At midday a gust of wind blows briefly down the street. There’s a change in the air. A pizza box skids a few yards, rattling its crusts, and flips up against the hubcap of a parked Nissan. For the last hour that greasy cardboard square has covered up a narrow crack between pavement and kerbstone. Now the sun pours down into the miniature chasm, touching the long, folded-back wings of an ant, a queen, as she clambers up its soil sides, using the withered leaf of a dandelion like a loft-ladder. Her antennae emerge, straightening and bouncing, reading air and concrete, followed by her glossy ink-drop head and body. Other ants bubble up behind – smaller males, similarly winged – each making short, darting runs, probing and returning to their fissure as though unsure, massing and conferring. But the queen has waited all summer for this particular conspiring of humidity, heat and light. She opens her wings and flies, flicking through the air quickly, unsteadily, touching wall, pizza box, tyre and tarmac, releasing chemicals to synchronise with neighbouring colonies and lure males into mating and swarming. Many are already airborne and, from out of the blur of daylight, one grabs her and they lock, tumbling along a windscreen wiper and onto a creosoted fence where a cat slumps. The breeze catches them again and they go with it, flying northwards over pavements and fences. A swift dips and ploughs a furrow beside them, mouth agape, swallowing twenty ants, but only glancing the queen and her mate with its wing tip, knocking them down through the tangled leaves of a goat willow and into the foliage that runs along the old railway.
A butterfly watches the ants drop into the patch of stinging nettles and writhe around on a leaf. With compound eyes consisting of thousands of honeycomb-shaped lenses, it registers the brief changes in light and leaf position, the oily roil of disrupted air and after-tremors in the nettle stems. But it remains still on the willow’s trunk. With its hindwings folded to reveal flecked black and brown undersides, it is as good as invisible roosting on bark and yet it sees everything in its dome of vision: the scramble of the ants now unsexing, the male flailing backwards; the queen moving to the edge of the leaf, then flicking down to a morass of stone and earth beneath. It watches too as the queen contorts her body and, one by one, tears off her wings before tunnelling into the soil beneath an empty Coca-Cola can to birth a new colony.
The breeze lifts again, rustling the willow’s leaves. Sun freckles its trunk. The butterfly senses warm pools of light on the bark above it and crawls towards them, crossing spiky patches of cambium where recently knife-gouged letters spell out the names Joe and Lauren separated by a heart. It opens its wings and sunbathes, soaking up the heat through its mole-like body, dark brown and covered with velvety hair. Its wings are the same shade, save for the stark orange-red bands and a few white dots, like dribbled paint over the tips. The willow shakes again. The sun dapples and disappears. Now the butterfly moves, churning the air and flitting sideways, landing on the same nettle leaf where the ants fell. Crawling to the tip it lays a single, tiny green egg and then rises, this time flapping westwards, dipping and climbing, keeping parallel with the old railway until coming to rest on a buddleia bursting with cones of purple flowers. Sense organs in the butterfly’s feet immediately taste the sugar and it slips its proboscis into the open heart of the petals and siphons their nectar. Drumming its feet, it works its way up flower spikes, until a twinge in its abdomen sends it banking over the meadow towards another clump of nettles. It is halfway across when it detects a different taste in the air – salt – rare, but an essential mineral in its diet. Amid the meadow grass cut into fluffy lines between the old railway and the wood, a man lies dozing under the full glare of the sun. Beads of sweat bubble, trickle and pool on his brow. The butterfly circles, then softly shakes down to his forehead and unrolls its tongue.
I open my eyes. A red admiral! For ten or twenty seconds its silhouette blots out the zinc brightness of the sky as it absorbs the sodium chloride evaporating from my skin, then it floats off in that weirdly graceful-dashing way butterflies move, like burning paper. Maybe it’s the heat – I’ve been lying here over an hour without hat or sun cream – but as I jump upright to follow its flight, the world swoons. The sun, a Maltese cross above the pylons, has scorched the asphalt and roofs, smearing the edge of town into a blur. Everything seems briefly skewed out of true, as if the butterfly slipped me something as it drank. Rubbing my eyes only makes it worse. Now every blink sends blobs of green, mirages of field and wood, flashing over the houses. This is what happens – I tell myself – when you get up too fast. A momentary lack of blood in the brain. Blind spots. Disorientation. I concentrate and try to bring it all into focus.
It is 1979 and Bilton is caught in a wave of change. The old railway has been decommissioned for years; its sleepers removed and track reduced to scattered shingle. The sidings are overgrown; the grand viaduct over the Nidd abandoned – a far cry from twenty years earlier when smart, stout ‘Hunt’-class engines thundered daily across the gorge, whisking passengers between King’s Cross and Edinburgh, each locomotive emblazoned with a leaping fox on its nameplate. Vanished too are almost all traces of the smaller, narrow-gauge line – The Barber Line – which hauled coal from the intersection of the railway and Bilton Lane (‘Bilton Crossing’) to the New Park Gas Works between 1907 and 1956. Now the only signs it ever existed are the immovable airshaft and a bricked-up tunnel peeping through the hydrangeas in a newly completed suburban garden. After years of vandalism and wet rot, the council has demolished the red-brick signal box that stood at the crossing point, its white wooden gates having fuelled the community bonfire on 5 November 1965. But such details are minutiae. They pale into insignificance when compared to the scale of the transformations happening to the south.
After decades of building momentum, the town’s encroachment over Bilton’s open fields and ramshackle cottages has reached fever pitch. Construction is booming. Tightly packed micro-suburbs and rural-sounding housing estates – Sandhill, Meadowcroft, Woodfield, Coppice, Hill Top – explode like flower heads from the tendrils of Edwardian and Victorian roads that once demarcated Harrogate’s urban limits. The farmhouses, meadows and cornfields that had conspired to form a landscape here since the Enclosure Acts have all been sold; most have been steamrollered and built over. The remaining few await their turn. Divided and sub-divided again, the estates fold into confusing patterns of beige, grey and red, hotchpotches of style and design that spill across the gently undulating slopes. Link roads, recreation grounds, community halls and new Lego-block schools cut across the old views of distant hills. The sprawl has spread so rapidly since the Second World War that it has begun to eat its own tail. Ageing veterans of Dunkirk and El Alamein who bought the first pebble-dashed semis after demob grumble to each other about mullet-haired plasterers with their noisy transistors singing along to Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ over their back fences. It seems that every time they look a new avenue of concrete-rendered bungalows has sprung up; some man in flared jeans is hauling a tea chest through a front door, a stack of Sabbath LPs under his arm. Even where the boggy fields meet the old railway’s sidings, a building site has been delineated with fencing. Diggers are tearing up the last of the hawthorn hedges and drystone walls, preparing the earth for what will one day become the smart cul-de-sacs and driveways of the ‘Poets Estate’. There’s an irony to this, but one perhaps lost on the glum-faced digger driver hacking away great sections of the tawny clay: the line of the railway was originally drawn far out here specifically to ensure it kept its distance from Harrogate. Now the town grabs at it like a lifeline. Once the houses of Keats Walk, Tennyson Avenue, Shelley Court and Coleridge Drive are finished, it will describe its northern boundary.
