The lane was single track with high banks and no verge worth the name, and I was on it at about eight on an August evening with the light going orange. The first tractor and grain trailer came round the bend at a speed that made complete sense for him and none at all for me. I got into the hedge. Then another one, four minutes later. Then the first one again, empty, going the other way.
I stood in that hedge for the best part of twenty minutes doing the sums. Combine cutting, two trailers shuttling, a dry evening after a wet week, and me in the middle of a production line wearing a green jacket. Nobody swore at me. One driver lifted two fingers off the wheel, which in that part of the world means everything from hello to please go home. I went home.
The season has a shape and I was ignoring it
For my first year of walking farm country I treated the land as a fixed thing that happened to have crops on it. It is not fixed. It runs on a calendar, and the calendar has weeks in it where the whole operation goes to sixteen hour days and everything else has to get out of the way.
Roughly, and it shifts by region and by weather: lambing and calving in late winter and spring, silage cuts through late spring and early summer, hay when the weather allows, cereal harvest in high summer through into early autumn, then straw carting, muck spreading, ploughing and drilling behind it. Add spraying at various points and hedge cutting once the season allows.
I do not need to know the agronomy. I only need to know that certain weeks are pressure weeks, and that during them the lanes carry machinery that is wider than the lane, driven by somebody who has been going since five.
Reading the signs a few days ahead
You can see it coming if you look. A field of wheat goes from green to gold to that dull matte biscuit colour, and the heads start to nod. Once the crop looks like that, the combine is days away, not weeks. Grass that has been shut up for silage gets tall, uniform and unwalked, with no stock in it and the gate tied. Chopped verges and a fresh scrape of mud at a field entrance mean machines have been in and out.
The other tell is the yard. Trailers washed and lined up, a combine out of the shed with its header off on a trolley, extra fuel bowser parked. If I walk past a yard that looks like that on a Sunday, I know what the following week is.
So I move my routes. Not out of the countryside, just off the arteries. Which brings me to the part I actually got wrong.
Lanes are not paths, they are roads
The mistake in that August hedge was not walking during harvest. It was walking a narrow farm lane during harvest at the exact hour when the day’s cut is being carted in.
Those lanes feel like footpaths because they are quiet ninety percent of the time. They are not. They are working roads, and a tractor with a loaded trailer behind it cannot stop the way a car can, cannot pull over where there is no verge, and cannot see a walker in the shadow of a hedge on a low sun evening. The load on the back is heavy enough that a hard stop on a downhill is a real problem for the driver.
Now, in the busy weeks, I use the field paths, the ridge routes and the bridleways, and I keep the narrow lanes for winter mornings when nothing is moving. If I must use a lane, I walk facing the traffic where I can see round the bend, I go early, and I wear something that is not the colour of a hedge. Bright is not a fashion decision at half seven on an August evening.
Standing still is the polite thing
When a machine does come, the useful thing is to be predictable. I get right in, stop, and stand still where the driver can see me. I do not keep walking toward him hoping we both squeeze past, because that makes him guess.
Getting into a gateway is better than pressing into a hedge, because it is wider and because a driver can see the whole of you. If I have the dog, it comes in short and sits. And I wait until the machine is properly past before I move, because there is often a trailer behind that swings wider than you expect on a bend, and there is very often a second machine forty seconds behind the first.
A raised hand as they pass costs nothing. I have had entire relationships with farms built on nothing more than consistently getting out of the way and waving.
Crops are not surfaces
The other harvest lesson was about the field itself. In my first summer I walked the edge of a wheat field on the crop side of the tramline because the margin was wet, and I flattened a strip of standing wheat with my shoulders and pack. Flattened wheat does not stand back up. The combine either misses it or picks up dirt with it.
A path across a cropped field will usually be reinstated as a bare strip through the crop, and if it is, that strip is where I walk even if it is muddy. If the strip has grown over, I go around the headland at the field edge rather than pushing through the middle. Walking the tramlines, the wheel ruts the sprayer leaves, is not the same as walking the path and I have been asked not to do it.
Standing hay and silage grass is the same principle. It looks like a lawn and it is a crop, and a line of footprints through it is a line of grass that got walked flat before it got cut.
What I gained by getting out of the way
I expected the seasonal thing to feel like a restriction. It has done the opposite. Knowing that the second half of August is going to be loud and busy means I plan the woods and the high ground for those weeks, and I save the low lanes for October when the drills are out and the light is long and low and there is nobody about.
It also changed how the farms treat me. The man who lifted two fingers off the wheel that evening now stops and talks, and last summer told me which of his fields would be cut that week so I could work around it. I did not earn that by knowing anything about farming. I earned it by not being in the lane at eight in the evening in August a second time.