When
I think of this place, it’s the earth I think of, the ground beneath my
feet. It was cold the day I was there, and
the ground was rather muddy, a thick clay that stuck to my boots as I walked
across the farmland. The tilled fields
were chalky, though not as much as the ones up on top of the hills, below whose
steep escarpment I was walking. I had
started on the tops, pressing into a sharp headwind that blew up from the vast
acres of the Vale of York, but had extended my walk slightly to take in a little
of the low country too. On the tops,
amongst the grazing ewes, there had been a variety of colourful wildlife: many
pheasants, the bright red streak of a bullfinch, twittering coal tits, a pair
of harsh-calling jays. Down below it was
grey and quiet.
I
was following a small but clear stream, Bishop Wilton Beck. Its course was flanked by stunted alders, ash
and oak, mixed in with brambles and teasels.
Water courses in chalkland are rare because of the porousness of the
rock, so it pleased me to track this one’s journey between the fields. The village of Great Givendale, sitting at
the top of the scarp, also has a ‘water feature’, a couple of large carp ponds,
apparently dug originally by the Romans – a Roman road passes close by. It was up there that I saw a heron flying
away at my approach and also where I called in at the pretty and peaceful
church of St Ethelburga. Much of the
church is 19th century but the chancel arch features some mediaeval
carvings of Green Men: leering faces joined together with tendrils of plants
that sprout from their mouths and noses.
Perhaps representing a, somewhat pagan, prayer for good returns from the
earth but also a celebration of the region’s fecundity.
The
high ground beyond the village either rolls over gentle hills or dips sharply
into steep-sided valleys, amidst woods, crops and sheep pasture. In the Vale, the fields spread out wide as if
pressed flat by the endless sky. Ahead
of me was the village of Yapham, raised, significantly, ever so slightly above
the level of the fields. When I was
young I used to cycle the lanes around here often, and a frequent route was
from Pocklington to Yapham, via Meltonby and up the hill to Givendale. The names, the landscape, take me right back to
that time and I always find the winter scenery is the most evocative, when the
trees are bare and the vegetation has all died back. The land then really stands out, silhouetted
against the flat white sky, and reveals its bones. In other flat places – Lincolnshire, the Fens
– people seem mostly to talk about the grandness of the skies, but standing in
that muddy field, tiny trees like cilia on the horizon, villages like islands
linked by causeways, it’s the earth I think of and my solid, boot-shod
connection with it.
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