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| Exmoor © Kathy Bater |
Devon Rewilding Project: Green Future or Red Light?
Property Section. Due Monday.
How many more of these could I write? My editor had assigned me a “feature on conservation clashes in west country Garden of Eden.” What that really meant was: read the damn press kit, interview a local eccentric, don’t fall in a bog, and file an irresistibly appealing piece by Monday. No doubt the property developer belonged to Soho House too.
The message was clear: pump out another puff piece dictated by the ad
department. My predictably pleasant Saturday in London attending an exhibit at
the V&A and a theatre preview at the Stratford East was to be pre-empted by
a wet weekend in Devon. I was to chase a lead about someone apparently called
Marianne—at least that’s what the post-it note stuck on the brochure said.
So here I found myself on Exmoor, boots soaked and notebook smudged,
expensive recycled paper press kit returning to its original stage of pulp, sloshing
along the seemingly endless river path to Watersmeet.
The car park attendant at the tearoom had shrugged and pointed me in
this direction. “Oi dunno ‘bout no conservative, sir—”
“—Conservationist—”
“But folks muck about in the river up that-a way.”
By the time I found her, the afternoon was leaking away under the rain-laden
grey clouds. She crouched by the water’s edge, sleeves rolled to her elbows,
mud streaked along her forearms. A falcon perched calmly on her shoulder, wings
slightly open as if in a gallant gesture to shield her from the drizzle.
“You’re late,” she said, without turning. Her soft voice was melodic and
sure, like water finding its course.
“I didn’t know we’d made an appointment,” I said.
“Everyone who comes here has been called.”
I just about refrained from rolling my eyes. Great. Fortunately, my hands
were too pruney from the rain to have my palms read.
She set a wooden bowl into the stream that trickled between weathered
slate banks. Clear water ran over her fingers, and for a moment—perhaps only a
trick of the light?—it glimmered faintly golden.
“The earth remembers its wounds,” she said. “It’s only the people
who forget.”
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| © Tony Smith |
Wiping her hands on her thick woollen cloak, and pushing her long dark
hair aside, she stood and picked up her staff. I’m no botanist, but given its
gnarled shape, it appeared to have been carved from blackthorn.
She lifted her face to the mist before climbing half a dozen shallow steps
cut into the earth. “Follow me.”
“How long have you been checking the water quality here?” I stumbled after her reluctantly, the path disappearing
into mizzle and moor. The cloud-smudged horizon promised an approaching
twilight; it was later than I’d thought.
“Feels like forever.” Marianne walked ahead, singing softly under her
breath, her blackthorn staff lightly tapping pace. “But now, with them here…”
I followed her gaze and fell silent too. Across the valley, the Garden
of Eden was a fresh scar on the rolling hills, prominent by its perfection. The
boundary lines of hundreds of years of sheep trails and dry-stone walls had
been replaced by impossibly groomed grass paddocks and methodical lines of
young trees. The full impact of the development was laid out before me like a
map of Middle Earth, with Mordor at its border.
“…I have to return more often.” She kept walking. “I’ll show you one of
the sources. It’s not far to the spring.”
I had expected eccentricity, maybe theatrics from a new age eco-warrior,
but she moved with quiet confidence. Something in the precision of her steps,
the way she touched the earth, made me pause.
“Why blackthorn?” I asked.
She ran her thumb along her staff’s clipped thorn nodules. “It protects
what’s tender. Even the gentlest thing needs its weapon.”
The staff was silhouetted against the enveloping mist, and for a moment
I thought the wood pulsed green—a trick of the dusk light, perhaps. A flash of
Spenserian allegory struck me: the patient knight, faithful and true,
protecting the sad lady against unseen harms.
I frowned. I’m a journalist, not a poet, I reminded myself. I’d left
literature on the shelf when I graduated. No call for creative writing on the properties
desk at a national newspaper.
A plaintiff bleating broke my thoughts. We had reached the boundary of a
field. In a ditch by the fence, a lamb lay tangled in wire, its leg caught
tight. Marianne crouched, murmuring to the creature as she carefully unravelled
it.
…a milke-white lambe she lad…
Another snatch of Spenser? I
scribbled in my notebook, sceptical that I would use it in my article. But I
couldn’t help it. The lamb stirred, then stumbled upright.
“There,” she said. “He’ll remember that someone came.”
Across the hummocky field a gentle fawn-coloured thatched cottage sat
with its back against deep pine forests. A fat piebald pony was tethered to a
stake, with plenty of room to graze. A red and yellow painted caravan was
parked at the side, its shafts buried in the knee-high grass.
