The dust has settled on all the milking activity, and dad is safely back in London recovering from his fall, waiting until his neck brace can come off (as the only person I know to break his neck on an evening stroll).
There has also been a sense of waiting on the croft. A sense of things in stasis; the vegetables in the garden are late and still to grow; the last cow yet to calf – six weeks behind the others; and our builders have still not returned to do the snagging, having said they’ll come back for six months now. There’s even the odd bluebell still lingering in the woods. It is possible summer is breaking now just as the days start getting shorter, but then winter didn’t really start until after the solstice.
The only place there is a noticeable change is inside the new deer fence. After several unsuccessful attempts to drive the deer out, they left of their own accord when a tree came down on the fence in early spring, and we have not seen any evidence of them since.
The result is an abundance of seedlings and saplings. Some of these are a few years old but have been suppressed for years by the deer and are now starting to grow properly. The deer, displaced, have unfortunately made a highway of mud and broken trees on the outside of the fence. Hopefully this will be resolved when the neighbouring properties connect their fences to ours and there is no way through – another thing we are waiting for.
Whilst waiting, we’ve had two large groups come to the croft to look at how we use controlled grazing with cattle and deer exclusion to manage the rainforest on demonstration visits organised by Lochaber Mor and the Alliance for Scotland’s Rainforest. People always ask how we monitor change, particularly when that change is slow and variable as well as what success looks like. People want a model that is replicable and measurable. They ask, “Where are you going?”, “What will it look like?” and “How will you get there?”; “How will you know if you have arrived?”.
Scientifically monitoring change in woodlands is one of Alasdair’s jobs. On the croft Alasdair is monitoring without even thinking, he notices a new rare orchid here, a bird he’s not heard before there, the bracken retreating, different species of grass, wood ants, pairs of swallows, seedlings, butterflies, lichens, bees. Knowing whether we are on the right trajectory is a culmination of these things. It wouldn’t make sense to quantify success by measuring any single factor as we are trying to improve the welfare of the land as whole; and it would be impossible to measure everything –as there are lots of things (like mycelia) we don’t even know exist. The information Alasdair has in his head is complex, hard to quantify or to articulate – scientifically or otherwise.
This tension was the focus of some of the talks at the Andrew Raven Trust Weekend which we also attended last month. The theme was “Lost Voices of the Enlightenment”. In the enlightenment humanities, the arts and science became more separate and lived experience translated into quantifiable outcomes – although Hutton himself was a farmer there still became an elevation of knowledge that could be proved through science. We discussed how the knowledge most farmers have of their land, from years of observation and generational wisdom, is not that different to that of an ecologist or nature observer i.e. farmers can tell when changes are positive to the land, when there are more birds or insects. But neither scientists nor farmers can predict not what those changes will be in advance, as every piece of land is different.
The tension between the experience and the measured came together with a visit from Marthe Kiley-Worthington, a self-described small fat old woman, who has written hundreds of scientific papers on animal behaviour and agroecology whilst simultaneously working at least five different farms. Her visit was a reminder that if we don’t tackle the adverse changes we are seeing in nature now, there may come a time when it becomes difficult to grow any food at all. There is already evidence the nutritional content of fruit and vegetables we grow and eat has declined significantly since the 1950’s.
Reading back what I have written, I see quite a lot has happened in our period of “waiting” perhaps not in terms of vegetable growth or calving but ideas gestating and growing. In the days between writing the first draft of this and doing my final revisions, summer seems to have finally appeared. I wonder perhaps if this sense of waiting I have been feeling has not just been about a pause in seasons but a change in my own way of being; a shift away from trying to control things and allowing things to just be. And to value observing. For the land doesn’t ever stop changing and nor do we.
Artwork in the boat house at Ardtornish created at the Andrew Raven weekend.
Orchids in new places on the croft
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