Another Country Diary #3
With wild bees, a white-tailed eagle, and underground cables.
The scourge of all townlings and city slickers is back with another dose of country diary. The previous instalment of ‘Another Country Diary’ can be read HERE
26/9
Three days of teaching, office work, meetings—energising and exhausting in equal measures. Today I’m working from home, emails and reading and marking. It rained in the night, heavy pummelling on the windows and tiles, noisy through the thin skin of our cottage. There is a smell of damp soot in the dining room and I remember that the chimneys have not yet been swept. The sky turns light and dark and light again. Charcoal clouds scud low above the trees. Blue sky comes and goes. Benji, our older cat, goes out in the morning and arrives back exhausted by lunchtime and sleeps. I read and I read and I read.
In the afternoon I take a break and set out on the quick walk to the parish church. The route takes me past the village noticeboard, with its flyers from Yoga teachers and its pleas for new members of the parish council, then out across a large field of broken stubble and beneath a line of mid twentieth century electricity pylons. My plan is to visit Molly the church cat, who lives alone in the church porch, and likes to sit on the laps of visitors who sit on the bench in her graveyard and dribble on them as she purrs. I’m midway across the field when I notice that the blue-grey clouds to my back have loomed a little larger. A few cool raindrops detach and land on the nape of my neck. I don’t have a raincoat, but I press on, thinking that I can always wait out a shower in the church porch. I’m almost at the church when I remember the Yellow Weather Warning for rainfall. I cast a wary eye at the bruised and broiling sky, see more raindrops falling in the roadside puddles, and turn heel. Molly can wait. As I hurry back there is a roll of thunder. The rain, of course, holds off, but I feel better from having cleared my head of the novel I had been reading.
28/9
We drive to the wood early morning and walk up the track from the lane under the spread of the beech canopy, disturbing a hare as we go, sending it darting into cover. The dead beech next to the track has dropped a limb, the rotten wood fracturing into a jumble of branches of various sizes. It must have come down at the weekend when the winds were up. Ceci and I carefully lift them out of the way so that the next woodland owner driving up doesn’t have to.
The sun is still low and it strikes golden through the massed trunks of the ancient wood as we traverse it. I can hear a deer crashing through the undergrowth somewhere behind us as we come to the field edge. Now the pig farm has gone this part of the wood feels tranquil again. The farm had felt like a semi-industrialised landscape, vehicles trundling about to distribute feed and heap manure, pigs squealing, and seagulls and rooks wheeling and calling in a frenzy over the mucked up, rucked up field of corrugated iron huts and livestock (soon to be deadstock). The field is planted up with what I think might be sugar beet, green again at least, and the only sound is that of what I think might be a hobby calling above the firs in ‘the nursery’.
Our woodlot is in a part of the wood known as ‘the carr’ on account of the wet woodland that dominates one half of it. The pond in it is fed by the River Wensum and during the winter the wet pastures flood so that the carr brims with a flat mirror of water that extends out across the valley. We follow the deer and badger tracks around a broad circular route through the wood. The nettles are beginning to thin and collapse, the wood is entering the start of its slow autumnal strip show, which includes not only the leaves of the trees but also a falling back of all the ground flora so that by late December the wood looks emptied out and open plan. The sweet chestnuts are starting to fall, or else are being cast down by squirrels, but are not yet big enough to collect. We collect a handful of crab apples from the trees on the old parish boundary and check on a nest of wild bees in the ivy clad oak. The oak must be about three centuries old at least, and has a thick coat of ivy up one side. The nest is in a hollow behind the ivy. For a few minutes I think they must have left, driven out by the pig years, but then I see a few bees emerge from a small entrance about four meters up the trunk. They are small, black looking bees, though it’s always difficult to get a good look and I’m wary of riling them up by getting too close. The bees make me feel hopeful that we can still save this place, that nature can still thrive.
The sun is slanting higher through the trees by the time we begin to make our way back down the track. All the neighbouring sections of woodland have been bought up by the council in negotiated sales ahead of compulsory purchase orders. It seems a rash use of money for a road project that will likely now not go ahead, or if it does, will almost certainly have to avoid these woods. Both Natural England and the Environment Agency objected to the plans for the Norwich Western Link in the recent planning consultation, along with approximately 4,800 other objections from various stakeholders, wildlife organisations, interested parties, and the general public. Roughly 200 wrote in favour. Even so, every time we come here it feels like a prolonged process of letting go, of saying farewell to a place that would be changed irrevocably. I glance upwards and see, to my astonishment, a white tailed eagle high above us, its wings so large and broad that for a moment I think it must be some kind of drone, until, with a single leisurely wing beat, it dispels my suspicions and continues west.
We leave the woods and follow a footpath that takes us further along the route of the proposed road, through more gorgeous deciduous woodland, across a gently rolling hill, and along a bridleway that seems to tunnel beneath a spread of hawthorn from the hedges on either side. The way is interrupted by a wide, carefully laid, gravelled road which has erased a large section of hedgerow. Some orange cones are scattered about and a sign indicates a 5mph speed limit. This is the construction track for one of the electricity underground cable projects that route from the North Norfolk coast to a large substation south of Norwich. This strange temporary road is designed to carry the equipment and earth movers and the miles and miles of cabling needed for the project. It looks like a ghastly grey scar across the landscape, and no doubt it will have an impact on the habitats it disturbs, but it is at least a temporary destruction that will be removed, the habitats repaired, once the cables are laid. As we walk back I try to imagine the permanent lesion of Norwich Western Link on this landscape, the four lanes of traffic an oozing pus of noise and pollution, and I feel my imagination failing because who in their right mind would want to devastate a place of this beauty and tranquillity?
30/9
The last day of September and autumn has arrived soggily over these islands. It rains all morning, breaks briefly into sunshine in the afternoon, before continuing to throw it down. Moving around campus, driving along country lanes—it is all more taxing in this weather. By the evening the lanes are silting up with field run-off and tree debris. Some places have seen three times the normal amount of rain for the time of year, but what constitutes normal in these abnormal times? Central Europe was hit by cataclysmic floods the week before last. The word cataclysm is derived from the Greek for deluge, to literally wash down. Every year brings new extremes and everyone just continues as if civilisation isn’t on the brink of calamity. In a seminar on the apocalyptic imagination last week my students angrily lamented the missed opportunity presented by the pandemic to reset civilisation, to build back better instead of getting back to normal. There are people in this room that will die as a result of climate change said one, and watching the rain come down today I feel the full weight of intergenerational responsibility.
Welcome and thank you to any new subscribers to This Party’s Over! 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. I’m playing with this form alongside other pieces of non-fiction in this Substack.