#marlesford

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A conversation with the land

Eldorado. The endless furnace of the sun’s forge has spilled over on to the land and turned everything gold. The fields of hay, the wheat and the barley. Every single thing, bar the trees, behind the meadows towards Moat Hall farm is gold. It is a shining dawn.

You should make hay whilst the sun shines and they do. The second cutting of the year is baled and in, whistling past me on a long trailer drawn by tractor, with a  third still to come by September. After several spoiled years the grass can not grow quick enough for the farmers.

The sight of the glistening golden fields being gleaned turns my mind to the naming of things. When you have been in a place long enough you start to map it. When you map a place you name. It is a process as old as time. I like to talk  with the land in this way.

Of course each place already has a name. The one found on the ordinance survey map. However, as you learn your place you add your own nouns. From this path alone I can see Long Meadow, Holy Tree, Favourite Tree, The Oak Road, Oak Cross, King Oak, Rabbit Run, The Cutting & Deer field. 

There is something eternal about this process. It is a continuation of a dialogue that started with our earliest ancestors and it is not restricted to the landscape. Take the fauna. Of course there are the formal biological names. But if I was to say I saw a Maniola Jurtina Lepidoptera  you may have no idea what I am talking about. 

Yet, if I was to say I saw a Meadow Brown Butterfly you would know not only what I saw, but where to find it and how it looks. The same goes for the Cabbage White. The Skylark, Swift, Blackbird and Red Kite. We name so that we can understand our world, and once we know it we can share its wonders with others. It is a conversation with the land and you only have to listen.

Seen Today : Blackbirds, Swifts, Swallows, House Martins, Goldfinches, Meadow Brown, Whites & Ringlet Butterflies, Skylarks, Rabbits, Hares, Squirrels, a Kestrel, a  Red Kite & a Sparrowhawk.

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The centre of gravity

To the station. Sixty years or so ago I would have walked this path to catch a train. Today it leads to the old station house, home to Mrs Lavender.The station sits now a captain with no ship to command, marooned beside the busy A12. 

Mrs Lavender has lived here for over twenty years. Before her Mr Messenger, the son of the last station master, made his home here. The last freight train stopped by in nineteen sixty-five. The last passenger walked through its doors in nineteen fifty-two.

The spirit of the station though still moves through the building.You see it in the icons of the past softly assimilated into the present. In the wide open fireplace of the ticket office that is now Mrs Lavender’s lounge. The glass window of the ticket counter still found in the corner of the room. The wooden desk of the ticket office unmoved from in its original place beneath the window.

Mrs. Lavender graciously shows me through her home and as she does so the station comes back to life. We step out of the ladies waiting room and into another world. The platform remains in tact and you do not have to close your eyes to see the past here.  It is alive and it is you who are the stranger from another land.

Honeysuckle is starting to straggle its way up through the platform and further down the line a dozen apple trees stand wearing the last of their beautiful blooms. Their pink flowers signalling summers approach down the line.

It is a wonderful metamorphosis.The trees were planted by Mrs Lavender and her late husband not long after they moved to the property. They straddle the line and in turn they draw your eye to another treat. An old train carriage that lurks in her garden. 

She thinks the carriage is from around nineteen hundred and four. It is a Great Eastern Railway smoking carriage. The car made from teak and slowly returning to the earth grain by grain. It is a strange sensation to see it sat so. Reminding me of those photographs of places hit by catastrophic disaster.  Lands whose life just stopped in an instant and which now wait patiently for the return of people who were there but a moment before.

I came to see the station but I am drawn to Mrs Lavender’s relationship to this place. To how the line still lives on in her. Over the years she has become friends with the current householders of the old station at Parham, and of the line keeper’s cottage by the ford between here and Hacheston. In this way her life moves up and down the old line the way the trains would have done.

She says that she has come to love the building and she tells me of how the station house has been an absolute joy to live in. Of how she loves to look out to the meadows and see the snow blanket the flat earth; the wide Suffolk skies. In particular she likes to photograph how the light here plays through the clouds. How the fingers of god bless the earth.

I follow the old line home across the footpath from the A12 and something that she said walks with me down the line. Mrs. Lavender had told me of how her husband had stood at St Andrews church not long after they arrived here and how he spoke of having come home. I have shared that emotion walking that path. 

To the Aboriginal Australian a homeland is the centre of gravity, heart and soul, beginning and end, and this is how the tracks of the old line feels to me. It is all things and the old station at Marlesford is an anchor along its way. 

