Horses in Field

To see the true English countryside, follow a walk from an out-of-print guidebook published in the nineties in a part of the land less visited. We have such a book, bought from some charity shop, centred around the Pendle Hill area of Lancashire. Pendle is a haunted place, the Salem of England, famous for its history of witches. There is a 'Pendle way' signposted by cartoon witch silhouettes and pubs that lean hard into Halloween trade. There are plentiful public footpaths and interesting sights to see, but there is less glamour or preservation here than in the Lake District or the Yorkshire Dales. We're north of Burnley, west of Leeds, just shy of the Forest of Bowland, in a curious nook where its easy to sense how a monolithic hill imposed enough psychic force upon locals to convince them of supernatural goings-on. 

The countryside here feels angry: we remark upon the sheer amount of signs telling us not to do things: no camping, no picnics, no straying off the path, no fires, no riotous behaviour. One recently-erected board states 'No river use' beside a stream just begging to be played in, accompanied by another sign telling us we're being watched by CCTV. It is autumn now so river use will be minimal (although we do use it to wash mud off our boots - was that allowed?), but to deny people a summer-time paddle feels cruel and unnatural. I have a sense that no-one should have the right to own a river and shut it away from the public. Sure, rivers can be dangerous and sure, people are famously bad at cleaning up after themselves, but telling folk they cannot 'use' a stream or sit on a bit of grass to eat a sandwich feels almost like a denial of basic human rights. 

The footpaths and rights-of-way are still present in this part of the country, but they have not been maintained. We find many toppled footpath signs and have to divert our course more than once to find ways around new fences, walls and driveways. There's some money somewhere in this area because there's an astonishing number of renovated barns and farmhouses, all slick and gleaming and elegant, complete with landscaped gardens and enormous windowed sections showing glimpses of neat homeware and furnishings within. The formerly rustic is gestured through mass-produced tat and a modern renovation practices, but none of it feels authentic. Every house has a trampoline in the garden, as if grown there by magic beans. And while anyone we meet is happy to pass on a cheery hello, there is an air of outsiders-not-welcome about it all; not so much a Deliverance-style hick vengeance, more of a we've-earned-our-right-to-be-here-and-protect-it kind of vibe. No picnics indeed.

Alongside all this are the farms. It's not possible to go for any sort of ramble in this part of the country without ending up on some sort of farmland. We cross endless fields of startled sheep and curious cows, and often end up in the stinky, haunted hinterlands of the farmyards themselves where there never seems to be anything but cavernous barns full of junk and tractor-adjacent vehicles standing idle. I've got hung up on this before because we have a tradition in the UK of indoctrinating our kids with Fisherprice imagery of utopian farmlands, where the animals smile and the pastures are eternally green and everything is bright and cheery and colourful and lovely. The reality is a stark contrast. Farms are rusting hellscapes. Farms are dumping grounds for dead machines. Farms are held together by broken sheets of corrugated iron and frayed blue twine. Farmyards are full of inexplicable junk; old computer chairs, dead baths, faded toys, piles of chipboard, metal in all guises. Threshers and harvesters and other spikey monstrosities line the footpaths like warnings to scare off city-folk. Its so rare to actually see any people, but you feel watched, as if through a sniper's scope, hackles primed for the release of baying hounds.

Which all makes it sound as if we had an awful time on our ramble yesterday, which is not true. It was a pleasant autumnal morning and the overgrown and encroached route made it all just that little bit more adventurous. And there were plenty of animals to see, even if most were farm-enslaved. Sheep and cows, of course, but also robins, wrens, geese, and, at one point, a pair of peacocks (in someone's garden beneath netting - they didn't look wildly happy). The most amusing were a gaggle of chickens who heard us eating apples and hurried over for scraps. They did that throaty whinge of anticipation and regarded us with marionette flicks of heads. But our most meaningful encounter was with a young horse that we later identified as a Clydesdale yearling - similar to a young shire horse. The footpath took us through his meadow via an altogether more positive warning sign that read 'Horses in Field', almost an invitation. He came straight over to us, stood by in that way that horses do. He wanted something to eat, and had clearly already learned that when a human puts their hand in a coat pocket, it might emerge clutching an apple. Sadly, we had nothing left to give, so he had to make do with us stroking his nose and patting his neck and telling him how handsome he was. He followed us for a while through the field, happy to have some company, before trotting back over to his mother who grazed by the river, uninterested.

It is lovely, of course, to be able to commune with horses, to feel something of that particular symbiotic bond they've developed with humans. But its easy to forget that, perhaps, deep down, we shouldn't really be able to do this. We actually have no need for horses now, not in the way we used to. But they have such historical and mythic importance for us that we keep them close and we cherish that bond, perhaps only rivalled by dogs. But, like the sheep and the cows and the geese and the chickens, is there a fate for this horse? Not to be eaten, but to have lived an artificial life, dictated and directed by an entirely separate species. Is this fair? Is this natural? It is cultural, which is an altogether different thing, and not always negative, of course. 

It is all part of a wider situation of countryside artifice. Farming dominates the landscape and eradicates much of nature's wider potential, while countryside villages enshrine and protect a certain way-of-life that seems to miss much of the point of what the countryside should mean to people more generally. Many nature writers and environmentalists concerned with the British rural are rightly worried about the great silencing of the countryside, where biodiversity and species populations are skewed and dwindling. The piles of rusting junk in disused barns, and the falsely rustic renovations seem to symbolise this rural gutting. We have our land, we've used it, we live in it, we love it. But we don't know quite what it is or what to do with it. We look upon it like a sheep looks upon a rambler: curious, wary, hopeful of sustenance. But then the ramblers pass by and we just get back to grazing.