Bonnylands

Meadow Waxcaps, a gentle blend of the colours you might see on the belly of a fallow deer, and the glistening bright Yellow Waxcaps and Scarlet Waxcaps, braise themselves in their hygroscopic liquors among thin slices of garlic on my stove, mushrooms almost too rare to eat now, mushrooms that memorialise lands that have escaped the chemicals. These come from Bonnylands, and no matter what the origin of a name that, high up here on the border, may as well be derived from Welsh as from English, those who knows this high windy open space love it for its name as well as for the views. West are the ridges of the Black Mountains, sometimes side-lit to reveal every rhiw and watercourse, every crumbling ancient field wall or thorn tree, and sometimes black flat back-lit cut-outs. Out east the plain and the hills topped with oak woods, Clee Hill and the Malverns as the world curves away and May Hill, topped with a clump of trees and scatterings of harebells, just visible rising out of Gloucestershire. On a good day you can see the Severn floodwaters glittering from high places in these hills.

She loved it here. When she couldn’t walk any more we would come up in my ancient car and look at it all, and she would say how lucky we were to live here. And though she knew that luck, for her, had pretty much run out, that wordless present seemed to mesmerise her until the sun went down behind us and the colours drained from the landscape and lights came on in the valley and another precious day was over. When I come here I look out particularly for hares, loping away nonchalantly lop-sided and confident, because for her to see a hare set a day apart from all other days. Sometimes I see one here. Yesterday, walking the sodden turf looking for waxcaps a snipe rose from a pool, a turlough where the water table in a hollow had risen above the turf and flushed out a few worms.

There were patches of the big Meadow Waxcaps on the drier ground, some starting to curl up to form bowls of a colour neither pink nor orange, bleached and rinsed by last night’s rain, showing their distinctly wide-spaced gills. There were intense scarlet waxcaps too, and yellow ones. You need a knife for these, to get below them without breaking the delicate caps, which give more flavour than their size might indicate, a sharpness balancing the muskier slight bitterness of the Meadow Waxcaps. The waxcaps grow here because the turf has never been ploughed.  I know that as a historical certainty. The field is the document that proves it. Waxcaps don’t survive the plough, much less artificial fertiliser. Their survival here must be miraculous, because it is almost impossible to believe that the farmers have never been tempted to spread some nitrogen fertiliser in the springtime to get a flush of chemical-green spring grass to feed their hungry ewes, skinny and drained by lambing.

This landscape has been farmed more thoroughly in the past. There are small fields trailing off from the end of the big common over the ridge, slowly rewilding themselves with thorn bushes and rowans, and ruins of houses named farms on the map. Bonnylands itself has fences where hedges once were, maybe with one or two old thorns. Further south where the name runs out is a stone wall with big trees perched along it, marking the edge of the old deer park and forming a funnel where the grazing animals on the common could be gathered towards the gateway before the help of sheepdogs. Farmers grew more here once, before they were undercut by changing times and better transport, but now they just graze sheep. Fences are needed less as animals have the liberty of these great sheep-runs and the only crops are fodder turnips and maybe fodder beet for them to eat in winter.  The walls, crafted from fieldstone and faced on one side with turf, subside imperceptibly beneath the slow rise of worm casts, except where the higher deer-park wall runs along the ridge, a statement of power from the same men who built the castles. The sheep are always here, so nothing grows above an inch or so except the waxcaps, a few rushes and the occasional gorse bush. Over the wall on the common there are fewer sheep, and slowly gorse is making shelter where birches and rowans can get to grow out of reach of sheep and horses. The turf that holds the mycelium threads of waxcaps may still have viable seeds of flowering plants that grew here once, and there may be bonsai flowers hidden in the gorse bushes, but we will never know what dormant riches Bonnylands holds until the sheep leave it alone.

Once maybe it was called Bonnylands because of the orchids and the pignuts, the dyer’s green-weed and the twayblade, the harebells and buttercups that grew here among the hay. With the flowers came the insects feeding on the pollen and on the nectar, so that to lie in the sun among the hay meadows was to drowse to the hums and drones of insects, and to watch the swallows darting, singling them out.  Once there were corncrakes, heard but rarely seen. Hay meadows would have come and gone as meadows were mowed or ploughed, but the wildflower hay fed to the animals would spread the seed around. The flowers would reappear wherever meadows were put back down to hay. Once you have a monoculture, one animal, one type of field, only the plants that tolerate that ecological boredom can survive, and there are few creatures for whom constant short grass provides both shelter and a food supply.

As I bend over among the waxcaps, I hear the quad-bike of the farmer bouncing across the field behind me, and I almost want him to come over to see who I am and what I am doing in this field. He will have spent much of his life up here, as I know his father has done too, and he has earned some rights far greater than any bundle of parchment deeds could give him. He does not abuse those rights by driving over to see what I am doing. I wish he would, because I know that our border voices would harmonise and we would recognise something in each other. I want to ask him how it is, right now, to farm sheep up here, and what is going to happen to him. Can he go on as he has always done, or has the government plans for him that he must follow? The price of lamb and of fleeces shorn at a loss may not be enough to live on when the Basic Payments end.  Can he accommodate himself to Environmental Land Management schemes? Is he besieged by wide-boys talking of money to be made from selling Biodiversity Net Gain, or of Carbon Credits?

I dream that this Bonnylands, so pure and yet also shorn of so much life, appropriately, by sheep, might one day return to ecological vibrancy like that of the old Norman deep park which was once just over the next wall, or Moccas Park in the next valley. If you see the biosphere as the layer of living soil and the creatures, the animals and birds and trees and plants that live in it and above it,  Bonnylands has a skinny biosphere maybe a few inches deep, scarcely raised above the waxcaps, even when a hare’s ears or a passing pipit raise the mean depth a little. Growing trees like those of the old deer park would deepen that sphere. It may be that the only way to make these fields pay the farmer in a year or two will be for him to enter into an agro-forestry scheme, or to take part in a landscape-scale Environmental Land Management project to bring the old deer park back to life. It is not impossible. Across the valley the Woodland Trust is reimagining that lobe of Moccas Deer Park that was coniferised in the 1950s, and my boyhood dreams of restoring the Caledonian Forests are coming true at last. Sometimes I fantasise about getting a new environmental project going here by the sheer power of enthusiasm, bringing the ecology of the old deer-park back to life by the dedication of a community wanting to put their world to rights.  But this is a place where for me mortality is ever present and the skin of life is thin. Just as likely as that I can drive a revisioning of Bonnylands by doggedness or enthusiasm is that next time the farmer comes across me I will have keeled over among my basket of mushrooms with no more warning than a gentle buzzing in my ears that all this, for me at least, won’t matter any more. It could happen in worse places.