Shouting from my shed

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Disagreement

[EDIT: you can read the stories from my progress across my map here.]

I sat on an overgrown, underused bench outside the derelict, boarded-up pub and squeezed out my socks. The men from the water board had warned me that the flooded road was deep, but I thought, ‘come on, how deep can it really be?’.

‘Pretty deep,’ was the answer and now I had wet shoes and socks for squelching around today’s grid square. Other than that, however, I was in cheerful mood for I had bought a new camera and was looking forward to testing it out. I was certainly more cheerful than the poor old pub, although nature was being diligent with the neglect and wild flowers were blooming all around it. There has been a pub here since the 16th Century but no longer. The roots of this story lay in a range of factors: property development, the often debt-stacked finances of the pub companies who own many premises, and the lifestyle shifts that meant some of us would now rather drink at home and do our socialising via our phones. But the upshot was miserably obvious. Pubs are not to everyone’s taste, and some are lifeless hellholes – but at their best, they offer a kind of everyday fellowship that the communities that lose them tend to miss.

Across the country, pubs are being shuttered at an alarming rate – scooped up by developers and ransacked for profit – changing the face of neighbourhoods and turning our beloved locals into estate agents, betting shops, and luxury flats.

Counting the closures of rural inns, high-street noise boxes, sticky-carpet boozers of the backstreets, it can be said that roughly 30 pubs shut every week in the UK; a rate of decline that, as one group of worried analysts has calculated, would mean total elimination of the British pub by the 2040s. The massive number of pubs in Britain, something between 50,000 and 60,000, is credited by some to the Black Death. Plague-struck, the 14th-century Britons who had not been annihilated were left in an emptier land, earning higher wages, perhaps better inclined to enjoy themselves. They spent more time and money than ever before in purpose-built taverns or private residences that would sell them drink. It is possible to feel deprived of a vanished pub even if it was one you never made use of, just as a church can be reassuring to the irreligious – for being redoubtable, bracingly old, with doors more often open than not. Pubs are potent and strange like that. 

Extremely rare on my map, but welcome, was a long strip of grassy land beside the road. Not particularly of interest to anyone, but for the fact that it was marked on my land as ‘land available for access on foot’. Beyond the slender green threads of footpaths and municipal parks, this is one of the only areas of open land that I’m legally allowed to explore on this map. On the other side of the road ran a row of houses, their names a nod to different ways of life in the past: The Old Post Office, The Old School House. An old lady in trilby and her nightie was smoking outside one house. When she noticed me looking at her, I felt bad, but she just grinned at me and went inside. The houses backed onto a field bright with poppies amongst the crop of pale blue linseed, or flax. The earliest evidence of humans using wild flax as a textile comes from the present-day Republic of Georgia, where spun, dyed, and knotted wild flax fibers found in Dzudzuana Cave date to the Upper Paleolithic, 30,000 years ago. Flax is grown for its seeds, which can be ground into a meal or turned into linseed oil, a product used as a nutritional supplement and as an ingredient in many wood-finishing products. Flax fibers taken from the stem of the plant are two to three times as strong as cotton fibers. Additionally, flax fibers are naturally smooth and straight. Europe and North America both depended on flax for plant-based cloth until the 19th century, when cotton overtook flax. 

Across the field, and through a hedge, and everything looked different. No more wavy flowers on this side of the hedge – nothing but the serried ranks of millions of stalks of wheat, standing tall and golden as the green ears ripened towards harvest. I say ‘standing tall’, but the most obvious change in cultivated wheat has been the dramatic reduction in height since the beginning of the 20th century, and especially since the 1960s. By the deliberate introduction of a single gene (various alleles of a single gene) referred to as Reduced height (Rht) genes, it has been possible to produce semi-dwarf wheats. These new shorter varieties of wheat are more resistant to lodging (the falling over of wheat stalks) and produce more grain than older varieties. The increase in grain yield is because a greater proportion of the products of photosynthesis accumulate in the grains rather than in the leaves. The shorter and more uniform height of the wheat also makes it possible for farmers to manage large fields and mechanise harvesting using combine harvesters. This dwarfing gene was the basis of the green revolution and helped to double wheat yields, worldwide, in the 1960s and 1970s.

