Welcome home

Despite the trundling tractor and buzzing shears, our ancestors would still recognise the rhythm, ritual and practices of the traditional hill farm, argues John Lewis-Stempel

- John Lewis-Stempel

THE sign at the end of the track says 'Home Farm'. If an ancestor time-travelling from the 17th century landed here today, he or she would recognise the place. Forty acres of hill farm, centred on a family farmhouse and clustered around farm buildings of varied architectural pedigree, from Tudor stone to 1950s red-brick cowshed. Down the valley is more ground, but rented. Almost all the land in this rainy place has been given over to pasture, save for one field on arable rotation.

English farmers were never given to poetry in nomenclature, only the prosaic identifier: the latter plot, alongside the road, is ‘Lane Field’. The rest of the farm grows sheep, cows, chickens and pigs. There is more than a mile of hedges on the farm; the thorny ‘quick hedge’—so usually associated with the Georgian enclosures—was there at the beginning of English farming. (Caesar records the Celts possessing hedges; the great ‘ripping out’ of hedges in the 1960s and 1970s in lowland England was always considered harm against history, as well as against ecology.) The field pattern is still medieval/Tudor. From above, the fields would look as if they were loosely tied together by crochet.

The time-travelling ancestor might gawp at the diesel tractor and the electric shears for the wool clip, but the traditional English hill farm has proved remarkably resilient over the centuries. Not only in looks, but in the rhythm, ritual and practices of the farming year, the abundance of Nature.

A year on the farm

January 23 Down to Lane Field: sheep 'folded' and eating kale, their emissions nurturing the land. The first great agricultural revolution was when some canny Neolithic farmer realised that meandering sheep and cattle were walking muck-spreaders.