I am certain too that the lines’ journey has not ended. Nor did in end more than half a century ago with the last train. In fact it is only just beginning and it lives on in what first brought people here, the beauty of the land. 

Seen today: Rabbits, Robins, Blackbirds, Sparrows, Goldfinches, Rooks, A Greater Spotted Woodpecker, Pheasants, Chaffinches, Weshimulo the Barn Owl, a Muntjac Deer and a Weasel.

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All the world's a movie

A tale of two birds. In the morning a Song Thrush feeds on the fat balls hanging from the ceanothus tree. It strikes me that it has been a long time since I last saw one, too long. The Song Thrush is a wonderful bird, a song leopard of the trees. The bird's latin name is turdus philomelas. Turdus is latin for thrush. Philomela has greek origins. The name taken from mythology, where the eponymous Philomela had her tongue cut out. She soon took her revenge by arranging for her assailant's son to be killed and fed to his father, who in turn pursued Philomela. She prayed to the gods for help and was changed, just to confuse things, into a nightingale. Later, I walk the long meadow with Lorca. A large bird of prey circles endlessly above us tracing buddhist mandalas in the sky. At first I take it for a Buzzard. Then I notice how its tail fans out in a perfect triangle. It is a Red Kite from its tail to its feathered finger wing tips and it is the first I have seen in Suffolk. The Kite follows as I walk the old train line to the ford. It occurs to me that maybe it is quarrying Lorca. I hold my hand against the spring sun and look to the bird. We watch each other like this and a moment of recognition passes between us. It is at times like this when you understand that we hold no dominion over the birds of the air. The space between us is broken by a rook flying out of the sun like a spitfire attacking a bomber. It worries the Kite away. Spring is everywhere today and in May it turns all the world into a movie. One in which we get to play a part. Seen today: Rooks, Blackbirds, Goldfinches, Rabbits, Hares, Starlings, Sparrows, Wrens, Great Tits, Blue Tits, a Muntjac Deer, a Song Thrush and a Red Kite.

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Winged Calligraphy.

The swallows are here. Is there a finer sight in spring? Perhaps the swifts, but they are a treat for later. The swallows are with us now and they bear upon their wings so many metaphors.

I could write of how the swallows come swooping, looping words around my knees in winged calligraphy. Or, I could tell you of how they scythe through the Suffolk skies and reap a harvest of the first flies. 

What they are is an unbridled joy. And the flies play their part in this performance. I noticed them first at the bridge over the dribbling of the River Ore. The flies evaporated by the warm air from nymphs to adulthood. I knew that with their prelude the swallows would not be far behind.

And then there they were over the water meadows of Low Road. First one, then two, three, four, five, six swallows slicing through the air. The birds greedily feasting on the flies. 

The swallows arrival a reminder of how, on their ceaseless circumnavigations of the globe, our land becomes an aircraft carrier for the birds. My neighbour told me on Sunday of how he had watched the fieldfares first flock and then fly north. Over the last week or so, I too had seen great arrows of geese fired towards the arctic by springs bow.  

The starlings are murmuring of their departure all along the old train line between Marlesford and Hacheston Halt. In their place cuckoos will arrive from the south; then the chiff chaffs and the swifts. The world turns on in this way and we watch and we wonder.

Seen today: Swallows, Rabbits, Seagulls, Rooks, Blue tits, Great tits, Long Tailed tits, Pheasants, Mallard ducks, Sparrows,Wood Pigeons and singing Blackbirds.

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Another truth

There are some paths you will always remember. Tracks that you can stride down in your mind and picture every house and every tree along the way. These lanes usually lead back to your childhood.

However, I am struck by how intimate Marlesford feels on my return from Denmark. How turning towards the village a warm sense of recognition comes upon me. A notion of home. There is something understood in the gentle heave of the hills here. The curls of their cambers carrying in them enough hint of Bedfordshire, my home county, to trigger an inherent memory. 

And yet it is something more. A feeling of Heimat found in the path that leads you from the rise of St. Andrews’s church to the shallows of the water meadow. This is a path in its true form; A way of life. 

It leads to nothing but a shadow of a track across a meadow and then on to a small foot bridge across a brook. This in turn takes you to the old railway station at Hacheston Halt. Yet on seeing it for the first time it was as though I had been walking this path my whole life, perhaps longer. 

It looks that way today too. The snow has stopped smothering us and the meadow is starting to breathe. Soon it will become transformed into a field, but a meadow is never a true field. It is a vision of a land which once was. A wilderness yet of unmanned beauty.

