Landscape tells the story of our collective journey through the ages via a myriad of individual stories played out and memorialised on it's surface. And it's everywhere. This morning birds flocked fresh furrows as a farmer tilled his field to a fine tilth; the crest of the field is crowned by two fine large Bronze Age round barrows, even after 4000 years of weathering remaining striking features in the terrain. As we passed below the field the fresh furrows channelled my view directly towards a barrow, highlighting a direct linage in the landscape. These barrows were put here by successful farming communities; settled farming communities that even by the Bronze Age had worked these fertile soils for 2000 years (older Neolithic long barrows are commonplace in these parts). That's 6000 years of uninterrupted farming so far....and counting. I thought, if you could raise one of these ancient farmers, once you'd stopped them freaking out, they'd understand exactly what was going on, they'd recognise farming as the fundamentals have changed little. Cool, eh.
Separately, as we returned home listening to the radio, blah blah climate crisis, financial crisis, corona crisis, death doom blah blah and so on, just for a moment I was in the opening sequence of one of those epic apocalyptic disaster movies. Strange days.
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