I listened the sound of skylarks singing and soaring over the fields. Male skylarks can be spotted rising almost vertically from farmland, grassland, saltmarshes and moorland. They hover effortlessly, singing from a great height, before parachuting back down to earth. These long and complicated song-flights can last for up to an hour and the birds can reach 300m before descending. They’ll also sing from perches, such as fence posts or large rocks. Despite their aerial activities, skylarks nest on the ground, laying three to four eggs. Chicks become independent after only two weeks and parents can have up to four broods in a breeding season.

Another fabulous bird song is that of the wren. The most common bird in the UK is the wren. There are thought to be around 8.5 million breeding territories in the UK. [Compare this to the world’s population of 50 billion chickens!] This may surprise some people because they are not as regularly seen as woodpigeons or house sparrows, for example.

However, wrens are very widespread throughout the UK and inhabit a wide range of habitats. They like to stay close to cover so don’t often come onto feeders but can easily be heard as they have a very loud song for a small bird. 

Wrens are not particularly noticeable until you learn their song. Once you do they become unmissable. That early-morning rat-a-tat volley of notes has not always won the bird friends. During the breeding season, this tiny bird, which weighs about as much as a pound coin, produces a noise so loud and reverberant that it seems to defy physics. 

In 1884, the Reverend J. H. Langille described his experience listening to the Winter Wren: “I stand entranced and amazed, my very soul vibrating to this gushing melody, which seems at once expressive of the wildest joy and the tenderest sadness.”

Per unit weight, Winter Wrens have 10 times the sound power of a crowing rooster. Their rapid heartbeat, respiratory rate, and metabolic rate don’t explain the output, since larger and smaller birds don’t match this. But what is even more amazing is that these birds not only produce the sounds but react to tiny parts of the songs, so their ears and brain can resolve in real time individual notes that we cannot without replaying the songs at slow speed.

How on earth can a wren sing so loudly? The answer lies in the songbird’s vocal anatomy. Unlike you and I, who create sound from the larynx way up at the top of our windpipe, a bird’s song comes from deep within its body. Birds produce song in a structure called the syrinx, located at the bottom of the windpipe where the bronchial tubes diverge to the lungs. The syrinx is surrounded by an air sac, and the combination works like a resonating chamber to maintain or amplify sound.

Evolution has given birds a far more elaborate sound mechanism than it’s given humans. Where we wound up with a flute, songbirds got bagpipes.

The origin of the word wren in Irish is dreoilín, which means a trickster. The trickery and cunningness of wren is popular since the day it was titled as ‘The King of Birds’. The story goes that all the birds gathered to choose the king of the birds. Each species had some or the other power which made it difficult for them to choose the best so it was decided that the bird who flew the farthest will be chosen as the King.

As soon as the birds took off into the air, the little wren hid herself in the feathers of the eagle, for she knew the eagle can fly the farthest. The eagle flew higher and higher to a point where it thought no other bird can fly further. As the eagle started to come down confident and happy that it had achieved the title, it heard a voice from the sky chiming ‘I am the king, I am the king!’ and this was the little wren who had been hiding in the feathers of the eagle. She took a little flight above the eagle without exhausting herself unlike rest of the birds who tried to fly high but could not beat the eagle.

The victory of wren was not accepted by the eagle who said ‘I used all my strength to win the competition’. The little wise wren replied, “if the eagle can win through its strength then why cannot she win with her wisdom?” She considers her wisdom as a power similarly to how the eagle considers her strength to fly high as a power. 

Wren Day (Irish: Lá an Dreoilín), is an Irish celebration held on 26 December, St. Stephen’s Day. The tradition consists of “hunting” a wren (now a fake wren but previously a real one) and putting it on top of a decorated pole. Then the crowds of mummers, or strawboys, celebrate the wren by dressing up in masks, straw suits, and colourful motley clothing. They form music bands and parade through towns and villages. These crowds are sometimes called the wrenboys.