It is walking this path that I become aware of another truth. Spring is here. It has not blossomed yet, but it is here. I have heard its key in the lock. This year is at that moment when you hear your door open and a loved one enters your home. You have not seen them yet, but you know that with just one more step they will be in your arms.

Seen today: Blackbirds, Rabbits, Mallard Ducks, Sparrows, Seagulls, Rooks, Bats, Goldfinches,Wood Pigeons, a Barn Owl and a dead Pheasant upon the grass.

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The doing and the memory of the act

One thin brush strokes of brilliant yellow runs along the horizon. This light is the last remains of the day. The memory of a sun by now dawning upon someplace else.

I came outside to try and discover another celestial treat. The comet Panstarrs should be visible close to the western horizon right now. Sadly, aside from this  slither of gold, the sky is thick with the white clouds that gave to us more snow. 

The morning brought more memories of things gone. I walked out at dawn on the fresh snow to Pam’s wood. Beneath the pine trees the path was littered with animal tracks. Without the fresh snowfall these nightly pilgrimages would go unseen, however the white drifts have finger printed the movements of the rabbits and the deer.  

What you are privileged to see is another memory.  The ongoing ripple of a moment in time that lives on after its creation. The animal is not here, but from their prints you can recreate their paths. The sudden movement, the dead stop.

The thin line of light gives way to night and this one is broken by a new memory. The aftershock of the church bells as they peel out from St Andrews along the lane. What I hear is not the moment that the hammer strikes the bell, but the vibration of this act. The memory that sings out long into the night. It is a sound so clear that you stop and you listen.

Hearing the bells it occurs to me that life is made up of two things. The doing and the memory of the act. Piece by piece our world is constructed in this way. It becomes something more than what we see before our eyes and it stretches back to the start of time.

Seen today: Blackbirds, Magpie, Rabbits, Rooks, Seagulls,Robin, Goldfinches, Sparrows, Redpolls, Pheasants,Wood Pigeons. Mallards, Moorhens, Barn Owl and a river Rat.

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Small islands in the drift of the conversation.

The Barn Owl is back again. I watch it hunting low across the meadow early in the morning. The Romany name for the Owl is Weshimulo- Ghost of the woods- and it is a name hard to better. 

The Owl is a magic lantern of a bird that appears to be half in this world and half another. It is an optical illusion exaggerated by its white undercarriage, giving to the Owl the impression of appearing and disappearing with each wing beat. Now you see it, now you don’t.

The back garden is also full of activity. Having placed the new nest boxes on Sunday, the first guest moves in. With cautious optimism a Blue Tit hops towards the nest behind the Miscanthus. Then it is in, and in that moment an empty wooden box becomes a home.

Spring, though, is not quite ready to join us in Marlesford. As Lorca runs in the meadow behind the church, little flurries of snow start to fall. Just as silence forms small islands in the drift of the conversation between friends, the snowflakes are a change of pace that enable you to reflect on your surroundings.

All is very peaceful, until Lorca runs towards me in a small but perfectly formed parabola. This is the shape of the world today.

Seen Today : Barn Owl, Blue Tit, Black Bird, Horse, Rooks, Goldfinches, Wood Pigeons, Coal tits, Sparrows, Chaffinches and a Kestrel.

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The little things that mean so much

Ash Wednesday. I walk Lorca down behind Saint Andrew’s Church. The village Church sits above Marlesford on a small rise and below it the meadows fan out into the distance. 

The top of this land is caught somewhere between frost and thaw. The very last of the snow has the sad appearance of tinsel upon a discarded christmas tree. The two flood ditches that frame the meadows maintain a thin layer of ice. Last night it was minus six degrees.

At eleven weeks old Lorca is still too small for the world, and the world is a little too big for him. This means that he is engrossed in his own universe and he misses the little things that mean so much.

The Hare that suddenly makes a dash between two hedgerows. Its long hind legs looping it across the land no more than twenty feet in front of me. The Hare’s long black ears erect to our presence.

He misses the ducks too. A drake and duck mallard, no doubt sensing our presence, make their exit from the small bend of the brook. These dabbling ducks sending up a chorus of quacking as they make good their escape.

One day, no doubt, these wild things will interest Lorca. One day, he will no longer be a pup but a wild thing too. As for today, he is content to simply sniff the grass and leave the bigger picture to me.

Seen today : Hare; Pheasants;Mallard ducks, Blue tits, Sparrows; Blackbirds; Seagull, Rooks, Rabbits, Kestrel and a Barn Owl.