On a Sunday in the early part of spring 2016, a couple of weeks after I’d first arranged the trail cam near the badger sett in the garden, I skipped down the lawn to retrieve the memory card from it. The sun was peeking over a row of beeches like a pastoral equivalent of the classic graffiti of Kilroy and his wall, and the owls of the valley had just handed the avian noise baton over to the Dawn Chorus. This morning the band, which was rapidly becoming one of my all-time favourite British ones, right up there with Led Zeppelin, Pentangle and the Stones, was working on a fuller sound: lots of new session players were chipping in and trying out new ideas, including a pheasant, the ensemble’s answer to a notoriously unreliable bagpipe player who stumbles in, still drunk from the night before, blows a couple of off-kilter notes, then leaves. Still in my pyjamas, I walked down to the river, inhaling overpowering wild-garlic stench, and immediately saw a kingfisher zipping along above the surface, fish in beak. As I walked back along the lane, a small white van pulled up beside me and its driver wound down his window. ‘Bloody hell, the things you see around here in the morning!’ said the driver. ‘I thought you were an escaped convict from Dartmoor prison, dressed like that.’ It was Ian, my plumber. Ian is a Morning Person too, and it was his trail cam that I had borrowed to film the badgers.
‘Any luck over the last couple of days?’ he asked.
‘Neh,’ I said. ‘Got a magpie yesterday. At least it was the right colour scheme.’
In a fortnight of striving to catch the badgers on film I’d so far managed to get one good clear eleven-second video of one scuffling around and another of a tail – thick and almost certainly badger-owned – wafting about in the corner of the frame. I’d also managed to record six other moving things that were manifestly not badgers: that magpie, two field mice, my left leg, a fox and my industrious female cat Roscoe returning from a hunting expedition with a mole dangling from her mouth. The mole, although assuredly deceased, wobbled slightly from side to side, so if you counted it as a moving thing too, that made seven in total. I said, ‘Good morning, Mr Magpie, and how’s your wife?’ to the magpie. I always say, ‘Good morning, Mr Magpie, and how’s your wife?’ to solitary magpies, as popular superstition dictates that I must, for good luck, but doing so can become very tiring as there are a lot of magpies where I live and very few of them are in steady relationships.
I went inside and checked the results of last night’s surveillance: no badgers. I got the impression that they had become wise to the trail cam. All my latest footage had turned up was another mouse, and even she had appeared a bit self-conscious. I’d woken in the night, looked down from my bedroom window and seen one of the badgers skittering across in front of the doorstep in what could easily be perceived as a cocky dance, yet, even though I’d scattered peanuts and dry cat food in the perfect place and aimed the trail cam directly down the line of their diagonal path . . . nothing.
Looking at that diagonal path – more multispecies A-road than badger byway – was instructive. It was a reminder that most of the paths in the British countryside were not planned by people in suits with clipboards and agendas; they were made organically, by silent, casual committee: a mixture of animals and humans deciding on the best route to suit their needs and forging defiantly ahead. Desire lines is what they call them in the transportation planning industry. I recently spoke to a woman from Maryland, on the east coast of the United States, who’d never visited rural Britain and was astounded to learn that I could walk in the countryside and get up close to cows and sheep that did not belong to me. Coming from a place where most of the greenery and all of the arable land is sectioned off from walkers, she found it an entirely alien concept. It’s conversations like this that make you realise how privileged we are in the UK to have the green lanes, bridleways and footpaths that we do, allowing us to clamber over stiles nibbled by horses into farmyards filled with inquisitive guineafowl or wild meadows where we might surprise a pheasant and it might surprise us back with a loud ch-kooick as it explodes from the grass. Later during the morning on which my conversation with Ian the plumber had taken place I set off on foot down to the river and in what seemed like no time at all was cuddling a large, docile ewe, a sheep I’d taken for a troublemaker the first time I’d seen her, waiting for me on the path above the Dart, but who it turned out just wanted to say hello and find out whether I needed anything. I told the sheep that she was the best sheep I’d ever met, then immediately felt bad because it was something I’d told lots of other sheep, even though this time I genuinely meant it.
I believe it is my duty to get to know my immediate natural world thoroughly, to not be complacent about it, as it’s the least I can do as a gesture of thanks to it for being kind enough to allow me to live within it. My need to explore my home county on foot – sometimes as much as sixty miles a week of it – also comes as a natural by-product of being one of those odd people who are excited by the design of an old kissing gate, a small pool in a depression at the top of a tor or the blotched patterns lichen makes on a boulder in a spinney. Not everyone will impulsively go ‘Ooh’ upon seeing moss and navelwort laying siege to an old wall – they will need some sort of violent modern stimulus to be prompted to lose control in an equivalently undignified way, and I accept that totally – but I am someone who does. I think my time on local footpaths, and in various places just off them, is also a reaction to something I’m told repeatedly about the way I should live, almost every time I turn on any electronic device with a screen. The whole world is there on the screen, for the taking, and a hive of demanding voices encourages us to absorb as much of it as possible, and keep up with it frantically, as it moves on, and it is always moving on, more swiftly and forgetfully than ever. If you’re someone with a thirst for knowledge, you can very easily get sucked into the excitement of this, before you realise it’s a flawed, impossible pursuit, and it’s not making people, en masse, any more knowledgeable. What it instead often leads to is a brand of knowledge that’s thousands of miles wide and half a centimetre deep: a pond-skating mentality of misleading screenshots and thinly gleaned opinions and out-of-context sound bites and people reading hastily between the lines while forgetting the vital thing you also need to do when practising that skill is to read the lines themselves. The idea of getting to know an area of limited size extremely well works as an antidote to this, and even in a very small area there is always more to know. You can reduce your space right down – to one hedgerow or wall or flooded out-of-use tin mine – and there will never be enough time to know it all.
It could be argued that I have a particularly fertile area in which to do my local investigations, but I’ve done it in another very different place too: Norfolk. And when revisiting the places in the East Midlands where I grew up – rural areas, but localities defined not by hills and rivers and water lanes and creeks but by parks and chip shops and factories and railway cuttings – I’ve been drawn to do the same, to start looking behind the obvious in a way that never would have occurred to me in the distant past: at the thirty-mile view from the hill above your aunt’s old semi and the haunting tower at its hazy edge, at the lovingly designed pattress plates on an abandoned