I Went to Mow My Meadow
Wild Notes #8 A hay-making ritual, a Gothic melodrama, a zooming deer and a baby bank vole
Hi, I’m Sanjida. I write about writing, wildlife and wilderness. This is one of my monthly-ish dispatches from our rewilding project in Somerset, Wild Pinebeck. You may be interested in more Wild Notes, such as:
We All Love Bird Song But it’s Just Birds Screaming for Sex
Searching for Snoozing Dormice Could Save the Species
Or my book, Wilderness, about our rewilding journey and my search for belonging.
‘How long do we have you for?’ I asked.
The scyther contemplated me. He was tall and well-built, of retirement age with long grey, curly hair.
‘I’ll be good for an hour. After three I’ll be crippled.' But, he went on to add, he’d been surfing in Cornwall the day before so his stamina might not hold out.
We had a four-strong volunteer team with us at Wild Pinebeck, our mini rewilding project, courtesy of the Mendip Hills National Landscape: two scythers and two rakers. The idea was to cut all the long grass in the meadow areas and remove it to reduce fertility and encourage more wild flowers (whilst discouraging nettles, for instance) - and we had to do it by hand partly because in the UK we’ve lost most of our wild herbivores, and partly because our almost vertical slope, rock-strewn and craggy, was beyond most mechanical means.
The scyther worked in elegant sweeps, tackling the lower slope of the hill, and the rakers tossed the sheaves of flailed grass, spreading them out to dry so they would turn to hay.
Sanjida scything at A Patch Wilder
As the scyther worked, in a lightweight pale shirt, grey trousers and felt bucket hat, I went full Terminator: black long-sleeve top, black work trousers, boots, helmet, ear plugs and defenders, safety glasses, visor, gloves, body harness and hip protector. I picked up the strimmer, longer than I am tall, and heaved it across the field to Jasmine Orchard. I’d already cut Daisy Meadow, Willow Field and Hazel Meadow: all of them small but awkward.
The scyther had said he didn’t do hills or hogweed, so I was tackling both. It was hot, hard and exhausting. The grass was six feet tall and chocked with nettles, thistles and native hogweed. In spite of my outfit, I could feel the sap spraying me, tiny beads landing on my skin through the mesh visor. Hogweed sap contains chemical compounds called furocoumarins which cause phytophotodermatitis - the sap reacts with UV light in the sun and burns the skin. The smell was so familiar from our annual hay-making ritual: sharp and green and ever so slightly sweet, and made me nervous about what state my face was going to be in.
We stopped for flapjacks that Jasmine, my daughter, had made with our own wild plums, and the scyther told me he’d found a family of toads hidden underneath a pile of logs. The logs, in turn, were buried deep in tall grass and he was annoyed because he’d dinked his ditch-digger blade and would need to peen it that night (he explained this meant he needed to hammer the edge of the blade thin before honing it with a sharpening stone). He wasn’t pleased, but at least the toads had survived with all their limbs intact.
Charlie Petch scything our field at Wild Pinebeck
Later, our rewilding neighbour, Charlie Petch, from A Patch Wilder, took over from him. His scything was less elegant but faster and more ferocious as he worked his way up the steep slope. Charlie found a bank vole’s nest with one baby left sheltering in the tawny grass, before the hill and the hour forced him to stop.
I was determined to bring at least some of the grass in as hay for our chickens to nest in over the coming year, but during the week after our volunteers had left, it rained every day. Every time the sun shone for an hour or two, I went out and fluffed up the grass, turning it over to dry. After I’d turned all the grass our three scythers had cut three times, I hoped it was dry enough and packed it into two one-tonne bags. It smelt of summers past: of cows and barns and childhood.
I raked the rest of the grass into mini hay ricks and left them to decompose in the fields. Sometimes, as I raked, I felt as if I were abseiling, the hillside was so steep; I hung on to the handle of the rake as it it were rope, the tines gripping grass roots. Already, by the end of that week, new life was appearing between the shorn blades: a gunmetal-grey bullet - the tip of a shaggy ink cap; a ground elder shoot, like a child’s drawing of the perfect leaf; the final pink hurrah of red campion flowers. Meanwhile, the seeds exploded like firecrackers around me as I raked. By the late afternoon, the hogweed flowers glowed a sepulchral white, and the ground elder umbels were the shape of bouquets of pink and green coronavirus.
Predators moved in: a buzzard and a kestrel took shifts, the kestrel perched delicately on the electricity cable in front of my office window, the buzzard exploding like a Gothic melodrama out of the wood. The buzzard caught a slow worm and sucked it down like spaghetti. Once, while flying, it nonchalantly tossed a vole from one talon a foot into the air and snatched it up in its beak, swallowing the rodent whole without breaking wing beats. Another afternoon, the buzzard spotted a mouse and dived straight down, almost hitting the gate post, before laboriously rising with the mouse in its fist, wings almost touching a Mini that had driven round the corner just at that instant; the driver hadn’t even noticed.
A family of roe deer moved in - a mother and two fawns. Their bracken-coloured coats matched my piles of hay as if painted with the exact same shade of Pantone. We had left about a third of the hillside uncut where the slope was steepest, partly because we’d run out of time and energy and we didn’t have the funds to pay someone else to strim it by hand, but partly because we thought it would fit with the randomness of our rewilding ethos. The deer, walking into this long grass, stained rusted iron with dried sorrel seed heads, simply disappeared.
One evening, we watched the mother and one of her fawns grazing next to this patch of long grass. The other fawn started ricocheting round the mown field. The mother and fawn stopped and stared. We stopped what we were doing too and watched in astonishment. The fawn dashed through Lilac Wood and Jasmine Orchard. It bolted and bucked, pronked and sprinted. What was wrong with it?
Jasmine looked at her watch. Six pm - the witching hour for small children, puppies - and maybe baby deer?
‘He’s just got the zoomies,’ she said, matter-of-factly.
Coming up soon: Point of View in fiction - the next instalment in my How to Tell a Story guide, how to find those fleeting moments of joy (and write about them) and whether it’s acceptable to steal your children’s lives to make your books better.
And don’t forget, you can come at stay with us at Wild Pinebeck: 10% discount for members of
!