ONE OF THE gardens I work in has a vast flower meadow, and every year I cut this down with a scythe. I use a scythe because it is quiet and doesn’t pollute, but mainly because the wildlife has a chance to escape. Brush cutters and strimmers are devastating for wildlife: they slaughter everything in their path. Frogs, toads and hedgehogs are slashed; their flesh is blended into paste. I’ve done it, and been splashed with blood. Deeply upset at this needless slaughter, I researched alternative ways of cutting down a meadow, and found that I could either invest thousands of pounds in another machine, or I could learn how to use and look after a scythe. I chose the scythe.
The stones in molehills in the meadow take chips out of my scythe blade, which begins every season as sharp as the razor in my bathroom cabinet, but I tolerate them. Every few strokes I stop and hone the carbon steel blade again with a smooth whetstone. At the end of the season I tap out the chipped edge using a peening hammer and anvil, to create a new edge which, like a razor blade, is a single crystal thick.
Scything is a physically hard job that requires plenty of rest breaks, especially as I get older, and so it’s a pleasure to stop and put the stone to the blade: it makes a lovely ringing sound when the stone hits the steel, and then a schwee sound as it slides along the edge from base to tip, three times usually, alternating from one side of the blade to the other. Then the stone plops back into the water-filled tin holder hanging on my belt and I carry on scything, or just watch the birds for a moment while I get my breath back. Scything too creates a pleasing sound, a long swishh with each stroke. It has a good rhythm: swinging from the waist, cutting from the right to the left with relaxed arms outstretched, and striding slowly forward step by step, cutting a swathe up to eight feet wide, and leaving a neat windrow on my left as the stalks fall off the three-foot-long blade. Swishh, step, swishh, step, swishh. Without my even trying, it all ends up co-ordinated with my breathing. In as I swing back and step, out as I swing for the cut. Long and slow. It used to take me two full summer days to cut down the meadow: now I’m older and it takes me more than three. Next year I may no longer be able to do it at all.
Ahead of me I can often see the small creatures running, shuffling and hopping to escape into the long grass ahead. There’s no vicious two-stroke motor screaming and making smoke, so I can hear the hedgehogs rustling and gently move them out of the way. The toads and frogs hop and crawl in front of me and I slow down, or half a dozen field mice rush along and dive into their burrows.
It is a human process, and the tools are simple and brown and honest. I have grown old with these tools: they are handmade of wood, steel and stone, and they have grown old with me and have moulded to my hand. I have a relationship with tools like this: I feel that all the things in the world that I touch are touching me back.
A reaper with a scythe traditionally leaves the last sheaf of grain standing in the middle for the spirit of the crop, ‘John Barleycorn’, to hide. Then it is bundled and tied and cut with a knife or sickle and taken indoors. I continue this tradition, and bring the bunch of drying wild flowers home.
The meadow is a semi-wild place by a small lake, and we are happy for the moles to live there. They are a part of the ecosystem which includes foxes, field- and woodmice, hedgehogs and millions of flying creatures, including dragonflies, lacewings, hoverflies, pheasants, owls, bats and hawks. The numbers of moles are controlled naturally by the hawks, owls and foxes. Everything here is part of the food chain.
Scything the meadow is done twice a year. In the mid-spring when the grass is growing I cut the new grass back so that the slower-growing wild flowers can come through. Then in late summer, when the flowers have been and gone and shed their seed and the stalks are dry, I cut them down and leave them in windrows on the ground until the sun has dried them and the final seeds have fallen. Most native wild flowers grow best in poor soil, and if I left the stalks they would rot and increase the soil fertility, so I rake them away in warm, dry weather with a massive wooden hay rake three feet wide and carry them to the compost heap: another day’s work.
AFTER THE AUTUMN equinox in September, the days become shorter and my telephone starts to ring. People have discovered molehills breaking up the perfection of their lawns and want them to be gone – they make the place untidy. The word ‘lawn’ comes from the old Welsh word ‘Llan’, meaning pasture or field. The name of my own village of Llandaff in Wales means ‘the field by the river Taff’. This was the language of this island before the Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived.
My first moles were caught in an immense and rolling country garden in South Wales that I look after, where I am the gardener, but later on I started catching moles in other gardens, too, as it brought me an income in the winter when otherwise I would have none.
In my early days as a gardener I was concerned that the few molecatchers I had come across showed little sensitivity, and that creatures were suffering. Looking back, of course, I have no idea what they felt. I judged them to be brutal men, but I am no different, not any more: the hammer shapes the hand, and I am moulded by the life I chose.
I was aware that the moles were going to be curbed by somebody. I wondered if there were ways other than killing them. I knew that somebody would be called on to do it, and I wondered if that person could be me. So I set about researching and studying the most efficient and humane ways of dealing with moles. I like to learn new skills, especially simple ones that allow me to have a relationship with natural materials, and simple hand tools. I read about the life cycles and habits of moles in books, on websites and in molecatchers’ advertising leaflets. I read again and again that the recommended and most humane method of controlling moles was to kill them in traps, and although I looked at all the other options it kept coming back. To get rid of them, you have to kill them.
An old farmer that I met who had been catching moles since he was a child taught me something of what he knew. Leaning on a rickety wooden four-bar fence, wearing his battered hat, he told me how to catch a live mole by creeping along in bare feet while the molehill was moving, and stopping when the mole stopped, and then at the last moment, to pounce on it with a spade and flick it into the air. I have never even tried to do this – I move too slowly. By the time I’ve got to a molehill its maker has usually finished what he was doing and moved on, and my life is too short for me to hurry.
The farmer said that moles like to build permanent tunnels along fence lines, and pointed with one of his massive hands to one such tunnel. This, he told me, had been there since he was a boy, and had been inhabited by generations of moles, one after the other, just as the traditional techniques used to catch them have been handed down through the generations of molecatchers for hundreds of years, one after the other. Farmers are often solitary people, and tend to speak from a distance for a while. The countryside is big, and they are not used to standing close to each other, but once they have started to feel comfortable they like to talk. I usually have a good relationship with them, because I’ve learned that they have a real and visceral love for the land that they are tied to.
I sat and walked on hillsides and watched the molehills and thought about them, imagined the moles’ lives and what they were doing down there. I put my hands into molehills to see what was in them. I tried to work out what kind of pattern the hills made on the surface, and how that might relate to what was going on underground. I wondered why they were on riverbanks and encircled trees, and why they were never in the middle of the playing fields, but were always around the edges.
I wanted to become the best and most humane molecatcher I could, so I bought many varieties of traps. I studied their construction and paid attention to how fast and efficient they were; I tested them by setting them and triggering them with a stick. Some of them were highly technical and would kill a mole quickly, and some simple and