The Field by the River

By Ken Burnett

'Surprises, entertains and enchants … the modern successor to Gilbert White and Henry David Thoreau.’ Indra Sinha, author of Animal’s People, short-listed for the 2007 Man Booker prize

‘A simple walk in the woods becomes a year-long adventure packed with mysteries, insights and wonder, often all on the same page. Ken's 'Field' will make you happy and, possibly, consider investing in rugged new footwear.’ Emma Thompson, Oscar-winning actress and screenwriter

Following a chance encounter with a kingfisher whilst walking his dogs in the overgrown field adjoining his Breton home, Ken Burnett is struck by the realisation that despite having lived in a quaint French hamlet for the past thirteen years, encircled by farmland, he knows next to nothing about his surroundings. He resolves to examine nature’s little wonders rather more closely, with surprising and delightfully funny results.

Accompanied by his three trusty dogs, and aided by wife Marie and a full complement of endearingly eccentric neighbours, Ken conducts a twelve-month observation of his field, which is, upon further inspection, rich with wonder. From foxes to wild flowers, magical mushrooms to mothering moorhens, Ken discovers that his unassuming patch of land is as bursting with life as any major city.

The Field By The River is a thought-provoking and enchanting work; a joyous, charming celebration of the fragile, interconnected ecosystem that can be found if we only take the time to part the leaves, look under the mosses or overturn a stone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Feb 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781909396128

Book preview

Introduction

Prepare to enter the field by the river

From certain perspectives it’s not much, this field. Viewed from a satellite out in space it would barely register. It doesn’t appear on any but a few maps of the area and looks unappealing on those where it does. In the totality of the French landscape it is a mere speck, not significant in any way. There are thousands of other fields like it. Maybe millions.

At first glance – usually all it gets – it’s just an ordinary, apparently empty field like any other among all the empty, or near empty, fields around here and across France and the rest of the world. Prone to flooding where it’s flat, and unproductively hilly and overgrown everywhere else, a farmer would dismiss it out of hand. You may think it undeniably picturesque, even pretty, as you drive past, but not worth stopping for more than a toilet break, or perhaps a picnic lunch if you can find a way to get in. ‘Thank God for fields,’ you might silently proclaim if you were particularly sensitive, or desperately in need of the loo, or feeling more than usually generous and observant as you drive by. But you miss a lot when you pass a field like this in casual haste because, as you will see, despite contrary appearances this field is far from empty, far from ordinary.

What kind of a story is this?

It’s perhaps easier to say what it’s not. It’s not a nature story, although nature is everywhere throughout it. It’s not really about the countryside, that’s just where it’s set, though it is, in a way, a countryside companion. It’s not about rural living, farming or hunting, though country folk, farmers and hunters all appear in it. It’s not (much) about expatriates living in France and it isn’t a lifestyle guide, though it does feature thousands, even millions, of real lives. It’s not a voyage of discovery because although I‘ve made lots of discoveries in and around the field, my voyages here have been tiny and most of my discoveries have already been made, often and by others, long before me. It’s not a story of exploration, because throughout the year in question I’ve been lucky enough, most of the time, to stay at home. And while at times I’ve strayed into new, unknown territories, such explorations as there have been were more about exploring myself than anything.

It is though, I hope, a tale laced with adventure, a narrative chock-full of surprises. It aspires to do nothing more than to delight, entertain and inform you. For surely those three count among the most useful and valuable of all things and, hopefully, the most enjoyable. For more than a decade the field by the river has been a constant source of new experiences, insights, enchantments and delights for me, so I hope that through this book I can share these delights with you without, it has to be said, actually inviting you round for tea. It’s not just you, of course; I hope also to share this field with as many other people as I possibly can, even if your and their tastes and interests are wildly different from mine.

But there are already quite enough sober and serious writings on most of the themes covered in this story. So most of the time I’ve taken a more oblique, even at times irreverent and tongue-in-cheek, stance. Serious and profound though my love of this field is, I wouldn’t want anyone to experience and absorb its delights with too straight a face, for that would surely diminish the enjoyment and defeat the point.

