It was raining hard enough that the lane had turned into a stream and I had water running off the peak of my hood in a steady line. In the gateway at the top there was a man on his knees in the mud with his arms in a hole, working on a water pipe, in the rain, on a Saturday. He had a spade, a bag of fittings and a soaked coat. I said morning. He said morning. I walked on with a flask of coffee in my pack toward a view I was looking forward to.
That contrast sat with me for the rest of the walk and it has sat with me since. I was out there because it was a nice thing to do on a Saturday. He was out there because if he was not, three fields of stock would have no water by evening.
The view is a workplace
The thing I find easy to forget is that everything I like looking at is somebody’s output. The hedge line is a hedge somebody has to cut. The green of a spring field is a crop with an input cost. The stone wall is a structure that has to be rebuilt after every hard winter. The gate I lean on to take a photograph is a piece of equipment.
None of this is a reason to feel guilty about enjoying it. But it does change the way I move through it. I stopped thinking of a farm as a landscape with a path through it and started thinking of it as premises that I have been allowed to cross.
The word that helps me is tolerated. Not in a bitter sense. Rights of way are real and I use them without apology. But the smooth version, the one where I am not a nuisance, exists because thousands of individual people keep choosing not to make it difficult, and that is a decision that gets renewed or withdrawn based on how walkers behave.
Margins I did not understand
I have no romantic idea about farming and I do not want to pretend I understand the economics from the outside. But a few things have come up at enough gates that I take them as real.
The income is lumpy and weather dependent. A bad week at the wrong moment can undo a season. A lot of the work is done by a very small number of people, often one family, sometimes one person plus whoever can be got in at busy times. And the machinery costs are the sort of numbers that make you go quiet.
Which reframes what an open gate is. It is not an untidy detail. It is a vet bill, a dead animal, an insurance claim, or two hours of a day that had no spare hours in it. I used to think of my mistakes out there as etiquette failures. They are closer to small unpaid invoices handed to somebody else.
What I have stopped doing
I stopped photographing people at work without asking. A man on a quad with a dog is a fantastic photograph and he is also at his job, and nobody at their job wants to appear in a stranger’s camera roll. If I want the shot I ask, and about half the time I get a yes and a short conversation.
I stopped treating yards as scenery. A yard is the equivalent of somebody’s office and back garden at once. I walk through it if the path goes through it, I keep to the line, I do not wander to look at machinery, and I say hello to anybody in it.
I stopped offering opinions about how the place is run. I have watched a walker tell a farmer that his hedges would be better cut later in the year. He may even have been right. He knew nothing about that farm, that contractor’s schedule or that man’s year, and he had been on the property for eleven minutes.
And what I have started doing
I buy things. Eggs from the box at the end of the lane with the honesty tin, potatoes from the trailer, meat from the farm shop when I am driving past anyway. It is a small amount of money and it makes me somebody who spends in the place I walk in rather than somebody who only takes photographs of it.
I report what I see. Sheep on its back, animal caught in wire, gate off its hinge, tree down across a lane, a stray dog. Twice I have been thanked in a way that made it clear it actually mattered.
I take my rubbish out and I pick up other people’s when it is the sort that gets into silage. A drink can chopped into a bale is genuinely dangerous to an animal, and I learned that at a gate rather than from a sign.
The exchange, honestly stated
Here is how I think the deal actually runs. I get free access to a landscape I did not build, maintain or pay for, and it is the best part of most of my weeks. In exchange I am asked to close gates, control a dog, stay on the line, avoid crops, and not be in the way during the weeks when the pressure is on.
That is an extraordinarily good bargain and it takes about ten seconds of attention per field. When I put it in those terms, the times I have got it wrong look less like small slips and more like a failure to pay a very cheap bill.
The man in the gateway
I went past that gateway again a few weeks later on a dry day. The hole was filled in and there was a new stopcock cover sitting slightly proud of the mud, and the trough in the field beyond was full. Nobody would ever notice it. It is not in any photograph I have taken of that valley.
The view I go there for sits on top of about four hundred of those invisible repairs, done by people I mostly do not know, in weather I would not choose to be out in. Walking past somebody’s living is a privilege with a very small maintenance cost attached, and I would rather pay it than be the reason it gets harder for the next person up the lane.