A policeman picks his way around the cluster of bare-chested builders sitting smoking rollies on a stack of bricks. The copper is new to his job – it’s clear from the pressed uniform and the mirror-shiny boots. The valiant attempt at a moustache on his upper lip can’t disguise his greenness. One of the builders wolf-whistles, sending his mates into fits of giggles; spurred on, another one enquires loudly, ‘Who ordered the stripper?’ The copper says nothing but grits his teeth: this is not how he envisaged life in The Force. This is not the kind of action he dreamed of when watching The Sweeney with his girlfriend over Saturday-night egg and chips. But he slops through the mud regardless, reminding himself that solving crime is solving crime, whether heroically apprehending a murderer in gangland London or investigating reports of a stolen car dumped on the outskirts of Harrogate. Squeezing through two sections of steel-mesh fencing, he athletically scales the bank in four leaps. From the railway, he scans the land to the north, frowns and pulls a map from his buttoned-down pocket. He’s never been here before but judging by the symbols, even the cartographers at Ordnance Survey have struggled to keep up with the pace of change. The remnants of track under his feet are pretty much the sole point of correlation. Where the map details a meadow and, beyond it, a plump wooded gorge, reality reveals a swathe of sad mud torn up by motorcycle scramblers, dumped with mounds of rubbish. Brick pallets and paint pots have been hurled up here from the building site; chipboard and packaging stacked against the gorse shrubs, soaked with petrol and set alight. A noxious stench drifts from blue plastic drums kicked onto their sides, and the pools of liquid inside swirl with the rainbow sheen of chemicals. Oxidised tin cans and the glassy detritus of broken bottles are scattered through the flowering knot-grass. The policeman strides out, keeping half an eye on where he treads, walking across a patch of earth old as England, now scorched, weedy and strewn with torn-out flaps of kitchen linoleum, and fag packets.
Town-bruised, town-battered, the birth of the edge-land has been a messy one. Quick, but bloody and injurious. Its woods, once the sylvan heart of Bilton Park and the Forest of Knaresborough, are thinned and sickly, the edges deformed, hacked down and fire-scarred. The copper detects a whiff of fresh smoke and smouldering plastic as he steps over the dusty, tattered semi-skeleton of a crow. The gully marked ‘Bilton Beck’ on his map is so soupy with litter it is more scrapyard than watercourse. The wreck of a motorbike juts up from the water like some installation from the Indica Gallery. The grey shell of a burnt-out car sits halfway down the bank, engine exploding with brambles and sycamore saplings. There’s no point scrambling down for a closer look; it’s too old to be the vehicle he’s been sent to investigate.
Half an hour later, in the meadow further west, closer to the viaduct, he spies a more likely suspect. The pea-green Austin Maxi has its doors flung open and is wrapped around the trunk of a Scots pine, half-hidden in a bed of stinging nettles. Notebook in one hand, the policeman reaches in with the other and removes the keys still dangling from the ignition. Then he carefully records every detail: registration, condition, location. He checks the boot and scrutinises the steering wheel and gearshift for fingerprints, then bags an eight-track cassette of Pink Floyd’s The Wall stuck in the stereo, and a cigarette he finds tucked under the carpet of the passenger foot-well. Evidence. It is a thorough inspection, yet one that fails to record the casualty at the scene. There is a body. Crushed between the Maxi’s radiator grille and the tree, a partially mangled creature is burial-wrapped, shrouded by its own wings – beautiful brown wings with orange streaks and white spots. It will never be discovered. Long before the policeman can organise a salvage team to recover the car, the errant hands that hotwired it will be back to finish the job, dousing its seats with lighter fluid and tossing in a screwed-up torch of flaming newspaper. Seconds later, in the fireball that engulfs it, the last red admiral of Bilton will be instantly cremated, lit by the fiery light of exploding modernity. Butterfly, sacrifice, metaphor.
I blink. I am sitting in the same meadow, unpoisoned now, healthily unkempt, brimming with life and insect noise. The heat has eased. The sun has been taken down a peg or two, calmed by the faint procession of dirty-hemmed clouds drifting north. Around me the landscape settles back into familiar forms of the present: mounds of mown meadow-grass, the brown, seed-clustered docks, the tall thistles, the silvery cotton-wool thistledown, vetches, plantains, nettles, trefoils, lesser and rosebay willowherbs, pink balsams, ripening elderberries and bouquets of Bird’s-Eye-custard-coloured ragwort. The air glitters with trails of flying ants being chased by black-headed gulls. Bindweed turns a dead hogweed stem into a shaggy Christmas tree; a white bellflower sits like a star at its top. Insects explore the forest of hairs on my arm. Red soldier beetles dotted with Day-Glo pollen mate on a cow parsley. Abundant, wild and bright with August light, it is hard to imagine that this shabby utopia could ever have been the tormented earth of that previous scene.
I pinch between my eyes and rub the back of my neck. Up now. I’m thirsty and need to stretch my legs. I head over the lines of grass to the old railway, flicking the flies away from my ears as I walk. Goldfinches, goldcrests and linnets loose sparkling phrases from the hollies, birches, hazels and willows that narrow this stretch of the old railway into a leafy carwash. It’s all so absorbing, the leaves, the wild melodies and improvised lines. Because they were here when I first discovered this place, I’ve always (unthinkingly) imagined these shrubby trees as permanent fixtures of the edge-land. Now, as I move between their branches, I realise not one of them is even as old as me. This is the deception, the lie of the land. The feelings of agelessness, the firmness of the earth underfoot, the infiniteness of the moment – all can draw in and dazzle the eye into believing in the ongoing fixity of the present. But nothing ever stays the same. Still, it may be, but still moving. Blink and you miss it.
The heart-shaped nettle leaf might have been cut with pinking shears. The edges are a perfect sawtooth pattern blemished only by the pinhead-sized green orb glued to one side. A week of warmth has passed since the red admiral curled its abdomen and laid it there. The egg has darkened; a tiny bulbous-headed caterpillar – a larva – squirms within. Daybreak is already midway through its performance over the edge-land. Faint shades of blue and red are a diaphanous backcloth; the gloomed, brooding trees are shot through with early sun. A chaffinch jigs between the willow’s branches then entwines its song into the woven notes of the dawn chorus being threaded above. A moment later, a hole appears at the top of the egg, widening and widening as the larva pushes headfirst through the waxy protective layer to split open the outer chorion.
It bobs around for a moment, absorbing its new environment, processing the changed intensity in light, the shape of the air. Then, like a jack-in-the-box, half-in, half-out, it works free its segmented form and slips from the egg completely. It straightens as it crawls along the leaf. With its thin cream body and black head it resembles a minuscule struck match, blown out before the flame could sully the wood. At its scale the nettle’s surface is covered in transparent needles, each filled with concoctions of formic acid, histamine, acetylcholine and serotonin designed to blister and wound. But the stinging nettle is the red admiral’s host plant and the larva moves knowingly and untouched to tear at the tender sections of green in-between its barbs. It feeds ravenously, trying to sate an incessant hunger that is designed not to sustain its life but to change it.
