'Context' - A Blog
A field view from the farm painted around the time (detail from a larger painting)
A Figure of the Future in the Landscape
24/12/2020
How much stranger is it, if a figure ‘in our mind’s eye’ in a landscape is our self?
I love a map. It holds details of places that stay in the mind.
It is nearly a year on from starting my first full job, on a dairy farm in West Sussex. (See the‘First Day on a Farm’ blogs from a month or so ago). I feel much more relaxed in my work now and feel reasonably competent at driving a tractor, though each year since has told me there was always more to learn.
The farm is in its ‘flat out’ mode. We are in the middle of first cut silage making. (A bit like hay making, but the grass is collected in only slightly dried and instead ‘pickled’ in a vast pile under a plastic sheet). I am driving trailers back and forward from the field where the wilted grass is being picked up by a forager (or ‘forage harvester’ to give it its proper name) which blows it into the trailers. Then it is taken back to the concrete yard in the farm where the grass is tipped and then loaded and rolled into the tightly compressed pile where it will remain pickled until needed for winter feed.
After an early start to feed the animals, the silaging work proceeds, seemingly unremittingly from nine am to nine pm, with just short periodic breaks to eat meals. We are collecting the grass in the furthest fields from the yard, and my trailering job at this point involves a flat out drive from the field to the yard and back, to make sure I return before the trailer the forager is loading is full. The work is strangely tiring, given there is little manual labour involved. Probably it is the constant tractor operation at a pace, on a task that is dangerous in its repetitiveness, as it always requires constant attention.
Thus, the only lulls in this constant cycle of focus for me, were if I made it back to the right point in the field with a half minute or so to spare, in which case I would pull up at the field’s edge and wait until I could see the last trailer was nearly full, before following the forager down the row to change over.
On one of these trips I pulled up on the lower edge of this furthest field, and had a good view over the hedge of the adjacent bridleway. As I sat for those few moments looking down that track, it felt to have a strange familiarity about it.
The year before when I started work there, was not, it transpires, my first day on the farm. I had, it seems, been there before. Only round the edge maybe, but I knew I had walked that path before, and seeing the field from this angle I remembered looking out across it on a hot, dry summer’s day.
My reverie was broken by seeing the forager turn at the row end and realising that I would need to hare round the field to follow it up that row and exchange trailers. That night however I pulled out the 25 Thou. map of the area and looked at the path on it.
The day came back straight away, why I hadn’t noticed when I looked for the farm on the map to find it for the first time I don’t know. Me and the same friend who had explored the clay lands’ 5 or 6 years before, see'Walking on Clay'., had also taken part in a two day hiking competition, and one of our practice hikes had taken us down this path. We had camped for the night just over the hill, discovering for the first time just how hard clays go in summer as we made futile efforts to drive our tent pegs into it.
I need hardly say that every time I worked in that field from then on, I saw our two rucksack loaded figures passing by. Even more strangely I conjectured what the fifteen year old me might have made of the twenty-something me, the future figure of himself in this landscape. At fifteen I had no concept that I might even want to work on a farm; my only plan at that age was to join the RAF. I think he would have been staggered to know that looking across that field 7 or so years later he would see his own image paused, leaning reflectively over the steering wheel in a tractor cab waiting to swap over trailers.
If we allow that in some intangible way the ‘ghosts’ (for want of a better word) of the people that dwell in, move through and work on the land become forever ingrained in our conceptualisation of landscape, how should we allow for the presence of those that are to do so in the future?
Perhaps part of the attraction of a landscape painting is not only its representation of all the life it has contained before, but the implication of the possibility of our own engagement with it?
It is nearly a year on from starting my first full job, on a dairy farm in West Sussex. (See the‘First Day on a Farm’ blogs from a month or so ago). I feel much more relaxed in my work now and feel reasonably competent at driving a tractor, though each year since has told me there was always more to learn.
The farm is in its ‘flat out’ mode. We are in the middle of first cut silage making. (A bit like hay making, but the grass is collected in only slightly dried and instead ‘pickled’ in a vast pile under a plastic sheet). I am driving trailers back and forward from the field where the wilted grass is being picked up by a forager (or ‘forage harvester’ to give it its proper name) which blows it into the trailers. Then it is taken back to the concrete yard in the farm where the grass is tipped and then loaded and rolled into the tightly compressed pile where it will remain pickled until needed for winter feed.
After an early start to feed the animals, the silaging work proceeds, seemingly unremittingly from nine am to nine pm, with just short periodic breaks to eat meals. We are collecting the grass in the furthest fields from the yard, and my trailering job at this point involves a flat out drive from the field to the yard and back, to make sure I return before the trailer the forager is loading is full. The work is strangely tiring, given there is little manual labour involved. Probably it is the constant tractor operation at a pace, on a task that is dangerous in its repetitiveness, as it always requires constant attention.
Thus, the only lulls in this constant cycle of focus for me, were if I made it back to the right point in the field with a half minute or so to spare, in which case I would pull up at the field’s edge and wait until I could see the last trailer was nearly full, before following the forager down the row to change over.
On one of these trips I pulled up on the lower edge of this furthest field, and had a good view over the hedge of the adjacent bridleway. As I sat for those few moments looking down that track, it felt to have a strange familiarity about it.
The year before when I started work there, was not, it transpires, my first day on the farm. I had, it seems, been there before. Only round the edge maybe, but I knew I had walked that path before, and seeing the field from this angle I remembered looking out across it on a hot, dry summer’s day.
My reverie was broken by seeing the forager turn at the row end and realising that I would need to hare round the field to follow it up that row and exchange trailers. That night however I pulled out the 25 Thou. map of the area and looked at the path on it.
The day came back straight away, why I hadn’t noticed when I looked for the farm on the map to find it for the first time I don’t know. Me and the same friend who had explored the clay lands’ 5 or 6 years before, see'Walking on Clay'., had also taken part in a two day hiking competition, and one of our practice hikes had taken us down this path. We had camped for the night just over the hill, discovering for the first time just how hard clays go in summer as we made futile efforts to drive our tent pegs into it.
I need hardly say that every time I worked in that field from then on, I saw our two rucksack loaded figures passing by. Even more strangely I conjectured what the fifteen year old me might have made of the twenty-something me, the future figure of himself in this landscape. At fifteen I had no concept that I might even want to work on a farm; my only plan at that age was to join the RAF. I think he would have been staggered to know that looking across that field 7 or so years later he would see his own image paused, leaning reflectively over the steering wheel in a tractor cab waiting to swap over trailers.
If we allow that in some intangible way the ‘ghosts’ (for want of a better word) of the people that dwell in, move through and work on the land become forever ingrained in our conceptualisation of landscape, how should we allow for the presence of those that are to do so in the future?
Perhaps part of the attraction of a landscape painting is not only its representation of all the life it has contained before, but the implication of the possibility of our own engagement with it?