What a difference a year makes. On this day last summer I was thatching under dazzling heatwave skies; today, as clouds scud in from the west, I’m being wind-buffeted on a roof. For the outdoor labourer the cool weather has one advantage, though: it has put the cleg season on hold.
The summer of 2018 was, by general agreement, the worst for the blood-sucking flies in living memory (I prefer the Norse-rooted Scots word to horsefly and use it, unscientifically, to refer to any members of the Tabanidae family). On the roof of a 14th-century Devon longhouse my bat-shaped “drift” tool became a handy fly swatter, a first line of defence against the aerial assault. Those that made it past the drift were squashed by hand into a paste of sweat and thatch dust, though only after the insects’ knife-like jaws had got to work. These mouthparts can work through cow hide: feeding on human skin must be like spooning up trifle. And so it went, week after week of sunburn and cleg-welt. Only the cool, peaty waters of the River Dart offered relief.
That was then. This year, the clegs are dormant still. The long grass behind the house where I am working, on the shore of the Dart estuary, is no doubt full of their pupae. This is a perfect place for clegs: there is a stagnant pond for the carnivorous larvae to grow fat in, a herd of Devon Red Ruby cattle graze in the next field, and I am a sitting target right here with bare neck and arms. As with midges, only the females bite (the feeble-toothed males feed on nectar).
Freed from the need to keep cleg-watch, I look out over the creek from the ridge. A shoal of grey mullet swarm up the channel with the rising tide; oak limbs, their leaves charged with fresh chlorophyll, form a topiary-neat edge along the line of high water (a local boatman likes to tell tourists he spends the winter months trimming the branches into shape with shears).
A breeze swirls the creek; the barometer is dropping. Tomorrow a low-pressure system will swing in from the Atlantic with more wind and rain. We may miss the heat, but for a few days more, rural workers will be spared the biting hordes.
