Land Keepers

A Sunday morning round of our favourite loop. Up through meadows, growing despite the dry. Down through pastures of plump slumped sheep. Back over the shoulder of the hill into the sun, where we found David, fettling a fence.

Curlews coasted on the still-cool breeze while he talked of the nearly six decades he has spent farming these fields. Of raising generations of stock. Of harrowing and mowing and baling the grass. Of lambings past, a part of the calendar he now misses having given it up, his one concession to being some way beyond the retirement age of any other occupation. Of looking after the old stone field drains. And of fettling fences on many a morning like this.

Later in the week, I climbed from the shaded valley into the blaze of a building spring heatwave, to meet another steward of land. This one is new to his fields. Still wondering what to do with what he now holds.

A grasshopper warbler reeled from the rushes while we talked about whether between all the many ways land matters – for feeding us, for storing carbon, for beauty, for being a space for people to breathe – a balance might be found. And what about all the other life that needs this space? Should we spare it some land, let it out of our grasp, or can we find better ways to share it? Should each landowner aim for the richest mix of life across their few acres? Or focus on the rare species their ground already happens to harbour – like the globally scarce waxcap fungi for which these hills are known?

I don’t know. But my seventeen years in philosophy left me content with the kind of conversation that doesn’t close things down, but opens them up. Puzzlement, not certainty, is the mark of having appreciated the world for what it is – incorrigibly plural, in Louis MacNeice’s words. That’s why I value these conversations with farmers and all other land keepers: they remind me that there is no single way to care for land, and no simple answer to what it asks of us.

Gleanings

The small and the scattered, swept up at week’s end

Constellations of stitchwort below Higgin House, egg yolks of marsh marigolds at Lower Rawtonstall / The Hebden Royd Churches Together cross, sharp against the sky, high on Horsehold Scout / Meeting friends and collaborators at the culmination of Northern Broadsides’ year-long Iron People project at the grand finale performance at Eureka! / A single swallow on a telegraph wire / Rescuing a hulking Maybug stranded on the road on our way to school / A brief flare of hope at seeing cars splattered with insects, just how they were in my childhood, quickly dashed by realising its cause was a greenfly population explosion provoked by yet more record-breaking temperatures / Gulping great draughts of bluebell scent on the morning school runs / Lapwing chicks, bundles of white-and-tortoiseshell fluff scurrying among the rushes, scolded by their iridescent parents to stay stock still while we passed.