Conservation Choices

 

              'Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency’. Rebecca Solnit, Hope. 

Just a few steps away from diesel-belching lorries and the constant trans-Pennine tourist traffic of the A66, is an almost invisible track sloping steeply down to the edge of a turnip field. The footpath sign is obscured by elder and hawthorn, but I know where to look and how to find it. 

Walking alone lets you notice things at micro-level – the way overnight rain has swirled the long grasses into patterns, the way the trees are colouring up – each species a different shade of yellow or amber. You notice the ghosts in the landscape too – deer toothmarks on the bark of a tree, the footprints of an otter on the sandy fringe of the river, the tracks of badger and fox.

I walk along the edge of the field, a row of ancient oak trees on my left in all their autumn colours. Some of them are so large it would take three people with arms outstretched to encircle their trunks. Among the oaks is a massive ash tree, only one or two branches still alive. Further on another has fallen in a recent gale, revealing the dark circles of die-back in the heartwood. 

Below the trees, two or three metres down, you can glimpse the fast-running waters of the River Eamont flowing out of Ullswater, bringing cold mountain water down from Helvellyn, High Street and the other Cumbrian fells that surround the lake. The Eamont meanders, cutting semi-circles in the wide valley below the sandstone scarp I’m walking on. 

It’s a mast year and the ground is thick with acorns, the hawthorn trees laden with red berries. Flocks of chaffinches and starlings are having an autumn feast in the branches, chattering among themselves, piping a warning call at the rustle of my approach. It’s good to see them thriving, but the lack of diversity of species this year, after the bird-flu epidemic, is worrying. 

At the end of the turnip furrows I’m confronted by a slope of glaring yellow. It’s too late in the year for oil-seed rape, but it’s certainly luminous enough to be flowering rape. Curious, I go through the gate to investigate. Under my feet the grass has been cropped down to soil level, most of it now yellow, though there are odd tufts of green growing through. It’s quite a contrast to the lush green of the track I’ve been walking on. 

Last time I came here this field was full of sheep and I realise that the yellow colour is evidence of a mineral deficiency in the soil, patchy circles where urine and droppings have leached the roots of the grass. Sheep-wrecked. There are large sacks of nitrate fertiliser stacked against the fence just inside the gate. The farmer is obviously intending to spread it for next year, an action that will create a run-off into the stream that runs down the boundary to the river below. He may even decide to reseed it; one of the further fields has already been ploughed up and resown with rye grass, the broad-bladed, identical shoots just creeping up out of the furrows. Monoculture. Intensive land use. This is modern farming, not the way my father cultivated the land, rotating crops and animals, using organic fertilisers. Old-fashioned perhaps, but it was kind to the land.

More evidence of change is in the broken-down stone wall that forms a boundary on two sides of the field – it’s gapped and tumbled along its entire length, gradually being replaced by the post and wire fence behind it. Walls shelter stoats, weasels, mice, lizards and other small creatures that owls and buzzards feed on. Modern farming methods create a desert for wild life. It’s not just red squirrels that are disappearing; at least nine other species are endangered here.

Beyond a plantation of pine and sycamore and birch, the track slopes down to the flood plain of the river. The traffic noise fades and I can only hear the river, explaining itself to the trees. And there, in its garth, is the tiny medieval church of Nine Kirks, standing on a more ancient site of habitation and worship. The river runs, deep and full, behind it, but the houses and little farms that used to be here have long gone, removed by Robert de Vieuxpont, Baron of Westmorland, a 13th century Norman aristocrat who wanted the fertile ground for his own purposes. He evicted people who’d lived here since the Romans left (and their ancestors probably longer), but kept the church. Land clearance has a long history.

I’m surrounded by sheep who’ve come up to see if I’ve brought anything to eat. They’re mainly twinters – a Cumbrian term for a ewe in its second winter. Their rumps are all either red or blue, showing that they’ve been recently ‘tupped’ and will be lambing in the spring.  Empty-handed, I disappoint them and push through them to the church. 

Inside the circular, walled enclosure there are old graves, tilting and toppling in the long grass. It’s an island of wild in this agricultural desert. There’s a ruined stone building where you could park your gig, and enough space to tie up your horse next to a mounting block. 

The church, dedicated to St Ninian, existed in Norman times, and there’s evidence that there was an Anglo Saxon chapel here before that, when the settlement was already old. Hoards of Roman coins and Bronze Age artefacts  have been dug up on the flood plain. The church was ‘modernised’ in the seventeenth century by a feisty female landowner called Lady Anne Clifford, and is now a Grade 1 listed building. 

The heavy wooden door into the church is left unlocked for visitors and, inside, the silence is total. The thick walls are bare white stone, there are flagged floors, carved oak Tudor pews, an elaborate ‘priest’s door’and a well-preserved medieval chest for vestments.  A single stained glass window has survived in glorious colour.

It stinks of damp and mildew. Above the simple altar the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed are painted for a congregation without books. I’m not religious, but some echo of the people who came here, were christened, married and mourned inside these walls, seems to linger. Local communities thought this building important enough to preserve long after its congregation had departed. I sit quietly absorbing the stillness thinking that it’s a pity we don’t have the same reverence for the natural world. We preserve human constructions much more readily than ecosystems.

On the way back I notice things I didn’t see on the way in. Some small animal, probably a fox, has dug an expert hole under the fence and left a track through the undergrowth. I lose it under some gorse bushes, but I’m glad to know that it’s there. In the field, a plastic tub, that once contained a mineral lick for the sheep, has turned itself into a miniature pond, with tall grasses and rotting vegetation. A dead baby frog hangs motionless in the anaerobic water just below the surface. We are a careless species. 

The sun is going down behind the northern fells as I walk back through the turnip field. It’s late in the year and the dark falls quickly.  I stand for a moment looking at the oak trees and the river. A flock of crows clatters overhead, heading for their roost. I’m thinking about land management over the millenia, from present day commercial farming, to the ancestors who lived off the land as hunter gatherers after the ice retreated. What will this landscape look like in the time of future generations? This section of the A66 is due to be widened into the turnip field. Inevitably, some of the oaks will go. Is transport really more important than the natural world? Is that question even being debated seriously by those who make the decisions? 

Rachel Carson wrote in the nineteen fifties that ‘the central problem of our age has ... become the contamination of man’s total environment’ which she believed to be ‘irrecoverable and mostly irretrievable’, due to the length of time pesticides, herbicides and other pollutants linger in the environment. But reclamation science has come a long way since then.

And we must always have hope – that the impetus that preserved a medieval church in a field far from human habitation, can rescue and preserve the land that surrounds it. Rebecca Solnit writes that hope rooted in rage and grief can be powerful.  But we have to use it. ‘Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky,’ she stresses. ‘It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency’.

We are living in a time of climate and environmental emergency. But inside the word ‘emergency’ is the word ‘emerge’. We have to have hope and we have to use it.