The light swells. The tree-gloom sinks into the soil and the dew dries. The edge-land is in full voice now and the town modulates with accelerating and decelerating traffic. A blue tit flies into the lower branches of the willow and spies the larva feeding in the nettles below, hopping down six inches to get a better look. Then it loses interest. In its eyeline, attached to a willow stem, is a more nutritious prize. It tilts its head, darts up, and wheels back to its nest with the fleshy green body of a hawk-moth caterpillar curling around its beak. The bird’s flight shadow whips across the nettle patch, crossing the already swelling larva, stirring it from feasting. Instinctively it moves, rippling to the side of its leaf, and begins to dispense a thread of strong silk from a spinneret in its lower lip. Working quickly, it weaves the leaf’s two edges together, drawing its halves upright and inward on themselves, sewing up the join from the inside. This tent will be the first of many it builds in the coming weeks for concealment and shelter. A folded, sewn, edible nest; a place to hide, moult and alter.
Instar – from the Latin ‘form’ or ‘likeness’ – is the word for the physical transitions the larva undergoes as it grows. Because its skeleton is on the outside of its body, each instar has a pre-set capacity, an unyieldingness that must be overcome in the name of progress. Even now as it eats away relentlessly at the furthest edge of its leaf tent, the larva’s exoskeleton is tightening, its birth body filling and nearing its limit. Processes are occurring under the surface. Enzymes are being released. Molecules are being modified. Subcutaneous skin cells are already detaching from the outermost layer and beginning to be reabsorbed. Reorganised, recycled, this matter will form a larger exoskeleton manufactured within, soft and folded up like a parachute. Soon the larva’s previous shape will be nothing but a thin sheen to be shrugged off and shed as the new incarnation ruptures it, expands and hardens.
Because of their fine-scale integration with landscape, their dependency on particular host plants and their recognisable forms, butterflies are what environmentalists call a ‘key indicator species’: a reflector of the health of a wider area; a being through which the land might be read. By zooming in and studying them, we can zoom out and take the pulse of a place.
It was a full year before anyone noticed the absence of the red admiral in Bilton. Then the following summer, 1980, it started with a casual enquiry: Bill Varley – a resident of Sandhill Drive – remarked to a neighbour that he was yet to see a single one that year. Tortoiseshells, peacocks, orange-tips, the ubiquitous cabbage whites all over his brassicas, but no red admiral. What about you, David? His neighbour shook his head. ‘Can’t remember the last time, come to think of it,’ he said, crouching to uproot some groundsel from his petunias.
Intrigued, Varley abandoned gardening for the day and began asking around. Pottering from neighbour to neighbour, he quickly established that not a single person on the street had clapped eyes on one. It was the same story on the next street, and the two after that. It soon preoccupied him enough that he bought a notepad and started to keep records. Daily diaries. His search grew into a kind of obsession, the sort that often sprouts into the mind of a recent retiree who suddenly finds himself set adrift and devoid of the rigours and responsibilities of the nine-to-five. He started enquiring further afield – his neighbours, at the Post Office, the bar at Bilton Cricket Club and the regular coffee mornings and jumble sales his wife dragged him along to at St John The Evangelist’s. Eventually he bought some advertising space in the Harrogate Advertiser, titling his entry for 8 July 1980 ‘The Strange Disappearance of the Red Admiral’. Residents of Bilton! – it began – Have You Seen The Red Admiral Butterfly This Year? Image below. If So, Please Contact Mr B. Varley. Harrogate 601436. He received one response. It was from a lady living in Keats Walk, but they soon established a case of mistaken identity. The butterfly she had freed from her bathroom the day before had undoubtedly been a tortoiseshell.
After swotting up on the subject (cricket was his primary focus outside insurance for forty years), Varley suspected the red admiral’s decline was probably down to the conversion of the land into housing. Properties like his own well-kept bungalow had completely covered the proliferation of flower-rich pasture and hay meadow that had existed in this spot thirty years before. Neat, manicured gardens patrolled by the allied forces of lawnmower and weedkiller ensured nettles had largely become a plant of the past. He also suspected – quite rightly – that the butterfly had been squeezed from the other direction too. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, the farms to the north had turned over all available ground to intensive agricultural methods. Hawthorn and blackthorn hedges had been treated, grubbed up and ploughed in to clear the way for new irrigation systems. Areas where stinging nettles, dogwood and nectar-rich wildflowers grew were lost as one field bled into the next and were sprayed with organo-chlorides to produce high-yield, monoculture crops. Varley reasoned that, if thus pressed on two fronts, the red admiral’s last hope of refuge had to be in the space in-between.
He visited the edge-land on eight occasions that late summer before conceding defeat. Each immersion returned him home more dejected than the last. Sandwiches untouched. Notebook filled with scribblings. Perspiration thick and stinking. ‘It’s appalling down there,’ he told his wife Vanessa, heeling off his wellies at the back door. ‘Frightful.’ As he stewed in the bath, she gathered up his clothes for the machine and listened at the door. His behaviour was not exactly concerning her, but it was different. A change. She’d worried about this happening when he retired. Gladys, a friend at church, had had the same with her Ian. ‘Humour him,’ she’d advised. ‘Let him know you’re interested. Otherwise you’ll lose him. He’ll secrete himself away and then one day, you’ll wake up and you won’t recognise him any more.’
And so she did. It was there on the dinner table when he came down for his beef stew, the flyer she’d picked up after having her hair set in the salon up the road. Typed across its top was, THE BILTON CONSERVATION GROUP.
‘They’re looking for volunteers,’ she said. ‘Thought you might be interested.’
‘I certainly am,’ he said, reading it twice. ‘Thank you, dear.’
A peck on the cheek too, over the washing-up. Good old Gladys.
Contrary to what the name might suggest, there was no real conservation plan at first. It was more a feeling among a growing group of Bilton’s more proactive (and largely senior) residents that something, anything, should be done to address the decline. The marginal land lying broken and burned beyond the back fences was intolerably damaged and increasingly dangerous; it was an eyesore for locals and a headache for the police. But as Varley found out at the regular Wednesday-night meetings, the first hurdle was trying to understand who had responsibility for this liminal space. The speed of development had shifted and blurred the lines of ownership. The edge-land was as undecided and unacknowledged as it was unloved, presenting both a physical and a philosophical challenge to the group. Where was it? What was it? Who owned it? Technically the council had claim over much of the neglected area, but it showed little interest in preventing its ongoing destruction. It did, however, do the paperwork. Sections of land were prospected and reclassified, inadvertently recalling what was buried beneath. Descriptors such as ‘common land’ appeared on the new maps where commons had existed before, like old wounds leaching blood through new linen. One patch was even designated ‘waste’, reverting it a thousand years to when the Domesday Book had written off all Bilton with the same word.
There were other aspects of this new edge-land for the group to contend with: the scruffy farm fields, the lanes, the pylons and the viaduct. Perhaps most significant was the wood that contained the wide sweep of the River Nidd and its litter-clogged tributary, Bilton Beck. Varley offered to do the research and discovered that the wood had been sold off along with the rest of Bilton Hall when the estate was broken up in the years after the Great War, its sole male heir having been killed in 1917. Legally it was in the care of private hands. But, as Varley related to the meeting that week: ‘Clearly they are hands unwilling or unable to take on the restoration work it so desperately requires.’
