Country Mouse Giles Wood
One of the more agreeable programmes that I’ve had to review in my role as TV critic was The Queen’s Green Planet. The low depravity content made me reluctant to criticise the glacially slow pace, as Attenborough and the monarch pottered around the grounds of Buckingham Palace discussing her projected legacy of a Commonwealth Canopy to fight back at climate change.
The programme hotted up when do-gooder Angelina Jolie swooped over the deserts of Namibia in a small plane to observe that many of the camel-thorn trees dotting the desert were dying. Cut to a child planting a sapling into this giant sandpit, followed by another child trickling a watering can over it.
Even now, I am anxious about the fate of this sapling. Where will the next watering can come from, once the cameras have moved on? Ecologists now prefer natural regeneration to human tree-planting, which is associated with grandiose ideas of maintaining stewardship of the planet. This is not to belittle Her Majesty’s intended legacy to ‘cool’ the Earth, which is laudable.
As an Arab friend once impressed on me, it is difficult for us rain-obsessed moaning minnies to comprehend the sense of elation that desert dwellers enjoy in seeing English rain, lakes and green grass, all of which appear miraculous to park-strolling denizens of Saudi-kensington.
This six-monther of a winter has delivered biblical quantities of rain but, finally, the puddle that I usually step into on exiting the Volvo has dried up. Like most cottagers, we are not overly clean, but there is no longer an excuse to declare the chore of swabbing down the drab cottage linoleum to be pointless. The chalk-and-greensand subsoil does not hold water for long and the miraculous pools and scimitar-shaped, flooded tracks, some containing newts, will not hang around for long in the Azorean sun’s rays.
‘Winter has turned into summer without even stopping for spring,’ gurned our village herdsman.
I have been reading about the prehistory of the Vale of Pewsey and learned that a friend’s village, six miles west, was ‘a difficult place to live in successfully throughout the prehistoric period. A tangled, marshy, impenetrable morass.’ I have always been envious that even today it can be waterlogged.
Conversely, it is the lack of water, apart from a few seasonal puddles of inestimable value to wildlife, which makes me find my own village a difficult place to live in. I have a fugitive vision of a large body of water turning the muddy fields a cerulean blue and reflecting the sky, like a Wiltshire version of a Venetian lagoon.
Until I read about it, I had not realised that my own village’s lack of water is because we live on a ‘middle step’. The top step is the Downs, the middle our village, and the bottom step (or floor) is the river valley of the Avon. Gravity feeds it.
I know I live in a now desiccated landscape because I’ve seen the stuffed waders in a case in the Wiltshire Museum in Devizes and that’s the only place where I will see them. Where is the large body of water that my spirit craves? And how come, up till fifty years ago, flocks of curlew and lapwing were Vale regulars?
All books on conservation after Richard Mabey’s magisterial The Common Ground (1980) are more or less surplus to requirements: ‘As late as the beginning of the 19th century, the feature of the agricultural landscape that would probably impress us most, were we able to see it, would be its allpervading wetness. Much lowland grazing was under water for the latter part of the winter.’
And, this year, I can confirm that such commendable conditions were evident in the field behind us. The turnip-eating sheep were joined by wildfowl and a cacophony of copious corvids and, most unusually, a handful of jacksnipe, a hitherto unseen species which, unlike their flighty cousin, the snipe, did not take umbrage and fly in a zigzag motion towards the heavens. They merely flitted a few yards ahead as if they’d calculated that my daughter and I were having more trouble staying upright than catching them for the pot.
Each footstep in the soggy ground had a strange, gurgling echo finishing with a wheeze as if some marsh fiend was dogging our footsteps. I doubt if the BBC technicians at the Radiophonic Workshop could begin to duplicate these Doctor Who sound effects .
All artists are attracted to floods – think of Alfred Sisley and Théodore Rousseau – and I have found a way of encouraging nature to bring both to this village. By plugging up the drainage channel to an unloved and denatured field corner, I now have my much-needed body of water.
Today, as if on cue, I have spotted my first heron – to add to the count of yellowhammers, wagtails, moorhen and a nesting pair of mallard – to visit these new pop-up wetlands. Re-wilding the landscape is all the rage, but re-wetting it is my own speciality.
However, I might have to wait until the post-brexit subsidy changes to gain statutory protection because someone in the village is not appreciating my activities on someone else’s land by persisting in pulling the plug on my wetlands. It has not gone unnoticed that ‘Someone’s playing silly buggers with the drainage!’
Deference to the land-owning classes still persists in rural backwaters. If only there were backwaters.