Meadows make livestock

THIS is a story of April flowers. A field we rent is in a wood, all by itself. It is a place at once curious and lovely. When you think ‘field’, you think of England’s familiar open patchwork landscape, where fields adjoin each other, separated by hedge or stock fence. But England’s first fields were hacked from the wildwood by the Stone Agers wherever was easy. Such as a pre-existing glade. Agriculture was not a continuous creeping frontier, but done here and there, in bits and pieces. Our first farmland was inside woodland. Like Mr Geary’s field.

‘Straggles of cuckoo-