The landscape in lines, left to right as you walk under the railway bridge at the edge of the town: 1, railway line on a brambled embankment ; 2, damp pasture with reeds and sedge and a shallow lake in winter, retreating quickly now; 3, thick hedge of wild rose, hawthorn and blackthorn but low enough to peep over in places; 4, the path, on a bank so that it rarely gets wet; 5, meadow, with buttercups and reeds, becoming broader towards the east; 6, the curving river Great Ouse; 7, an extensive marshy meadow with reeds and willows, inaccessible to people; 8, the road from Ely to Queen Adelaide and Prickwillow, on a high embankment. The complex engineering of centuries controls the water level in the river – it always seems to be full – and allows water to be taken in or out from the meadows on either side through culverts in the embankments. The very different landscape of my childhood had one identical feature, the water meadows in the Avon valley, flooded in winter and thereby enriched with sediment and retaining moisture well into dry summers when up above all was parched. (The water meadows between Salisbury and the old suburb of Harnham to the east of the cathedral, Constable’s famous viewpoint, have been restored, sluices mended, and are grazed again by sheep.)
At times the whole thing becomes a vision of contentment, a bit like certain moments in Clissold Park maybe, when the blackthorn is out, and the skateboarders obey their procedural etiquette, and little children feed rubbish to foolish ducks and line up for football practice, and blackbirds and robins sing. But it’s still a zoo, with tranquillised deer and caged birds and fences all round the ponds to keep all the actors in their places; and the securely fenced organic veg project. At Ely the landscape is just as carefully managed but all the actors seem to voluntarily, without fences, contribute to an easy harmony, especially in spring, of course. Geese share the strip of bright, even lawn their grazing has made with people and dogs, cautious and observant, retreating to the river if made anxious. The greylag geese are the ancestors of the white domestic goose and seem half domesticated. Canada geese are also common, but more distant. There’s just one sign, asking people to stay out of the marshy meadow to leave the birds in peace. A thick hedge separates it from the path, but there are gaps.
Banks of hawthorn and bramble are in flower; their birds are mostly invisible. A bit like the greylags, the robins and blackbirds are more familiar, more at home with humans, the others, blackcaps, chiff chaffs, wrens, chaffinches, are very hard to see.
today, may 18th, sunny sunday afternoon, shrinking lake. Deviating cattle ploughed their way with slow deliberation through deep mud to reach deeper water, lapwings soared and plunged, whooped and swooped, jubilantly, it seemed.
I first heard lapwings again last year, and knew them across fifty years. The RSPB book says: call, from which it gets its alternative name of peewit, is a rather wheezy, drawn-out ‘pee-wit’. The song that accompanies its display is ‘pee-wit, wit, wit-eeze, wit’. And that does recall the sound; the rhythm of it is useful. But wheezy! An insult. It’s a pure, liquid cry, like no other, and I can’t do any better than that. Google photos comes to me sometimes with an offering, like a dead tit the cat’s brought in, a new memory. Contradiction in terms, I thought. But the call of the lapwing is a memory I didn’t know I had, well known these days as a recovered memory. So, all right then, a new memory. Sad but joyful. It’s something about the way the song and the flight seem part of the same thing.
Baby coots go bobbing and skating over the shallow water, half hidden by the growing clumps of sedge. Nearly all of them, and the goslings too, will be dead before the winter; they are like victorian babies.
A couple of young rabbits half hidden in the sedge near the railway line, securely close to the huge banks of brambles that cover the embankment. The dog plunges into the river after a stick. All the dogs I’ve seen there seem to have been instructed to respect the geese. (Quite a lot of them are not left off the lead. This indicates two kinds of dog, but also two kinds of owner. Some think their dogs will take part in the Arcadian pastoral, some that their dogs will damage it.) High above, the swifts are back! Against the setting sun harmless midges form a lazy snow storm. black headed gulls in elegant looping flight. And of course the trains go by. Nothing takes any notice of the trains, except for a few people. I do like the long goods trains from Felixstowe with their containers full of tea and oranges from China.
Unlike the park, you never get everything at one sitting, (except the trains, and the blackheaded gulls. oh, and the crows and rooks and jackdaws and pigeons and magpies.) At other times I’ve seen a barn owl tracking slow and low over the whole territory, marsh harriers passing through, just one glimpse of a reed warbler, sometimes several snipe zig-zagging away, a hovering kestrel, a burst of song from a nightingale just after dawn, and a rarity, the weird and exotic glossy ibis, like a gothic black curlew, solemnly stepping through the mud and poking down into it with their long down-curved beaks, one afternoon last summer, newly arrived from north Africa. And a different scene in winter with the migrants, the gadwall and wigeons and shovellers.
Anyway, the cattle also are back, on both sides of the river. I’ve not seen them on the far side before, the extensive rough wet meadow defended by deep ditches. (This terrain has something in common with its opposite, rough mountains: they are both difficult of access, fenland because of its deep mud and drainage channels, mountains through their rocks and cliffs, and both are free from walls and fences.) They were walking and grazing in a line on the raised bank, on solid ground, very slow beside the slow Ouse. They are there to give us images, to illuminate our history, to make the world seem well.
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea, the second line of Thomas Grey’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, already in 1751 deep in sad nostalgia.
Critical thoughts appear, of course. Penitential procession or bucolic contentment? Have they found freedom through slavery?
