Next to Nature
A landscape in mind, where the skylarks sing and last orders for the Old Pheasant
Where the Skylarks Sing
Before we moved to Rutland, we took a trip one weekend to visit an Open Studio hosted by artist Carry Ackroyd at her home in Northamptonshire.
Carry is a painter and printmaker who has brought to life the work of ‘The Peasant Poet’ John Clare, illustrating three books. Her work also accompanies The Oldie magazine’s Bird of the Month column and, occasionally, she’ll pop up at 5.57am on BBC Radio 4’s Tweet of the Day.
We bought a print that afternoon that now hangs in our sitting room: a woodland scene at twilight featuring a multitude of moths.
But there was another picture that caught our eyes. It was an oil and pencil sketch of a hedgerow-lined Rutland lane, plunging into a steep valley and wiggling all the way up the other side to a high, tree-crested ridge.
Carry explained it was a lane she would drive along every year on her way to Birdfair at Rutland Water and, one time, she felt compelled to stop the car and capture the scene.
We didn’t purchase it then, but the picture lodged in my mind, becoming something of an icon of the Rutland landscape. I’d never seen this particular spot, but it’s how I came to picture the county.
So when we moved to Rutland it was a surprise to find that the lane, between Seaton and Glaston, was on our doorstep. I discovered it on one of my first circular walks from home.
I regretted not having bought the picture so, a few weeks later, I e-mailed Carry. She responded and said she could send it straight away, in the next few minutes, as she was packing for a trip to Scotland. It arrived in the post days later. I had it framed and gave it to my wife Tina as a birthday present. It currently hangs in our piano room, where I work, and I can see it on the wall behind me during video calls.
I walked along the lane last week, on a spring saunter. It is such a satisfying view – a line that leads the eye into the landscape, the slant of the fields, the outline of hedgerows and trees, and the curiosity of where the lane disappears to. (If you wish to know, there is a stream in the valley bottom alongside the old railway line to Uppingham, the tree-lined embankment and brickwork of a long-dismantled bridge still visible.)
What brought the scene to life on my walk was the sound of skylark song. I had to stop, look up and listen to the joyful, high-pitched, penny whistle tunes of this extraordinary little bird, fluttering on high. One, two, three: little dots in the sky, barely visible, but whose song pierced the breeze and arrowed straight to the heart.
Skylark song was the soundtrack to my childhood and youth, walking on the chalk grasslands of the Sussex Downs. As a species, skylarks used to thrive on farmland, but the shift to planting cereals in autumn rather than spring means they are now on the RSPB’s conservation red list. So to find this precious pocket of landscape where they sing brings unbounded joy.
Now, whenever I look at Carry’s picture, I also hear the sweet sound of one of our most treasured song birds.
Last Orders
At the top of the lane in Carry’s picture, on a high limestone ridge, is the village of Glaston. By the crossroads where traffic from Leicestershire and Cambridgeshire passes through on the A47, barely registering the existence of England’s smallest county, is the Old Pheasant.
It’s a squat, stone-floored, low-ceilinged pub that offers good food and accommodation. I’ve walked across the fields for a pint here numerous times. The route and routine is familiar enough for the dog to turn right into the pub garden whenever we approach. But, this week, the pub called last orders and closed its doors.
I’d seen the announcement the week before on social media and booked a table for the final Sunday lunch. The only time available was midday.
We walked the 35 minutes across dry fields, grassy cereals sprouting underfoot. The dog remained on the lead to prevent her chasing distant hares into paddocks of pregnant ewes.
We were the first to arrive, but the pub was soon busy.
The problem for The Old Pheasant, like so many country pubs, is recruitment.
“We need four chefs to make the business viable, but we only have two,” the landlady told us.
I wondered if it was a consequence of Brexit.
“Covid, actually,” she said. “Three of our chefs left during lockdown, became drivers and never returned. People have left the industry and no one is coming through to replace them. It’s not so bad in the cities and towns, but harder out here.”
One of our most memorable family dinners was at the Old Pheasant, last summer. It was a spontaneous outing in the middle of a week that, for whatever reason, had gone wrong for everyone.
Downtrodden, we set off across fields of thigh-high barley, the footpath cut cleanly through the crop. By the time we reached the pub, we were already feeling restored, the stresses of the week melting away in conversation and warm evening air.
After too much pizza, on sourdough bases from a bakery in the neighbouring village of Bisbrooke, we made our way home, carrying the remnants of our feast in square cardboard boxes. Rural Deliveroo.
In the stillness of mid-summer half-light, we stopped to pick pineapple weed from the grassy path bordering the field, to take home and make into tea.
That evening, when the world appeared set against us, we could have stayed home and stewed in our own juices. But the walk and conviviality of a country pub transformed our week and will remain a cherished memory.
I’m sorry to see the Old Pheasant go.
Next to Nature
Scrolling through Instagram this week, I see Carry Ackroyd has posted about attending the thanksgiving service of author Ronald Blythe, who died in January aged 100.
Blythe was from a farming family and wrote Akenfield (1969), an account of life in a Suffolk village from the turn of the century. While the place and book’s characters are fictional, the people and stories are real. Accounts of working men gathering around the forge at the blacksmiths to keep warm in winter are vivid.
I’m currently reading Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside, a collection of Blythe’s essays and columns written over more than two decades for Church Times, published just a few months before his death.
In Carry Ackroyd’s post, there are photos of Ronald Blythe’s home, Bottengoms Farm. It was bequeathed to him by the artist John Nash. Blythe’s bedroom was previously Nash’s studio.
Blythe also championed John Clare. So, to finish this week’s ramblings, a couple of paragraphs by Blythe on the topic of writing, relating to Nash and Clare, from March’s chapter of Next to Nature:
“Writing is a static activity. Artists move about, shifting this way and that. My friend John Nash stood with his back to the north light from ten until four every day, regular as clockwork. Sandwiches arrived at one sharp; tea was by the fire, or in the garden. When he and his wife went to Cornwall or Scotland twice a year, he cleared a place in the studio for me to write. But I wrote outside in the garden when it was hot, and downstairs by the Rayburn when it was cold.
“The great rural poet John Clare often wrote in hiding, lying low in a field or under a hedge, so that the neighbours could not see a ploughman engaged in matters which were none of his business. But he compared himself to the nightingale who ‘hides and sings’. He led a double life in the village, although eventually it became a marvellous single existence of traditional labour, and the right words to describe it. Those who had previously written about the land and its seasonal demands had rarely put a hand to it; after Clare, it would be different.”