Quote: ...a wildlife desert. Blame Wordsworth.

Come to this farm that neighbours the fell wall,

this tired house roofed with unmatched slates,

whose barns once served a medieval church 

five days over the mountains to the east.

Once, two lords with a map could make us all – 

cattle and sheep, fell farmers and the fells – 

Scottish or English at a single stroke.

I knew those ancestors. They built this

in the time of the Restoration;

the date-stone tells of prosperity 

and the raising of barns – a thousand years 

of sheepwalks, spinning, cowbells and butter.

Meet the inheritor of my land, their line.

 

Milking his cows and turning out his tups

raddle-chested to the autumn flock, he learned

a story from every grass-blade on my flanks. 

A mere ten thousand years of knowledge: how

ice, compacted a mile deep, ground smooth 

Silurian grit and sandstone; how snow-melt 

carved my long valleys where his ponies shelter 

from the winds; where screes tumble first in frost;

which of my slopes will bloom in a dry year;

which valley bottoms slow the winter floods. 

 

Quote: hill farming with hefted flocks, and a thriving ecosystem, are at odds.

He walks my rocks – no peat core biopsy

needed to tell him where the upland 

flora come out first to shout of spring;

why forest never hid my windswept tops; 

how the tangle-maned Fell mare and her foal 

keep their own ground, and every hill-hardy 

tuft of sweet turf ties hoof to heaf, up here 

where we are roofed by unhaltered cloud.

 

I speak to him of childhood, when he chased

fox cubs and black-capped gulls. He remembers 

how along that trod, his horse ran away

while sledging home the rusted brackens,

and his father cuffed his head and his grandfather

sent him to the forge with chains to mend.

His adolescent legs took him downhill

in seven-league strides, boots slipping on wild thyme.

If you would listen, every slope of me 

would share its ghost. 

 

He was lish then, a prize for any woman,

and a twenty-hour day no trouble;

he walked my tops to gather sheep at dawn,

clipped them and turned them back before the night.  

When he ran-out Fell stallions, for the old men 

to mate to their tail-swishing squealing mares,

their lust pranced over the green spring grass

and his thighs sprinting beside them

drew the young women, flirting, hungering.

 

If it weren’t for that black dog of his

who growled at wedding photographs,

he could have mounted all their bouldered slopes,

laid them in any of the mossy ghylls,

my autumn turf as velvet as their skin.

But I am his Amazon, his Serengeti.

My rowan trees slim as girls’ wrists

hang their red-lipped berries over his head.

 

Quote: Why should Wordsworth and Ruskin govern our tastes beyond the grave?

Your paper judgement signed by city hands 

can’t quantify such men as him. His heart 

clings to my base rock like the fossils cling 

to the mudstone sea-floor, like the peat

layers years bone-deep with carbon from old stars.

 

At night, before he struggles into bed, 

it’s me he studies, and the sky I lean on,

for the presence or the absence of the stars,

feeling the scarf of wind worn on my shoulder 

to know what morning weather I will give him. 

He crawls my flanks now like a scarlet beetle,

sitting the quad bike sideways. Tamed by pain

he hunts only photographs, and the sun.

 

He knows Death has him in its cross-hairs 

and the hammer is about to fall, but

in spirit he’s still climbing to my heights 

to fetch his sheep or ponies home for birth,

or crossing the sloped meadows at my feet

cutting the sun-warmed grass for winter hay, 

watching colts galloping across the snow, 

bucking and kicking in a dazzle of light.

He is still naming foals as yet unborn. 

 

Do not presume to tell him how to live.

By Sue Millard © 2017

---

With special thanks to members of the Wordsworth Trust Writers group for their submissions inspired by our 'Our Common Heritage exhibition during its display at The Old Courthouse in Shap; its themes evident in their featured work.

Return to poetry homepage>

 

---

References

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/02/lake-district-wildlife-desert-blame-wordsworth 

The Lake District is a wildlife desert. Blame Wordsworth – George Monbiot

“...two cherished assets – hill farming with hefted flocks, and a thriving ecosystem – are at odds.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/09/lake-district-world-heritage-site-george-monbiot?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

“why should Wordsworth and Ruskin govern our tastes beyond the grave?”  – George Monbiot

http://publications.naturalengland.org.uk/publication/5090557693001728 

The Howgills are “remote, exposed, open, unenclosed common land, covered with a seasonally colourful mosaic of upland habitats” - Natural England publication