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

I have no idea where I am. I’m totally disorientated. Getting here was a maze of narrow roads, tall hedges and people riding horses slowly down the narrow lanes. I cannot yet orientate myself to where I am compared to any other nearby grid squares I’ve explored over the course of this year. I can hear the buzz of motorbikes on a distant race track, brought to me on a gentle summer breeze. I haven’t been on my map for a while so I feel disconnected today, somehow distracted. I’m also slightly high strung still from a closed motorway, a long detour and being late for an appointment earlier this morning. I consciously try to shrug all that off, to look around me and appreciate where I am.

I emerge from woodland into mown hay meadows and see a long, lovely valley dropping away down towards a grid square where I remember drinking hot soup on a cold winter day. The road is too narrow for a car to pass my bike so I have to tuck in tight to the hedge whenever an occasional vehicle appears on these quiet, out of the way lanes. Doing so allows me the chance for a blackberry update, nibbling one or two while I wait for the car to pass. A few berries are now ripe and swollen, but the summer has been so damp and sunless that most are still small green nubbins.

As I turn into a field the clang of the metal kissing gate startles a buzzard that lumbers off the ground and flies up into the sanctuary of the trees lining the field. I stand still in the field with the wind at my back, and feel myself beginning to slow down and unwind. I’ve been unsettled and uneasy for a long period of time now, anxious about the future, with no real plans and nothing exciting or significant to be working towards. My working life as I’ve known it for so many years has all but disappeared in the past 500 days and the world has changed dramatically. I’ve never felt such aimless drift before and I don’t like it at all. What can I do about it? I really don’t know. What can I do about it right now? Accept these thoughts and feelings and be present right now. Connect with what matters right now (this grid square, this single map) and take some action. I breathe in the smell of summer hay fields, blink my eyes at the sunshine, and remind myself that things can’t be too bad if I’m relaxing in a summer hay field.

Half of the field has been mown and gathered. Another sweet-smelling section has been cut and left to dry. And the final part of the field awaits mowing, knee high and golden-coloured. Hay is grass, legumes, or other herbaceous plants that have been cut and dried to be stored for use as animal fodder. Commonly used plants for hay include mixtures of grasses such as ryegrass, timothy, brome, fescue, Bermuda grass, orchard grass, and other species, depending on region. Hay may also include legumes, such as alfalfa and clovers. Legumes in hay are ideally cut pre-bloom. It is the leaf and seed material in the hay that determines its quality, because they contain more of the nutrition value for the animal than the stems do. Farmers try to harvest hay at the point when the seed heads are not quite ripe and the leaf is at its maximum when the grass is mowed in the field. The cut material is allowed to dry so that the bulk of the moisture is removed but the leafy material is still robust enough to be picked up from the ground by machinery and processed into storage in bales. Hay is very sensitive to weather conditions, especially when it is harvested. In drought conditions, both seed and leaf production are stunted, making hay that has a high ratio of dry coarse stems that have very low nutritional values. If the weather is too wet, the cut hay may spoil in the field before it can be baled. Thus the biggest challenge and risk for farmers in producing hay crops is the weather, especially the weather of the particular few weeks when the plants are at the best age/maturity for hay. A lucky break in the weather often moves the haymaking tasks (such as mowing, tedding, and baling) to the top priority on the farm’s to-do list. This is reflected in the idiom to make hay while the sun shines. Hay that was too wet at cutting may develop rot and mould after being baled, creating the potential for toxins to form in the feed, which could make the animals sick. The successful harvest of maximum yields of high-quality hay is entirely dependent on the coincident occurrence of optimum crop, field, and weather conditions. 

Hay production and harvest, commonly known as “making hay”, “haymaking”, or “doing hay”, involves a multiple step process: cutting, drying or “curing”, raking, processing, and storing. Hayfields do not have to be reseeded each year in the way that grain crops are. Early farmers noticed that growing fields produced more fodder in the spring than the animals could consume, and that cutting the grass in the summer, allowing it to dry and storing it for the winter provided their domesticated animals with better quality nutrition than simply allowing them to dig through snow in the winter to find dried grass.

