Over the Farmer's Gate (5 page)

So I started to relax and look about me, wondering where all the wildlife was – there was none to be seen. Not even the compulsory flock of seagulls.

We’re a long way from the sea here but there are local seagulls that live on a pool. Local legend has it that they have never been to the seaside and therefore are not to be trusted.

To get back somewhere nearer to the schedule I had in my mind, I ploughed on into the evening. There was nothing to be seen and then suddenly, at about eight o’clock, standing on the ploughed ground just ten yards away, was a solitary lapwing.

He, she, whatever, didn’t move and as I passed and re-passed,
I started to agonise over the possibility that I’d ploughed a nest. I’d been ploughing 20 acres in a 40-acre field. The other 20 acres will be left with last year’s stubble for wild birds to nest in. It would be ironic if this lapwing chose the wrong 20 acres to nest on. Then its mate turned up and the pair spent their time on the unploughed area. As far as I could make out, I’d disturbed the pair of lapwings and a pair of skylarks.

The lapwings are more of a concern. They are the first pair I’ve seen lately, and we’ve plenty of skylarks.

I drove home late in the evening hoping that there would be time for them to make a fresh start.

With time to make up to get back to my schedule, it was a very early start the next morning. I set off to plough just as it got light. First on my list was a lovely white owl, still busy working the hedgerows, I could easily have stopped to watch it if I’d had the time.

The pairs of lapwings and skylarks were still there but before long a heron arrived and was soon gorging itself on worms.

Then down the valley, effortlessly gliding like stealth bombers came a pair of red kites. They circled me a couple of times, not looking for food but to check on the quality of the ploughing. The ploughing isn’t bad if you don’t look too closely at what I did at the start, and off they went down the valley. They exuded aloofness and superiority as they went on their way.

EVERY year we try to get away for a few days’ holiday in May. The holidays seem to get shorter and shorter as we try to sandwich them between our B&B guests departing and the next ones arriving.

We always seem to have guests leaving the day we go and new ones arriving the day we get home. It becomes quite critical
within our own travel arrangements about what sort of risers the departing ones are, and, if they are a bit slow in the mornings; will it affect our own travel arrangements?

You sometimes sit there, bags packed and in the car, listening to them taking a leisurely breakfast, to which they are perfectly entitled, and you feel like going in and asking: ‘Well are you going to eat that sausage or not?’

I sometimes think we’ve got our priorities all wrong, but we seem to manage.

This year we went to Ireland, somewhere we’ve been lots of times before, but decided this time to go to the north.

We’ve never been to the north before and very beautiful it is, too, I recommend it. There’s a lovely ride that follows the coast north of Larne, I think it’s the Antrim coast, and, late afternoon one day, we stopped in a small village for a cup of tea.

Well, you can have tea at home, can’t you, so we decided to have some Guinness. We were on our second, or was it our third, when a big man in a black suit comes in and starts drinking at the bar.

There’s me, busy at my people-watching, and I see that he is vigorously chewing at something he keeps pulling out of his pocket. He’s a bit of a people-watcher as well and before long he’s watching me watching him.

At first I think he’s not best pleased, but he plunges his hand in his pocket and thrusts out a big handful of what looks like dark brown chewing tobacco, and says: ‘Want some?’

I ask him what it is. His accent is very strong but I eventually find out it is called ‘dulse’ and it is dried seaweed. He tells me it is gathered off the rocks, dried in the sun for a couple of hours, salted and is then ready to eat. I try some; it’s OK. It has a taste reminiscent of laver bread my mam used to get me out of the fish stalls in Cardiff market. She used to fry it with bacon but that was in a more liquid form.

Just because I quite like it, it doesn’t mean that I want to eat it by the bucketful but he keeps it coming. I start to wonder how long it’s been in his pocket so I tell him I’ve had enough for now.

He tells me he’s been eating it for 60 years and he’s got 14 children, which is probably another good reason for not eating it. He tells me his wife eats it as well and he tells me what it does for her. I can’t repeat that but you can probably work it out for yourself.

That’s five days ago now and I’m still picking bits of it out of my teeth. Next day, I buy some dulse in a shop. The shopkeeper tells me that it kept thousands of people alive along that coast during the famine, so that’s good.

I reckon next time I go to the pub on a Saturday night, I’ll have some in my pocket and keep chewing away at it without saying anything, until they ask. By then it could be cannabis, or who-knows-what. It cost me £1.20, bet I’ll get good value out of it.

If I get the village hooked on it and it has the same effect, like 14 children per family, it will help keep the village school open.

IT’S BEEN dry now for several days and I’m on my way, on the tractor, for my first full day of field work. It is logical that the driest field will be the highest field and that’s where I’m headed.

