Heathering

 

At the turn of the century, I left my activist days behind me. I had gone from the Newbury Bypass protests to Critical Mass bike rides, Land is Ours trespasses and Reclaim the Streets parties to co-founding a community land trust and participation process that saw a few hundred people securing some acres of Britain to be put in trust forever, never to be sold again, then left alone to recover. More on that very soon.

  Although I’d involved myself with these worthy ventures, as the millennium turned, I felt that I’d been committing myself largely to battles of the mind. I’m not saying here that these getting-in-the-way activities, the non-violent direct action of the nineties weren’t crucial and soul feeding to be active in; but they were ostensibly about changing minds, and at the end of the chapter, I felt unable to honestly say that I knew the first thing about how to be here, with the land I thought I’d been fighting for, or how to really take care of it.

  So, over that winter, I found work as a farm hand on an organic farm just north of Lewes in Sussex. The ten acres had previously been growing flowers intensively in six acres of greenhouses and multi span polytunnels. The whole acreage was in organic conversion by a remarkable sailor from Suffolk who’d changed tack when his ceramic tile business went under after a huge restoration job for St Pauls Cathedral went sour. Along with a few other local growers, he provided four hundred veggie boxes a week to local subscribers and a stall at a Saturday market in Brighton, twelve miles to the south.

  On the wall of one of the old sheds the farmer, Adrian, had squatted for an office was a photograph. It was framed, hazy and aged, faded to a matted sepia and, in perfect cursive script, written in fountain pen was the name of a lane near the edge of the land and the date, ‘Autumn 1938’. It was a photograph of a sight that would have been all too common. There were three orchard ladders, their wide legs splaying into the stubbled field, the narrow heads with planks tied across them, leaning into a hedgerow that stood around twenty feet high.

  Posing on and around the ladders were the folk of the locale, baskets in arms, harvesting the hedge for its haws and hazelnuts, sloes, blackberries and rosehips. Preparing for the coming winter. There were three or four generations of the village either perched on the ladders, turned to the camera or stood at the foot of the hedge. From the cardigans and shawls over summer print cotton dresses in the field, up the ladder of rolled up sleeves, braces and trilby hats to the very top, where the smallest and lightest boys, in shorts and caps, perched proudly. The whole community was gathering the crucial winter foods and medicines as they had done every Autumn harvest for generations.

Then, every ten to fifteen years depending, the hedge would be laid in the area’s vernacular pattern (there are thirty different styles recorded in the UK and Ireland). This is the craft of partially cutting through a tree, until it lays down to be woven through stakes into a living fence; but cutting it so that all the key layers of the trunk remain in place to keep it living and thriving. It marks a field’s boundary, some styles being stock proof, and provides a thriving eco system, full of food and refuge. Once laid, and because of the immense energy in the mature root system, the hedge, like the craft of coppicing, bursts forth in the following Spring with shoots of new growth and, rejuvenated, begins again.

  This, along with the natural annual harvest, is an age-old practice and that photograph I remember now, hanging in a ramshackle farm office in Sussex, had that air of consistency. There is a felt sense of a depth into time that these glimpsed memories of our country life conjure in us, that we hold so close as we navigate these times, trying to locate a way back or though. They serve as documents from a ‘time before’, where we can project ourselves as we imagine a regenerative culture, a viable civilisation. Maybe the hedge is a thread in the repair work ahead.

  The photograph’s date, Autumn 1938, makes it impossible not to set this scene in the wider background of what was happening in mainland Europe: the revelatory horror of the next six years as it culminated in the unthinkable mushroom clouds over Japan, marking the end of the British Empire and the dawning of the American. As I stared into that image, my boss looked up from his work and, realising what I was looking at said, “That was some of the last free food.”

  In his view, from the enclosure of the commons to what was about to happen to the hedges of the country was one direct line. It was a representation of what everyone, then and now, lives with here, the systematic deprivation of access to the land by the very few for their own profit. And, with the hedge as an example, the deprivation of the resources that support rural communities, effectively and historically, driving them to leave for the industrial centres or to be subjected labour, tied to the landowners.

   When our ancestors cleared the forest to cultivate crops, it is thought that they’d leave lines of trees as boundary markers, shelter belts and wind breaks. Hedges began to be planted during the Neolithic and the oldest known surviving hedgerow is Judith’s Hedge in Cambridgeshire at nine hundred years old.

  Shortly after the Second World War, the British government, with a post war goal of ‘food independence’ for the country, enacted the 1947 Agriculture Act. In that spirit, came ever larger agricultural machinery and what some have described as the ‘waging of war on the land’, with ever more efficient technologies developed in wartime, accelerating the creation of the green deserts we often find ourselves in today.

  In 1950, the UK Forestry commission concluded that we had 1 million kilometres of hedgerow. By 2007, this figure had dwindled to just 477,000, a loss of 52 percent of this crucial environment and ancient ecosystem in only fifty years. This destruction was paid for in subsidies and grants from the British taxpayer. In more recent years, spurred by the reports of habitat loss, there are more programmes of grants to plant and maintain hedgerows. But the decline continues, particularly in the slow death under the flails of the tractor mounted mowers that snap and tear, smashing new growth into chip. Without traditional hedge laying techniques, the plants do not go through a regenerative process, the root systems become moribund and, one by one, they eventually die off.

