In terrible times, confined close to home, focus on the small delights, they say; take pleasure in the here and now. But the unfettered mind can wander, sometimes across centuries and millennia.
My morning exercise walk takes me past a drystone wall, almost half a mile long but only about 25 years old, a functional work of art representing many months of skilled labour. It’s A-shaped in cross-section, with outer walls of carefully selected interlocking, flat-faced rocks enclosing a rubble infill. Large slabs, “throughstones”, span its width at knee height to give stability, and it is capped with jagged rocks set on edge. It could easily last several lifetimes.
This barren, mineral habitat has accumulated a living patina. On the sun-dried south face there are only lichens, ingrained in the stone. On the shady northern aspect, some flat, jutting throughstones are carpeted with moss. Elegant red-stemmed spore capsules of the moss Bryum capillare and clusters of the pixie cup lichen Cladonia pyxidata fill gaps amongst the cap stones. And, wherever the smallest pockets of humus have accumulated, drought-tolerant dandelions, grasses, even stunted birch seedlings, arriving as seeds carried by wind and birds, have sent roots into the wall’s cool, damp recesses.
This is how life restarted in this valley, more than 10,000 years ago. A warming climate and a retreating glacier released meltwater rivers that shaped a landscape strewn with bare rock. First came lichens and mosses, germinating from microscopic spores. Then seedlings, tundra, forest, people, settlements, woodland clearance, livestock, crops, roads, mines, and modern farming. The wall is a time capsule of the pioneering life forms that started it all.
For a time-travelling naturalist’s fantasy bucket list, when would have been the best time to be roaming this ever-changing landscape? When the first people settled in the wooded foothills? During that bucolic, pre-industrial revolution era that conservationists strive to recreate?
Today, here and now seems a good place to be. A bumblebee is nesting in the base of the wall. A wren is searching capstone crevices for insects. And someone has left a child’s white-painted stone, decorated with the NHS rainbow and “STAY SAFE”, on one of the throughstones.
