Common Ground (27 page)

I blink. I am sitting in the same meadow, unpoisoned now, healthily unkempt, brimming with life and insect noise. The heat has eased. The sun has been taken down a peg or two, calmed by the faint procession of dirty-hemmed clouds drifting north. Around me the landscape settles back into familiar forms of the present: mounds of mown meadow-grass, the brown, seed-clustered docks, the tall thistles, the silvery cotton-wool thistledown, vetches, plantains, nettles, trefoils, lesser and rosebay willowherbs, pink balsams, ripening elderberries and bouquets of Bird's-Eye-custard-coloured ragwort. The air glitters with trails of flying ants being chased by black-headed gulls. Bindweed turns a dead hogweed stem into a shaggy Christmas tree; a white bellflower sits like a star at its top. Insects explore the forest of hairs on my arm. Red soldier beetles dotted with Day-Glo pollen mate on a cow parsley. Abundant, wild and bright with August light, it is hard to imagine that this shabby utopia could ever have been the tormented earth of that previous scene.

I pinch between my eyes and rub the back of my neck.
Up now
. I'm thirsty and need to stretch my legs. I head over the lines of grass to the old railway, flicking the flies away from my ears as I walk. Goldfinches, goldcrests and linnets loose sparkling phrases from the hollies, birches, hazels and willows that narrow this stretch of the old railway into a leafy carwash. It's all so absorbing, the leaves, the wild melodies and improvised lines. Because they were here when I first discovered this place, I've always (unthinkingly) imagined these shrubby trees as permanent fixtures of the edge-land. Now, as I move between their branches, I realise not one of them is even as old as me. This is the deception, the lie of the land. The feelings of agelessness, the firmness of the earth underfoot, the infiniteness of the moment – all can draw in and dazzle the eye into believing in the ongoing fixity of the present. But nothing ever stays the same. Still, it may be, but still moving. Blink and you miss it.

The heart-shaped nettle leaf might have been cut with pinking shears. The edges are a perfect sawtooth pattern blemished only by the pinhead-sized green orb glued to one side. A week of warmth has passed since the red admiral curled its abdomen and laid it there. The egg has darkened; a tiny bulbous-headed caterpillar – a larva – squirms within. Daybreak is already midway through its performance over the edge-land. Faint shades of blue and red are a diaphanous backcloth; the gloomed, brooding trees are shot through with early sun. A chaffinch jigs between the willow's branches then entwines its song into the woven notes of the dawn chorus being threaded above. A moment later, a hole appears at the top of the egg, widening and widening as the larva pushes headfirst through the waxy protective layer to split open the outer chorion.

It bobs around for a moment, absorbing its new environment, processing the changed intensity in light, the shape of the air. Then, like a jack-in-the-box, half-in, half-out, it works free its segmented form and slips from the egg completely. It straightens as it crawls along the leaf. With its thin cream body and black head it resembles a minuscule struck match, blown out before the flame could sully the wood. At its scale the nettle's surface is covered in transparent needles, each filled with concoctions of formic acid, histamine, acetylcholine and serotonin designed to blister and wound. But the stinging nettle is the red admiral's host plant and the larva moves knowingly and untouched to tear at the tender sections of green in-between its barbs. It feeds ravenously, trying to sate an incessant hunger that is designed not to sustain its life but to change it.

The light swells. The tree-gloom sinks into the soil and the dew dries. The edge-land is in full voice now and the town modulates with accelerating and decelerating traffic. A blue tit flies into the lower branches of the willow and spies the larva feeding in the nettles below, hopping down six inches to get a better look. Then it loses interest. In its eyeline, attached to a willow stem, is a more nutritious prize. It tilts its head, darts up, and wheels back to its nest with the fleshy green body of a hawk-moth caterpillar curling around its beak. The bird's flight shadow whips across the nettle patch, crossing the already swelling larva, stirring it from feasting. Instinctively it moves, rippling to the side of its leaf, and begins to dispense a thread of strong silk from a spinneret in its lower lip. Working quickly, it weaves the leaf's two edges together, drawing its halves upright and inward on themselves, sewing up the join from the inside. This tent will be the first of many it builds in the coming weeks for concealment and shelter. A folded, sewn, edible nest; a place to hide, moult and alter.

