In the late afternoon a large fox wandered around the slope of an empty field through grass up to his belly, his rich auburn coat catching the light, a burnished body pushing through the thick green growth. He criss-crossed the field, abstractedly following an unseen path, his head down and out of sight, then up again and smelling the air.
The fox’s main food sources are small rodents and rabbits. But foxes are opportunistic hunters and if their natural food source has gone, they’ll take food where they can find it. It’s well known that they will occasionally kill young lambs – born in the spring, just at the moment when the fox has a den full of cubs to feed. I’d stood in our field in Wales and watched two foxes rip a lamb apart. A hideous sight. I’d chased another as it jumped through the hedge with the last hen in its mouth, after it had spent the night emptying the hen pen. But I’d also followed Dad through the fields as he shot rabbits that had exploded in numbers and were decimating the cornfields in the years after every fox in the district had been removed. I’d watched him poison the rats too, and the mice. And the water voles.
But far more persecuted than the fox or rabbit is the badger. Bovine TB is an ever-present disease among the cattle population of the UK. Cattle are regularly tested for the infection and any animal testing positive is slaughtered – leaving farmers to endure the financial and emotional heartache of losing their livestock. Alongside humans, badgers can also contract TB, a disease that’s equally deadly for cattle, humans and badgers alike. Most of us have been vaccinated against the disease, but to combat the spread among cattle we don’t use vaccines, we cull badgers instead. It’s commonly thought that badgers spread TB to cattle, so the government approves culls across an area of this country larger than Israel, causing localized extinctions of an animal that has inhabited this island since the Ice Age. As a child our pedigree herd of cattle was termed ‘accredited’. In the 1960s and 70s that meant the herd was tested and proved to be TB-free. Free to live and roam the fields that were surrounded by woods. The same woods where badgers lived, silently getting on with their lives. TB-free. A bovine vaccine exists and yet we don’t vaccinate cattle, as apparently it’s impossible to develop a test that will differentiate between a vaccinated cow and one infected with TB. We encourage mothers to vaccinate their child against every possible disease and yet a cow that is tracked and traced from birth can’t be injected with a vaccine that’s readily available, a vaccine that could be visible and readable on their record, like any human medical record. So the cull goes on, and yet the numbers of cattle with bovine TB don’t fall. Possibly they’re not catching TB from the badgers after all, but, like the common cold, from each other.
Rarely seen, other than as roadkill on the side of the motorway or playfully running around their sett on an episode of Springwatch, the badger stays low, hidden in the woods and hedgerows. Safe in their world of undergrowth, on their diet of grubs, mice and ripe fruit, only ever venturing into the fields in the dark of night, vulnerable to any infection that might be lying waiting for them in the grass.
At what point in our lives does cynicism take over from instinct? When we stop feeling the softness of rain on our face and start worrying about being wet? Stop marvelling at the wonder of a badger rooting through the grass in the twilight, stop listening to the sounds carried on the wind or the echo of ourselves inside it? Or when we hear the young voice of an activist on the radio and doubt its validity? When do we make that switch from being part of the natural world to being an observer with an assumed right to control it?
As Murray was writing Copsford, he looked back at Walter, a naïve twenty-something, wandering in the fields picking herbs, and painted a picture of a discovery of life and nature in a landscape that has gone. There are few areas now where you can walk through meadows and collect armfuls of foxgloves and centaury. There are few people who have heard of centaury, fewer still who have seen it in the grass and heathlands it used to inhabit in abundance. Even as Murray wrote the lines in the years after the Second World War, decades after he hid in the bushes watching the girl he loved picking blackberries, he could see that the countryside was changing, that plants and animals were disappearing, unnoticed and unseen. Simply fading from sight as people lost their connection to nature and became mere observers.
As we walked across the farm in the early spring, the empty fields shone with a new green carpet. The last of the previous tenant’s sheep had left the land at the start of the winter, allowing the land to recover over the winter months. But there were no badger trails through the grass that was tentatively beginning to grow, or beneath the hedgerows showing the purple spring haze of buds about to break. Sparrows argued among the branches and overhead the buzzard circled his territory, calling into the distance, yet if there were badgers in the area they didn’t cross the farm. We stopped to look downriver, the water catching shafts of sunlight on the high tide, to a church tower and the woods beyond.
