'Stamp your foot on the earth in winter or spring and you will feel the ground tremble and hear the water gurgling and undulating around you, only inches below the surface.'
Do this on the Somerset Levels suggests Roy Preece, in his wonderful memoir The World is a Bundle of Hay, though sadly not this year, and now seemed like the perfect moment to settle down with the book that Carol (who comments here) very kindly gave me for my big 6-0 birthday last year. Now I have to get this right, Carol is the daughter of Roy's cousin, and Roy has written his recollections of growing up on a family farm in the 1940s and 50s on the Somerset Levels, all published in this book.
Of course even without this book we would all be complete experts on the Somerset Levels, if you had never really taken much notice of them before, anyone who lives here in the UK will have done so now. Quietly and stoically submerging under the flood waters and generally 'getting on with it' suddenly everyone realised (especially those that lived there) that four weeks had gone by and the people on the Levels were still suffering, entire villages abandoned to the flood water, others still being evacuated, homes still under water and awash with sewage... we actually had homegrown refugees and nothing was being done.
Well cue pandemonium...Royal visits, ministerial visits without wellies on, ministerial visits with wellies on, TV crews taking up residence, the Royal Marines rolling up their sleeves, boats, sandbags, irate MPs, people digging moats around their homes, promises about funding and dredging... goodness we are all now experts on dredging....and in the midst of it story after story of real loss. Finally yesterday came an unreserved apology to the people of Somerset, whose pleas for funding for dredging last year had fallen on deaf governmental ears. Deaf to the people that is, the government instead apparently only listening to the Environment Agency who had set firm agin and advised accordingly. Now there's a right old political bunfight going on and meanwhile people remain homeless and displaced.
Maybe, as it would seem they have lost sight of the fundamentals, those in power should all read Roy Preece's book to get a sense of this unique way of life. but above all to hear and consult the voices of experience; those whose families have worked and managed the Somerset Levels, the Land of the Summer People, for centuries, and who know every last ditch, gutter, rhine and pill. These constructions for managing the water said to be a collective effort down the centuries equivalent to that of building the pyramids... their purpose to keep water at bay from land that is below sea level, but land that holds a special place in the hearts of many...
'Dig a hole or a grave and it will immediately fill with water. The flat land...may distort your sense of physical proportion so that walking across a twenty acre field with the complete semicircle of sky above, you will sometimes have the curious feeling of being ten feet tall...'
In her introduction to artist John Caple's book Somerset, writer Nell Leyshon defines this again...
'He sees that flat land stretches to the sea; it has rivers and rhynes, droves and withy beds. It's fields are silver in the floods. Pollarded willows shake clenched fists at the darkening sky. Black peat lies under the topsoil, motionless, ancient. Silt and sand and sea reach out to the horizon.'
So I thought I knew everything about the Somerset Levels having watched the news for the last month, but predictably Roy Preece had plenty of fascinating things to tell me. For starters, originally transhumance was the order of the day, the Somer settlers would move to higher ground for the winter until eventually efficient drainage systems allowed them to farm the land all year round. But what hard work those were, and what we now all know, there can be no let up in maintenance of drainage channels and ditches. Every field boundaried by a ditch to improve drainage and lower the level of water in the ground, and every ditch had to be 'thrown out' (cleared) annually to forestall flooding.
And here's where Roy's book tells of something of relevance right now...
'The spacing and depths of the drains are matters of experience, depending on capillary properties of the soil, and it was always said that land drainage was as much an art as a science...'
Roy Preece classes the period after the second world war, the late 1940s and 1950s, of which he writes about in The World is a Bundle of Hay, as a unique one. Conditions were fair for the labourers, support for agriculture gave farmers security and a reasonable prosperity...
'The English countryside was flourishing but modern farming was still mostly in the future. In this time of transition many aspects of the way of life and sustainable farming practices had not changed for centuries.'
Everything still done by man and horse power, and though this era was coming to an end there was still time for Roy to learn many basic skills now lost.
Haymaking surrounds us here in the Shire through the summer, and as Roy says 'It's only dried grass,' but what skills are required to preserve large quantities for winter feed for stock, and I'm almost up for building a traditional hayrick now that Roy has explained it all. What a sight they were, what beautiful and treasured tools were used and with such skill, and how cleverly constructed the hayrick was to keep out water for the winter. This original photograph by Henry Fox-Talbot c1840 used by Roy to demonstrate the art...
Every single aspect of this picture 'matters' when it comes to building a hayrick, from never trusting a painted ladder (it may hide knots in the wood, a source of dangerous weakness) to the angles of the roof, to that horizontal guideline, to that 'pole' sticking out (the handle of a lethally sharp cutting tool). Ricks slowly replaced by Dutch Barns and now it's much more fancy stuff, a highly mechanised process, all wrapped and baled. We did get a little glimpse of our Lovely Farmer haymaking last year, the weather too good not to get in some more small bales, and this field to the front of our house we discover aptly called Mowhay Meadow in years gone by.
There is a beautiful moment at the end of Roy Preece's book when the cows are taken out to their summer pastures after wintering indoors, leaving the barns quiet and empty...
'There is something about a deserted farm building which powerfully, though indistinctly, speaks to the imagination, more so even than does a church or a castle : a feeling of things hidden in time or unexpressed, or inexpressible. In castles and churches time is linear and punctuated and articulate; in farm buildings time is cyclical, mute and anonymous and so is mostly unknowable and without limit; we are aware only of a vibrant cycle of life repeated over and over from time immemorial, whose details we shall never know.'
Watching the TV news and seeing the distraught farmers on the Somerset Levels loading stock onto trailers to be driven away from their ground... the farmer walking off through water waist high, his farm and his buildings, for now, desolate and useless... and I could only hope that they, and all the others who live there, would each hang onto that vibrant cycle of life and know it would be repeated again soon.
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