The air tasted of smouldering mist. Smoke trickled from the chimney, and
Marianne walked me around the side of the house, to a small well shaded by a
rowan tree. She took a carrot from a bucket under the bench and fed the pony.
“Good boy, Puck,” she whispered.
“How long have you lived out here?”
“Long enough to see the same wounds open twice,” she said. “You mend a
river, and a quarry slices its heart again. You plant a wood, and someone burns
it for pasture. Still—” she smiled faintly, “—the land forgives more easily
than people.”
I nodded at the well, its ancient stone wall sunk into the earth. “Is
this the source of the water?”
“Yes.” She drew her blackthorn staff through the mud, leaving a spiral, and
softly sang.
We exist, exist, exist together.
“And do you receive a grant for your conservation work?” I struggled to
get this interview on track. So far, all I had in my notebook were rain
splodges and a quote from Spenser. “Do any local companies or government help
with funding? Does the new development support your work?”
“They don’t care.”
Her voice carried the ache of things remembered too long.
An owl called from the forest. I suddenly realised that it was almost
dark. The breeze had cleared the clouds and the evening star glistened over the
western horizon on a sea of indigo.
“It’s late,” I said. “I should be getting back. But can I meet you
tomorrow, and we can talk about your initiatives, meet some of the others in
your group. Perhaps, in the way I write the story, I can help get funding for
you.”
I don’t know why I offered that. My editor would axe anything so
provocative without a second thought.
“Your car is just on the other side of the woods,” Marianne reassured me.
“You won’t get stuck here overnight.”
“It wouldn’t be so bad. I haven’t seen a sky like this for a long time. Nighttime
London huddles starless under a burnt orange, not this shade of amethyst.” I
shook my head in a bid to shoo the poetry from my mind.
“I’ll walk you through the woods, so you don’t stray.” She opened a
small gate to a forest path. “The trees are so thick they hide the starlight.”
We said goodbye at the entrance to the car park.
“Here.” She handed me her staff. “To help guide your way.”
“When I return?”
“When you go back.”
She turned and walked between the pines, disappearing into those deep shadowed
woods.
The car park attendant whistled in his hut, a single lantern illuminating
his weathered face.
“Any luck sir?” he greeted me.
“Yes. I met Marianne. I’ll be back tomorrow to interview her.”
He frowned.
“Her? Haven’t heard of her in years. Folk say she comes when the land’s
sick—storms, blight, the like. Always walking, she is.”
The next morning, following the path through the sun-beamed pines, resin
perfume wafting from each footstep, the outline of the cottage chimney appeared.
There was no silvery blue plume curling, no woodsmoke tinting the air.
The pony was gone.
The caravan, too.
And no matter how hard I looked, I could not find a single wheel track
in the long grass.
Far to the west, I thought a falcon hovered, but I blinked and it
disappeared.
A single shoot emerged from the mud around the well. I carefully scooped
it out of the soft earth, putting it in my duffel coat pocket for safety.
***
Back in London, I stared at a blank screen, ready to write my usual
glowing review of a developer full of integrity, sympathetic to the land. I
would include economic statistics, corporate quotes, government studies… all written
with a slightly patronising nod to the activists plodding through the sodden
Devon landscape.
The blackthorn staff stood propped in the corner of my study, and beside
it, the clay pot in which I had planted the shoot I’d carried from the well. Its
leaves had doubled overnight, small white blossoms opening, though it was
months yet until summer.
When I touched one, a fragrance of rain and forest and growing things
filled the room. An echo of her voice thrummed, low and sure:
Follow, follow, follow.
For a heartbeat, the wild and breathing moor appeared under a sky that
shimmered gold and green with dawn.
I began to write about the land: its wounds and endurance, the slow,
patient care it required, the quiet guardians who answer its call. I left the
magic implied, letting it live in the spaces between words, for readers willing
to see.
I opened my windows as a gentle rain began to fall upon the streets and
roofs and gardens of London. The scent of water drifted around me. A sudden
thrush’s call pierced the distant hum of traffic.
I filed the story on Substack instead of the office server. And then I
handed in my notice. For the first time in years, I felt free to write the
stories that mattered.
We exist. Exist. Exist. In the country in between.
Inspiration:
Song - Marianne Faithfull and Nick Cave, The Gypsy Faerie Queen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndseNmYb4s0
Poem - Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45192/the-faerie-queene-book-i-canto-i
Attribution: Photo by
<a href="https://stockcake.com/i/colorful-gypsy-caravan_1186933_965832">Stockcake</a>
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