‘Do you remember how much equipment and livestock it took to farm a place this size?’ Moth was now lying on his back on the damp grass, watching clouds mass and then separate, but obviously his thoughts were far away.
‘Not really, I think I’ve blocked it out. When we were walking I tried not to remember because thinking about home hurt too much, and now if I try to remember I can’t.’
‘I can, I remember it really well.’ I turned to him and watched his face, eyes closed, concentrating, as he listed an inventory of machinery and livestock numbers that I couldn’t recall if I tried. ‘The grass is growing now, it can’t be ignored, and we’re in no position to buy livestock.’
‘But do you remember that day on the beach on your fortieth birthday when it rained all afternoon?’ How could he remember livestock numbers?
‘Of course, and we played cricket in our wetsuits because it was so wet, but the kids didn’t want to go home. But what’s that got to do with it?’
‘Nothing, but you remembered.’ I lay back on the grass. He remembered.
‘I think we’re going to have to talk to Sam about finding someone to use the grass. We can focus on resurrecting the orchards, making cider and overseeing a biodiversity plan for the farm, but I can’t see us being able to actually physically farm the whole place ourselves.’ He stood up, looking around the fields and down to the wood. Sure about what he was saying, clear in his reasoning. ‘And I need the freedom to do other things too. If we own the livestock that graze the land then we’re tied to the place, every day of the year. I need to be able to come with you to your events and do other things too.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘I’ve been thinking about another walk.’
I followed him as he wandered down the hill, back towards the farmhouse. His stride still a little lopsided, but his feet finding the ground with certainty. The sun broke through the clouds, the grass grew a little greener and at the base of a hedge, untouched by man or machinery for months, a patch of snowdrops pushed through the ground.
On a dull, flat morning when the air was still and even the spring light didn’t seem to lift over the hill, I followed the newly created paths in the orchards where apple blossom was showing the first signs of swelling on the branches and in the long grass something stirred. A roe deer, a doe, clearly pregnant, trotted slowly down to the stream, disappearing into the darkness of the old deciduous trees that followed the water downhill. I reached the tree I’d been looking for. The fallen tree with the drill holes. Flicking through a magazine in a waiting room my attention had been caught by an article about the larvae of a moth that eats holes in trees, and the picture of the holes had looked identical. In the new growth of the tree, where branches covered in the buds of new growth pushed skyward away from the fallen trunk, a sticky sap oozed from the randomly drilled holes and a few insects buzzed around the spring food source. An early red admiral butterfly folded its wings, unable to tear itself away from the all-you-can-eat breakfast, but on the lower dead side of the tree the sap had dried to a hard resin around the holes.
The goat moth is huge, one of the largest moths in the country, and increasingly rare. Its main habitat is in the south of the UK, though it’s rarely seen this far west. The adults lay their eggs in a number of wetland trees, ash, birch, alder, but also apple trees. The larvae can live in the tree for as long as five years. Five years of munching and digesting the cellulose in the wood before a bright red caterpillar nearly ten centimetres long crawls out into the light of late summer. It will then quickly disappear into the grass to pupate over winter before emerging as a fully fledged moth, so well disguised that it’s barely distinguishable from the bark of a tree. Five years of hiding away from the light, of collecting its strength and preparing for life. There’d be no way of knowing what insects were in the tree until they emerged, maybe tomorrow, maybe in five years, emerged blinking into the light, ready to shed an old form and embrace the new. Five years is a long time, long enough for even the most reticent insect to transform and finally spread its wings.
The sound of a vehicle pulling into the yard gave me the familiar sense of nervous reluctance and the almost overwhelming desire to stay hidden in the orchard and hope that Moth was awake to go and see who it was. I was still struggling to shake the deep-grained mistrust of others. Few people ever called at the farm – occasional visitors from Polruan, but more often just someone whose satnav had sent them in the wrong direction. I took a deep breath and headed towards the house. How long would I need to be here, hiding from the world, before enough time had passed to allow me to spread my wings and transform?