Exasperated by the process, the locals eventually staged an intervention. Over the long summer of 1982, the Bilton Conservation Group removed more than forty tonnes of rubbish from the edge-land’s meadows, woods and waters. Then its volunteers tackled its numerous burnt-out cars and motorbikes. The unlikely-sounding ‘Harrogate Sub Aqua Club’ was roped in to attach underwater cables to three saloons dumped in the Nidd. After some gentle badgering the army provided the apprentices and kit to haul them up the gorge’s steep sides. Vanessa had come down on that afternoon unannounced, turning up with Gladys and bringing welcome Thermoses of tea, mugs and bags of scones for the troops. Watching his wife handing out the cakes on paper plates, all red-faced in the syrupy air, flustered by compliments, her husband had beamed with pride.
‘Any red admirals yet?’ she’d asked him, handing over a scone in a napkin then straightening the tie beneath his green tank top with a pat.
‘Oh, I think we have to wait a while yet,’ he said. ‘But I’m hopeful now.’
Then, suddenly, catching himself by surprise, he kissed her. Equally surprised, she blushed and smiled. The Red Admiral (Vanessa atalanta). A derivation from the eighteenth-century common name ‘Red Admirable’. That’s you, my dear, Varley thought. My admirable Vanessa.
The clearing of edge-land was completed around the middle of August, whereupon the priority became ensuring there could be no future fly-tipping or stolen vehicles dumped and firebombed. ‘The cancer is gone,’ said Varley to the group, ‘but we must now turn our attention to preventing its return.’ And all harrumphed in agreement. So, by letter and in person, the group lobbied for adequate barricades that could stop motor traffic invading along the old railway, while permitting the open-foot access to those who wanted it. Impressed with the surprising strength of local conviction, not to mention the dramatic and cost-free improvement to its lands, the council duly obliged, installing concrete-footed fencing and a padlocked gate at the junction where the old railway intersects Bilton Lane. The earth stirred. Another inadvertent echo: a gated crossing point constructed where one had stood before.
As Varley leaned on it one evening, he took in the open waste ground beyond. Green shoots of dandelion, fat hen, shepherd’s purse and stinging nettle were beginning to scab over the mud and burned earth. Even in the vanishing days of summer the new was already emerging through the old. An invisible membrane had formed itself beyond the fence. Although he would never admit to anyone, each time he passed through it he felt he was somehow experiencing a transformation.
Precisely how long it took for the edge-land to assume its current form is difficult to determine, but the healing happened relatively ‘naturally’. The Bilton Conservation Group possessed neither the funding nor the experience to launch the kinds of conservation or preservation strategies employed with landscape today. There was no appetite to locate the ground in some nostalgic frame of yesteryear, no rigid profiling of flora and fauna allowing only that which had thrived here when it was a royal hunting park. Nor was there a restoration of its rubbled flax mill into a visitor attraction. This was not prime countryside by anyone’s definition but still a sweep of scrappy land where, even in its most remote spots, the shadow of the sprawl breathed down its neck. No, what happened was largely a letting-go, an end to the human interference or management, aside from the few still-worked farm fields and the council’s yearly cutting of its hay meadows. And, left to its own devices, the land reassembled itself, repairing its DNA and becoming wild, lush, untidy and beguiling. Out of the ashes, its trees shooted and spread; the wood thickened and bloomed. Bacterias bloomed. Air and insect propagated its pollens. Brambles, bindweeds and cleavers crept. Blackthorns and hawthorns budded. Thickets tangled. Grasses and wildflowers seeded and carpeted. Native and non-native plants abounded and contested. Nature’s rebellious children found their own balance, reclaiming wood and meadow and railway and river, the colonisers, the opportunists and the crawlers evolved into ecosystems unhindered, luring back life in its many forms.
The Bilton Conservation Group continued to keep a close eye on things. Volunteers like Varley walked the old tracks and attended to the edge-land’s details through field notes. The group even drew from these to produce regular typewritten and hand-illustrated newsletters for distribution among its members. Today these read like short dispatches from inside some newly forming state, which in many ways, of course, they were. Each an astute phenological document, far more than the mere list of weather conditions and species it appears at first glance. In context, these acts of recording and veneration captured the development of this unplanned, unburdened and largely unnoticed realm as its shape emerged.
Sadly most of these reports were lost in the intervening decades. As the group’s original members aged, downsized, moved into nursing homes or died, files and boxes containing these treasures became rubbish clogging up the corners of spidery lofts. Detritus to be cleared on Sundays by mourning families. The earliest surviving newsletter (No. 17) dates from winter 1985/6. Even so, being written only three years after the clean-up, it testifies to the speed and spontaneity with which nature had reclaimed the ground:
A biting east wind brought the temperature down to -1°C and snow flurries encouraged us all to trudge briskly through 4” of soft snow.2 Six traps produced two sleeping Field Voles (Microtus agrestis) a hyperactive Common Shrew (Sorbex araneus), a Wood mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus) and, surprisingly, a stray house mouse (Mus domesticus). Fox and rabbit tracks in the fields near the rim of the Gorge. A gibbet of Grey Squirrels and Woodpigeons reminded us of the endless battle the farmer has to control vermin. Time and again we were to catch Bank Voles (Clethrionomys glareolous) – a larger cousin of the more common Field Vole distinguished by its longer body (8″) and tail (1″). Few birds were on the wing apart from Robin, Blue Tits, and Finches skulking in the thickest scrub, and an occasional Crow. With chattering teeth we examined the last traps of the woodland fringe before descending to the riverside. Here the steep slopes were shrouded with dormant hazel, beneath which our last captives – Wood Mice, Bank Voles and Common Shrew – blinked in the daylight before bounding away from the sharp eyes of predators such as Kestrel or Fox. The river was grey, cold and in spate. Alders trailed icicles in the current. Someone remarked, ‘Who’d be a trout in winter?’ and no one braved the flood to check for crayfish hibernating under the banks. Ducks and wildfowl have become less common and a wet, sandy spit provided evidence of Mink footprints, which might explain why. The Mink may fill that ecological gap left by The Otter, which is thought to have become extinct in The [Nidd] Gorge sometime in the 1950s. Escaped Mink wreak havoc amongst the native waterfowl and mammals. More encouraging though were the prints of Roe Deer, Rabbit, Fox, Stoat, and even a Common Hare, which we were fortunate enough to encounter before the walk was over.
If not an exact description of the edge-land I found on New Year’s Eve, it is a damn close likeness. An instar.
These long days. These late-summer days, drowsy, immense and golden. It’s Tuesday. I walk up the lane at lunchtime troubled by the thought that I may have been lax in my own recordings of this place. The microscopic details of the here and now seem to possess an inexpressible value that I’m worried I’ve overlooked. I wish I’d kept more rigorous data. More snapshots. The changes in a single leaf in a single location from day to day. The biodegradation of a discarded fag butt on the stone track. The minute-by-minute movement of a single bird through the wood. Maybe these are the things of true importance.
