Wild Hares and Hummingbirds (5 page)

B
Y THE END
of the month, the snow is but a distant memory, though patches of ice still persist in the shadier corners of the parish. On fine, sunny days the sky now glows blue with the distant promise of spring. Just above the Mendips, there is a long, thin layer of smoky cloud, as a lone hot-air balloon drifts upwards, and an easyJet plane descends slowly towards Bristol airport.

Just like the snow, the mud along the droves reveals
what
has passed by: the paw-prints and horseshoes of the local hunt, whose hounds, horses and green-clad riders entertained the village children as they came past earlier in the day, in pursuit of a local fox.

Until I came to Somerset, my experience of foxes was confined to those I saw in Bristol or London. There, if I came across a fox it would stand its ground, facing me defiantly until I gave in and walked away. How very different from Somerset foxes, which have developed the art of self-preservation not needed by their city cousins.

When I wander down to the end of my garden and find a fox asleep in a sheltered, sunny corner, the sheer sense of panic as it wakes is extraordinary. Even during the heavy snow, when I watched a large dog fox padding purposefully across a field, I knew that when he caught sight of me he would head off in the opposite direction – which is exactly what he did.

The thaw has revealed signs of another, even more elusive mammal, the mole, with masses of molehills appearing at the edges of grassy fields. I recall my grandmother telling me that her father – my great-grandfather – was the proud owner of a genuine moleskin waistcoat; which he presumably obtained from the local mole-catcher. But nobody bothers to trap moles any more – they either put up with the damage to their fields and lawns, or call in the pest controllers to poison them.

As we wait for February to arrive, the lengthening days and imperceptible rising of the sun in the sky signal that
spring
is, if not quite around the corner, nevertheless on its way. The birds sense this too: increased day length triggers sensors in their tiny brains, prompting them to embark on one of the most wasteful and dangerous, yet most vital and beautiful, aspects of their behaviour: birdsong.

Wasteful because they can ill-afford to expend so much energy; dangerous because singing draws attention to their presence, making them vulnerable to predators. Yet vital, because if a male bird does not sing, he will be unable to defend his territory and win a mate; and if he cannot do that, he will not be able to breed this year. If he fails to breed, he may never get a second chance.

And beautiful? Yes: because even though we now understand the scientific reasons for this behaviour, we cannot help but be overwhelmed by its sheer beauty.

January sees the early starters in the breeding race begin to sing. In my garden, robins lead the way: sometimes uttering their sweet, deliberate and tuneful song on New Year’s Day itself. During mild winters, robins are joined by a chorus of other garden birds, each determined to get a head start on their rivals. So great tits sing their brash ‘tea-cher, tea-cher’ from the bare branches of the apple trees, while goldfinches twitter in the hawthorn hedge.

Later in the year, as spring finally takes hold, these early birds will be joined by new arrivals: the migrants currently spending our winter thousands of miles away
in
Africa. And day by day, week by week and month by month, other creatures will emerge: insects and mammals, reptiles and amphibians, and the panoply of wild flowers that will grace the parish fields and byways all summer long.

It is a gradual process, an unseen hand weaving a complex tapestry of sight and sound, smell and colour, by which the nature of this parish – and of country parishes all over Britain – begins to reveal itself. As each day, week, month and season passes by, the picture finally takes shape, reaching its full glory with the approach of the summer solstice. Then, as the year begins to turn, and the days imperceptibly shorten, an equally gradual retreat will begin. Little by little, we shall witness the decline, departure and disappearance of the plants and animals that make up the natural history of our little part of the world.

Like a film being run backwards, the tapestry will start to unravel; slowly at first, then more rapidly, as we head towards autumn, then winter. Finally, at the close of the year, we return to how things were; seemingly unchanged, yet subtly different from where we began. But for now, at the end of the first month of the year, the annual cycle has yet to run its course, with all the joy, wonder and surprise this will bring.

OUR VILLAGE FIRST
appears in the historical record more than a thousand years ago, in
AD
973. Almost a century later Queen Edith, the wife of King Edward the Confessor, granted this little patch of land to the church at Wells. She is commemorated in the name of a hamlet just outside the parish: Edithmead.

Another local place name suggests that people may have settled here even earlier. Totney, a farm at the eastern end of the village, means ‘look-out island’ in Anglo-Saxon. It rests on a narrow tongue of higher ground, rising a few yards above the surrounding land, meaning that our ancestors could have kept their feet dry here. For like those other great English wetlands, the Fens and the Broads, the landscape of the Somerset Levels is both made up of and defined by water.

Today, as I gaze out from the top of the church tower, the surrounding land gives every impression of being as solid and permanent as anywhere else in lowland England. But this is an illusion, for these green fields were once beneath the waves. At the time Queen Edith made her gift, much of this ‘landscape’ was essentially a seascape: saltmarsh, inundated twice a day by the tides.

