When one travels southwest from Hereford in the UK along the 49, which is sometimes known as the Ross Road, towards Monmouth and the Welsh border, any number of alternate routes lead to any number of alternate adventures.
Stray a bit east and one can wind up unexpectedly in Aconbury Wood, through which in the middle of a late winter day it can become quite dark, and during a substantial rain, which are not infrequent, countless cedars and oaks render the paths more misty than showery, but no less muddy.
If instead one heads further west and a bit northward across Callow and Bagwyllydiart, the greetings at St Margaret’s before getting to Peterchurch offer lessons in grace and kindness unmatched anywhere. More or less in the middle of all this hedgerow business is the crossroads of Michaelchurch, a dip down from Vowchurch, and the beginning of the foothills of the Black Mountains, where real treats await.
Along the way ten thousand acres of turnips, lambing Ryeland ewes, carrots, and the occasional goat greet one through rain and thornbushes and northwinds until one has had just a little more dampness than one can reasonably tolerate. This is the moment when the road turns and just ahead, a bit beyond an apple orchard, two steers, a handful of black lambs, a tractor, and several hundred yards of marvelous dry-stack stone walls, is a softly-stuccoed Vermeer-yellow west Herefordshire pub. Tucked seemingly between clouds and raindrops, it is a worn and sooty respite where inside is a Franklin-like stove warming wet dogs asleep on the slate floor and providing visitors (even Americans) with farmhouse cider, crusty bread, and piping hot soup. Here the conversation is a very un-American combination of literal (“by chance were you aware of the sheep shit on your shoes?”) and chivalrous (“right…fancy something to eat or drink?” (though the kitchen is closed)).
The soup inside – earthy and redolent – is as simple, good, and inexpensive as the hills outside are fertile, rich, and loamy. The air inside is thick with woodsmoke from the stove and frying bacon from the grill. Outside smells like cypress and fresh buttermilk, of topsoil and compost and humus: of good crops to come.
The American vernacular – of processed twinkie spongcakes from Dallas, and processed cows from concentrated feedlots in Maricopa, processed backyards from Chemlawn in Tennessee and processed Menhaden from Reedville – has somehow missed the important deforested Welsh countryside for Home Depot’s artificial Christmas tree. If you make the mistake of cutting down all the trees, yet are wise enough to keep the hedgerows, you have functional reminders that, as Wendell Berry noted, can communicate “the balance of the natural and the human make a landscape that looks comfortable and comforting.”
Lovely country. Beautifully written. I felt like I was there…
Hey how did Cypress get there that isn’t native is it? You are in Corgi country. Perhaps the spirits of Rocket and Lucy are flying with you!
Thoughful and well written; The pub “between the clouds and the raindrops” is located at the heart of the area described in Bruce Chatwin’s novel, On the Black Hill. Today, frequented by hikers, mountain bikers, literary folk and rich City types, but it is doubtful if Chatwin’s fictional brothers would ever have had a pint of “Butty” there!
Oh yes,not native but the Common Cypress has been growing in the West country for around four hundred years.