The art of really seeing

On its journey this observation of what goes on in one large(ish) field asks and seeks to answer many questions, some significant, some trivial, hopefully all intriguing; Who lives here, and why? What do they do with their time and what does that have to do with the rest of us? Why do frogs and toads migrate when newts and salamanders don’t? Are the birds we see territorial residents or passing visitors? Where do robins go in summertime? How do trees work? Are ants clever, or just pre-programmed? What do ducks and herons get up to when they think they’re not being watched? What are moles, moths and mushrooms all about? What are we looking at when we gaze up at the stars? What changes might be coming to fields like these and how will those who live here adapt? And what else might we find in our forest if we choose the best time to lift and look under the mosses, part the leaves and overturn some stones?

It pays to be observant here. Most of the other creatures that live in and around this field and its neighbouring hamlet, Kerkelven, from which it takes its name, are only too aware of and watchful of me whenever I am about. Humans may be the top species of all that’s yet been found in nature (there may of course be superior beings clever enough to have remained hidden) but our apparent superiority inclines us at times to be complacent, even short-sighted. Too often we of the people species don’t really look at what’s in front of or around us. So we can too easily overlook the really interesting stuff that is right before our eyes.

That a place of such interest and enjoyment should also be streaked with blood, infused with history, alive with intrigue, complicit in dastardly cover-ups, riddled with secrets and veiled in several unsolved mysteries will not come as much surprise to you, once you have got to know it better.

Both field and forest are just bursting with life. Apart from the human inhabitants countless thousands of other creatures live here, all dependent on a complex, fragile, interconnected ecosystem to survive and thrive. This is no exaggeration or colourful embroidery; the range of residents is extraordinary. Thieves live here, and murderers, fools, dimwits, scolds, misers, noisy and silent types, crawlers, slitherers, scamperers, gliders and flappers, itchers and biters, dribblers and spitters, sociable as well as solitary beings, shy and nervous sorts, geniuses alongside dolts, high achievers and failures, the industrious alongside the lazy, the workers with the wasters, the passive cohabiting with the hyperactive, the meek mingling with the mild, the friendly and the fiercely aggressive all bundled in together … They and more all live here together in this field in a delicate, shifting balance, in what for the most part passes for harmony but is often anything but.

This land has been here for centuries, since time began. There are parts of the woodland now where the foliage is so thick even the wildlife can’t easily get access, so no human foot has trod there for generations, or longer. What lies hidden there? Who lives there and how do they spend their time?

As one who walks across and around it almost every day the field and the forest by the river are sources of constant mystery and unanswered questions and … well … equally, who gives a poop? Sometimes the field is just so gorgeous, natural and uncomplicated that it seems plain stupid to be worrying about anything beyond simply revelling in it. After all, life is too short to worry for long. My constant companions as I tour the field, our three dogs Max, Syrus and Mortimer, don’t ever ask such questions, for they would simply never occur to them. I don’t imagine any of the other creatures who share the field, who live in the woods, grass and river, would ever bother with such things either, even if they could think of them. To the woodpeckers, owls or herons who’ve made their homes here, or the buzzards, such concerns don’t register. Just conceivably a fox might pause to ponder upon it on a particularly bad hunt one night, or a jumpy deer between flights. But the moorhens? Or the ducks? Naaah.

The idea of recording what goes on in this field came to me quite suddenly one day after a surprise encounter with a kingfisher. I bumped into the startled bird while enjoying my daily (well, thrice daily) constitutional, with the dogs tagging along as usual.

Even before I saw him he took off like an arrow from the riverbank, a streak of blue following the course of the river about a metre above its shimmering surface. Then he was gone, almost before I’d realised what I’d seen.

I thought, on meeting that glorious kingfisher, that I would like to share the privilege of such a sight with as many other people as possible. Our encounter lasted no more than six short seconds but I realised then, beyond doubt, that the brief glimpse of perfection that I’d been lucky enough to catch contained all that I knew about this shy, mysterious creature. I was barely aware of the tip of what I should know about such a strikingly beautiful thing.

And I share this place with it!

So I started to wonder why that should be. It dawned on me that, despite living here a full thirteen years, there were hundreds of wonders in my field that I bumped into on a regular basis, yet I knew next to nothing about most of them.

So, a project started to unfold, and quickly grew. You’re reading the results of it now. It wasn’t an original idea, of course. The seventeenth-century so-called father of modern ecology, the Reverend Gilbert White, had more or less the same idea 250 years before me – or a version of it, at least, which he immortalised in his classic Natural History of Selbourne. I did have the idea independently, though, some months before I came across Gilbert in the course of trying to learn a bit more about what goes on in this field.