But where do you begin? At the entrance to the holloway the hedgerow is dense and wild and inscrutable; it is almost impossible to make out the rotted stumps of fence, the animal runs, the tumbledown wall stones concealed within. I can smell wheat and death and sweetness. Meadowsweet, perhaps – the scent of the back of old cupboards and ground almonds. There’s a scorched, fumy-blue sky crossed with wires. Starlings whistle. Dog roses (white). Foxgloves (pink). Shrivelled sloes. Hawthorns heavy with berries. A skyline of soft hills. Plane contrails crossing the pylons. A million things. The time is 1:54 p.m. I kneel and try to imagine a rough metre square in this section of the hedge and begin to document what would fall within its borders. My eyes get lost in the spectacular variety and I fill three pages in scribbled shorthand. When you take down the world in this way, it feels as much about holding onto something as understanding it; in some small sense you are always trying to save a moment. An indirect preservation. But by the time you finish each word or sentence, that world has already gone. Then a thought comes: perhaps in the future someone, something, will scour back through such records, read them for clues, try to decode the point where it all went wrong. They will celebrate nerdy field notes precisely for their banal lists and lament where description is trimmed and tailored in favour of style. By trawling the records of such microcosms, they may unlock the mysteries of incomprehensible macroscopic human behaviour. The interzones will serve as a legend to the wider map, testifying to our collective denial, our ruinations, restorations, contradictions and wilful amnesia towards our environment. Unearthed sometime in 3000 AD, a few pages about a single patch of edge-land might prove as vital and telling as all the scientific data on melting ice sheets and rising sea levels.
Down the holloway, just where the banks rise and the path feels suddenly cocooned by the earth and silver birch, a tawny pool of sun. I stand there with the place to myself and listen. The sound of the weir and the rusty call of a woodpecker. The air smells of coming rain. I descend the track towards the river, going deeper into the wood, passing the exposed gunnels, the mined pits and the quarried stone. Here, where the mill once stood, drift the ghosts of industries gone back to green. The ash circle of Sir Hare’s fire is lost now under a mat of ground ivy. A place where I watched him wake and wash in the river, all bony and long-limbed, is a mass of flowering honeysuckle. Dog’s mercury furs the rutted millers’ paths as the ground swallows the last of their pebbles. Foliage prints new, exotic patterns on the earth. Bursting balsam pods fling their seeds through the undergrowth and into the folds of my clothes. Crunched between teeth, their tiny black or cream dots taste of water chestnuts. Across the river, the punky shock of a skunk cabbage sticks out among a bed of nettles. Its huge yellow flower looks both prehistoric and from a time beyond our own. Like the wildly re-grown meadows and the re-colonised old railway, these things point not only to a past, but a future. In them you can see a world without us when nature calmly repossesses whatever we have left.
I’m watching a heron stand statuesque in the shallows of the Nidd when there is a crash behind me. I spin and see what looks like a clod of soil hurtling through the canopy, separating into two. As I scramble up the bank for a closer look, the larger section moves from its position in a beech – a kestrel. It flaps away through a rift in the leaves back into open air. The second projectile smashed into a large holly at the top of a bank and looking up into its heart I see a blue tit, fluffed and shaken but not injured. It looks down at me from its high branch. Did you see that? written all over its face. Bloody hell!
‘You’ll be all right,’ I tell it and off it shoots, dipping low and twittering.
The rain will be here soon so I cut across the meadow to join up with the old railway. A man looms out of the trees. He’s old and grey-haired, but youthful in step and with a trendy T-shirt – a Union Jack made up of ripped and sewn garment fragments. He leads a fat, butter-coloured Labrador, which limps along behind. As they draw closer I see the man is holding a takeaway coffee cup and wonder where he could have got it. Then I see clamped between his side and his arm are three cans of fizzy pop, a crisp packet and a half-filled bottle of mineral water. He slows to talk with a shake of his head.
‘I can’t understand how some people think this is acceptable.’ His accent is broad – South Yorkshire. He thrusts his litter collection at me. ‘Thoughtless bastards, the lot of them. I’ve just picked this up from the verges. Can you believe it? And don’t even get me started on the dog shit.’
I don’t, but he’s off again anyway.
‘Every day I take at least two bags home. And that’s not including my own.’
‘That’s terrible,’ I reply, hoping that by ‘my own’ he’s referring to his dog.
He shrugs. ‘Yeah, well, I can’t stand seeing the stuff. It ruins the place. Have you seen much today?’
I tell him about the kestrel and the blue tit.
‘I meant litter.’
‘Oh, no. Not really. A cigarette butt …’
‘Yeah, well. There should be litterbins and dog bins all the way along this stretch. And a seat or two wouldn’t go amiss, either. But you wait. It’s going to be better when they put the cycleway in.’
I had half switched off but his words are like a jolt. Fingers stuck in my sides. ‘The what?’
‘The cycleway. It’s going right along here.’ He sweeps his arm side to side to denote the length of the old railway. ‘Didn’t you know? It’s been in the papers.’
No, I didn’t know. I follow his arm as he swings it again, pointing left then right, towards where the track runs into the wood and the gorge, where the reinforced metal shutters block off the viaduct and prickle with spikes.
‘Oh, they’re going through all that,’ he says, reading my mind. ‘Pulling it all down. Sorting the viaduct out and extending the cycle track all the way to Ripley.’
I must look shocked because he frowns and attempts to gee me up. ‘It’s a good thing,’ he says. ‘They’re doing the place up.’
‘Who is?’
‘Council. And they’re starting soon. Cutting all this back for a kick-off.’
I have a thousand questions, but can’t get any of them out. I can smell meadowsweet again. And hear the linnets.
‘It’s a good thing,’ he says again. ‘It’s so that all them kiddies and families can come down and ride here, y’know? So they can get outside and into nature. It’s a good thing.’
The sky is blurring and shading grey.
Bored with me, the man wanders off. ‘Come on, Jess. It’s gonna rain.’
But there’s no need for the future tense. Specks are falling heavily on my coat. They thicken quickly into a downpour, worrying the leaves and shushing the fretting nettles.
Each rapid alteration in its size, colour and appearance has been profound. Moving from leaf to leaf, constructing and devouring, the caterpillar has changed entirely: the little body that emerged from its egg has swelled and thickened inside a succession of spun, silken nettle-wombs. Now, in a lull in the weather, it slips from its leaf tent in a final larval shape: a hefty, armoured, bullet-headed form that muscles over the nettle, weighing down the wet foliage. It is the same black as a male adder and trimmed likewise with zigzag yellow along its flanks. Each segment of its body bristles with defensive hairs, repellant hairs, thick, sharp tufts like gorse thorn. A chaffinch in the willow sees it, but doesn’t move; of all birds, only a cuckoo would dare swoop and take it like this, but there’s not been a cuckoo here for thirty years.
The air brightens, pearlescing the clinging damp that has dogged the old railway for days. A linnet sings hurriedly, as though thrust into a spotlight. The caterpillar continues to traverse its mutilated plant, winding down and down the central stem to reach the lower leaves of this sodden, hot clump. These are plumper leaves, but the caterpillar has no interest in eating them. Instead, it once again rolls up the edge of one and draws it together with another, binding them with wraiths of silk to form a cave of green. The sky darkens and a dog brushes past, shaking the stems. The rain begins again, drumming with increasing ferocity and running down the outside of the leaf cave to flood the shining mud. The caterpillar, a full three and half centimetres long, scales the sides to sew a small button of silk – a cremaster – between the leaf’s veins, like a spider’s web in the rafters of a barn. Into this it weaves its hooked hind feet and then slowly, as though testing its tensile strength, extends itself down, head first, until it comes to a twitching rest in a perfect ‘J’ shape.
