For five years now I have come to know this parcel of land, this haven of wild and quietude, as my home and sanctum. The last eighteen months living on and with it, hardly leaving it, eating the sheep that eat the heather that eats the soil and bathing in the rain that falls. Days roll into weeks and I am here, watching the mist rise up from the valley each morning and roll in from the hills at dusk. Every day I walk the land, planting my footprints in the soil and imprinting the lay of the land and the intricate details of spiralling mounds of red sphagnum moss and spires of heather into my soul, absorbing the light and the minerals and rain into my marrow.
I know where the frogs lay their spawn in bubbling piles of jelly and the tadpoles wriggle as they warm in the early spring sun. I know the scent of snow that blows in on a damp, north breeze and where water will still flow when the land is parched dry in summer. I know where to look for baby oaks unfurling through the heather in May, where the kestrels fledge their young in the holly cliff and the cuckoos lay their eggs in the meadow pipits’ nests. I know where the orchids send up purple spotted spires through the grass in June. I know where the butterworts bloom on the paths, bogs and stream beds, where the devil’s bit scabious’ pompom flowers bounce on the breeze around the old flax ponds and through the wet grasslands in September, where marsh fritillaries and peacocks flutter and dragonflies dance. I know where the cock chaffinch has claimed his stretch of the hazel hedge behind my caravan for the second spring running, where he perches and calls for a hen to join him. I am here, I see it all, I hear and breathe and feel it all.
I know this land. I can trace every inch of it. I know every tree, every gnarled and mossy bough, every stand of gorse, every ridge of shale and limestone jutting from the land. I know the patterns in the rocks carved by rain and splotched with lichens, black and chalk and grey, some maybe millennia old. I know where the badgers dig for grubs and hazelnuts and where the deer tracks go. I know the points on the horizon where the sun rises and sets through the seasons, where the land is baked dry under the high summer sun and where the rains wash mud into gushing floods that drain in from the hill above and carry our silt to the fertile river valley below.
I see where tree roots and canopy shade will catch floods and soften droughts and build resilience and depth into our steep, eroded soils. I know which trees will grow here, that want to grow here, indigenous and wild, and give nutrients, nitrogen and carbon to feed the life in our hungry soils, where planting trees can benefit the land—and also, importantly, where it won’t. I know which herbs to sow among the pastures to root deep, open the soil and bring up minerals to the sward, which “weeds” to encourage to do the same (there are no such things as weeds, the wild plants that arrive and flourish have stories to tell and work to do—we can learn a lot about the land by listening to them—and when you’re grazing goats nearly all leaves, shoots, twigs and flowers are tasty nutritious morsels rich in a diverse array of minerals and medicines pulled from the soil to be cycled through layers of life and back again).
But I am no expert. I hold no degrees. I am just a farmer, just a humble herder of my caprine queens and benevolent sheep, doing the best I can with the land I farm and live on, learning from the land. Learning to work with what we have from where we are in a constant flux of seasons and changing weather patterns. How hard to graze the heather and how long to rest my pastures, how many sheep I can keep for how much of the year before their pressure is too much for the land to comfortably hold, how to integrate our farm and livelihood in a way that gives more than it takes from the land. Learning from all the sources I can find to deepen my understanding and care of the land I have come to call my home. What grows here, what rock lies beneath the soil, what life crawls within it—what can I do to feed it. The history of the land, its memories, its spirit—for the land is alive. Listening to the soul of the land, the stories told by oak trees and neighbours in the pub and old stone walls and forgotten place names and an old man’s gleaming, teary eyes. Learning and adjusting and relearning in a continuously evolving dynamic between nature, us, and land.
A life’s work. A life’s learning. A life immersed in service to the land that holds me, nourishes and earths me.
“Praise the earth… She is our temple. She is the body of God.” Marija Petkovska
Yes, praise the land, for we are the land, and the land is us. The land is life. There is nothing else.
When someone says farmers are dumb, I have to laugh. If only I had the knowledge of all my ancestors from only a few generations ago to guide me on my own little farm. The internet comes in handy but in the last two weeks I've had moments of what it must have been like in small farming communities. I was raised on prideful individualism--never ask questions or seek help. But I had to reach out about a ewe's prolapse and then another ewe's health. I dreaded judgement, but what I got instead was more knowledge and friendship. Lovely writing!
This is gorgeous, so evocative. It’s not as poetic, but you might like to read some my dad’s old diary entries from birdwatching records he kept in the 1980s when he lived on the Blackwater estuary and was a warden of a nature reserve there. I’ve been posting them on my Substack called AUGURY. He documents the flora and fauna and the changing seasons in a similarly loving and poignant way to you, again no ‘formal training’ as you say, but just years of being outside among it all with eyes and ears open. Thank you for writing such a lovely post!