Another Country Diary #26
With faded bluebells and fallen trees.
12/5
Summer has arrived early, or so it feels. The lanes are full of flying insects, catching the low sun as we walk up to the top. The hedges that looked bare and shorn a mere eight weeks ago are now full and soft with new growth. There are more butterflies. Orange tips in an aerial courtship. Something small and blue, almost violet, flying along the surface of the hedge in a world of stalks and leaves. The verges are growing higher with grass and cow parsley. Red campion has risen with them competing for light. I love the cow parsley’s delicate structure, the way its stalks bifurcate, the strangeness of its flowers, a crown of white. When I was about eight or nine I used to walk along such a verge every morning and afternoon from the school bus stop. Cow parsley always reminds me of that walk and of the way, in the warmer months, I would take my time and run my hands through the white flowers.
There is a roe buck in one of the top fields. It spotted us before we caught sight of it, and it stands its ground for a while, on the other side of the field, assessing what threat we might pose, before bounding along the hedgerow and into the safety of a small copse. The hawthorn blossom seems to have peaked. It hangs in snowy clumps along the hedgerow that bounds our garden.
13/5
There is a muntjac deer in our garden at breakfast time. It is only a few metres beyond the window and is browsing on the large rose bush that obscures the access hatches to our sceptic tank. It is overgrown so the additional pruning is welcome. We move closer to the glass to observe it, and it notices us, gazing back in stilled terror for a few seconds, before moving away, first to the other side of the rose bushes, and then turning tail to run out towards the copse that starts at the end of our garden.
The light feels strong long into the evening, slowly touching the oak above the hen run with the rust of deepening sunset.
14/5
The jackdaws of UEA are freewheeling over the grass of Earlham Park from tree to tree as I walk over to teach my workshop. Some of them land to strut purposefully around.
After work I sip tea at the table at the end of the garden. The hawthorn is dropping its blossom all around, the original confetti. It looks as if a wedding party has just departed. Some of it lands in my tea. From the overhanging willow a bird shits on my jeans.
15/5
It is grey and chilly. I am working from home, on the kitchen table, and can hear the starlings on the telephone line outside, chirping and clicking and whizzing like mechanisms of some kind.
16/5
We go to hear our brilliant colleague Tessa McWatt read from and discuss her new book, The Snag. It is a book about a mother, a forest, and wild grief, and of the way all these things intersect. The snag is a term referring to the oldest tree in the forest, one that is in the last third of its life, and thus full of the features of decay that favour the creation of microhabitats for lichen, fungi, microbes, insects, birds and bats. In English woods ancient oaks fulfil this role, with up to 2,000 species dependent on them. Despite my many years of knocking around woods and reading about them it isn’t a term I’d encountered, but it works incredibly well as a figure for the snag we find ourselves in as a species as our habitats, our dwelling places, collapse around us. I will look forward to reading Tessa’s book.
17/5
At the wood we are greeted by the sound of two buzzards. They are rising out of the meadow next to the woodland entrance with long leisurely flaps of their wings. I’m guessing that we have disturbed them from a kill somewhere in the long grass. It is a while since we were last here, at least six weeks. A little further up the track we find that a couple of trees have fallen across it. A large beech has knocked over a younger tree. The younger tree is blocking the track, while the large tree has become hung up, snagged on the trunks of two other beeches. It is a mess that will need to be carefully brought down. It is beyond my abilities. The track and the trees that have fallen belong to a nearby estate; we only have rights of access up the track.
We leave the car well clear of the mess and skirt it to go up the track. From the woodland edge we see a hare in the middle of the adjacent field. It is raised on its rear legs, as if scenting the air, and its light brown colour blends almost perfectly with the earth field. The field has been tilled, but it doesn’t look as though a crop is growing.
Further up the last of the bluebells are fading. This is ancient woodland, and the bluebells spread in a carpet beneath old oaks, ash, beech, and hazel coppice. The sun breaks through the morning cloud. Coins of sunlight fall on the flowers, bringing out their colour. Some of the flowers have started to form the green seed pods that will slowly dry over the next couple of months. We push onward towards the section we own. There is a water sprinkler in a field of potatoes shush-shushing through the trees. A blackbird scolds us unseen in the canopy. Coal tits dash about between trees. Along the track baby conifers are spreading from the plantation into the ancient wood, and I wonder whether somebody ought to be removing them. The problem is that in a wood like this, that has been divided into sections of ownership and responsibility no larger than about 3 or 4 acres, there can be a lack of management strategy for the wood as a whole.
Our section is close to the River Wensum, and as we approach, there is always the sense of coming close to a body of water, a shift in the quality of air, and the sound of freshwater birds. At this time of year the carr is not full, and the water meadows are not in flood, but the reedbeds are visible through the trees. We have come to harvest more wild garlic from where it grows in a patch beneath the elephant-hide trunk of a large beech tree. The wood is lively with birdsong. The shrill keening of a goldcrest, the strident call of a wren—chaffinches, blackcaps, chiffchaffs, robins, blackbirds.
The woodland floor is tinder dry with leaves and twigs. Every step feels brittle, as if the world might break. We have not had any wildfires in the area as yet, but I fear that they will come if this dry period of weather continues. The area burnt by wildfires so far this year already exceeds that of any other year this decade1, a fact which staggers me considering the terrible wildfires that hit the country in 2022. We haven’t even reached the peak of the fire season that arrives with high summer, when crops and vegetation are drier still. A recent Met Office study has found that the wildfire danger in the UK is six times higher because of human-induced climate change. It predicts that ‘the frequency and severity of fires are likely to increase, posing significant risks to both natural ecosystems and human populations’2. It’s a terrifying thought. More frequent and severe wildfires. More frequent and severe flooding events. More frequent and severe storms. More coastal erosion. And much of this experienced and felt the most in rural areas.
On the drive back I see roadkill—a young fox, still a cub really, a muntjac on the central carriageway of the A47—and feel thankful once again that the inhabitants of the woods of the Wensum Valley were spared this fate.
Many thanks to those of you who have upgraded your subscriptions to support my writing on here. Thanks are also due to those Substackers recommending this page: History, Landscape, Birds, and Stories; Hinterland; All My Old Haunts; The Guild of Master Procrastinators; Another Disappointing Walk, and Some Flowers Soon.
If you’d prefer not to upgrade but would still like to show your financial appreciation, you can also use my Stripe tip jar.
About ‘This Party’s Over’
On ‘This Party’s Over’ I publish my creative non-fiction, personal essays, place writing, and a country diary. My ‘Another Country Diary’ pieces are my most regular posts (about three a month).
The country diary can express a sort of local distinctiveness, explore a personal set of interactions with a landscape, and in doing so, almost accidentally, tease out the way the natural world is entwined with culture and politics. It can be a quietly radical and uncanny form, or sometimes just plain parochial, oddball in its specificity.
If you enjoyed this post, then follow the link to the last one to read more, and, if you are feeling in the mood to, like, share, and subscribe for free.
Another Country Diary #25
This Party's Over is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
A really lovely read, beautifully written.
Beautifully written, made me see things and feel things; thank you. I found myself curious at the use of the word "we," as to whether it's a literary way of referring to yourself without needing to use the word "I" over and over, or whether you were accompanied by one or more other parties? Thank you again for sharing your work with us!