Meadowland Read Online Free Page A

indicates land formerly given to the common grazing (‘walking’) of sheep.
    The field names also crystallize Herefordshire dialect: ‘The Tumpy’ is a bumpy or steep field, a ‘tump’ being the vernacular for hill. And surely ‘Sour Meadow’ was a place of bad grazing? You can see too the pattern of former village settlement: ‘Butcher’s Shop’ was adjoining the local meat emporium, long since gone.
    One name sits on the Tithe Map with the mien of a gravestone: ‘Cuckoo Patch’. There are hardly any cuckoos in the valley now.
    People needed to know field names, which were their places of work. Children and wives needed to know where to take men their ‘elevenses’ and ‘fourses’, their cider or tea, their bread and cheese.
    Outside, a seeping rain is still coming down, so I vote for warmth and rummage along the shelves of the local history section, where I find a reproduction of the 1664 Militia Returns for the village. (The returns were a form of taxation.) There listed halfway down the page is one Sam Landon, liable to pay tax on £6 of income.
    It is Sam Landon from whom the farm takes its name, Trelandon, being Welsh for house of the Landon family. He rented from the co-heirs of ‘Ye Lorde Hopton’; the Hoptons would own the farm for another hundred years, until they sold to the Marquis of Abergavenny. The Marquis’s family retained the farm until 1921, when they, like so many other landowners in the shadow of the Great War, sold up. Between 1918 and 1922 a quarter of the land mass of Britain changed hands, including Lower Meadow. It was a sale of land unprecedented since the dissolution of the monasteries.
    When Sam Landon took on the farm he brought with him a newfangled idea, which was to live on site. Previously, the prevailing pattern of rural settlement was that all toilers of the land, labourer and farmer alike, would live in a village and walk to work. Therewas nothing quaint about Herefordshire medieval villages, which largely consisted of lots of tumbledown hovels of sticks and clay, in which yokels insisted on burning elder wood, and wondered why they died at night. (Burning elder releases cyanide.) So poor were country people in these valleys under the Black Mountains that one seventeenth-century local gentleman, Rowland Vaughan, declared them ‘the plentifullest place of poore in the Kingdome . . . I have seene three hundred Leazers or Gleaners in one Gentleman’s cornfield at once’; the great impoverished were scratching around in the dirt for the ‘gleanings’, the left-over grains.
    One assumes Sam Landon was glad to leave the madding throng and build his own house in splendid isolation. He was certainly a man of notions. By Hooper’s rule of dating hedges (age = number of species in a 30-yard stretch × 110 + 30) I have estimated the western hedge of Lower Meadow to be 350 years old. This hedge divided off Lower Meadow from the wetland above it; the ditch dug at the same time dried the bottom land. More, by dividing off Lower Meadow, Landon was able to stop stock grazing this drier, better land over the spring and summer.
    He turned a field into a hay meadow proper.
    Of course, rummaging around in forgotten documents entails the same risk as going through someone’s diary. You may discover information youhad no wish to know. A flick through the pages of a book on Herefordshire informs me that the rainfall on this far western edge next to Wales averages 30–40 inches a year. Amusingly, the same shelf has the history of the school my paternal grandfather attended, and which is also situated bang on the English–Welsh border. In the eighteenth century this establishment advertised in London for boys to come and learn Latin and Greek in the temperate, healthy climate of Herefordshire’s borderland.
    I almost laugh aloud.
    The rain is still pouring uncontrollably from the sky, and the library is closing for the night. When I return home, I tog up in my Barbour, battening down