Trespassing

I went for a walk on Bob’s farm yesterday. No simple thing, because there are no rights of way on his hundreds of acres, though there used to be several (which is another story). He has banned me from walking on his land, so I have been agonising about this walk for weeks. He banned me for suggesting, in a public response to his planning application to build holiday lodges in the middle of a large stretch of open country, that if he got the permission it should be on condition that he replaced a piece of woodland that had somehow disappeared clean off the map from the place where he wanted the holiday lodges.

This kind of suggestion is commonplace now; in fact farmers are making money by selling ‘biodiversity net gain’ to developers who are causing biodiversity loss. Farmers, at the epicentre of an ecological destruction that puts us in the worst 10% worldwide for biodiversity loss, are selling their expertise at creating biodiversity! My suggestion, made without any obvious irony, earned me a lifetime ban from Bob’s farm. I don’t want to be difficult, and yet I think I have the right to walk about in my village.  Part of me hoped not to meet Bob; part of me wanted to meet him and to try to explain my point of view. There’s not much of a point made if no-one sees you making it. So maybe I do want to be difficult. Access to the countryside is important, for our wellbeing and our mental health, and to safeguard the countryside - landowners can rip out hedges, fill in ponds and trap protected birds of prey with impunity if we are not allowed on their land to see it. We have a moral right which is denied us by draconian property laws, which developed around the time when you could be hanged for stealing a sheep. Scotland has a Right to Roam.  We need one too. I’m not asking for a revolution.

So I set off to walk on Bob’s land, keen to enjoy the landscape and wildlife of my village. I quite fancy trying my hand at what is known as nature writing, and you can’t do it sitting in your kitchen.

I took the ancient hollow way that leads from the village down onto the wide floodplain of the river, facing the wooded hills on the haunches of the Golden Valley, with the Hay Bluff just visible over the ridge. The track I walked is probably an access track that dates from the Enclosure Act for the parish, and if so, if Bob only knew it, a right of way that he cannot throw me off. This was the great village hay meadow before the parish was enclosed. Ducks and coot were skulking beside the track in a pond shaded with huge white poplars, a fragment of an old river meander, and over the corn stubble the martins were flying low. In the meadow beyond the hedge swallows hawked the flies around the cattle. Some were twittering on the wires, with a growing awareness that it would soon be time to go to Africa. Yellowhammers sat on the hedge tops at intervals, singing their ‘little bit of bread and no cheese’ song, and linnets flocked with their dipping flight above the stubbles. The river has been snaking over this land for generations, leaving abandoned meanders that form sinuous ponds rich with wildlife. It was too late in the season to hear the whitethroats and the blackcaps singing in the undergrowth, but a heron got up from one of these pools, giving the traditional croak after the first few flaps, and headed off towards the river. A flight of duck burst out of the willows, and as the commotion died down I could hear the call of a moorhen and see the flick of its white tail feathers as it vanished in a stand of yellow flag. I leaned on the bridge and watched the sticklebacks in the water below, a small shoal cruising gently then suddenly flicking away. I ducked under the wire into the next field and followed a sheep path through a flower-rich meadow, where golden dung-flies danced on the cowpats curling in the sun, past a deep pool where ducklings ran over the green duckweed surface to hide in the reed beds as a red kite banked overhead. The next meadow was rich with white clover, loud with bees. The peewits rose with that querulous call, and overhead a curlew called, anxious that I was too near its chick hidden in the meadow. Chaffinches were calling from the hawthorns, and a green woodpecker rose from drilling an anthill in this ancient meadow and flew with undulating flight to a stoggle oak in the next field, where a hare spotted me and crouched lower in its form.

This might have been accurate fifty years ago, and many of you will be wondering if during my walk I saw a rat, or if you are merely smelling one. You can’t in all conscience do ‘nature writing’ if there is no nature to write about, and all I actually  saw on my trespass was one white butterfly, four small brown birds I could not identify,  four gulls and six rooks flying past very high overhead, and a disconsolate duck on a dried up pond. I didn’t count the pigeons but there might have been three or four. As for flowers, I saw two wild pansies – heartsease - growing in a bean field that had no other wild plants or flowers, only a few rogue oilseed rape plants that had survived because they were genetically engineered to tolerate the glyphosate weedkiller that had been sprayed to kill everything else.

For this is the Wye valley, where seventy years of ‘modern’ farming, by farmers who had been told that they needed to use chemicals if they were to be modern farmers, has left very little nature. In this kind of farmed landscape water is where you will usually find a some wildlife surviving, but the Wye Valley is also dominated by a chicken industry of which the Cargill family, secretive owners of an American company that has been called ‘the worst company in the world’, is the ultimate beneficiary, and their chicken units are killing the river too.

I used to think that the enclosures were the last major change to the British countryside, and even that they might have brought some benefits, as the new hedges provided a habitat that was not available in the old open fields. Like many environmentalists I valued our landscape of small fields and hedges, and believed that ‘traditional’ mixed farming was valuable because it preserved and managed this lovely landscape. In America vast prairies cleared of Native Americans and buffalo were now monotonous monocultures of wheat or maize, with the grain silos of companies like Cargill at the railheads. They had monocultures of almonds that stretched for hundreds of miles, with so few insects that almost all the commercial bee colonies in the States had to be trucked in every year to pollinate them. Here we had small fields, and regulations to preserve the hedgerows. There they had almost completely mechanised meat production, ‘farming’ cattle in huge ‘feedlots’, and chickens in factories. They had pioneered methods of cultivation using chemical inputs of nitrates and phosphates and insecticides and herbicides, and huge corporations like Cargill, Monsanto and Bayer had created an agriculture moulded to serve the needs of these companies. I was glad we had escaped the worst excesses.

But then, walking the land in my village and describing what I know from my boyhood birdwatching was here before the chemical agriculture revolution, and seeing the contrast with the wildlife of today, it starts to feel as if this might just as well be prairies. We have kept the hedges, and it still looks almost as lovely as it did when Meg and Boxer pulled the old broad-wheeled wagon full of sheaves down the lane and into the rickyard on some mythical summer evening. But now there is bugger all here. It might just as well be a prairie. With Cargill chicken factory-farming dominating the Wye Valley and poisoning the river with nutrients originating in from the deforestation of the Amazon for the cultivation of soya, and the insects and the soil organisms killed with the products of Bayer and Monsanto, and Glyphosate used to kill any plants creeping in to the farm monocultures, frankly it might just as well be prairie. The hedges may fool you, but they don’t fool me.