Tuesday 12 June 2012

Learning from the Land.

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or so ago I was asking a farmer about the difference between hay and silage, and he explained why silage has largely superseded hay as the preferred winter feed for stock animals.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.

No comments: