I didn’t expect my last post, on using the whole animal, to take off quite like it did. Thank you to everyone who shared and restacked it, and welcome to new subscribers. I always feel compelled to reintroduce myself and my little corner of Substack whenever I get a flurry of new subscribers like that, so I have given my About page a little update—please take a look if you haven’t already. And, rather than repeating what I’ve already written, I will point you to a couple of recent posts that serve as introductions to who I am and what I write about, and our farm.
We have been living on the land for nigh on a year and a half now, just about through our second winter in a makeshift cabin on the hill with no power or running water and little to insulate us from the elements. Little to separate us from the land. We have watched and felt and listened through all seasons, vibrant summer and bleak winter, rain, gale, hail and shine, flood, storm and drought, and the land has spoken. It has whispered through the tall, swaying birch down at the wooded creek along our southern boundary where a few giant oaks still standing line the crumbling remnants of an old, stone road that leads to the spring on our southwestern corner. It has gurgled and gushed from the streams and flooded wetlands, poured from the old flax ponds, their drains brimming over with rain. It has called from the cock chaffinch that sits outside our window declaring his claim to the hazel hedge, screeched from the jays that drop acorns from those giant oaks on the heath in a perpetual effort to birth forests anew, and swooshed through the ravens’ wings as they scout the open hills for carrion overhead. It has howled on the wind that rips across our grasslands and hammered with the rain that batters and seeps through the rough, timber walls of our little hut on the hill, squelched in the floods and mud of our shallow, peaty soils and crackled in the baking heat of the high summer sun that turns the mud to dust.
This land doesn’t want to be tamed. No, not in the way it was ravaged and raped, clear felled and beaten, stripped bare and exposed. This land doesn’t want to be strip grazed or ploughed. It will not be forced or coaxed to produce. It will not keep giving—it has nothing left to give.
The open, treeless landscape of our rain battered hills tells a history of persecution, of ravagement and war. Even the blackface sheep on our western hills are living relics of colonial Britain that replaced the native people who lived and farmed there. But the memories held in the hills themselves and the germs of oak trees that keep bravely sprouting where they’re dropped on the open heath and the stories told in forgotten place names, in a language unspoken, are of woods and wildness, thick and green.
There is a lot more nuance to that conversation than I can fit into a short blog piece. How people have always lived and farmed in these hills with minimal impact, in coexistence with the wild. How the sheep have become a part of our landscape, food and livelihood (indeed, they are mine). How the open hills and heaths, grazed by livestock, are habitat to a wealth of wildlife and the greatest threat listed to our upland ecosystems is reforestation (as in non-native spruce forestry that creates an ecological dead zone—not carefully, judiciously planted pockets of native woods). Not farming.
But I have listened to the land. I have felt its strain. I have seen the earth crack and turn to dust under the summer sun and then wash away in the rain. I have fought the wind and scorched under the sun and I have heard the wild whisper, this land needs trees.
We met a (slightly) older neighbour in the pub last week whose family farmed the land next door when he was a boy. The land next door is young, spruce forestry now. Still green and wild, the trees just tipping over the weeds, but when the tightly planted evergreens grow tall and shade out the undergrowth they will strip the last traces of fertility from the land and turn the soil sour. A shame, we agreed. He knew our land—he’d hunted it years ago for duck and pheasant. He knew our old flax ponds where the ducks come down to nest. He told us the Old Irish name of our townland, an area of approximately half a square mile in which our little farm sits, before Anglicisation to its current, meaningless form, translates to ‘Little Wood’.
Little Wood. The name sends shivers down my spine, tingles through my peripheral nerves and makes all the tiny hairs on the backs of my arms prickle. Truth tingles, as my mother calls it, that tingling sensation that drops you into your senses when your physical being recognises an intrinsic truth. Little Wood. It gives words to the shapeless cries of the land. It tells of the memories that run through the hills, spoken through mycelial networks of deep, humus-rich soils and soft, green mosses and forest and fern. It tells of a land that once was lush and fertile and generous, a land that held and sheltered and fed its people until they came and took all it had to give. And it tells me to do better, keep listening to the land, keep giving back. Give more back to the land.
It has always been our plan to plant a lot of native trees on this land. Not closed forest that would leave no room for us and our livestock and wouldn’t work anyway on this mixed, rough land, but open, tree pastures, shelter belts, copses and hedges, planted and managed to improve the soil and pastures, to benefit the land and our livestock and pay homage to the way the land once was, and wants to be. Little Wood. Yes. That feels right. We begin the season’s bare root planting this weekend.
A little bit of “housekeeping”: I have been struggling with the ethical/practicable conundrum of what and how much to put behind the paywall. I came to Substack without a very clear goal, simply as a farm blog and a place to share, and expand and develop my writing, with a theme on our place as humans on the land, in nature, and in the great web of all life. I want to continue to write from a place of creative generosity, not from a place of selling. But like everyone else I also have bills to pay, and my commitment to this space takes time and effort like any other job. My paid subscriptions keep me writing regularly while supporting my farm and livelihood, and I have been overwhelmed by the support and generosity of my readers. So I also want to give additional value to those who reciprocate and quite literally enable me to put my time into writing. But I’m still figuring out how to do that in a way that feels right.
Most posts are still free for now. Until now I’ve only paywalled a very little, more personal content. Having a small group of paying subscribers has allowed me to write more freely and personally to a closed group while figuring out where to go with this. Going forward, it is my intention to keep very sensitive content (eg animal butchering) and my knowledge or experience that I’ve hard earned or paid for that doesn’t feel okay to give away freely, for paying subscribers.
I have given away a handful of paid subscriptions which have been covered by the generosity of others who give more. As I begin to put more content behind the paywall, I will extend that offer to anyone who really wants a paid subscription but genuinely can’t afford it—reach out to me. And I offer a lower subscription rate for anyone who wants to give a little but finds the usual rate too high (bearing in mind Substack and Stripe take their cuts as well). I hope that by offering a tiered system like this I can make my writing accessible to everyone it speaks to while still covering myself.
Go raibh maith agat. Thank you for your support.
Intrigued and moved by your desire to discern and give the land what it wants. The essence of good husbandry.
As a student of palynology (the study of pollen, (particularly its signature on the land, which, through soil cores, can tell the story of plant associations that have lived and thrived there before), may I suggest you consult the scientific literature for your area and see if anyone has done this work and can offer an idea of what species grew there in association with what forbs and graminoids and when (climate change always a consideration). Is there a University nearby? It might be a fruitful place to start reimagining the land as it once was.
Chills. The land remembers. So beautiful to hear this piece of remembrance you received about the land you dwell on now. How it is communicating to you through these different channels, a name given feels like a deeply potent offering of trust. Of how it desires to be held and seen. Beautiful too how you so openly listen and tend to a healing land. Giving love where love is needed. This is healing that moves beyond even this plot of land.