On glimpsing the kingfisher – and you have to be really quick, believe me – I was stunned. It stopped me where I stood not just because this tiny bird is so beautiful, so delicate, so mysterious, so shy, but because its natural, instinctive action when it saw me was to flee in terror. As soon as it had realised my existence the kingfisher had upped and flown off, so quickly it was little more than a blur.

This upset me, as I’m sure you’ll understand.

The encounter took me back to my very first visit to Kerkelven many years earlier, when with family in tow I came to look at a house that we might buy in the middle of tranquil rural Brittany, in the northwest corner of France.

It was about noon on a very hot, high-summer day. I’d already more or less decided that the near ruin we’d just looked over wasn’t at all suitable (too much work, endlessly expensive, right next to a pig farm, too big, etc.) when, dragging my two small children reluctantly in my wake, I decided to take a look around down by the nearby river. Being bigger and better equipped than sons Joe and Charlie for wading through long grass, I was comfortably in the lead as I mounted the overgrown riverbank and … stopped dead in my tracks. I stood motionless, transfixed, with my flapping hand reaching behind me to silence the kids as one after the other they piled noisily into me. But the object of my fixation, a male otter standing fully upright on his hind legs in mid-river, just stayed motionless where he was, looking inquisitively but fearlessly at me. It was the first time I’d ever seen an otter in the wild and I’ve only seen them once since, playing and swimming under the big bridge downstream. I think it was the otter’s first experience of its kind too, but I doubt if he treasures the moment as I do.

I’ve never forgotten the magic of that encounter. I think it played a major part in the backtracking I was to do later, as we reversed our first decision on the house.

So, I’ve mentioned a couple of the surprising creatures with whom I share this field. There are many others. Like the kingfisher and the otter, they’re also mostly very shy and quite hard even to see, far less to get to know.

The experience with the kingfisher woke in me the realisation that, though I’d made my home in the countryside some years before, I really didn’t know it well at all. I saw that, quite apart from integrating successfully (well, partially at least) with the local human community, there was a whole natural community on my doorstep that I’d barely encountered, far less learned to understand and appreciate. So, during the year covered by this project, I‘ve set out by various means to change that. It has been an amazing, illuminating, delightful experience.

There are other delights here too, in the abundance of produce that comes along each year in this field – the annual harvest of apples and pears, the chestnuts, hazelnuts and the extraordinary variety of mushrooms that grow spontaneously here. I might have a hard time living off this land, at least at first, but many other species both survive and thrive here, the field catering for their every need.

I’ve learned a lot in this field, more perhaps in the last year than in the preceding thirteen. My view of it is quite different now. I confess there was a time, not very long ago, when I was so wrapped up in myself and what I was doing that I wouldn’t have noticed half of the things that I now see in this field, that have become so important to me. When, if I’d seen a hoopoe at Kerkelven, it probably wouldn’t have registered. When, if I’d stumbled upon a nettle mite, I’d have viewed it just as one more bug in my bug-infested field. When I’d have missed the snake hiding in my wall, when I’d have overlooked the signs I now see that show something significant happened in the field overnight. I would have missed a lot back then because I wasn’t in tune with this field, so even if I’d looked as hard as I could, I wouldn’t have been able to see much.

It is of course supreme arrogance for me to refer to this field as mine in any way more proprietarily than I might say this town is mine, or this football team is mine. When they’re not fleeing from me in fear most of the creatures that live here pay scant regard to me. The things that go on here, both exciting and routine, would happen with or without me in total indifference. My presence is all but incidental. It may even be detrimental. I think about that a lot, as I ponder upon my field.

But ten years after we bought the house I did indeed buy this field, and paid money for it. It is still the biggest thing I possess. In truth I paid probably quite a lot more for it than it’s worth, at least in open-market terms. But I rate it the best value of anything I have ever bought, by far.

I take great pride in telling visitors such as hunters, fishermen, campers and the like that ‘je suis propriétaire ici’. Yet it seems amazing to me that one human being is stupid enough to imagine he owns something as big and full of life as this and feels he really has some sense of control over it … that’s plain daft, bordering on offensive. But what I do have is the privilege of living by it. Even though with that comes some measure of responsibility for its upkeep and protection. Again, how silly is this? The field has got on just fine for centuries without any protection from me or my kind. Rather than upkeep it we’re much more likely to destroy it.

