The lane

John Lewis-Stempel on an unnamed lane he once walked with his grandmother

John Lewis-Stempel’s Herefordshire is an ancient place, with its native cattle, gentle lanes, and old churches. It is a place that farming made

The lane? I’m not sure it even has a proper name. English country people are not spendthrift with nomenclature. So, it’s always been ‘The lane.’ As in my grandmother saying, ‘Let’s go for a walk up the lane.’ There were other ways to go from the house (prosaically, ‘East View’) and other lanes, but one knew automatically the lane. As in my wedding to my wife, from London, the directions to the isolated church in the Black Mountains included ‘go past the trees’, which everyone from Herefordshire understood but anyone ‘from off’ arrived, finally, saying, ‘There are loads of trees.’ Yes, but the trees…

Anyway, the lane. The approximate geography: in cartography it runs horizontal from the village of Withington towards Westhide in the county of Herefordshire. I’ll even give you the exact lines of latitude and longitude for the starting point, 52.085687, -2.636445. But it’s all immaterial. It’s simply the lane, and I first walked it holding my grandmother’s hand, and the recollection is clear because the weather was flawlessly clear and she stopped suddenly, raised her face upwards, and said matter of factly, ‘There’s rain on the way. I can smell it.’ I, a yard high, lifted my nose in mere imitation — and caught the shrill, swimming pool whiff of incoming precipitation. We scurried home, and as we reached the porch the first fat plops fell on our shoulders. On the back of my grandmother’s grey gabardine mac I had stuck a green tendril of cleavers, ‘sticky willy’, snatched from the lane-side verge. A childish prank, Saxon-old. She had walked innocent of the green serpent tattoo on her back. As we went through the front door I pulled the strand of cleavers away.

I don’t think I have ever walked more than a mile along the lane, and for infant years my view was restricted by the parallel hedges, these in winter Brillo-wiry and fierce, and in summer lushly barricading. A straightforward place, a mile in length, 30 feet across, including the gabardine-grey tarmac. The constraints were, curiously, an escape. I got lost in the lane, absorbed by the enforced detail. My grandmother — a farm manager’s wife who made corn doilies as a matter of course rather than as a ‘craft’ — alerted me to weather forecasting by the flowers in the verge. If her nose failed there was the indispensable floral barometer of scarlet pimpernel, ‘the shepherd’s weather glass’, which drooped its pretty red head when rain was on the way. We never needed a watch; she could tell the time by the flowers, since some, like daisy (‘day’s eye’ in Old English), open and close as regular as clockwork.

I still walk the lane almost every day, though it must be 20 years since I set foot there. The lane was an open-air education, a state of being, an experience. And a rather beautiful one, since few places are lovelier than an English country lane in May, when the wayside flowers fountain colourfully from the earth: the pink of campion, the blue of forget-me-not, and the bridal white of greater stitchwort. As many as 700 plant species are to be found in the lanes of England, whose verges are memorials to a flowery rural Albion almost extinguished under the chemical sprays of industrialised agriculture.

For my grandmother’s generation the lane was, among its other attributes, a living larder. She regaled me with tales of eating hawthorn leaves on the way to school, and we foraged sloes for sloe gin at Christmas. It was a toyshop, too. We played childish games with the lane’s plants, like ‘sticky willy’, although my favourite was ‘pop-gun plantain.’ (You loop the wiry stem of ribwort plantain behind the flower head, and tug sharply: the brown, cone-shaped inflorescence shoots off like a bullet, with an effective range of a whole three yards.)

Do children play such wayside games anymore?

I suppose if you had to name the lane, you’d call it ‘Old England’s Lane.’ But the sign is becoming rusty, and those who drive past barely notice it.

John Lewis-Stempel is a farmer and writer. He is a twice winner of The Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, Magazine Columnist of the Year, and author of Sunday Times bestsellers The Running Hare, The Wood, Woodston, and England, A Natural History