The wren celebration may have descended from Celtic mythology. Ultimately, the origin may be a Samhain or midwinter sacrifice or celebration, as Celtic mythology considered the wren a symbol of the past year (the European wren is known for its habit of singing even in mid-winter, and its name in the Netherlands, “winter king,” reflects this.)

The reason for my wren digression (wreason for my ren digwression?) was a loud bird call that I didn’t recognise. I pinpointed it to being a wren’s alarm call as it bobbed up and down anxiously in the low branches of a tree. It was only then that I noticed the cat prowling towards the tree.

Sir David Attenborough has warned that cats are killing huge numbers of birds in British gardens. The TV naturalist said cat owners should buy bell collars for their pets to help stop the deaths. The most recent figures of how many creatures are killed by cats are from the Mammal Society. They estimate that cats in the UK catch up to 100 million prey items over spring and summer, of which 27 million are birds. This is the number of prey items which were known to have been caught. We don’t know how many more the cats caught, but didn’t bring home, or how many escaped but subsequently died.

A footpath led through an industrial yard filled with industrial equipment and giant cranes for hire. At the rear was a scrap recycling business, with pyramids of old tractor tyres and rusting piles of complicated looking machine bits from vehicles. The footpath passed from the yard into bushes and young trees. In there, looking like jungle war relics I passed several vehicles in stages of decomposition. An old lorry whose cab had rusted and collapsed. The steering wheel stuck up in the air and the broken headlights stared into the tangle of brambles alongside an old milk delivery truck with its Unigate logo peeling from the door which now hung limply down from one hinge.

There was a hazy stillness to the morning and a pleasant breath of breeze. Summer. Tomorrow is St Swithin’s Day, and according to traditional folklore, whatever the weather is like on St Swithin’s Day – whether rain or sunshine – it will continue for the next 40 days and 40 nights. 

The old poem goes like this…

“St Swithin’s Day, if it does rain
Full forty days, it will remain
St Swithin’s Day, if it be fair
For forty days, t’will rain no more”

Swithin was a man born in or around the year 800. He became Bishop of Winchester. Unlike other religious figures, he asked not to be buried in a prominent place within Winchester Cathedral, but outside in a simple tomb “where the sweet rain of heaven may fall upon my grave”.

The legend says after his remains were moved inside there was a great storm and it rained for many weeks after. Weather experts says that since records began in 1861, there has never been a record of 40 dry or 40 wet days in a row following St Swithin’s Day.

I cycled down a narrow road, hemmed between high hedges on both sides. Then I squeezed through a narrow gap back onto another footpath across the fields. A swallow swooped low right in front of me.

“When the swallows fly high, the weather will be dry.”

This weather folklore rolls easily off the tongue and there is even some truth to it. In this case the swallows are not flying high to admire the view; instead they are chasing their next meal. On fine summers’ days warm air rises upwards. Insects are also swept up in these bubbles of warmth, sometimes carried hundreds of metres aloft. And, since swallows eat insects, they have to fly higher on fine days to find their food. Conversely during unsettled and cold weather insects will seek the shelter of trees and buildings, so swallows have to swoop low to find them.

To get here, the birds must travel 6,000 miles, from the tip of southern Africa, over the tropics and the Equator, the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean, until they finally cross the English Channel to reach our shores.

Then, in one of those mysteries of Nature that baffle and amaze in equal measure, they will return to the very place where they were born.

One of the key reasons why swallows are so central to our rural lives is that, unlike other summer visitors such as warblers, flycatchers and chats, swallows are so noticeable. Because they feed throughout the day on flying insects, they do not hide away in dense foliage, but swoop around our fields and farmyards, calling companionably to one another with that soft, twittering sound the French call le gazouillement, the same word they use for a babbling brook.

The other reason swallows are so familiar is that — with a handful of other species, notably the house sparrow and house martin — they have chosen to live alongside us, in a relationship that scientists call ‘commensal’.

In fact, swallows are not so much commensal with us, as with our livestock: they usually live close to sheep and cattle, which attract the multitude of flying insects these birds need to feed their young.