  Next time you’re out there, somewhere, passing along a hedgerow, cropped level like a garden privet, with the ever increasing gaps between surviving trees stretched with barbed wire; or, in the case of the wheat deserts, nothing at all…Stop. Look through a gap as a camera frame and you might see fields so huge that the gargantuan machinery that further destroys it can only keep a straight line of cultivation using Sat Nav. Then, your focus might return to what’s left of the hedge, flailed and beaten down every three years or so, barely alive or already dead standing.

  And all this, bought and paid for by subsidy and grant, meted out to landowners by the British tax paying public. That is how pretty much everything happens out here. Is this a fair exchange for their so-called stewardship would you say? Or are we complicit in our home’s destruction by proxy?

  When I am standing at one of these denuded hedgerows, as I did recently, out walking a lane above where I live, looking through a huge gap, watching a tractor’s crawling progress as it turned the stubble in for Winter, listening to the steady high-rev whine of the engine turning the rotovator; I feel the grief and rage in one for the daily destruction and I have to remind myself where I am. When I know that I can’t walk on without placing myself in time that makes sense of this, I remember that, although the picture may not look like it in the moment, I find myself, again, stood in the midst of a temperate rainforest, in the native state of the island where I live. From there, I can accept this fleeting time of desertification and perceive the living forest surrounding me. I can understand that all will, eventually, be well. I can listen there and hear the need to simply begin, to choose the regenerative path. 

Here, the hedgerow’s first cipher strand. We gave folk with the land our money to grub up the hedgerows, to buy the machines of industrial agriculture that have got us, and keep us, here. We even give money to save the field edges from the plough and the chemical sprayers, for ‘nature’. These are all policies of our successive governments, of us and this has all been done in our name. But what if the policy was for broadscale regenerative agriculture instead? What if the premium subsidy we gave was to regenerate and repair the land and water systems whilst providing food etc. for the local community? Would the destruction continue? Maybe, we have to decide to listen to the forest that we are and begin.

  There’s a story then, of a boundary that feeds and homes that, like many life support systems, is currently being beaten to an inch of its life. And we can stop there, if you like, nodding thoughtfully, gazing toward the inevitable horizon that this path is taking us on and leave it here in the wee box we’ve made of it together in our minds, in the comfort of our own homes. Or we could make felt sense of it in a second cipher strand and, if your will has it, we could walk out together, into the fresh air, up a stoney single track, winter rivered with rain and washed-out potholes, to a hedge I laid in the West Midland Pattern fifteen or so years ago. A place that salved a heart that, at the time, was properly broken and helped a man come back from the edge through the work of care.

  It’ll be ready again now, somewhere nearby, that is, really, here. I’ll show you how to free the crown first, with a long handled brash hook. You can have my leather gloves, for the thorny skin, to reach in and grasp hold of her, as a stem. You might feel through the leather her pulse, readying for the clean and sharpened billhook blade. You could strike the pleaching cut, two thirds through her and, when you feel her move to begin her fall, you can catch her with a firmer hold. Then maybe both of you can lay gently down to the face of the field.

At the Heart of a Hedgelaying.

I find it now, being called back to ending times,

to that family broken, thrown away winter.

Three moons round, held up in a seventeen foot Astral,

I discovered realm words for grieve in the flood.

It was Easter then and, leaving the pieces still floating

in my chest, I looked up a hundred yards I’d laid

through a time, where the thorn waited for my numb skin

and scratched blood dripping onto the billhook’s bend.

When I landed, I came with two bags. One was full

of my river stones I’d hauled through thirty years,

like friends, who a counsellor would help me finally name

and lay out to dry in that summer’s coming sun.

The other had a more forgiving weight, hefted lightly as it was,

with brash hook, bow saws and a fauns footed small axe.

From there, I laid lives bare, with pleaching cuts, to hazel,

hawthorn, blackthorn, its bitter end. I laid each crown

In exact degree, gently up the field; each on top of the last,

thorn upon thorn, crook cradling wren and robin’s nest,

to foil magpie, hinder crow. Tears sometimes,

drove hazel stakes to the heart of it.

Locking branches, in a regimen two feet apart,

I followed the land’s line in  prayer for perfect order.

I wove hazel heatherings through stake tops, swimming

their fluid and fish skins to a braided rope, four whips thick.

I battered them down with a clubbing pole, holding

the whole together, keeping the bullock in. I cleaned

the path side then, every cut end, each wayward branch,

its heels, angled the same, peering out to passersby.

Each bared heartwood was glowering cream white

that morning, the winter’s moon grieve sung a little

more faintly in the cold and I was finished, making

a new shape to the land.

A month since equinox, new shoots were an inch or two long,

the leaves alone unfurled. I rolled a smoke and rested my boot

on the last cut heel. With folded arms round my chest,

I blew out, emptying my ribs in steam and smoke.

The heathering rope swam back up the hill to the bullock,

his own head, buried in the brash side, grazing young hawthorn.

Good for the heart they say. So, I took my own mouthful and chewed

slowly, to let it all in and, for a while, we stayed there,

together, he and I, ruminating our certain futures.

Thanks so much for being here. Until next time. Go well.

With Love from here.