Light then dark. A day passes. The light returns with dawn rain. A brief interlude of sun, then rain again. A ripple slips down the length of the caterpillar. And another. It becomes a slow, subcutaneous rhythm. Each tremor stirs the dark skin and reveals it to be just another thin membrane. Then a split occurs, silently, behind the head. The ripples continue like shock waves, pushing out the newer, tougher incarnation of a blunt-headed, immobile pupa – a chrysalis. Every contraction further releases it while rolling up the caterpillar’s old form until it becomes nothing more than a crumpled garment of segments, legs and head gathered at its feet. The chrysalis gyrates, twists, and kicks it off, as if stepping out of a bathrobe. Then it hangs there unmoving; a strange, ergonomic-looking shell that would fit well in the grip of a tiny hand, with its smooth plates for the palm and ridges for fingers. In days to come, it will grow nippled and sow-bellied as it dries and turns the colour of an old leaf. Inside, disintegration has begun. Digestive enzymes will liquefy all but a few hard structures as the caterpillar’s cells are recycled for a final purpose. Outside the rain keeps time in the leaves – tick-tock-tick-tock. A roll of thunder resolves into a diesel engine slowing to a stop. A Ford Transit flatbed, the council’s tree-cutting truck, parks up at the bottom of Bilton Lane. Its occupants sit and wait for a break in the weather to begin their work.
‘Everything up to the ash. Stop at the ash,’ bellows the older man. If he’s not in charge, he certainly gives the impression of it. He is talking to a younger lad who looks a little confused. There are two others further on, dressed identically: high-vis tabards and white hard hats. Ear defenders fixed over the top and toughened Perspex glasses. They have the same squaddie tan – the arms and neck. They know what they’re doing, though. Their chainsaws drop from high whines to resistant growls as each bites into the bark of bigger trees down the track. Two cuts either side, one higher than the other, and they step back. A silver birch slumps backwards with a crash.
‘The ash?’ shouts the young man.
His mentor coughs and wipes some dust from around his mouth. He walks over. ‘This one,’ he says, slapping a trunk.
It’s hard to believe this is all happening so quickly.
The gate at the crossing point is unlocked and flung open. The ground either side of the old railway is covered by a wet, orangey sawdust skin. A large red storage tank has been lorried in and sits just beyond the concrete block of the old platform. For a good stretch down the track, and two metres to either side, the vegetation has been cut and cleared. Everything has been chopped back, hacked down or dug up. Stumps lie on their sides, brown, wet-rooted with pale egg-yolk hearts sliced open as if to reveal their ages. Not one of them as old as me.
There are stacks of branches and brambles, and piles of strimmed nettles. Just beyond the red container is something I’ve never seen before – it looks like the base of an old lamppost.
The men work surrounded by safety cones and signs. The track has been off-limits for days, but I approached here from the back way, through the wood and over the meadow so I could watch them from the other side of the willowherbs. I feel like I should be here. Someone should be here. Someone should do something.
‘Don, what about this one?’ The young man’s voice is loud over the chainsaws. The bush he stands next to is taller than him. Its leaves are spear-shaped and burst out at intervals from its mess of long, arching, flex-like branches. At the tip of each is a large flower cone that looks almost furry. Even now, at the death of August, they are an iridescent lilac-purple; the whole bush looks like a can of paint midway through being exploded. Jets of colour shoot everywhere, too vibrant, too alive, to be hacked down. And that’s what’s thrown the lad for a minute.
‘It’s just a buddleia,’ yells Don.
‘So … cut it, yeah?’
‘Of course cut it. Then dig its roots. It’s a bloody pest.’
Not that it matters now, but it was Bill Varley who first laid eyes on this shrub. Varley who’d been initially unsure as to what it might be (the shoots only had a few leaves on them and his eyes weren’t what they’d been), but after checking his RHS Encyclopaedia of Gardening, he was convinced. Varley who’d written in his notebook: 27th Aug – I’ve found Buddleia davidii growing on the dismantled railway! That was 1990. The species had come a long way since its seeds were sent to London’s Kew Gardens from China almost a hundred years earlier. Becoming renowned for its late trusses of colourful flowers and a honey-rich scent irresistible to insects and butterflies, it had earned the colloquial name of ‘The Butterfly Bush’ and quickly spread throughout England as a much-prized garden shrub. But buddleia wasn’t content to be contained for long. Pavement cracks, waste ground, development land, walls, chimneys and shingle banks turned out to be ideal replicas of the rocky screen of its native Sichuan province. By 1922, it had jumped the fence and wild bushes were being reported in all manner of strange and sheer places, rampantly colonising Britain’s railway network. Erupting from trackside tunnels and bridges, its rootstock was decried as weakening surfaces and structures and the plant swiftly fell from favour. A black mark was made against its name and rail operators, then government, sought a reclassification. The good-looking, fragrant guest had changed into an uppity, invasive nuisance requiring large amounts of money to control.
Then, during the 1970s, Buddleia davidii’s benevolent side once again came to the fore. Not so much pest as provider. A ferocious depletion of natural habitats in and around Britain’s towns and countryside was taking a catastrophic toll on wildlife. As meadows, grasslands, farmlands and forests experienced large-scale deterioration, the wild-growing oriental shrub proved to be a vital resource for the rapidly declining populations of pollinators. Conservation charities, initially wary of the risks an invasive species posed to biodiversity, recognised that buddleia’s abundance was creating crucial feeding sites for many species of bees, butterflies and moths. And it was the same story in gardens, for despite its demonisation in official quarters, buddleia had never ceased to be cherished closer to home. Being an exotic-looking shrub, a magnet for wildlife and requiring little or no looking after, it had been planted continually by gardeners, including the green-fingered residents of Bilton’s new housing estates. Even when fashions shifted in the 1980s and many outdoor areas were paved over with patios, decked, covered by conservatories or turned into parking spaces, buddleia thrived. Residents would find it poking out from what they’d assumed to be soilless spots. And so it happened that when a south-west wind blew through Tennyson Avenue in autumn 1989, it shook a wild buddleia that had burst from a crack in a backyard paving slab. The rustling of its dry flower head loosened a winged seed, which the breeze carried north and deposited in the stony earth beside the old railway.
After discovering the seedling growing there the following year, Varley had kept a vigil as closely as he could, recording its progress among the nettles and wildflowers as they capitalised on a late spell of hot weather. Whether he reported his findings back to the Bilton Conservation Group is unknown. Certainly no surviving newsletter makes mention, and it’s entirely plausible that he didn’t. The argument over whether buddleia should be eradicated or celebrated had split the room in previous discussions and, in any case, Varley had started to miss the Wednesday-night meetings; rheumatism gnawed at his hips and ankles, and his failing eyesight was a constant source of irritation. He grew tired quickly. Just walking up the road was a painful and potentially hazardous journey. Vanessa worried about him. She felt his rapid changes as if they were her own – the shrinking shoulders, the thinning skin, the breathlessness – and she did as much as she could to offset his frustrations, including painting scenes of the edge-land that she hung in their lounge.
‘You just never think your body might become a prison,’ he confided one evening as she helped him from his chair. She had managed to hold her small smile until he’d left the room, then buried her face in her apron and burst into tears.
