly where, you are and which way you’re supposed to be headed. Footpaths on Bryant’s Heath lead every which way other than the one described in my route guide. When I recognise that the path I’m on is taking me back in a loop, I decide to accept the exit from the Heath that I had at first discounted. The upshot is that I find myself back up on the Weaver’s Way, the old railway line much earlier than the plan would have been.
The upshot is that I get to walk a sheltered, tree-lined pathway rather than open fields. I get the frisson of wondering for a mile or so if I’m even heading in the right direction. Butterflies continue to keep me company. I don’t think I missed much.
