Cornwall 2: Beaver walk

One evening in early August, just before 8, we parked in a field and joined a small group gathered around an old man seated on a de-coupled trailer. He was wearing shorts that displayed muscled bare legs, and a jacket. The summer evenings were cool. Loose lace-up shoes. No socks. A walking stick, tall, like the one Charlton Heston as Moses used to part the Red Sea. White hair. A bent back. With no introduction, we understood this man was to be our guide.

I had come with my son’s family – son, his wife, two 12-year old boys (yes, twins) – to go on a beaver walk organised by the Cornwall Wildlife Trust. The first thing I noticed on getting out of the car was the air – how good it smelled, how fresh. Cornwall isn’t urbanised, but we lived in a town with heavy traffic. To get to this field, we’d driven a good distance along a dirt track with zero passing places. This field and this farm were literally ‘far off the beaten track’. 

When it was time, the old man stood and walked on, a terrier happily bounding beside him, around him, ahead and back. We followed. He walked slowly and we followed slowly, feeling the pace of life slow in ourselves, the urgency to go, go, go easing.

In an outdoor covered space, we assembled around a table on which was a stuffed beaver and information boards. “As there’s no guarantee we’ll see a beaver...” My hearing being imperfect, I stood close as the old man talked softly about beavers, of their physiognomy and habits, all while lovingly stroking the stuffed beaver’s pelt. Two chickens strutted past on the track. A ghostly barn owl flew low across field just beyond.

The old man led us out. The track dipped down towards a line of trees at the bottom of a valley. On the opposite hillside were small cultivated fields with hedges. A barn owl flew up and we paused to watch it glide past and vanish into a square of black open space at the side of the barn. Lucky barn owl, to have an actual barn as home.

As we walked on, a strange sensation came over me. I wasn’t expecting to meet my young self on this track, or my family of long ago, the family that had farmed land in central Latvia between world wars, but there we all were, congregated on the track, walking together. Memory brought up the dirt country tracks of childhood holidays, that I had once walked alone, exploring and sensing and imagining. And it brought up old stories and old photographs of the farming life lived by my mother’s parents long before I was born, before even she was born – the coming together for harvests and scythings and Sundays in the small wooden chapel on the farm’s land, a life that had vanished. My grandmother’s memories were tales of community. Now here we were, a gaggle of strangers, walking together with shared purpose, and in that moment, feeling like community. Where I lived in town, neighbours greeted each other and walked on. After 17 years in the same flat, I still didn’t know my neighbours’ names, and they didn’t know mine.

At the bottom of the valley we stopped at a small stream, narrow enough to cross with one long step. “The beavers haven’t got to this bit...” The old man talked of the life of this stream, remembered from boyhood, no by-rote tour guide but a man who clearly loved this land, and sharing its stories. We saw how trees could be protected from the beavers’ attention. We saw trees downed by beavers, the result of days of patient gnawing.

We stopped at an area where beavers had been busy. Beaver dams – edifices of sticks and branches – had formed a small pond. We stood a long time listening to the quiet. A heron flew by. There was no sense of rush, of being moved on, we were allowed to linger, to think our own thoughts. People talked in whispers and low murmurs, responding to the quiet by quietening themselves. The evening was still. No breeze disturbed the leaves. Here, we were out of sight of fields. All was green growth and water, untidied, wild.

No beavers appeared, but the pond was alive with life. Widening circles of ripples marked where fish were jumping. Fish had arrived almost miraculously along that pitifully small stream. Beavers had created conditions where they thrived.  

We walked on in the darkening night to a bigger pond. Again we stood, gazed, absorbed, went silent. The old man and I talked in low voices of the work he had done here. His family had farmed here for generations, but his dream now was to take on another farm, one that was struggling, that had spoiled its own land, that needed a beaver project to revive nature. Since he’d introduced beavers in 2017, bio-diversity had increased. Before, they’d identified 7 species of bats, recently they’d identified 11. But he’d have to sell this farm.

“You can’t sell this farm,” I said. A short pause. “No... it would probably kill me.”

I admired a man who, at a guess in his 80’s, was still capable of looking ahead, still found in himself a desire to take on a long-term project that would make a small patch of the world a better place. When you work a farm, when you stay there, when nature is in your care, you can’t retire.

He decided to show me something, I missed what, but when he walked on I followed. My son and a few others spotted us and joined. The old man opened a gate and led us into a field of long grass (me worrying about his bare legs and ticks). We trudged up and diagonally along to a patch of flooded ground at the side of the field. Living trees were standing deep in black water. This was a pond in the early stages of creation.  

In the last of the light my son and I stood by the larger pond watching bats wheel across our vision. The quiet of the evening was profound, almost holy. Suitably, we filled with reverence. An awe. “I’d like to spend the night here,” I murmured. He got it, agreed, yes... The feeling of rightness was overpowering, and next to that sat an understanding of all we had lost in the drive towards progress, towards always wanting more, towards the endless taking and the not enough giving back. This wildness created by beavers demonstrated how nature flourishes when man gets out of the way. On the way back, we paused at the smaller pond. Geese had landed and were paddling about, drifting, graceful, barely disturbing the water.

Before we said our good-nights, I asked about the economics of the farm. The primary source of income was no longer agriculture, but education - tours like ours, school groups, events, accommodation. Farming did still go on. Some of the income from our group was earmarked for a new tractor. But the farm was less focused on creating produce, and more on creating diversity of nature. Then showing what nature was capable of. We were town-dwellers who did not share lives with barn owls, bats, fish, herons and geese, but despite not having spotted a beaver, we were leaving with hearts glad to know they were here, just up a dirt track from the B3275.

I found out who the old man was: Chris Jones. From the farm’s website: “As custodians of Woodland Valley Farm, we want to share it with the wide community and use it as an outdoor classroom founded on the themes of conservation and sustainability.”

If you happen to be in Cornwall, do yourself a favour. Go. Help Mr. Jones buy a new tractor.