By May 1991, Varley noted that the wild shrub was shooting at an impressive rate and easily outgrowing the competition. Over the following weeks he visited as much as his stiffening, sickening body would allow, inspecting the nettles for signs of rolled-up leaves and caterpillars. It was a gloriously hot summer and when not picking painfully through the edge-land, days were spent resting in their garden, Vanessa painting and Varley listening to the cricket. Their own early-flowering buddleia – Buddleja agathosma – crawled with insects and day-moths, ladybirds and peacock butterflies.
‘I feel it’ll be a good year, this year,’ Varley said suddenly one afternoon over the chatter of Test Match Special. It was June and England were beating the West Indies at Headingley.
‘It will, dear,’ she piped back too brightly. ‘It will.’
Her chirpiness was an attempt to mask her nerves. Varley’s appointment at the specialist in Leeds had been set for ten o’clock the following morning, but as Vanessa told Gladys later at church, she already knew. In the end, she didn’t need to hear the consultant’s gently delivered words. She could tell from his joyless smile as he guided them to their seats in the carpeted, white-walled consultation room. He wasn’t long enough in the job to have perfected a poker face.
Liver, colon and lung. Started in the liver and spread. Quick. Invasive.
‘We will of course schedule an immediate appointment with an oncologist to discuss any possible treatments, but I’m afraid it’s very late …’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ Varley had said. ‘That won’t be necessary. I’ve had a good innings, thank you.’
It was his ‘thank you’ that set her off.
He had held her right hand in his all the way home on the train. At Burley Park station, they watched small tortoiseshells and commas swarming the trackside buddleia only two feet from the window. They were drunk with its nectar, sleepy, seemingly unafraid of the great beast that threatened to engulf them. Strange as it may sound, they appeared content.
The edge-land’s buddleia flowered that August, flushed with the keenness of youth. Vanessa helped Varley down to the railway to see it. It was the 8th and nature was taking its course. He’d grown too weak to walk any further, but he leaned on his stick and smiled as she nipped back to the car for a couple of folding chairs. Then they sat beside each other a few feet from the shrub – her snapping a roll of photographs for future watercolours, him writing out a few slow, sluggish sentences in his notebook:
It feels like 30°C. But then my temperature can’t be trust [sic]. All over the place. A woodpigeon heads west. Hoverflies. Cabbage whites. Orange-tips. Jackdaws chatter. Pheasants. I want to catch it all, but I’m too slow. Or it’s too fast. Writing is a pain. My hands move at half-speed. My body is disintegrating, although (mercifully) I feel nothing. (Good Painkillers). No pain. I only wish my eyes were still good. So much to see. So much we should all see …
‘Bill. Bill,’ Vanessa was whispering.
Varley paused, blinked and turned to her. She was sitting, camera lowered. Stock-still.
‘Look,’ she said, nodding at the foliage.
The nettles pulsed. A blur of green. Thistle flowers. A twist of pale bryony.
‘The buddleia,’ she barely said.
Varley narrowed his eyes and moved them across each of its iridescent flowers. The highest cone moved suddenly as though its tip had taken flight; even his clouded vision registered it. Hovering, it settled on another spike and then opened its wings again. Dark brown wings, almost black in the brightness of the day, save for the stark orange-red bands and white dots at its tips.
Whirr. Click-click. The camera blinked. The photograph would be a wonderful one. Zoomed in tight so that the red admiral and the buddleia filled the frame. Hung on a hospice wall a month later, it was the last thing Bill Varley ever saw.
I’ve been hiding for a week. Moping is probably a truer verb. The rain has given me a good excuse to stay inside and avoid witnessing the destruction happening down the road. And yet it is constantly on my mind. I’ve kept pushing the chair back from my desk and beelining for the skylight, flicking its bar and sticking my head out, looking off in the direction of the edge-land. I’ve strained to hear the chainsaws, but caught only traffic, the beep of a reversing lorry on the ring road, the caged cries of fattened lambs and done-for ewes, and always the digital burble of starlings on the chimney pots and roof ridges. It’s evening now and I’m here again, head out of the window, watching the clouds break and bloom like ink in water. Each swirl temporarily exposes the flat, gold of sunset far off west. It seems from another time, like a memory you can’t quite recall trying to form itself but forever being thwarted by darker, more pressing thoughts. This whole week my head has felt the same, as though there’s something trying to get through to me. But each time it begins to shine through, the anger and frustration clouds over again. All I can think about is how I don’t want those men hacking away. How I don’t want them interfering, cutting down things that they don’t know or care about. How I don’t want any part of the edge-land, my edge-land, to be ruined. And how I can’t do a thing about any of it.
I try to rationalise these thoughts. Why do I feel it will be ‘ruined’? I suppose I’m just uneasy about the appropriation of places by large organisations, councils or charities, especially when it includes the creation of ‘official’ pathways through a piece of land. They may encourage people to visit more frequently, but it still feels like a prescribed process. Controlled. Passive. Distanced. Everyone who follows that pathway will experience the land in a very similar way: guided, like a tourist being ushered through. Everyone will see the same trees, the same views, and the same undulations from the same two directions – there and back. It will discourage access to the wider ground and the slower exploration of its space. As a result, it will restrain and deny, creating another form of boundary. The edge-land feels like the antithesis of such management because it has been left to itself. It’s always felt abandoned to me, and that’s part of its allure. It falls outside the normal governing rules, unaffected by the structured control and design you find everywhere else. Instead, to those who know it, the edge-land has its own tracks, the ‘desire-paths’ formed by unofficial movements of people like me and the people who came before: Bill Varley and the Bilton Conservation Group, the farmers, the commoners and the millers, the miners and the drovers, the woodsmen and the huntsmen, the lovers and the wanderers. The countless runs of its animals form desire-paths too. All of us have cut our own routes from A to B, crossing the ground in the manner we see fit and not the way a council or landowner wants us to. It’s the control; I hate the control, I tell myself, shutting the skylight and heading downstairs to bed.
That night a vivid dream comes as I sleep. What my conscious mind has failed to recall all week, my unconscious grabs and bundles into my brain. I see a boy in a bracken field. Fair-haired. Bob-cut. Nine or ten. Wearing shorts, T-shirt and sandals. He is pushing his knees up a rise after his brother who runs ahead on faster legs. It’s a hot day and they’ve already been swimming in the beck higher on the moor. Up where the curlews call out cour-leeee in the huge, thick, flustered air. Now, in the late-afternoon sun, the bracken smells earthy, damp, woody, and grows tall as a cornfield. They push through it, cracking stems, sweaty and red-faced with the sun, knowing they’re supposed to be home soon, but neither wanting to leave. Approaching their den, they crawl and wriggle through its branched entrance and down into its hole. From here they can see the houses in the valley below. Their house. The edge of a shining town. Then the younger boy shifts on his belly. He looks down at his feet because something is moving past his shoe. He grabs his brother’s arm and they both watch in silence as the snake noses up the bank, its little head with piercing black and gold eye, its thick olive-green body and yellow collar. Grass snake. I watch them run home screaming for their mother. But I remember it well. Our screams were from excitement, not from fear.
