Uninspired
There is a danger in setting out to write. We look at things differently, we seek to capture them, rather than letting them be. We wonder about them, rather than wondering at them. We expect to be touched, moved, inspired.
And sometimes we are not.
Sometimes we work too hard at ‘going into nature’. Sometimes a walk should just be a walk.
I was having one of those days. You know the ones: when you show up and get with the programme, but you’re not really there. Your head is in the room, but you’ve left your essence lying around somewhere else. Nothing catches.
We can respond to this with irritation or disappointment or, better, with acceptance. If our muse is busy elsewhere, then we can trust her to know what she is doing, and just go along for the ride. Or in this case, the walk.
We’re not ‘field walking’, which is a very specific way of covering a field inch by inch to search for something: clues, artefacts, archaeology, life. More accurately we’re ‘edge walking’, sticking to the footpaths which mostly run along the edges of fields. Where they do cross the fields directly there is a sense that maybe once there had been a boundary here, long grubbed up and forgotten.
These days, the edges are where the life is. The edges (and hedges) are where the wild things grow, where they are allowed to grow. We have forced them out of the centre, and only let them cling on at the margins. But cling on they do, and put on their annual show to remind us of what we are in danger of losing – and what we have already lost.
Before we even enter the first of our five fields, we meet walkers coming the other way, complaining about new fencing and a path that is ‘all overgrown’. It is a particularly abundant year for growth. Warm spells and wet ones might have humans moaning, but a lot of the plant life is responding with exuberance.
Grasshopper
The flint wall marks the old edge of the village, but in another corner, space has been gouged out of the slope to accommodate a house extension. Rubble. Work-in-progress. A field under assault.
The grass has been cut and cleared. New growth is green, a contrast to the silver-gold of the ripe stragglers that mark a new edge, a future hedge. Oak saplings are wrapped in plastic, not trusted togrow strong on their own. This field-edge path will one day become a twitchel, and people will forget when it was open to the place where a single butterfly quartered the field, chased by cloud-shadows. They will not know that just over there, in that clump that escaped the cutting, grasshoppers sing.
Maybe the field itself will go.
When the trees have grown and the path is enclosed, the blackberry and rose will be less bright. The red admiral, today basking on the bramble, will look elsewhere for its warmth and light.
Who knows what the flowers will do. They can be wayward creatures, growing where you least expect them. Being wildly abundant one year, then absent the next. Or waiting underground for decades for the disturbance that brings their seeds into the direct sunlight they need to germinate. Or sending out their radicals to surface somewhere unexpected. If you think of flowers as stationery critters, think again.
For now, the roses show only their hips. Last night’s rain has washed their petals away. The brambles are at that point of flower-and-fruit, going over from one to the other.
Barley
Through a gate and into space. The open barley field, with its views across the marshes and way out over the sea into the sky. Wide acreage. Mono-crop. Devoid of life – or so we’re told. I wonder what lives among those stalks.
Today, all I find is a nondescript brown moth, hanging outupside down. Maybe it thinks it’s a bat. Or maybe all moths do that. I don’t know.
Humble barley. Heads hanging low, awaiting execution. The wind wanders through and stalks huddle in groups, not so much dancing as trying to shuffle out of the way, trying not to be seen. Keep looking down, don’t make eye contact.
A single speedwell waits by the edge of the path. Unseen. Untrampled. Just the one.
Brassicaceae
The brassicas. Once known as the Cruciferae. The mustards and the cabbages.
Perhaps I’ve got you onside with that. If I had said “rape” or even the less argumentative “rapeseed”, maybe not so much.
We came to this field two months back, when the Brassica napus was in full flower, and had few raising their hands in support. I claimed a simple love of its Van Gogh glow on dark days. Someone else told us that bees would choose rapeseed over borage given a choice. I cannot speak to the truth of that, but I can tell you this: this hedgerow is the richest of our fields today. This margin is the one that speaks of insects in variety and plenitude.
We have had common mallow all along our route, but here it explodes. It dances with the Alexanders, now in their late-summer yellow and green, seed-heads bulging, both species
head height: a carnival procession.
A patch of chamomile or mayweed. The leaves look to me more like the finer ones of mayweed, but my weak sense of smell denies me the defining olfactory experience. I’m happy to settle for daisy-type-devices. White petals, sun-burst face, feathery fronds. I’m sure they’ll forgive me for not knowing who they are, any more than they know me.
More bindweed. Our Lady’s Little Glass according to the Brothers Grimm, who tell the tale of Mary (mother of Jesus) being given a drink of wine in such a cup.
Bold spires of prickly thistles, and red ants delving to see what might be good to drink.
Less-showy mugwort in subtle shades of grey and green.
Yesterday’s poppies proud in their seedhead perfection; today’s blooms already beginning to shed their paper hearts.
Hiding under all, the heartsease, love-in-idleness, the tiny, wild pansy. Pale and delicate, unlike her cultivated cousins: a virginal bonnet, and lemon bib, no shocking violet colours here. Pansy comes from the French pensée. Pansies for thought.
Lark Rise
We call it the lark field, because we are always greeted by skylark song. This is the high point and turnaround for today’s walk. Here among the wheat, the corn marigold are making a break for freedom. They spread out in both directions from the path, gathering in groups among the wheat to negotiate their next excursion. Such patches of yellow among the corn, bring glimmers of hope that maybe one day we will see the return of cornflowers, and poppies, and all these wayside fellows back where they belong among the growing crops.
Maybe one day the lark will look down and see a more varied field, where flowers and insects are allowed their share, and we understand that the value of the field is not purely vested in the pounds it generates or the produce on the table. The field, this one specific field, if allowed to support its share of wildlife (plant and animal) can add so much more to its neighbours, and to us if we take time to pause.
A walk is just a walk. It doesn't need to be a research trip or a writing expedition, but even so, upon reflection, we might be surprised by what we've gathered along the way, without even trying.