That’s why I’d like to share some of the beauties and wonders of the field with you now. I want to show you the life, the colours, the vibrancy and the excitement that’s everywhere in this brilliant field. I think these things specially well worth sharing for I fear they may not be with us for long.

Then, there’s the unknown

Though I’ve already learned a lot from this project, I still have much more to learn about the field and its occupants. For one thing, there are creatures here that I can’t identify, even with the help of all the field guides and nature books that over the past year I’ve surrounded myself with as part of my bid to become more familiar with the field and everything in it. And things turn up here that frankly no guidebook could ever have prepared me for, such as locusts, praying mantis and, once, five pure white young bulls. So much of what I think or might assume that I know about this place is not quite what it seems. Kerkelven is a good cure for the curse of assumptions, a good training ground for the open mind. It’s taught me to always expect the unexpected.

The valley of the Sarre

The field is in deep country. It could be part of the set for Emmerdale or The Archers, from Jean de Florette, or le Grand Meaulnes (not quite the French equivalent of these two English soaps, but near enough). Our side of the river is pristine, there’s no construction of any kind anywhere in sight. On the far bank, however, you’ll see four houses studding the valley side that slopes steeply down from the Guern/St Barthélémy road. Viewed from this road, which passes directly in front of them, these houses are mere cottages but because they’ve been built into the slope they’re surprisingly large when seen from the river view, their backside. Tall fir trees form the wood to the right of the cottages, above the meadowland where our far-bank neighbour, farmer le Beller, grazes his herd of fine Friesian cows.

I love meeting his cows as I stroll by the river. They are so placid and relaxed, but always take a lively interest in me, often rushing up to greet me and trotting along their side of the river to accompany me for as long as they can, as I pass by, huffing and puffing and blowing hot steam into the morning air (them, not me) while giving me queer looks with their big cow eyes.

A simple low bridge carrying the road from Quistinic to Plouay across the river forms our boundary, signalling the furthest point of our stretch of the valley. A mere two kilometres further downstream our little river joins the deep, wide river le Blavet, which flows from the centre of Brittany all the way to its estuary near the port of Lorient, about fifty kilometres from us.

Our river is la Sarre. It meanders from its source somewhere in the hinterland, taking a winding, convoluted path to join the Blavet, just down the road from us. The Sarre’s valley is low and fertile with good farming land along its entire length. Tall trees densely line its route, crowding together to get the best place, at times falling over each other in an endless jostling for position. Every so often someone has to trawl these tree-crowded banks and cull the most untidy. A painful necessity, but for the greater, common good.

Many beasts of the field and fowls of the air choose to have their homes by the river, living here come rain or shine, wind, heat or cold. Often the riverbank is quiet and can seem deserted. At times, though, particularly in summer, it’s a hive of industry as busy as the busiest thoroughfare in the world. Then it reminds me of those scenes from innumerable sci-fi films with three-dimensional traffic from all corners of the galaxy coming and going up, down and sideways in profusion and seeming abandon but each on a determined mission to somewhere. It’s an insect traffic cop’s nightmare, but the traffic here flows pretty smoothly, all the same.

So, what kind of a field and forest is this?

Superficially, the field by the river is easily described. You’ll find our field at minus 3.12 degrees longitude, 47.98 degrees latitude. Its surface area is 1.4 hectares (about 3.5 acres, roughly 20,000 square metres) with a further hectare of woodland attached. Our wood is a remnant of ancient forest, Brocéliande, so we often refer to it as such, for ‘forest’ sounds more exotic and magical, which of course it is. The forest has life and character. It has history, legends and secrets. It has depth, mystery and hidden places. Compact it may be, but ours is truly a forest, not merely a wood.

It isn’t big. I don’t really know how many trees we have, as whenever I’ve tried to count them I get quickly confused as they stand so close together and all look so alike. I’m not saying they move, but for sure I wouldn’t be able to spot if they did. I reckon we must have around five hundred properly grown trees, with countless bushes, shrubs, plants, undergrowths and sundry other scrubby stuff. Many of these trees are oak, beech and chestnut but there are also birch, alder, ash and several others. Although identifying tree species is far from easy, I’m a lot better at it now. Some are apple trees (about thirty, I reckon), there’s at least one pear tree and other fruit bushes too, bearing blackcurrants and blackberries. Some of our trees are thin and tightly packed, some are weedy and spindly, some are great sprawling giants, some are magnificent specimens that would grace any royal park. All are important. This is their home too.