I wake in the morning feeling foolish. And selfish. My memory has revealed some unavoidable truths: the only reason I ever came to know the edge-land in the first place was because that world had been opened up for me. When I came to find this margin I didn’t have to learn how to be in it, how to navigate its desire-paths, how to open it up and see its layers, listen to its histories and draw closer to its wildlife; I didn’t have to because I already knew how to do all that. Thanks to my mother and father, the fringe had always been a mysterious and wild adventure playground, a refuge, frontier and a portal since childhood. Could I really be against others having the same opportunities? We live in a different world, a changing world. I can’t remember how many people I’ve encountered in the edge-land in all the days I’ve spent there, but it’s not many. And apart from that snowy morning in March when they came to play in the meadow, I don’t recollect seeing any children. My concerns over the controlled experience of landscape may be valid, but it’s a battle to be had down the line. There’s a more pressing crisis. Society is so disconnected from something real that perhaps a tarmac cycleway and signposts are required to reach such spaces. At the very least, I suppose, it is a beginning. A way in. And maybe as people cut through the meadows or cross the viaduct on their bikes, the pollen, seeds and grasses will lure them deeper; the woods and river will grow in their imaginations. Entranced, they’ll wander off the track, cut their own paths and slowly become transformed. It happens to us all.
I look over at Rosie in our bed. She only sleeps on her side now, two pillows under her head and one between her legs to support her hips. She is full-term and suits it, carrying the baby ‘neatly’ – as the books describe it – at her front, so that you could scarcely tell that she’s pregnant if you were standing behind her. Aside from these precise sleeping positions, she is more comfortable than she has been for months. As we get up and fuss around in the kitchen making breakfast, I notice how the bump has recalibrated her spatial awareness. The way she shifts her body back to the exact distance now needed when opening drawers and squeezes past things inch-perfectly, it’s as if this shape has always been waiting within her. Inside the safety of its womb wall, our little traveller has come an infinitely greater physiological distance, blooming from a cluster of dividing cells to its final, recognisable form. I try to picture what it must look like now: a tiny assemblage of limbs and fingers and toes, thundering heart, eyes tight shut. Alive but not yet alive, cradled safely between Rosie’s bones, it is almost ready to emerge.
Through the skylight in my office, an early September day. Beautiful blue skies, long shadows and the air chilled and sharp. Best of all is a vast cloud in the shape of a hare hunkered and hiding in its scrape. I reckon it must be slap-bang above the edge-land. I’ll take that as a sign. I open my laptop and search for a word I overheard the tree cutters mention: ‘SUSTRANS’ – the organisation behind the cycleway. I know the name. It is a sustainable transport charity responsible for the conversion of great lengths of disused railways into foot- and cycle-paths around and about Britain’s towns and cities. It is an agency of the edge-land, part of its goal being to promote open access, reduce traffic and increase activity among the unused, unloved areas that fringe our lives. You’d have to be mad to be against that. And as its website resolves on the screen, I’m immediately reassured. There is a photograph of a cyclist, her back to the camera, with sundogs haloing around her. She’s cycling away down an old railway. To her right rises the edge of a town; a wall of semi-detacheds sits on a lip of messy, tangled greenery. Beside the track there’s bindweed in flower and rosebay willowherb. It looks to be late August or early September, judging by the light. Around now, in fact. The physical resemblance to my edge-land is uncanny; it could be Bilton’s old railway. Heck, it will be Bilton’s old railway soon enough. It feels premonition-like – Here you are, see? Nothing to worry about. Just more people. And it’s true. The ground in the photograph is still wild edge-land; it still possesses the same untamed DNA, it has just undergone a necessary metamorphic shift. An alteration from a solitary to a social existence. A progression essential for all perpetuation and survival.
The homepage photograph fades into another: people walking and cycling to work along an old canal; then another: kids on a bridge surrounded by scrub and high security fencing. It’s a close-up and I can see something in their faces: a sense of belonging. This is edge-land as true common ground – reclaimed, re-purposed, nourishing, loved again. And now I feel even more foolish about my resistance to the old railway’s new incarnation. The margins should be made part of people’s daily experience. Of course they should. The wild collision and coexistence of human and nature, the complex interlocking of infrastructure and land, the bizarre and beguiling interchange of the layers of history and modern life – this is what tomorrow’s decision-makers must know, experience and understand. This is the reality of our species’ interaction with our environment. The edge-land is a visceral reminder that we are all part of a process. It teaches us more about the way things were, are and will be than any grand, aspic-preserved landscape or sterile park. It shows us what we truly are: authors of our own transformations and the transformations happening throughout our world.
The acrid smell of burning drifts across the edge-land again, just like 1979. Not from burning cars this time, but Dense Bitumen Macadam brewed to 200°C off-site and brought, broiling, to the bottom of Bilton Lane. A man flicks a lever on a truck and empties a fresh torrent into a wheelbarrow before steering it along a plank to the rest of his team. Slush. Return. They are working fast, taking advantage of this high, warm spell of afternoon sun to sweep this steaming treacle lacquer over the old railway. Another skin, the brown-black track, dries behind them. It is 2.5 metres wide and 60 millimetres deep, rollered into flawless billiard-table flatness, banded on either side by the orange sawdust and turned earth. Just on the edge of this cleared zone, a nettle was caught by a strimmer two weeks previously. Or rather, it was half caught. One side of its thick stem was flayed into shreds, causing the plant to lurch sideways and carry the chrysalis hidden amid its lower leaves from the path of the strimmer’s return.
Slush. Sweep. Slush. Sweep. The bitumen is spread closer. The smoking tar sets quickly over the ants’ nest and the raked soil where the willow tree stood. A trundling roller grumbles past, vibrating the ground. After seventeen days of disassembling and reassembling, something moves inside the chrysalis. The smooth plates of the exterior crack and part. A hunched, black, caped creature pushes itself through the rift. First its left antenna springs up from its stored position beneath its body, then its right. Then front legs flicker out; long legs that give it the grip to drag free its changed body. Resistance falls away. The female red admiral scurries from its now transparent pupa and climbs, carrying its still-wet wings on its flanks, like sodden leather saddlebags.
Slush. Sweep. One of the workmen manoeuvres to get a better angle to brush the macadam and stamps on the nettle, crushing the empty chrysalis. The butterfly holds firm to its leaf until the trembling stops, then continues scrambling up, moving from stem to stem and crossing over into the branches of a blackthorn, warmed and edged by the sun. Underwings folded up, it waits, drying, unrolling its tongue to caress its furry chest, like a dog licking its coat. Then it opens those wings. Pulsing. Pulsing.
Another red admiral flits over to join it. A male butterfly from further north is migrating south, corkscrewing from ivy flower to ivy flower seeking nectar for strength. For a while they flash around each other and bob upwards, as if blown in great breaths from the ground, the last flakes of a vanishing summer. Then the male is up and away again, climbing higher, tumbling towards the invisible lure of heat on the horizon. The female doesn’t follow; it remains basking on the edge-land’s blackthorn. And it will stay until March, hibernating through the cold months deep in the pile of cut buddleia stacked beside the cycleway, waiting to be lit by the fiery light of the first warm days of spring. Butterfly, metaphor, indicator species: its presence here testament to the restored health of this patch of earth; its survival through the winter warning of a warming planet.