It’s true to say that on the Cotswold Way,
We walked through a great deal of ridge and furrow,
And traversed a great deal of common land,
And there’s nothing in the landscape to tell you
Just what this pattern of ridges and humps
In grassland, sward and pasture implies,
Or connotes: no plaque or information board
To let us know that where we tread
There was a whole different way of carrying on
From what we regard as normality today:
The tyranny of the clock and pursuit of profit;
Instead, there was a community
Based upon sharing and mutuality.
It wasn’t just the sharing out of the strips
Of arable land in the open fields,
Or the gleaning.
The tending to and milking of a cow.
The looking out for rabbits.
The gathering of fruits, berries and nuts.
The being satisfied with that you have.
The exchanging of surplus so as to just get by.
The lending or borrowing of tools.
It wasn’t just the fuel – wood, turf, furze, bracken,
Or the crops, gleaning or grazing that gave sustenance,
It was also the community of reciprocity;
The sharing, the mutuality
That fashioned a community,
And the arranged or happenstance meeting
In field, lane, pathway, holloway, baulk or common,
And the ensuing conversation
And sharing of the time of day
(‘Good morrow, Gossip Joan,
Where have you been a-walking? …’);
And ‘wasting time’ didn’t mean laziness,
It might have been incomprehensible to the elite,
But the lower orders could have an eye for the picturesque too,
You didn’t have to be educated to have an eye for the sublime:
John Clare textualized what many saw and felt:
‘How fond the rustics ear at leisure dwells
On the soft soundings of his village bells
As on a Sunday morning at his ease
He takes his rambles just as fancys please
Down narrow baulks that intersect the fields
Hid in profusion that its produce yields
Long twining peas in faintly misted greens
And wing leafed multitudes of crowding beans
And flighty oatlands of a lighter hue.’
But they don’t tell you this, do they?
So let your imagination run free
The next time you traverse ridge and furrow
Frozen in time and space in the pasture;
Walk with the ghosts at their toil
And at their joyful recreation,
For as William Faulkner said:
“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
