Around Eccleston and Croston

Maize crop, Eccleston, Lancs

A circuit around Eccleston and Croston, today. This used to be a regular outing during the Covid restrictions, when travel outside the local area was banned. I’ve not done the route since things opened up, so thought I’d look it up, on an otherwise slack day. On the downside, I clonked my toe getting into the shower this morning, so I’m hobbling a bit. I’ve also got the wrong boots on, again, still trying to wear these old army things in, even after what must be getting on for six months. I’ll give up on them, and switch back to the leaky Scarpas, especially for any of the longer walks into hill country. But then I forget and say: well it’s only a short walk and flat, so let’s give them another go – we’re bound to get them worn in eventually. We’re three miles out, now, and I can feel them starting to bite already.

Three miles out is also, usually, the highlight of the walk, this being a lovely old oak tree that stands alone at the head of a long meadow. It draws the eye from a distance, and is very photogenic. Up close, it centres a bucolic scene of pasture, thorn hedgerows, and sky. I have lots of pictures of it from the Covid lockdown years, and always something different on each visit – a different season, a different light, a different sky – and I’d been looking forward to seeing it again. Today, though, we discover the tree has been swallowed up by a vast crop of maize, and we can barely tell where it is, let alone get near it.

The maize is seven feet high, and fills a mile or so of formerly sweet open meadow. It swallows us up, too, and is something of a shock, the path disappearing into this dense, gloomy, monocultural jungle. It’s looking like it’ll be a claustrophobic struggle to make way. We can forget the tree until they harvest the crop, but by then the pasture will be in ruins. I hope there’s no one walking the path when they come with the harvester.

As well as rendering the right of way such a weary mess, it’s a worrying trend in UK farming, one that has begun to blight my neck of the woods in recent years. Maize is a controversial crop, but increasingly popular with farmers. They’re growing it everywhere around here now, taking land out of use for food production, and selling the maize for biogas. But it’s bad for the soil, depletes it, compacts it, allows the weather to erode it, and it transforms the landscape – a polite way of saying is spoils the view. But it’s more lucrative than food-farming, and who cares if a footpath is no longer pleasant to follow?

After a very sweaty trudge, then, we emerge gratefully from the maize, blinking into the light, to find there are still some cows about. Denied the opportunity of photographing the tree, we photograph a cow instead, having in mind the French photographer, Jeremy Piloquet, whom I read about recently, and who says cows are more honest, therefore preferable to people as subjects for portraits. Point a camera at a person, he says, and you never capture what they’re really thinking and feeling. Everyone pulls down a kind of mask.

I take his point, to a degree, but I’d also suggest the ease with which we anthropomorphise things – animate and otherwise – means we’re not really getting what the cow is feeling either, only what we’d be feeling if we had a face like that. As for “thinking”, it’s more of a comfort to me knowing they don’t think at all, or their short lives would be unbearable. This cow looks content enough, a little goofy, and obviously unconcerned the nation may be edging towards a de facto general strike.

And with that rather clumsy segue, we weave into our story a quote that’s had me tittering to myself all day. The Bishop of Durham typifies much of middling opinion concerning our current rash of industrial disputation by claiming to identify with the issues, while saying strike action is not the answer. To this delicious example of doublespeak, Mick Lynch, leader of the RMT says: “What is the answer? Do we pray, or play tiddlywinks, or have a sponsored silence?” I enjoy listening to Mick Lynch for his pithy clarity, and disarming honesty, something sadly lacking in public discourse, and not always easy for the more circumlocutious, or indeed the verbosely opaque to deal with.

I admit to beautifying that cow. Yes, I photoshopped it. Airbrushed it. Its face was full of flies, its eyes too, which it seemed admirably Stoic about in real life, but they were troubling to me, so I tidied them away. Piloquet is right, people have difficulty being honest. Mick Lynch is also right, and we should never fear upsetting others, by saying what’s really on our minds. It’s just making my mind up that seems to be the problem.

All I know is, I’m off to the Dales in the morning, and I’d better leave these boots at home.

Thanks for listening.