Instar – from the Latin ‘form' or ‘likeness' – is the word for the physical transitions the larva undergoes as it grows. Because its skeleton is on the outside of its body, each instar has a pre-set capacity, an unyieldingness that must be overcome in the name of progress. Even now as it eats away relentlessly at the furthest edge of its leaf tent, the larva's exoskeleton is tightening, its birth body filling and nearing its limit. Processes are occurring under the surface. Enzymes are being released. Molecules are being modified. Subcutaneous skin cells are already detaching from the outermost layer and beginning to be reabsorbed. Reorganised, recycled, this matter will form a larger exoskeleton manufactured within, soft and folded up like a parachute. Soon the larva's previous shape will be nothing but a thin sheen to be shrugged off and shed as the new incarnation ruptures it, expands and hardens.

Because of their fine-scale integration with landscape, their dependency on particular host plants and their recognisable forms, butterflies are what environmentalists call a ‘key indicator species': a reflector of the health of a wider area; a being through which the land might be read. By zooming in and studying them, we can zoom out and take the pulse of a place.

It was a full year before anyone noticed the absence of the red admiral in Bilton. Then the following summer, 1980, it started with a casual enquiry: Bill Varley – a resident of Sandhill Drive – remarked to a neighbour that he was yet to see a single one that year. Tortoiseshells, peacocks, orange-tips, the ubiquitous cabbage whites all over his brassicas, but no red admiral.
What about you, David?
His neighbour shook his head. ‘Can't remember the last time, come to think of it,' he said, crouching to uproot some groundsel from his petunias.

Intrigued, Varley abandoned gardening for the day and began asking around. Pottering from neighbour to neighbour, he quickly established that not a single person on the street had clapped eyes on one. It was the same story on the next street, and the two after that. It soon preoccupied him enough that he bought a notepad and started to keep records. Daily diaries. His search grew into a kind of obsession, the sort that often sprouts into the mind of a recent retiree who suddenly finds himself set adrift and devoid of the rigours and responsibilities of the nine-to-five. He started enquiring further afield – his neighbours, at the Post Office, the bar at Bilton Cricket Club and the regular coffee mornings and jumble sales his wife dragged him along to at St John The Evangelist's. Eventually he bought some advertising space in the
Harrogate Advertiser
, titling his entry for 8 July 1980 ‘The Strange Disappearance of the Red Admiral'.
Residents of Bilton! –
it began –
Have You Seen The Red Admiral Butterfly This Year? Image below. If So, Please Contact Mr B. Varley. Harrogate 601436
. He received one response. It was from a lady living in Keats Walk, but they soon established a case of mistaken identity. The butterfly she had freed from her bathroom the day before had undoubtedly been a tortoiseshell.

After swotting up on the subject (cricket was his primary focus outside insurance for forty years), Varley suspected the red admiral's decline was probably down to the conversion of the land into housing. Properties like his own well-kept bungalow had completely covered the proliferation of flower-rich pasture and hay meadow that had existed in this spot thirty years before. Neat, manicured gardens patrolled by the allied forces of lawnmower and weedkiller ensured nettles had largely become a plant of the past. He also suspected – quite rightly – that the butterfly had been squeezed from the other direction too. Throughout the 1960s and '70s, the farms to the north had turned over all available ground to intensive agricultural methods. Hawthorn and blackthorn hedges had been treated, grubbed up and ploughed in to clear the way for new irrigation systems. Areas where stinging nettles, dogwood and nectar-rich wildflowers grew were lost as one field bled into the next and were sprayed with organo-chlorides to produce high-yield, monoculture crops. Varley reasoned that, if thus pressed on two fronts, the red admiral's last hope of refuge had to be in the space in-between.

He visited the edge-land on eight occasions that late summer before conceding defeat. Each immersion returned him home more dejected than the last. Sandwiches untouched. Notebook filled with scribblings. Perspiration thick and stinking. ‘It's appalling down there,' he told his wife Vanessa, heeling off his wellies at the back door. ‘Frightful.' As he stewed in the bath, she gathered up his clothes for the machine and listened at the door. His behaviour was not exactly concerning her, but it was different. A change. She'd worried about this happening when he retired. Gladys, a friend at church, had had the same with her Ian. ‘Humour him,' she'd advised. ‘Let him know you're interested. Otherwise you'll lose him. He'll secrete himself away and then one day, you'll wake up and you won't recognise him any more.'