It breeds across the Americas, Europe and Asia, spending the northern winter in South and Central America, Africa and Asia, with some reaching northern Australia.

One plucky little bird has even been seen in Antarctica, making it the only one of the world’s 6,000 species of songbird to have reached all seven continents. Hence the remark by ornithologist Collingwood Ingram, writing in 1974, that the swallow is ‘beyond doubt the best known, and certainly the best loved, species in the world’.

The youngsters that do survive to the autumn then face the mammoth task of flying all the way to Africa—and back — before their first birthday. How they manage to undertake such incredible journeys baffled our ancestors; indeed, many early naturalists — including Gilbert White — struggled to believe in the concept of migration at all.

Alternative theories included the notion that swallows hibernated in caves, at the bottom of ponds, or even flew to the moon and back. It wasn’t until the mid 19th century that the truth — that these birds, weighing less than an ounce, undertake a global trip of more than 12,000 miles — was finally proved beyond doubt.

“I love the swallows,” the farmer told me. “I love nature. When I was a student in London I thought I would go mad. It’s an illness, you know. I needed to get out, somewhere green.”

I agreed with the farmer, naturally. This was probably the first point we had found common ground on in about ten minutes of heated, but polite conversation.

It had started as I lifted my bike to cross a stile and walk a footpath across some fields. 

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” called an angry voice.

I turned to see an elderly farmer, flat cap and all, walking my way.  

“I’m lifting my bike to cross a stile and walk a footpath across some fields.”

“Yes, well I’d really rather you didn’t.” The farmer went on. “I’ve got cows on this farm, the grass will all get trampled, and anyway the grass is really wet: you’ll get soaked.”

“I don’t mind about the damp grass,” I replied in a conciliatory voice. “I won’t bother your cows or leave path. But this is a public footpath.”

“I know it’s a footpath, but it’s a bloody nuisance and it would cause me deep distress if you use it…” And off he went, on a long rant about the scourge of people coming onto his land, dogs off their leads, trail bikes scaring the cattle, and the scourge of the “bloody Ramblers association arguing about access rights.”

I had no intention of causing anyone deep distress for the sake of a footpath across a field and told him that I’d find another way. I was fairly certain that arguing with an angry old farmer wasn’t going to change his mind, but the lack of access to nature has been one of the repeated frustrations of my year on this map. So I pushed back with some facts about our 49,000 miles of lost footpaths, our lack of access to countryside, about half of England being owned by less than 1% of the population, and the proven importance of nature for our physical and mental health. 

This was when the farmer told me about the swallows and his love of nature. 

I pointed out that in the same way he had needed to get out to green spaces, so too did all of us, including the 99% of the population who don’t own fields and hills and woodlands and rivers. 

He agreed with me on that need, but dived back into another rant against people using the footpaths across the land.

At some point in the futile, but slightly cathartic conversation (for me, though I suspect not for him) we established that we both had a mutual farming friend. This made him become extremely apologetic for his anger. “I’m afraid I haven’t treated you in a very Christian way, have I? Would you like to come and see the cattle, or have a cup of tea?”

I thanked him and said that I was fine. I’d be on my way now. Not the way I wanted to go, a way that I was perfectly entitled to go. But a way that wouldn’t further upset an old gentleman. 

Nonetheless, I felt upset as I pedalled away down the road. I support and appreciate the farming community. I don’t support walkers whose dogs scare cattle, nor those who leave litter, trespass or damage crops. But I do believe that we all have a need for access to the natural world, not only for our enjoyment and health, but also if enough of us are to develop a connection and a caring for the natural world to reverse its destruction before it is too late. And I despair that our laws put so much of the country in the hands of so few people. 

    

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Comments

  1. Paul Mnich Posted

    I think perhaps fewer people use footpaths because they feel that walking for it’s own sake, without necessarily having a destination in mind, is pointless. Others, while appreciating the beauty of the countryside, find accessing it too challenging. I noticed many more people out walking during the COVID lockdowns – and thought it might continue – but it seems although not all, the majority returned to their cars, towns and shopping centres. Sadly it’s almost as if most people need to be forced into doing what’s good for them!

    Reply

 
 

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