The Hushings - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 172

rather than indoors. 'In the fields, the sheep don't give birth after dusk.
If you do it in the shed, it's round the clock. But it's essential to get up
early, as they start lambing at dawn. The crows line up on the fence,
waiting for their moment. They'll pluck the eyes out of the lambs even
before they're fully born. You have to be there to keep them off.'
As we walked up the track which cut across his land, I started to
become aware that I was in the presence of an excellent mind. Over
the next few hours, he would speak about the best way to rebuild a
cheap hydroelectric turbine, the long-distance signalling system used
by the Romans, the problems associated with acid waste lagoons in
China, new caving routes through the disused slate mines, the differ-
ence between a clacker wheel and an overshoot wheel and a dozen
other subjects, in every case with an unusual combination of lightness
and authority. He had also prepared himself well for my visit: he had
read and considered the key texts on the subject I had come to discuss.
He was - and this is a word I seldom use - a brilliant young man. He
could have done anything. But he had chosen the sparsest and hardest
of livings. It also became clear to me that he had something else few
people possessed: he knew who he was. I envied him that.
Dafydd had a degree in Welsh, from Cardiff University. He spent
half his time farming and divided the rest between translation work
(mostly in the winter) and outdoor education (mostly in the summer).
He was deeply embedded in the life of his valley, helping to run, for
example, the community woodland that had replaced a local conifer
plantation. 'Here,' he told me, 'you've got the history of the nation
written out in the landscape.'
The low sunshine exposed every scratch and tump of the sheep-
shaved ground. Half-buried in turf were the remains of a drystone
wall - first built, Dafydd said, in 1680 - that once separated the two
great estates whose boundary his farm had straddled. It ran across the
many miles of moor and mountain from Pumlumon to Cwmystwyth.
Half of one of the estates had been lost - as tradition demanded - in
a card game, which was why the farm whose tenancy his
great-grandfather had later taken had been split between two owners.
Among the knolls and tummocks he pointed to were Bronze Age bur-
ial mounds, medieval longhouse platforms and mystery enclosures,
which might have been fishponds, but appeared to be in the wrong