The field slopes gently from the west to the river, but by the time it reaches the second cataract it’s completely level, flat and lying quite low. That’s why it floods so readily in winter and early spring. The forest, however, is much more steep. The downside of this is that it’s less comfortable when walking through our wood, unless steep woodland paths are your thing. The upside is that our house, Kerkelven, is securely installed high above its valley, safe from floods, damp and any other uninvited intruders that might rise up from the valley below.

The river was always central

As the Nile is to Egypt, so is our river, the Sarre, to Kerkelven. The scale, of course, is a bit more modest.

Not so long ago this river may have been a thoroughfare of some kind. The sturdy flat stones of what look like landing places can still be seen on both sides of the banks, though I doubt it was ever deep enough to allow commercial traffic. More probably these were washing areas, where in times gone by the womenfolk of Kerkelven would come down with their laundry to scrub and beat clean in the waters and on the rocks of the Sarre.

The Sarre is still a source of life and movement. Fish swim in it, cows drink from it, herons catch fish in it, pond-skaters do their weird dance on its surface, damselflies show off upon it, birds sing along it and rats do the unspeakable things that rats do, in it and all around it. And I sit by it and think how lucky I am.

As it floods each year the Sarre brings its silt to nourish the fields by the water’s edge. But it’s a bit too much of a flood plain where our field is, so it’s not great for crops and for that I am eternally thankful. This means my field has been left uncropped for decades or more; it’s not so much gone to seed as been put out to grass, so it’s just done its own thing, gone its own way, which is to say it hasn’t changed, it’s stayed pretty much as it always was and, if I have my way, always will be.

Neighbours and neighbouring lands

Where we are the sides of the valley are quite steep, though upriver it quickly levels out (to the right of our field, looking from the field towards the river) into flat and comparatively featureless meadowland, called la prairie (the prairie) by locals. I won’t say much about our neighbours or their farms, at least not yet, though, because there’s only three housefuls of them actually in Kerkelven. I’ll just quickly introduce you to a few of the main characters.

From the moment we arrived here, my great buddy both socially and on walks around our hamlet has been Mathurin le Belligo. Mathurin is the perfect neighbour sent from wherever it is that they make perfect neighbours to make our lives here not just tolerable, but good. Kindly Mathurin used to be a farm worker on neighbouring farms until he retired, but that was a long time ago. Now in his late eighties and in failing health, Mathurin has been married to Angèle for more than sixty years, most of which they’ve lived at Kerkelven. They’ve always risen early and are usually in bed by 9 p.m. though they make exceptions when any of their large extended family visit, which is often.

Most of the land hereabouts was owned and farmed since before Napoleon’s time by Bertrand’s family, the Jouannos. Then the year before we arrived Bertrand, last surviving member of the Jouanno family, a bachelor with no children, retired and sold up. He too is now getting on a bit, and must be nudging eighty. Some years before he retired, Bertrand had built a new house for himself and his mother. She died and after a decent passage of time Marie-Thérèse, a widow from the village, moved in and Bertrand was bachelor no longer. Like Mathurin, Bertrand used to come with me on occasions for long walks in the environs.

When Bertrand retired his farm and buildings were all bought up by the farmer, the recently deceased Emile, except for our house, which was so old and ramshackle that no one wanted it. It lay empty for thirty years, awaiting our occupation. Emile lived with his family at Petit Kerkelven, about a kilometre from us. His daughter Lucie and her husband Jerome still live there today.

Emile’s son Loïc now farms his father’s land as a tenant to his brothers and sisters, who with him inherited all the farm buildings and land, equally. He lives at Pleumelin, a nearby town. The old pig-farm buildings, though ruined now and deteriorating daily, are for sale and have been for some time, with no buyer in sight.

Raymonde and Elodie, with their three children, complete the Kerkelven roll call. We see little enough of them though, for if they’re not out at work they’ll be away on their boat, staying with Raymonde’s parents in the Alsace or borrowing their pretty cottage at Concarneau, a spectacularly beautiful part of the north Brittany coast.

Sadly for us, after spending all his long life so far in Kerkelven, our great friend and close neighbour Bertrand with his partner Marie-Thérèse has recently packed his bags and sold his birthright, to move to the nearby village of Guern, citing the onset of age and a declining inclination to constantly drive everywhere. So we have new neighbours from Paris to get used to. Kerkelven is always changing. They seem OK on first encounter, do Patrice and Anne-Claire. Time will tell, for sure.