I wondered about the word bucolic. What does that even mean? Ah! – Bous, the ox. Boukolos, herdsman. And here’s a happy distraction, from Miriam-Webster, ‘bucolic in context’; prestigious American dictionary comes over here to place this word from classical Greece in its rightful 21st century place: “my husband Toby and I … live on a remote sheep farm in the Cotswold Hills … Our house perches on the edge of a bucolic valley, its pastures divided by ancient dry-stone walls and hawthorn hedges.” Plum Sykes, Vogue, November 2016. ah, that lovely word ‘ancient’. 18th century enclosures maybe? Or early 19th? And the house is perched? Like a blackbird, ready to fly? And a remote sheep farm? Remoteness in the Cotswolds? Are you a shepherdess, Plum? Does your Land Rover Discovery (going forward, the company was sold by Ford to Tata in 2008) help you to overcome that stern isolation? Toby and delicious Plum!
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
As the darkness began to come on I noticed some way off a familiar old couple, he is thin and frail, she is shorter than him, more robust, and seeming to shepherd him. They like a slow walk in the evening, well into the dark. I’d been wondering about them. Haven’t seen you since last year, I said. She obviously didn’t remember me, after all she was the memorable one in those meetings. (See Easy Walks No 3, down to the river and Ely Diary) Then she told me again that they had lived here all their lives, that they live in Willow Walk. She told John, who is quite deaf, that a train was coming. It was the King’s Lynn to King’s Cross train, driven by their nephew. He looked out for them and hooted or tooted, they waved back. Familiar, all actors in a 21st century pastoral. The next one was a goods train. They speculated about the nature of the tanks it carried. Chemicals? And the few different waggons, ordinary big boxes, they would be somehow useful in case of emergencies…. Another diesel. The first 19 of that series used to pull coal to the power stations in the 60’s and 70’s. He used to go up to Doncaster on a thursday to watch them. Geese and goslings in the river close to the bank. I saw one tiny thing up on the grass, running away from the river, lost, trying to hide. I pointed it out to her and she followed it and picked it up, dropped it into the river. A little splash and it was up and swimming, skating over the surface, but soon it came close into the bank and scrambled up again, I noticed it crossing the path and heading for a reed-filled ditch, where it was immediately invisible. Safe for now but without a future. We all know that most of them must die, but we still for hope for their survival.
I looked up the diet of gulls. The black headed have an admirable menu of worms, mayflies, beetles,ants, spiders, slugs, small fish, small crabs and carrion. I say admirable because we don’t care too much about those things. We hope for their prosperity en masse, as part of the eco-system, but they are rarely, if ever, individuals, they are all things that we might casually crush or swat. The herring gull, on the other hand, and there are a few of them on and around the lake and the marshes, will sometimes eat the eggs and young of other birds. The carrion crow, rook, jackdaw and magpie will also eat young birds. (Magpies ‘eat almost anything, from fruit and berries to carrion, and from beetles to dog faeces. Will catch and kill live prey such as small mammals and young birds and will also raid the nests of other species. In general the summer food is insects and other invertebrates and the winter diet is vegetable material, but there are many exceptions to this.’ Yet they keep themselves so nice and clean and black and white! But the RSPB adds: The magpie has retained its reputation as a destroyer of nests and eggs, but the case for it causing the decline of small-bird populations is unproven despite thorough research.’ Analysis of their ‘faeces’ has shown that birds made up only 5% of their diet, though that must vary with the seasons.) Then there are owls and foxes, kestrels and marsh harriers. The British Waterfowl Association warns also of mink, stoats and weasels, badgers, and of course cats and dogs, and even squirrels – grey, of course.
A bit further on are the proper deep water lakes called Roswell pits, formed by centuries of digging for clay to make the embankments which contain the rivers and drainage channels. Here the great crested grebes nest. Far out but with binoculars I clearly saw one young one riding on the nest-like lap of its mother’s back. Nothing could be more cute. And two other little ones apparently playing at splashing and diving. A man, his patient wife in attendance, with the long lens that means bird watcher, a cannon of a Canon, was watching them. Even so, he said they were too far away for a good photograph. That was his smaller lens! The really powerful one was too heavy and awkward to carry often. He told me that the young ones weren’t playing. Or it was the sort of game which could become deadly. I could see that one of the three young birds was smaller than the other two. He thought that in the end that one would be drowned. Sometimes a weak one, if it doesn’t thrive, is killed by its mother, sometimes by its siblings.
I asked him about the terns. A notice says that the floating island was constructed for them to nest in, but I had only ever seen black headed gulls on it. He said there’s a tern out there now! And so there was! Like the gull but with two long tail streamers and did I imagine? – extra grace and agility. I had looked so often for them that I had stopped looking, and just assumed that all the birds on the lake were gulls. They are arctic terns, which make the longest annual migration: birds that are seen in this country in spring are passing through on their way from the edge of the antarctic to the edge of the arctic, where they nest, though a few nest here.
The grebe doesn’t dive into the water, it just puts its head down and disappears, leaving a slowly widening pattern of surprised ripples, no more than wrinkles on the surface, and appears again with almost no disturbance, often much later, much further away. Seen close to its beak is a powerful sword with a fine point.
Today I saw the grebes again, a tight little family, two adults, two young ones.
Et in Arcadia ego
like a little black book 