In the hedgerow is one of those concrete Ordnance Survey markers that tells me I am working at 984 feet. If anyone asks, I’m working at 1,000 feet, which doesn’t seem an unreasonable exaggeration in the circumstances. The only company I have up here are a neighbour’s sheep in the next field and, of course, the wildlife. On the way up here, on the track that runs through the field, cock pheasants stood like sentinels every 50 yards or so.

The approaching tractor drives some of them in front of me
so they come up against their neighbours and a fight breaks out. They are so preoccupied with the fight they will break up only when the tractor is inches away and they usually take to flight, and I often wonder if they ever get their places back.

Today’s job is rolling, which isn’t too taxing on the concentration as long as you get the steering right. As the steering part of the job becomes instinctive you have the opportunity to switch off a bit, listen to the radio and take in your surroundings. I’ve been given our ‘best’ tractor today, which came as a bit of a surprise, and my preferred choice is Radio 2 until 5pm and then Radio 4.

About the only thing that can go wrong from a tractor-driving point of view is for the roller to become detached from the tractor. You should become quickly aware of this because the progress of the roller is marked by a sort of trundling noise you can hear even in your sound-insulated cab and above the radio.

I once had a lad working for me, who I sent rolling, who must have ‘switched off’ in quite a big way because he hadn’t secured the metal pin that attaches roller to tractor properly. The pin had come out but he’d carried on driving for about half an hour, up and down the field, the roller sitting in splendid isolation where he’d left it.

He didn’t realise what had happened until I went to see how he was getting on. He begged me not to tell anyone but refused to tell me what he was thinking about to be thus distracted. I only told one or two people: that’s all you need; a story like that will soon gather its own momentum.

I turn the radio down a bit, and watch the wildlife. There are eight carrion crows busy about the field; for them it is the approach of harvest time as they busy themselves with their pillage of eggs and fledglings. I have a loathing of carrion crows that borders on hatred. I know they are doing only what is natural for them, that we’ve all got to live, but why do there have to be so many of them?

I try to bring a balance to all my thinking and I’m very conscious that I could be doing as much damage as them, with my roller. Apart from the cock pheasant and carrion crows, the next most numerous bird in this field is the skylark, which is good, very good.

I’m worried that the roller will damage their eggs but I watch the carrion crows carefully as they waddle about and I have not yet detected the triumphant sort of swoop that they make when they find some food; hopefully the skylarks haven’t laid yet.

In the next field I have 20 acres of stubble that was left for ground-nesting birds last year and this year; it is in what we call ‘set aside’. It’s grown an abundance of weed plants during its first fallow year; there’s plenty of food and cover there for groundnesting birds, and I can see just as many skylarks in that field as this, so that’s good as well. I’ve not yet seen any lapwings about, which would be even better. I try to count the pairs of skylarks in this field but it’s almost impossible and I give up.

I haven’t seen a hare yet, which is a concern; the grass is about nine inches tall and perfect cover. Then in the next 10 minutes I disturb three. Having exhausted my studies of the wildlife I turn my attention to the wider vista. About two miles away I can see the hills where the track of Offa’s Dyke runs. Closer at hand, but a bit higher, are the sites of two Iron Age forts. They must have lived in very scary times to choose to live up there.

My mind starts to wander a bit and I think of the book I was reading last night. I have a book on the go all the time; if I haven’t a new one, I will scour my shelves for an old one.

One that comes out at least once a year is Dylan Thomas’
Under Milk Wood
. Last night I was reading about the postman and his kitchen full of simmering kettles, all ready to steam open the letters. We used to have a postman around here who was a bit on the inquisitive side. As he would hand you the post he would make
comments that were a giveaway: ‘Joneses have had the cheque for the lambs they sold last Friday, but yours hasn’t come yet.

‘You’re the only farmer around here who filled in the ministry census forms on time. All the others have had a reminder.’ We always reckoned he used to read the holiday postcards. ‘I thought Davies was going to Blackpool for a holiday but he’s gone on up to the Lake District.’

One year I put him to the test and sent a neighbour a postcard from my holiday. All I wrote on it was: ‘I thought Tom would like this picture.’ When Tom handed my neighbour the post he said quite crossly: ‘You can tell that Roger Evans I don’t read the postcards.’ Job done!

I HAD occasion to travel north of Shrewsbury last week. I had made a similar journey just a few days previously. On that occasion, the River Severn had been in full flood.

A torrent marked the course of the river; adjacent fields were all flooded. A glance off the bridge as I passed by last week revealed that the Severn was still swollen but quickly returning to normal levels. Signs of where the flood had been were very obvious. There, in the middle of a large field of winter wheat, ‘parked up’ in splendid isolation, was quite a large tree, uprooted from who knows where, floated down the river and left in the field when the waters receded.

But it was the banks of the river itself that caught my eye in particular. There, clearly marking the height that the river had reached were all the indicators of modern society. Plastic litter in a huge abundance, tons of it. What an eyesore, how sad, how long will it be there? It must be something in our national psyche that makes the dropping of litter somehow acceptable.