Starter Smallholders

I recently spent a few days sick leave re-reading Adam Nicolson's Perch Hill. It is a book that I enjoy reading with the intensity that only comes when you feel that the author is relating to me, me, me, despite the fact that I see many things that very definitely do not relate to me. Not least of which is that he had enough money to buy a farm in Southeast England, complete with all buildings and a good sized piece of land. The assertion I found most objectionable, and that was repeated many times throughout the early parts of the book, was the idea that the value of the countryside as an area of food production could be replaced by the monetary value put on it by people seeking houses in beautiful areas. It reminded me of something I had read on the BBC several months ago, Who needs farmers anyway? Adam Nicolson soon discovered that it is precisely those people who buy the beauty that need responsible country workers - farmers to tend the land and to look after the animals, and all the people who maintain the hedges, walls and small woodlands that have made the fields of England the green patchwork they are. By the end of the book, he is sitting in a farmer's meeting, discussing the impending sale of the local livestock auction, and arguing quite strongly that country areas need to be working, vibrant and liveable, and it is his honesty about the changes that he went through over the years that help make the book as attractive as it is.
In the last few pages of the book he makes the point that the real pleasure does not lie in the management of the land, but "in the ability to roam in your mind across the surface of a place which is so well known to you that it has become in a sense indistinguishable from who you are."
These, more than anything else, are the feelings that lead me to read the book again and again. This feeling of knowing has had a profound effect on our lives, not least of which is that we are still in Latvia long after we expected to move on. And it is this familiarity with the land, this recognition and burgeoning knowledge of the work of nature around the house that forges a connection between our lives and our land, not our plans for a new house, the vegetable garden or ideas for the future development of the property. We know that the wild boar and deer have had a hard winter, because they have left trails right up to our front door; far closer than they have ever been before. We know what the land will look like as we step through the woods, where it drops away into the neighbours property, and where the deer come to drink. We are starting to know how the various parts of our property and the land around us will look as they go through the year, and it is this knowledge, or the gaps in it, that makes us feel we are missing something when we are away.