Meadowland by John Lewis-Stempel Read Free Book Online

quite likely this meadow, saw thousands of years of skirmishing between invaders and settlers, between law-upholders and rustlers. (You need a bit of space for a decent scrap, thus the
field
of battle.) The Saxons, initially, gave up colonization six miles to the east; but burned the halls and hovels of Longtown in 743 then pushed beyond Offa’s Dyke in the tenth century. The Vikings harried the valley in 915; the Vikings and the Welsh under Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, Prince of North Wales, rampaged through in 1055; it took the Normans three years to subdue the area’s Mercian king, Edric; the Normans in turn gave the unquiet land to Walter de Lacy, who gave his name to Ewyas Lacy, later to be called Longtown after its distinctive one-street style of settlement. The castle built by de Lacy and his heirs was one of ninety the so-called marcher lords constructed to keep the borderland in check; not that they were entirely successful, for the valley became synonymous with cattle and sheep rustling by the Welsh.
    Remembrance of those times lingers in the folk mind. Anything well built, from the studded oak door at Clodock church to a well-strung fence, still earns the accolade ‘That will keep the Welsh out.’ By law, it is still permissible to shoot Welshmen in the cathedral precincts of Hereford with a bow and arrow.
    The violence of humans lessened after the centuries of the thieving Welsh, as the border was brought within the proper ambit of England. But bloodshed did not wholly leave the land. During the Civil War a Scots Parliamentarian army camped locally before besieging Hereford. (The Parrys, unusually for a Herefordshire family, were solid for Cromwell; one of them became a colonel of horse in the New Model Army.)
    There are days in a desolate November when you still hear the hollering of fighting men, of horses’ hooves pounding on the shingle of the Escley. And where are the dead men buried? In this brookside field, probably, where the clay is relatively easy to dig into, and the impenetrable sandstone is deeper than the bottom of a grave.
    The gentle pasture of England is tomb after tomb of animals and man, roofed with green.
    In this blood-red earth the little miner today is going about his business with gusto. About a quarter of an acre on the upper side is splattered with heaves, and I am reminded of the poet Cowper’s line on a mole infestation in a field, where
    at ev’ry step
    Our foot half sunk in hillocks green and soft
    Raised by the mole.
    By going on tippity-toes I get to within ten feet of where a mole is digging, volcanically spewing up soil from the centre of a mound. Once, when I was small, I lay with my ear over a mole run in my grandparents’ orchard; a small lifetime of waiting ear-to-the-ground was rewarded by the sound of scuttling claws and a distant squeak. Today I momentarily see those claws as they thrust a load of soil up through the hole; they are outsize, splayed, human in their pink nakedness, but with nails from a Halloween witch. A twitchy, fleshy snout follows them into daylight. The mole is probably a male. Male moles suffer a kind of OCD where they make straight galleries. This one is throwing up mounds that run a ruler-straight line towards the centre of the field. There is a great deal of method in his madness; he is digging parallel to where the ditch-water leaks into the field. He is digging exactly where the ground is softly malleable yet not so wet his tunnels will flood. Since March is the beginning of the breeding season he is tunnelling so frenziedly because he is searching for a mate. Moles breed between March and May, when the sows make oestrus to attract boars, the pheromones being switched on by either the lengthening of daylight or the warming of the earth. Gestation is forty-two days, with between three and six hairless pups born in a chamber lined with grass.
    After mating, boars go on the hunt for other,unmated females. If they encounter males in their tunnels they