The story of how saltmarsh was gradually turned into brackish marsh, then freshwater grazing meadows, and finally dry land, is an extraordinary one. It involved hard work, of course, but also vision: the vision to realise that the land could, with time and effort, be reclaimed from the
sea
. Like all great human achievements, it also required a degree of arrogance; as one writer has noted, ‘men have played God with water on the levels for more years than can be comprehended’. Or, as one local told me: ‘we couldn’t raise the land, so we lowered the water instead’.

In its pristine, original state, this landscape must have been a precious haven for those creatures that depended on water, such as wading birds and wildfowl. People came here too, regularly visiting the area from higher ground, to catch fish, trap waterbirds for food, and kill otters and beavers for their fur.

We know this because of a remarkable discovery made in 1970 at Westhay, a short distance to the south-east of the parish. A man digging peat unearthed the remains of an ancient pathway, made from wooden poles and planks of oak, and later named (after its discoverer) the Sweet Track. Using the method of studying tree rings known as dendrochronology, its construction was dated to the year 3806
BC
, making it almost six thousand years old – the oldest properly constructed roadway found so far anywhere in the world.

Later, around two centuries before the birth of Christ, archaeological deposits reveal that the inhabitants of Iron Age Glastonbury caught, killed and ate Dalmatian pelicans, a huge, now globally threatened bird, long extinct here in Britain.

T
HE LONG, SLOW
process of reclaiming the land from the sea began in medieval times, when the monks of Glastonbury hired men to dig ditches across this bleak and treacherous land. Ditches and rhynes allowed water to drain into the three rivers that cross this part of Somerset: the Parrett, the Brue and the Axe. Later, sea walls were built to prevent storm surges and high tides from flooding the low-lying land behind the coast.

Today, a waterway still runs just west of due north past the White Horse Inn, between Vole Road and Kingsway. It is easy to miss from the road: a deep trench, 5 or 6 yards wide, edged with grass and reeds. In winter it often ices over, while during the summer it is carpeted with a thick, lime-green layer of duckweed.

This slow-moving body of water may not look very significant, yet it holds the key to the history of this parish. Without it the pubs, the shop, the church hall, the cricket ground, the homes, the gardens and the rest of village life simply wouldn’t exist. For this stagnant, neglected waterway was the key weapon in the battle to win land from sea.

Records from Glastonbury Abbey dating back to the middle of the thirteenth century refer to it as the Morditch. Today, the Ordnance Survey map shows it as the Pillrow Wall Rhyne, while the locals call it Mark Yeo. Finished in 1316, early in the reign of Edward II, it ran all the way from Glastonbury, via the River Axe, to Bridgwater Bay: a distance of some fifteen miles. Tidal
along
the whole of its length, it allowed seagoing barges to bring goods and people across the waterlogged land, until the early sixteenth century, when Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries led to its eventual decline.

But despite the draining and reclamation of the land, the battle was far from won. On 20 January 1607, observers reported seeing what appeared to be a bank of fog drifting in from the sea. In fact it was a vast wall of water, possibly a tsunami caused by an undersea earthquake, which breached the sea walls and poured over the land beyond. By the time the waters came to a stop, at the foot of Glastonbury Tor, hundreds of square miles of Somerset had been flooded, a score of villages devastated, and more than a thousand people were dead. Rabbits were seen floating on swimming sheep, while a baby in a wooden cradle was miraculously rescued from the floodwaters.

Less than a century later, an even more devastating event occurred. On the night of 26 November 1703, the worst storm ever to hit Britain swept up the Severn Estuary, pushing vast amounts of water upriver. As the estuary narrowed into a funnel, the water could no longer be contained, and just as it had in 1607, the sea burst through the coastal defences and onto the low-lying land. Once again, hundreds of people drowned, along with thousands of sheep and cattle; incredibly, one seagoing ship was found more than fifteen miles inland.

Following these disasters sea walls were strengthened, rivers straightened and rhynes dug, creating the
landscape
I see around me today. The lives of local people were transformed. Sheep could now be grazed without the constant problem of foot-rot, which had previously killed thousands of animals. The effects on the local wildlife are less easy to quantify: wetland species must inevitably have declined, while those that lived on farmland would have increased in numbers.

Yet despite all these efforts, the people who live in these low-lying lands are well aware that their homes are still vulnerable to extreme weather and high tides. Only the maintenance of sea walls, the regular pumping of rainwater off the land each winter, and constant vigilance, keep us safe from flooding. This is still, essentially, a landscape dominated by water in all its forms, eloquently described by local poet William Diaper, writing soon after the Great Storm of 1703:

Eternal mists their dropping curse distill

And drizzly vapours all the ditches fill:

The swamp land’s a bog, the fields are seas

And too much moisture is the grand disease
.