Much hay was originally cut by scythe by teams of workers, dried in the field and gathered loose on wagons. Later, haying would be done by horse-drawn implements such as mowers. With the invention of agricultural machinery such as the tractor and the baler, most hay production became mechanized by the 1930s.

I pass a man walking his dog, tennis ball in mouth (the dog, not the man). Trailing him by several yards is his teenage son, glued to his phone with headphones firmly in. He doesn’t notice me. I climbed a stile and entered a wood. The undergrowth was completely choked with brambles. The only real light came for a corridor of clear-cut where the wood had been felled to allow passage to a telegraph wire. The footpath was mostly dry, with occasional muddy patches. I cycled through trying, but failing, to notice something interesting. Shortly before the end of the wood, however, I came upon a large memorial stone, relatively freshly laid and strewn with roses. It is rare in the UK to come across memorial stones away from churchyards. I stopped to have a look. It was a tall, uneven limestone boulder, almost my height. Positioning it here was no mean feat (an average guesstimate weight for rock is 2.7 g/cm3, so there was a couple of tonnes here at least).

There were no words on the memorial, just an engraved star in a circle, known as a pentagram. In ancient times, the pentagram was used as a Christian symbol. It stood for the five wounds that Jesus Christ received during his crucifixion (the nails in each hand and foot, and the spear wound in his side). In the past, the pentagram was commonly seen as a symbol for good and for protection against evil. In Taoism, a pentagram shows how the five classical oriental elements (earth, water, wood, fire, and metal) are related.

Nor was there any message accompanying the cut roses lying at the foot of the rock, so I had no clues whose memorial this was. Then I spotted, tossed away into the woods, the foam used for the funeral letter displays used at funerals to spell out a name in flowers. Green foam edged with red ribbon gave me my only clue whose life was commemorated here: MUM and NAN.

My map showed that there was a pond in the heart of this wood, but barbed wire and brambles kept me away and I could not reach it. Google maps satellite view showed a brown, dried up circle, but I’ll never know quite what the pond was like. If truth be told, I did not try particularly hard to reach it. After 10 months of sneaking around woods, leaping fences, pushing through brambles I am tired of being restricted access to my local countryside. So I carried on out of the wood and back onto farmland.

I came upon an area where every field was full of thistles. Waist-high, prickly, and choking every other plant, the thistles were in seed and white thistledown filled the air. Whilst all plants have a value to wildlife, some can become very invasive in grassland, such as thistle, ragwort, dock nettle and even rush on wetter sites. In large infestations they can out-compete other species or make management such as hay cuts impractical and the hay unsaleable. Indeed both spear and creeping thistle are classified injurious weeds under the Weeds Act 1959, under which it is the landowner’s responsibility to control them and
prevent their spread. Within species rich grassland, control of thistles is not necessarily about total elimination but about achieving a sensible and manageable balance using methods of control that do minimum damage to other wildlife interests. 

The goldfinch is the bird most commonly associated with thistles, the seeds of which make up one third of its diet. Greenfinch, siskin, linnet, twite and redpoll also feed on the seeds. Butterflies including painted lady feed on the leaves. Other butterflies such as the white letter hairstreak, peacock and meadow brown use thistles as a nectar source. Other invertebrates including bees feed on nectar and use the micro-habitats created in and on thistles. The stem is particularly important as an over-wintering habitat for insects.

True to form, a charm of goldfinches –a hundred or more– burst into flight with their cheerful wittering call and looping flight. A charm of goldfinches, an ascension of larks, a school of dolphins, a cloud of bats, a murder of crows… collective nouns for animals are a delightful quirk of the English language. Many of them are fanciful names thought to have been made up by a single 15th century nun and writer, Juliana Berners, who coined them in The Book of Saint Albans in 1486. She headed the priory of St. Mary of Sopwell near St. Albans, and she wrote books, including that one, on hunting, fishing, and falconry.

First published in 1486 with sections on hawking, hunting and heraldry, the book became very popular in England, with further editions including an essay on angling. The book’s treatment of heraldry has pictures of coats-of-arms in six colors, making it the first English book in colour print.

