View from a Carriage Window: Fields of Ridge and Furrow near Minety
Gaze out of your window between Kemble and Swindon,
Look left and right between Purton and Minety,
And you will see a clear pattern of ridge and furrow
(‘Like corrugated fields or waves in a land-sea’),
Particularly on frosty midwinter days:
A glimpse of a world before enclosure
Parcelled up and privatised the landscape
With fences and gates and hedgerows;
A time before the tyranny of the clock and pursuit of profit.
For out there in those fields was a community
Based upon sharing and mutuality:
Sharing out of the strips of arable land in the open fields;
Gleaning together, grazing cows together, rabbiting together;
Collecting fruits, nuts and berries in season too;
The exchanging of surplus so as to just get by;
The lending or borrowing of tools;
The sharing of fuel – wood, turf, furze, bracken:
A community of reciprocity, sharing, mutuality,
With consequent arranged or happenstance meeting
In field, lane, pathway, holloway, baulk or common –
And ‘wasting time’ didn’t mean laziness:
It might have been incomprehensible to the elite,
But the lower orders could have an eye for the picturesque too,
You didn’t have to be educated to have an eye for the sublime:
John Clare textualized what many saw and felt:
‘How fond the rustics ear at leisure dwells
On the soft soundings of his village bells
As on a Sunday morning at his ease
He takes his rambles just as fancys please…’
Glance to your left and glance to your right:
Let your imagination run free
As you pass the ridge and furrow
Frozen in time and space in the pasture;
Watch the ghosts at their toil and at their joyful recreation,
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past”
In the fields around Minety and Purton in Wiltshire.