An NWR EA06/07 Area day conference offers so, so much for the price of a shop-bought sandwich and a plate of food for sharing with old and new friends. That’s how I like to think of the adventure that the Area day conferences never fail to deliver. This year it was organised by the tiny Glinton Group with the help of the ladies in Peterborough. Squeezed into the Helpston village hall, we were delighted by the speaker for the morning Mr Richard Astle from the Langdyke Trust http://langdyke.org.uk/ he enthralled me with his breadth of knowledge of the life and poetry of John Clare 1793 – 1864, Helpston’s native son. More importantly Richard wove the modern day legacy Clare leaves through his inspriational poetry which led to the creation of some of England’s earliest Nature Reserves. It’s hard to summarise how special this community organisation is to this small part of our countryside.
The toxic rubbish dump is the remant of chalk upland that Clare immortalised in his poem of over 1,200 words ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’. He was writing with passion of a beauty spot encroached by the Enclosures and damaged by the greed of landowners. Here is one verse :
The bees flye round in feeble rings
And find no blossom bye
Then thrum their almost weary wings
Upon the moss and die
Rabbits that find my hills turned oer
Forsake my poor abode
They dread a workhouse like the poor
And nibble on the road
It’s remarkable that Clare’s observations and concerns for the condition of nature were so acute and modern in for a self-educated poor man.
We went on to learn how the area had even worse to suffer in the 1970’s until eventually its fortunes changed when the local community purchased the site and removed the rubbish and scraped the soil back over the site and miraculously the seeds in the soil flourished and now orchids are flourishing at Swordy Well.
Clare’s penultimate verse errily foretells that resurgence :
And if I could find a friend
With no deciet to sham
Who’d send me some few sheep to tend
And leave me as I am
To keep my hills from cart and plough
And strife and mongerel men
And as spring found me find em now
I should look up agen