A minimum about this region

To be honest there’s a lot to recommend close study of this quirky, colourful and charming part of France, for there’s just about something of everything here. Brittany is a land soaked in history, culture and tradition going back beyond even the ancient Druids and their legacy of mysterious standing stones. Its myths and legends are captivating and its people warm, hospitable and friendly. Its scenery is grand, its cliff-lined coast thrillingly dramatic with sweeping craggy bays and inlets, quaint fishing villages and beautiful sandy shores. Ancient, largely unspoiled, traditional hamlets dot the landscape amid tranquil rural vistas that are charmingly reminiscent of pastoral scenes from a bygone age. Although Kerkelven is one of these, history of the conventional sort is not what this tale is about, so you’ll find only a little of it here.

The daily grind of a country squire

It’s not a life that would appeal to everyone. Of course Kerkelven is at its best in the summer. In winter, this place can easily seem quiet, even dreary. At times it’s dull, lonesome, overwhelming, drab, even sad. Our house here can be cold and draughty. Cleaning it is a never-ending chore and dust, like the insects, becomes just something else you live with. Walking the dogs can seem a drudgy routine.

But overall life here is pretty good. I don’t commute. While others struggle in to their daily work on cramped commuter trains to Waterloo or Euston I walk around the field by the river.

Kerkelven is a healthy place to live, no traffic fumes or traffic wardens, no terrorists, few time pressures, or troubles of any kind. It’s a good place to come if you’re looking for peace.

Living among the Breton people is itself a calming experience. They are a quiet, undemonstrative, very distinctive and appealing race. Life is simpler; priorities are different. For the most part people here are judged not by their wealth or their influence but by their sociability. They’re friendly people, the Bretons, if you make an effort to be friendly to them. They have a well-developed sense of fairness and almost invariably are as honest as the day is long. You can leave your house unlocked and open all day, no worries. People leave their cars unlocked too, without a thought. (Or at least the English do. As Bretons are always expecting disaster to fall they tend to lock and shutter everything.) It is, though, a different way of living, at a different pace. And along with their history and culture, the cuisine of the Bretons is as wholesome, varied and colourful as you’ll find anywhere. If a bit fattening and alcoholic.

Buying the field

The idea of buying this field came to us when we discovered that the field that we called ‘long grass’ wasn’t in fact owned by neighbouring farmer Jean-Michel Lévesque, who farms it. Instead it belonged to a rich landowner from a distant village. Our poor neighbour was merely a tenant. Although he would cut the grass a couple of times each year and his dad would collect the apples in the autumn, Jean-Michel had just one main use for the field: he needed it to keep up his acreage so he could claim the maximum subsidy under France’s over-generous participation in the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy.

I saw no reason to disturb that. If we were to buy the field Jean-Michel could continue as tenant so would have no reason or interest to oppose the deal.

Bertrand and Marie-Thérèse thought we were mad. ‘Why buy,’ they exclaimed, ‘when you can go there any time you want and do in it whatever it is that you might want to do? No one else uses it, or hardly at all. You can enjoy it all you could ever wish, without paying a sou.’

They also reminded me that even as owner I would be powerless to keep other undesirables out, should I want to, such as hunters, fishermen or day-trippers and their likes, on account of France’s odd laws on trespass.

Their logic seemed unarguable. But I really wanted that field. One day some workmen from the local council had come and chopped down trees along the riverbank and I’d felt powerless to stop them. (Though I would have stopped them then if I could, in hindsight what they do is brilliant stewardship of the riverbank. They just don’t do it often enough.) Anyway at that time I had some spare cash and couldn’t think of anything better to do with it than to buy that field.

Along with much of the agricultural land and woodland around us, the long-grass field was owned by a certain Madame Séverine le Gendre (née Taillec). Her husband Sebastian, who had clearly married very well, appeared to manage for her the property side of her affairs. Friends in the village spoke of him in hushed, disparaging tones, for he had no proper job other than to collect rents and buy and sell from the likes of us. They evidently viewed him as a sort of kept man.

Sebastian le Gendre is a wizened old fox with a reputation for tough if not slippery negotiation. He lives in Cléguérec, the other side of Malguènac, an inconveniently long way to go just to buy a bit of land. But he has three of the loveliest daughters, all in their twenties and all, mysteriously, living at home with their parents. Madame le Gendre is a nice enough if somewhat harassed-looking woman, but she has that strange knack of seeming almost invisible and being instantly forgettable. Even now I can barely call her to mind. But her daughters … that’s another story.

