Open Field

The more I think about the countryside, the more machine-made it seems. But I still feel something irresistible urging me out there.

This Monday morning, I’m as usual on the London train, in transition from reading to my daughter at her nursery into my corporate identity, desked in the shiny-toy world of Canary Wharf. I’m thinking of plate tectonics (we were reading about volcanoes) and vectors (the train’s apparently direct line skimming off the curve of the hills), and my eyes are taking in the grey-brown of Oxfordshire arable, cropless and hayless now at the start of October.

There are trees, hedges, towns and villages, but the main view is “country”. By this I mean great bare fields, and white sky. It’s a default countryside – absence of buildings and tarmac, presence (most of the time) of green stuff. And my instinctive assumption is also that here is wildlife.

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Of course, I know that all this open space is probably an ecological desert. Even where there are wide field margins the animals and plants in corridors are mostly hanging on, continuation of their existence often dependent on the vagaries of the European subsidy purse. The vast baldness of the fields, the voids between treelines at least give some intimation of this. In the dairy country near where I grew up the lushness of improved grassland fig-leaves the emptiness – as the smooth motion of the train belies the orange globe of magma that my daughter discovered this morning deep under her feet.

And knowing this, I want to be out there. That man, swinging his stick as he takes the arcing path from the pasture to the village, has everything. This thought laces my mind as my fellow passengers try fruitlessly to shut the train windows against the poison of fresh air.
It’s madness to want to be that man, now miles behind, his coat still swinging. Any alternative life would be as full of petty frustration as this, quite likely worse. But still, when the clat of the train has gone, he’ll have the up-cut of wind on his face. He’ll have the chance of seeing a group of fallow deer proud of the horizon.

Never mind the excess carbon dioxide. Never mind the damage done to woodland by deer overpopulation. In the breathing, in the optic nerve, the eruption of the other-than-human still places my desire to be in his shoes, as the wet earth fills up the treads.

I’m carried off by the train. Houses and warehouses arise and disappear, taking me into the ring of the city, a place I love because of its humanness, and because even there the other-than-human rises out of the faultlines: peregrines on the “cliffs” of the Tate Modern, a seal in West India Dock. But in the blank world of Canary Wharf, where the human and the other are both marginalised, I am that man, swinging my coat, freshets of the day in my lungs and life.

In the last few years, for reasons largely out of my hands, I’ve been much more a city than a country wanderer. Among many miles walked across London, I traced the route of some of the Thames’ tributaries. These rivers are largely culverted, buried in sewer pipes. One, the Westbourne, flows in a steel tube across the platforms of a Tube station. It may be as far from its origins as the fields I’ve been longing for are from their natural state. I love the city as much as the countryside. I don’t think I know any more what “natural” means.

It is natural to turn down a side road at the sight of an unusual building. It is natural to feel a dart of excitement as an introduced species appears through the trees – a muntjac. It is natural for the reeds to disgorge flocks of waders in East India Dock Basin. It is natural to sit in a pub garden looking down on ploughland nursing tired legs, muddy boots and a sense of a day well spent. Sometimes the only difference may be the amount of thought spent on it.

It’s been so long since the term “the natural” could be used of the surface of southern England. Richard and Nina Muir’s "Fields" tells me as much, in great detail. Mike Pitts’ "Hengeworld" talks of the immense changes made by determined ancient groups. They may have been more in touch with the movements of the seasons, but the land they worked on had been clear-felled, farmed, ritualised, fetished, as I fetish the idea of space and air. And the controversy about “rewilding” drawing on Franz Vera’s work breaks down the notion that I could have any real sense of how things were. The archaeology makes clear that I would starve in “the natural”.

Despite this, the idea of rewilding is seductive. To me it would be an act of atonement for damage done, a gesture towards letting the world find its own balance again. Relinquishing control over, relinquishing involvement in, something so deeply human-shaped as a tract of England would be a radical declaration of better intentions for the world. But if it led to a landscape rank with Japanese knotweed, always scarred at the margins by pesticide and fertiliser run-off from the surroundings in a world of worsening food shortages, I’m not sure it would have been worth it. There are also other rich countrysides that would be missing. I would love to walk in pure grassland through clouds of butterflies. But I also want more heath, hedgerows, orchards, and their attendant life.

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I might be able to describe what the image of that figure crossing the field means to me, but it’s hard to know that the person I’ve told understands my underlying response. I might tell my daughter about the birds we can hear, show her leaves and seeds. We might run over the claggy earth, or examine a rabbit hole and its attendant poos. But in explaining this zone that I love despite all I know about its denuded pelt, I wonder if I run the risk of stripping back another crust, over-revealing the place – no surprises, even when deer crest the ridge. And, of course, if I show her that this is what the countryside “is”, is it something she’ll come to accept, even defend – this depleted, polluted, bald and empty default.

Still, I want to be out there, with a few miles to go, a pigeon banking over the copse, and rooks turning up larvae to the side. I want to watch the contour of the slope resolve itself away from the map and into the valley. I want the kestrel half seen stooping to come out of invisibility on the ground and rise from flight into hovering. It bows its head into the wind, which brings a scatter of silver cold onto my face. This is good, I tell my daughter as we look down on the path into a hedge’s October colours. This is the countryside.