A certain section of this work, titled ‘The compaynys of beestys and fowlys’, contains a list of 165 ‘groups’ not only encompassing animals but encompassing human professions as well. While some of them are exceedingly common, e.g. ‘a gaggle of geese’, others range from the almost-too-technically-correct e.g. ‘a subtlety of sergeants’ or ‘a superfluity of nuns’ to the humorous e.g. ‘a sentence of judges’ or ‘a fighting of beggars’.

I don’t know why all these fields had been left to thistles. The margins of the fields had been mown, but nothing else. I passed a patch of Scarlet Pimpernel (and some plastic bags and Carling cans). Once considered a weed of cornfields, the Scarlet pimpernel is now in decline due to intensive agricultural practices. It can be found in arable fields, on roadside verges and waste ground, and on coastal cliffs. Flowering between June and September, Scarlet pimpernel is a common arable weed and is most famous for being the emblem of the fictional hero of the same name. It is sometimes also known ‘Old man’s weathervane’ or ‘Shepherd’s weather-glass’ as the flowers close when atmospheric pressure falls and bad weather approaches. Set during the French Revolution, The Scarlet pimpernel is an adventure play and novel written by Baroness Emmuska Orczy in which a masked hero attempts to save the doomed French aristocracy from the guillotine. Only his close followers know his true identity and he signs his messages with the small red flower from which he gets his name.

The Scarlet Pimpernel is the first novel in a series of historical fiction by Baroness Orczy, published in 1905. It was written after her stage play of the same title enjoyed a long run in London, having opened in Nottingham in 1903.

The novel is set during the Reign of Terror following the start of the French Revolution. The title is the nom de guerre of its hero and protagonist, a chivalrous Englishman who rescues aristocrats before they are sent to the guillotine. Sir Percy Blakeney leads a double life: apparently nothing more than a wealthy fop, but in reality a formidable swordsman and a quick-thinking master of disguise and escape artist. The band of gentlemen who assist him are the only ones who know of his secret identity. He is known by his symbol, a simple flower, the scarlet pimpernel. Orczy’s premise of a daring hero who cultivates a secret identity disguised by a meek or ineffectual manner proved enduring. Zorro, Doctor Syn, the Shadow, the Spider, the Phantom, Superman and Batman followed within a few decades, and the trope remains a popular one in serial fiction today.

The profligacy of wind dispersal is extraordinary. Thistledown covered the ground like snow in places, and throughout the grid square the air was full of seeds drifting on the breeze. Because plants have no idea where their seeds will land, they are forced to produce vast numbers and then put their faith in a seed. Faith in a Seed, incidentally, was the title of Thoreau’s final manuscript, a (very wordy) study into the wind dispersal of seeds.

Back on the road I tuck in to let the post van pass on its way to a new retirement community. A carton from a McDonalds Quarter Pounder with Cheese is crushed into the muddy verge. McDonalds’ litter has been a constant of my map, as have post vans, courier vans, and Tesco delivery vans. It is astonishing how much we all get delivered to our doors these days. A “meteoric” rise in online shopping is expected to drive a boom in UK courier and delivery services in the coming years. Demand for courier services was already booming prior to COVID-19, with the value of the market increasing by a total of 44% between 2014 and 2019 from £7.6 billion to £11 billion. This growth is set to continue with the sector’s market value forecasted to increase by 92% between 2019 and 2024 to reach £21 billion.

I sit for a few minutes on a bench decorated with a motif saying ‘Live Love Laugh & Be Happy’. Earlier I passed a sign on a farm gate with a picture of a cow and the words ‘Slow down’. Designed to caution drivers about the milking herd, I imagine, but I chose to see it as a wise cow advising me to slow down, chew the cud, enjoy the sunshine. So I paused for a few minutes on this bench. Truth be told though, I had been hoping to visit the pub shown on my map. But, like so many others, it has closed down and been converted to homes. All that remains are old bollards lining the narrow lane, each one painted with a letter spelling out F O X & H O U N D S. I like it up here. It’s a high backwater on my map, a mesh of tiny lanes leading nowhere much that I’ve never paid much attention to before, even when out exploring on my bike. I realise that it’s a sort of back entrance to a valley I’m fond of, and I enjoy getting a totally new view of that wooded valley and down across it all the way to the flat lands to the north of my map. The tall buildings of the city are clearly visible on this fresh summer day too. It looks close but feels distant.