Meadowland Read Online Free

in the gateway hazels; most of the farm’s thrushes, together with the migrant redwings and fieldfares, have retreated before the west winds and gone to the villages and lowlands. The sea-wrack leaves of the mistletoe give the plant the appearance of being stranded by an invisible oceanic flood.
    At night a fox somewhere across the river yips at the moon. I am unable to resist a go down the Cresta run; the slough of the sledge is the only slander in the moonlight.

    21 J ANUARY I count Edward Thomas among my favourite poets. In fact, ‘Adlestrop’ is one of the only two poems I know by heart. (The other being Shelley’s ‘Masque of Anarchy’, learned in a punky rebelliousteenage phase.) When Thomas was asked by Robert Frost why, at the age of thirty-five, he was going off to fight in the First World War, he bent down and kissed the earth of England. ‘Literally, for this,’ he said. I would do the same if asked. Thomas thought the greatest gift he could give his children would be the English countryside. In ‘Household Poems’ he wrote that his bequest for his son Merfyn was:
    If I were to own this countryside
    As far as a man could ride,
    And the Tyes were mine for giving or letting, –
    Wingle Tye and Margaretting
    Tye, – and Skreens, Gooshays, and Cockerells,
    Shellow, Rochetts, Bandish, and Pickerells,
    Martins, Lambkins, and Lillyputs,
    Their copses, ponds, roads, and ruts,
    Fields where plough-horses steam and plovers
    Fling and whimper, hedges that lovers
    Love, and orchards, shrubberies, walls
    Where the sun untroubled by north wind falls,
    And single trees where the thrush sings well
    His proverbs untranslatable,
    I would give them all to my son
    If he would let me any one
    For a song, a blackbird’s song, at dawn.
    . . .
    Then unless I could pay, for rent, a song
    As sweet as a blackbird’s, and as long –
    No more – he should have the house, not I:
    Margaretting or Wingle Tye,
    Or it might be Skreens, Gooshays, or Cockerells,
    Shellow, Rochetts, Bandish, or Pickerells,
    Martins, Lambkins, or Lillyputs,
    Should be his till the cart tracks had no ruts.
    Field names rarely match the romance of village names (Wingle Tye!, Margaretting!); hardly ever do they lift themselves above the ultra-prosaic. We always called the meadow ‘Copse Field’ or ‘Finger Field’; the neighbours on arrival told us it was ‘Bottom Field’. I take advantage of a dreary day to look up records in Hereford Reference Library, where some assiduous and civic-minded amateur historians have compiled a volume of local field names. Almost alone among the books – everyone under forty being on a computer – I uncover the field’s historic, official title, as given by the Tithe Survey of 1840. Lower Meadow. This is next to Bank Field. Nearby fields include Big Field, Sheep Shed Field, Long Pasture, Cow Pasture, Eight Acres, Field Down the Road, Far Field, Big Meadow and Flat Field.
    Field names are not the only uninspired descriptors in the English countryside. Farm names are invariably utilitarian, as the same source confirms. The nadir resides about four miles away. Farmhouse Farm.
    The tithe survey was carried out following the passing of the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836, which was designed to rationalize the system of financial support for parish priests, which by that date had become bogged in confusion and evasion. The act was designed to codify formally the practice of paying tithes in cash (the ‘commutation’ of tithes), rather than in animals or agricultural produce, and was based on the amount of land which people owned. For the system to be effective, maps had to be produced, together with lists of landowners and how much land they held. Looking at the maps though, I realize what a memorial field names are. Any field name that includes ‘Stubbs’ or ‘Stocking’ refers to it having been cleared from woodland, ‘Butts’ may well have been the place the medieval locals practised archery, and ‘Walk’