A week or so ago I was asking a farmer about the difference
between hay and silage, and he explained why silage has largely superseded hay
as the preferred winter feed for stock animals. Today I was talking to another
farmer and asking him about his hay meadows. He said to me:
‘I’m old fashioned – still make hay. I’ve never made silage
in my life.’
It occurred to me that I wouldn’t have fully understood what
he meant if I hadn’t spoken to the first farmer. And I’ve often found that
something that’s happened or been said on one occasion has served as
preparation for understanding or appreciating something that’s happened or been
said a short while later.
It raised one of my favourite questions yet again: Is all
this really accidental, or is there some element of planning or external
guidance involved?
* * *
There’s something very special about where I live, and I
keep trying to pin down exactly what it is. There’s no need, of course; just feeling
it is more than enough. And yet there’s a part of my human brain that likes to
explain things rationally, and so I keep trying.
It’s something to do with it being solid, timeless and
comfortable. The landscape of lowland Britain
isn’t wild; it’s a cultivated, domesticated landscape, on which countless
little lives have come and gone for thousands of years. The land has been their
life; they’ve worked it and loved it, and in the process come to form a
partnership between human and the more primal forces of nature. Parts of Britain
are losing that partnership now in the drive for large scale, intensive
production which recognises only one side of the equation. But not here, not
yet. And maybe that’s the essence of its magic.
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