Spring meadows are the morning’s territory, vibrant and saturated both with moisture and colour; the grass tips just starting to dry in the new heat. Pipits swoop close to the dandelions and sound sliding squeaks like the hopeful tuning of an analogue radio. I near a dry stone wall settled into the hillside, each nook offering shelter to some tiny mammal or insect like a Tokyo capsule hotel. I lift one heavy boot and then the other over the stile, softened by lifetimes of Westmorland rain. Squinting into the sun, I drop onto the other side, ready to breathe in another glorious view.
But it’s spoiled. Spoiled by a plastic bathtub, sitting a few yards from the path and listing uncomfortably on a slope. Once a pristine B&Q white, it’s now filthy, as one would expect here. I can see through the useless holes for the taps and overflow. A hosepipe (its source a mystery) is propped on the higher side, and green slime hangs from its trickling end. The water slops over the wide brim into a muddy pool, from where it seeps into the ground and under deep bovine footprints. It’s ugly.
¹ I’m sure a good part of my dismay was because I was cold, dirty and perpetually dreaming of taking a scolding hot bath.
It’s also not right! This is a bathtub: it should be indoors, it should be clean and it should preferably be full of steaming water and suds.¹ It belongs in this field like a cow belongs in a bathroom. If it were a one-off I’d possibly be charmed by the absurdity; in fact it’s a motif of British farmland I find quite miserable.
The bathtub-in-a-field is only an example of the subject of this note. You see, I often found farms on my walk quite, well, untidy. I raised this point with Jim when he joined me—knowing he is ‘of farming stock’, as I think they put it—and his reaction made me laugh at my own sillyness. He stopped and looked at me, shaking his head. The sort of expression I imagine I give when somebody says something like ‘What do I need to know maths for anyway?’ The look that says ‘You just said something so ignorant, so far off, I don’t even know how to start explaining this to you.’
Perhaps I chose a bad example for my case. Although I don’t find it aesthetically pleasing, and would prefer to see something designed for purpose and constructed of a material sympathetic to its environment, I know the bathtub has a function: to hold water for livestock to drink. More concerning to me were the pieces of machinery I found strewn around fields: a plough trailer for a tractor, left rusting in long grass; the shell of a Volkswagen Beetle, gutted and left to decompose; the debris of some vehicle, possibly a quad bike, scattered so far it looked like it had exploded.
This stuff has been thrown away—it’s litter, even on their own bits of land. The worst example I remember was along Hadrian’s wall towards Steel Rig. I reached an excavated Roman Fort, certainly on a protected heritage list. The farmer, however, had decided it would make a good place to discard some worn-out tyres, leaning them against the ancient wall. Okay, so you don’t have time to take them to the dump now, but please don’t leave them there! I wouldn’t have dared drop a sweet wrapper on it.
I can’t remember exactly how Jim responded to my complaint, but it was something like ‘Do you think a farmer’s job is to make the countryside all pretty for townies like you to come and visit when you feel like it? They have work to do! They live here!’ I know this, of course. As little as I understand the responsibilities of farmers, I imagine they don’t get to spend much time chatting on Facebook. I’m being a bit cheeky. But does being busy excuse a person from being tidy? My workday is likely shorter than most farmers’, and involves a lot less physical effort. But even if I worked from dawn to dusk, I expect I’d get some complaints if I decided to throw CRT monitors or outdated programming manuals into the garden when I was done with them.
Bill Bryson argued a while ago that the whole of England should be made into a National Park. I’m sure this was meant to provoke thought rather than as a serious suggestion, but I appreciated the sentiment (I’d include Wales and Scotland too, obviously). This is a beautiful island, and we should look after it. He also wrote, on the subject of littering and despicable fly-tipping,
‘A clean and lovely countryside shouldn’t be a surprise. It should be a right. Litter breeds more litter. That is a simple, immutable fact.’
² I should know better than to antagonise farmers. I’ll have to watch out for cows on bridges.
I don’t believe he was thinking about farmers when he wrote this, but I would certainly like to extend the suggestion to them: keep the countryside tidy, farm dudes.²