Mégane, the middle daughter, is the businesslike one of the three and she helps her father with matters financial. Charming and lovely, I sense she’s also even tougher than he is. She has the dark hair, flashing eyes and pale, creamy skin of a Celtic beauty; with little hints of roses in her cheeks, hot passions and fiery temper lie thinly veiled behind those deep emerald eyes. Truth is I’d have paid twice the asking price just to prolong the deal-making.

But again, that is another story.

The deal-making begins. The coffee and cakes come and go. Voices are raised and heels are dug in. Then, compromise, we shake hands and I get a smile from Mégane, though I can’t tell whether it’s contempt or approval.

In the end I officially paid £3,000 for the field. It’s a common practice to pay a further sum in cash under the table but I’m not admitting to that here.

Scandalised, my neighbours told me I had paid twice what it is worth. For me, this has never seemed a problem. My attitude, indeed my only guideline in any negotiation, is to ask ‘What is whatever I’m buying worth to me?’ Though of course I’ll pay less than that if I can, that’s what I’ll pay up to, to secure the deal. I’m like this when haggling for souvenirs and stuff in parts foreign. I judge I’ve got a bargain if it’s worth to me just a little more than what I paid for it. That way, I’m usually happy with my purchases, however much the vendor makes (and I rarely begrudge him or her a living).

So what would have been the right price for this field? Well, mathematics was never my strong suit but I couldn’t ever work that out, however numerate I might become. It’s something beyond price, something that has shown me what value really is. In exchange for this place, I gave just money. Wow! Who’s the fool, in the transaction over this field? Well, no one really, I suppose, though you might wonder at M. le Gendre, who clearly didn’t want it. Whatever, I’m convinced it wasn’t me. I got what I wanted at a price that now seems to me foolishly low.

Our year starts in September

It’s pure chance that I’m starting here, but a year is a circle, so September is as good a time to start as any. We’ve just survived a particularly wet and rather disappointing August. The tourists have all gone. The weather is still great. There’s a lot happening here, now.

Yes. September will do as well as any other time. It’s a good time and place to start.

September

And it looks like the summer is over

Suddenly, rather too early, the moorhen family has gone.

I take their departure as the first irrevocable sign that summer also will all too soon be leaving us. It will return, of course, and so will the moorhens, but it seems a long dark time till then. Perhaps merely a product of global climate changes, the fine weather meanwhile is holding well so, whatever price the planet might pay later, we in Kerkelven can enjoy the Indian summer that lingers here and over the rest of Brittany, seemingly for several very agreeable weeks.

The moorhens, though, have surely seen signs already of winter’s approach and have gone. They’ve nested and raised their families here as long as anyone can remember but it seems they don’t like the cold. So at the first sign of summer’s passing, they’re off south. Each year two of them return to raise another brood. It’s unlikely to be the same pair each time (though they sure look alike), but must be their descendants I guess.

It’s funny how attached you can get to creatures that flee at every encounter, the instant they detect your presence. It’s like that with the moorhen family that lives on our neighbour’s big pond. I’m so proud and protective of them I worry for their welfare daily. They care about me not one whit. Every morning for the last five or six months as they’ve been busying around getting on with their lives I’ve either gingerly tiptoed by, or patiently crept along our path to some vantage point or other where I can see the moorhens without disturbing them.

In this I almost invariably fail, sometimes because of clumsiness on my part, sometimes because the mother moorhen is so sharply alert to predators, but mostly because either Syrus, Max or Mortimer, or some combination thereof, blunders past me setting all the moorhens to squawking.

When this happens Ma Moorhen’s first instinct is always for her babies. Wherever she is she’ll beetle from the undergrowth, wings a-flapping, to gather up her brood and usher them off to safety. Ironically if she’d only tell them to stay where they are, she and her clutch would be secure from all dangers, perfectly safe on the stout, sturdy nest which she and hubby have built in the middle of the pond. He’s a shy, almost reclusive sort, the father. Both parents seem to share the manual chores equally, but I’ve always assumed it is the mother who so conscientiously brings up the kids. Mind you, as moorhen sexes are notoriously hard to tell apart I may have sexed them the wrong way round and it may be the father who is the good mother. In practice they take it in