In June I'll change my tune
dairy - six
On May Day
I heard a cuckoo. I could sense it moving about the valley, it’s see-saw call echoing out first from the conifers that line the southern slope of the fields, then from the ash grove that slants up behind the house, but I never saw it. I have a very vague, possibly imagined memory of hearing one in my early childhood, but that sound has been missing from the valley’s birdsong tapestry for twenty years at least. Welcome back, cuckoo.
It’s been almost unrelentingly beautiful here for the last few weeks - a real bucolic folk song of a May. To walk the valley now it to wade through a sea of stitchwort and stickyweed, sharp-edged nettles and knee-high buttercups. The orchard froths with heady cow parsley, interspersed here and there with the first rough stalks of hogweed and the hawthorns are dripping with may blossom. The goat willows have blown and cast out their seeds, so that the air is full of them moving in mists on the warm spring eddies, scented sweet with clematis. Luckily there have been a few deep night rains, so the spring is still running, spitting its overflow into the stream-bed.
Last year, my family were lucky enough to be able to buy two large fields that adjoin our valley, spanning the top of the hill. Once a stretch of common land above the village, they have most recently been used by industrial sheep farmers for stock and crop. After years of “improvement” (this is literally what it’s called, and entails annual grazing and ploughing which thins out the topsoil and depletes it of nutrients) these fields came to us practically barren. Our plan is to cut hay for the next five years, which should give the soil a chance to rest and rejuvenate. Hopefully, every year more of the original species found on that site should return. This will be the first summer the fields haven’t been grazed, and though its just the very beginning, I’m so happy every time I pass the golden haze of buttercups that now stream across them.
I’ve very little new work to show you, as my mind and hands have been occupied with other things lately. As we speak I’m waiting for the kiln to cool so I can open it and see how some new ideas have vitrified. I will share with you next time.
