This upland moor is a place where culture and nature are intertwined. Everywhere we looked on this sun-glazed morning were irregular, if repeated, hummocks and corresponding hollows that are the insignia of old mineshafts.
Derbyshire workmen once followed lead seams across Bonsall and, as they dug, they left mounds of spoil. They are still so contaminated with heavy metals that the livestock can die of lead poisoning and grazing pressure remains light. Bird-planted hawthorns have infilled many shaft hollows and now Bonsall is more covered in thorn scrub than almost any other part of this county. Fieldfares gorged their berries and overhead the heavens were freckled with chakking thrushes.
As we walked, suddenly out of one dell came a very different story of culture-contaminated nature. It was a fungus – a strange velvety, brown-purple shell-like beauty that loves elder and was once known as “Jew’s ear”. This edible fungus has since been purged of its antisemitic name and is now commonly referred to as “jelly ear”. It is a reflection of a process carried out recently by the American Ornithological Society, which has stripped from 120 birds their mostly male-dominated patronymics such as Audubon’s shearwater and Wilson’s snipe.
I understand the rationale. We need new names. Fungi, for instance, of which there are about 12,000 British species, are sometimes trapped behind a perimeter wall of scientific nomenclature. Common names – memorable names – are part of the protocol of personal diplomacy. We shake hands, we learn names. Names are the essential preliminary before acquaintance, affection, even love.
We also need old names, if only to remind ourselves of our past, including its wrongheadedness. There are two names, however, I’d love to know, because my Bonsall companions included Charles Foster, the author of Being a Human, who trialled what it might feel like to live in the Upper Palaeolithic in this very spot.
For weeks he lived on what he could forage, and we recalled that his chosen community would have eaten fruit-filled fieldfares, and jelly ears. What names did they have then, I wonder?
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