Greening the Desert - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 76

the animals on the other side of the little valley, the foals grazing at
the heels of the mares.
The hills on the far side of the estuary were now patched with the
small dark shadows of cloudlets, the scouts deployed by the great bat-
talions massed at the offing as a front approached across the sea. A
young buzzard soared above the horses then began to mob the
kestrel.
We walked through the pastures around the top of the wood, stum-
bling across a little waterfall, sudden and surprising in the midst of
bracken and gorse. Marsh marigold leaves withered on the banks.
'This,' Ritchie said, 'is the end of life as we know it. From here on
up there are no trees, except for that one birch.'
I looked up for a moment at the bare, bleak plateau, the pony paths
converging into the distance, the hessian emptiness, then turned away.
We climbed back over the fence and stood among the trees he had
planted at the topmost corner of his old land. Here the soil was thin and
poor. He had found little piles of stones - about the size of fists - gath-
ered together, which suggest that it had been cultivated. Ritchie told me
that he had once met an old man in the local market who, in the 1940s,
was part of a team of contract mowers working with scythes, travelling
from farm to farm during the harvest. They had come to this farm to
harvest the oats, in fields further down the valley. 'It was a privilege to
meet him. He was the last of his kind, and the harvest here was one of
the last he ever cut.' But this land, high in the watershed, might not have
been tilled for many hundreds of years: the piles of stones, Ritchie said,
could date back to the Bronze Age, when shifting cultivation was prac-
tised. 'It was probably similar to slash and burn farming in the tropics.
It would have exhausted the soil pretty quickly and they would have
moved on.' (The difference, in the tropics, is that the soil and vegetation
often recover quickly; the impact of traditional shifting cultivation can
be low. In the Cambrian Mountains, probably because nutrients are
quickly stripped from the exposed soils by rain, this does not seem to
happen.)
The rowans, on this poor soil, had, in twenty years, grown to only
four feet. They were wizened and wind-bitten. The oaks had scarcely
grown at all; they had put out a few weak branches just above the
soil, which were now dying back. But the pines he had planted were