And so she did. It was there on the dinner table when he came down for his beef stew, the flyer she'd picked up after having her hair set in the salon up the road. Typed across its top was, THE BILTON CONSERVATION GROUP.

‘They're looking for volunteers,' she said. ‘Thought you might be interested.'

‘I certainly am,' he said, reading it twice. ‘Thank you, dear.'

A peck on the cheek too, over the washing-up.
Good old Gladys.

Contrary to what the name might suggest, there was no real conservation plan at first. It was more a feeling among a growing group of Bilton's more proactive (and largely senior) residents that something,
anything
, should be done to address the decline. The marginal land lying broken and burned beyond the back fences was intolerably damaged and increasingly dangerous; it was an eyesore for locals and a headache for the police. But as Varley found out at the regular Wednesday-night meetings, the first hurdle was trying to understand who had responsibility for this liminal space. The speed of development had shifted and blurred the lines of ownership. The edge-land was as undecided and unacknowledged as it was unloved, presenting both a physical and a philosophical challenge to the group.
Where was it? What was it? Who owned it?
Technically the council had claim over much of the neglected area, but it showed little interest in preventing its ongoing destruction. It did, however, do the paperwork. Sections of land were prospected and reclassified, inadvertently recalling what was buried beneath. Descriptors such as ‘common land' appeared on the new maps where commons had existed before, like old wounds leaching blood through new linen. One patch was even designated ‘waste', reverting it a thousand years to when the Domesday Book had written off all Bilton with the same word.

There were other aspects of this new edge-land for the group to contend with: the scruffy farm fields, the lanes, the pylons and the viaduct. Perhaps most significant was the wood that contained the wide sweep of the River Nidd and its litter-clogged tributary, Bilton Beck. Varley offered to do the research and discovered that the wood had been sold off along with the rest of Bilton Hall when the estate was broken up in the years after the Great War, its sole male heir having been killed in 1917. Legally it was in the care of private hands. But, as Varley related to the meeting that week: ‘Clearly they are hands unwilling or unable to take on the restoration work it so desperately requires.'

Exasperated by the process, the locals eventually staged an intervention. Over the long summer of 1982, the Bilton Conservation Group removed more than forty tonnes of rubbish from the edge-land's meadows, woods and waters. Then its volunteers tackled its numerous burnt-out cars and motorbikes. The unlikely-sounding ‘Harrogate Sub Aqua Club' was roped in to attach underwater cables to three saloons dumped in the Nidd. After some gentle badgering the army provided the apprentices and kit to haul them up the gorge's steep sides. Vanessa had come down on that afternoon unannounced, turning up with Gladys and bringing welcome Thermoses of tea, mugs and bags of scones
for the troops
. Watching his wife handing out the cakes on paper plates, all red-faced in the syrupy air, flustered by compliments, her husband had beamed with pride.

‘Any red admirals yet?' she'd asked him, handing over a scone in a napkin then straightening the tie beneath his green tank top with a pat.

‘Oh, I think we have to wait a while yet,' he said. ‘But I'm hopeful now.'

Then, suddenly, catching himself by surprise, he kissed her. Equally surprised, she blushed and smiled. The Red Admiral (
Vanessa atalanta
). A derivation from the eighteenth-century common name ‘Red Admirable'.
That's you, my dear
, Varley thought.
My admirable Vanessa
.

The clearing of edge-land was completed around the middle of August, whereupon the priority became ensuring there could be no future fly-tipping or stolen vehicles dumped and firebombed. ‘The cancer is gone,' said Varley to the group, ‘but we must now turn our attention to preventing its return.' And all harrumphed in agreement. So, by letter and in person, the group lobbied for adequate barricades that could stop motor traffic invading along the old railway, while permitting the open-foot access to those who wanted it. Impressed with the surprising strength of local conviction, not to mention the dramatic and cost-free improvement to its lands, the council duly obliged, installing concrete-footed fencing and a padlocked gate at the junction where the old railway intersects Bilton Lane. The earth stirred. Another inadvertent echo: a gated crossing point constructed where one had stood before.