Life of a Chalkstream. Simon Cooper

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      FROM A DISTANCE water meadows look unkempt and uninviting, but once you get into them they have a beauty all of their own, with a myriad grasses, flowers and stunted shrubbery growing in an apparently irregular pattern. The pattern is dictated by the cattle that graze the wet pasture of the river valley.

      Cattle, sheep and other livestock are the cloven-hoofed landscape gardeners that create the meadows. Without their relentless chewing, battering down the growth, fertilizing the ground and churning up the turf, the fields would soon become a dense, overgrown bramble thicket. Where they graze tight to the sod the sun and light let the buttercups thrive; cowslips spring from the nitrogen-rich manure patches and where their hoofs punch holes in the soil, the rhizomes of the yellow flag iris are split and separated to create fresh growth for the following season.

      And sure enough, as I picked my way across the meadows I spied a diverse collection of cattle grazing in the distance, only their upper bodies visible above the pasture. Livestock are also great path-makers. Their sense of direction may be slightly off-kilter, and they may fail to realize that the shortest route between two points is a straight line, but they are canny and I know that if you deviate from the path they’ve trodden you will soon become stuck in boggy ground. So I followed their zigzag path across the field.

      Reaching the cattle, a motley collection of brown and white Hereford crosses, black Aberdeen Angus and the pale, long-limbed, lean continental types, I paused to consult the map. The cattle paid me little interest, raising their heads now and then to check me out, but never pausing as they masticated their way through their daily mass of roughage. I’m told that meadow-grazed beef is the sweetest, most tender meat of all but it seemed unfair to share this news with them.

      To my right the summer brown of the grassland gave way to a vivid green ribbon, the best indication yet that the river was close by. The dry cattle path petered out, giving way to wet ground poached by a thousand hoofs where the cattle had grazed right up to, and under, a barbed-wire fence. In fact the grass immediately under and just the other side of the fence had been grazed as tightly as a bowling green; proof that – for cattle at least – the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.

      Picking the stoutest fence post, I climbed onto the top strand and from this vantage point caught my first view of a sparkling river. I was still separated from the river itself by 30 yards of rushes and as I leapt to the ground the other side I sent up two silent prayers of thanks. First, that I had had the foresight to put on waders – those 30 yards were likely to be slimy, smelly and difficult to negotiate. Second, that the river was fenced, СКАЧАТЬ