Boswartha by Katie Barron

We parked in a lay-by opposite the footpath sign. My son liked the challenge of jumping over the mud, skidding from drier patch to drier patch, while I preferred the veering gait of a giant, straddling the path, swinging straight legs and zig-zagging from side to side. Brambles and nettles brushed us heartlessly.

We descended between a stone wall and a wire fence into a small thicket of lichen-encrusted hawthorns that twisted over their treasure of ruins. The dark water of the well pool could have been any depth. Leo took a look and turned away. He set off towards a beech tree where someone had hung a swing. The stunted hawthorn by the pool was tied with pink and yellow rags, the colours of Tibetan prayer flags, sodden as goats’ beards. In Scotland these ragged wishes are called ‘clooties’ and such pools ‘clootie wells’.

I had been worrying a lot about the world lately, about burning rainforests and burning futures. Could I form some kind of prayer? I looked down into the clammy vault of the well and then at the stone and turf wall above it, which caught the sun. The granite sparkled and the grass twinkled in the wind. Where the stones sat against each other there were recesses as dark as the well. What if these venerated places really could be cracks in the world; orifices where we could breathe our good wishes directly back into the heart of the planet, without recourse to all the usual negotiation? Could you sit here by a Cornish well and pray for rain and plain good sense to extinguish the fires raging through the Amazon? Could that prayer be taken in at certain places in the earth’s crust, down into the inner echo chambers, and re-emerge as voice and action elsewhere?

Or is that just what it’s come to? Wishful thinking. I had no ‘clootie’ rag to add to the hawthorn’s collection but I tore up the tough reed-like leaf of a montbretia and knotted it onto a living twig. A bandage for my worries.

Leo groaned to discover that the walk was carrying on. We headed down to a stile and waded through fields juicy with leftover dew. Good pasture, empty of cows. Where were they? We passed a whitewashed cottage and climbed into a lane where a car sat rotting in a drive. We climbed up the fields on the other side. No trees now, just walls of stones bedded into turf, with grass growing along the top of them and seams of copper bracken running along beside them.

We came to a farmhouse of smooth granite blocks, once elegant, now reclaimed by ivy, the panes in the sash windows full of jagged black holes. There were in fact two farmhouses and plenty of outbuildings, all in ruins. It had a name on the map, ‘Boswartha’, a common enough name meaning in Cornish a ‘further’ or ‘higher house’. A road had never been built out here. In its prosperous days the place would have been approached on horseback. Since the days of cars, there had never been enough money to metal whatever tracks existed.

Leo didn’t like those buildings either. At the next field, when we were still walking uphill, heading for an Iron Age fort promised by the guidebook, he started to yell.

‘Quiet! Quiet!’ I hissed at him, eyeing a collection of furry reddish cattle that were gathered for a conference ahead of us. To my relief I saw a figure emerging out of the middle of them. He wore the nondescript colours and sagging shapes of a farmer. He was setting off from that group to cross the field above us towards another clutch of cattle. He walked a little hesitantly, looking down towards us, predicting, rightly, that we would ask him the way. Even at that distance his demeanour suggested, ‘Here we go. Another lot.’

I walked steadily towards him. He waited.

‘We’re looking for a stile,’ I said, as a way of apologising for tramping over his land.

He looked amused. ‘Well the path goes through there.’ He pointed over to the field of cows he’d been heading for. ‘But I suppose you’re some of those people who feel nervous of animals?’

He wore a gingery woollen beanie, a checked shirt with a frayed collar, and some kind of coat pretty much the colour of the holy well. He had a delicate face that had seen plenty of wind but might not have seen a wife. Perhaps something withdrawn, muscles not in constant conversation?

I complimented him on the views from his fields. Half of them were rimmed with the vivid blue of the sea, a mile below. ‘Ah! It’s nice today. But you should come here when there’s a wind. I had some roofers in. They said what a lovely place it was! How they’d love to live here. Next day they came again and it was blowing a gale, they nearly froze. It’s terrible when it comes out of the East.’

He gave us the up and down. Leo had quietened, thank God, and was willing to weather the conversation.

‘I suppose you’re some of those people who like the sea?’

‘You don’t?’

‘No, not me! Dangerous place. No living to be had, neither. Not enough fish these days. They’ve all been taken.’

He offered to walk us across to the next stile, as he was going in the same direction.

I like cows, at a distance, and I was curious about his. ‘What breed have you got there? They look like Guernseys? Or Jerseys?’ I hedged my bets.

‘They were Jerseys. They were a dairy herd. But I had to move out of dairy. I’ve just got sucklings now. They’re stores. I’ve crossed them with other breeds. There’s some Hereford in them.’

He waved his arm across the tiny but lush fields undulating downhill from our feet towards the sea.

‘There used to be five dairy farms here. But they’ve all sold up and gone. There are just two left. That one, and that one.’ He pointed at two clusters of buildings back down towards the village. ‘When the Milk Board closed, the supermarkets squeezed us and squeezed us. They’ll be running the farms themselves in the end.’

So his solution was to cross his dairy herd with some meat cattle and rear young animals who he sells on to other farms up country for their next stage of life (and death).

He adjusted his cap. ‘It’s beyond me. We don’t seem to be a producing country anymore.’

I felt wistful about the dairy farms. I asked him which farm he lived at.

‘Boswartha,’ he said.

That spoliation of ivy and jagged glass we had passed below? I struggled to hide the shock in my eyes. I wondered if he lived in a trailer in behind somewhere. But I’d seen no road.

He pointed us on our way into a narrow, overgrown alley between stone walls which headed straight up to the fort. More mud for Leo to leap.

I loved it at the top, among the heady bracken and scattered stones. A goshawk rose from the undergrowth just ahead of us and paused on a boulder, his steel grey shoulders practically clanking around him. A peacock butterfly settled near us. And Leo loved the place because I sat in a dog poo. That made the walk for him.

I was glad I’d met the man at Boswartha. I could learn from him. Worn and full of hope, like a clootie, his life was a prayer. He’d found ways to hang on to his fields. The supermarkets didn’t own them yet, and the winds might change.

 ………………..

Katie Barron gave up being a financial journalist to teach EFL and write nonsense. Her stories have been short-listed for the Asham award in London and the RTE One/ Francis MacManus competition in Dublin. She stays afloat in Cambridge. 

Blog: 'Adventures in Toryland' at http://www.katiealicebarron.wordpress.com