WHEN I started doing serious fieldwork, the sort you get paid for, it took me a while to work out the ground rules. When I was an undergraduate, fieldwork was a mob-handed mix of beer and photo opportunities with a bit of ecology thrown in to fill the hours until opening time. Maybe that explains the second-class degree…
In real life, fieldwork is an often solitary activity revolving around sweaty tedium, occasionally enlivened by moments of bizarre perfection. Despite being a slow learner, I have spent many ecologically rich days doing fieldwork on the uplands of Exmoor, intently pursuing the sparse and elusive mesofauna of moorland soils, mostly worms about half an inch long. Hardly big game, I know, but good sport nonetheless. And you don’t need hounds.
Exmoor on a questionable day in early April is what fieldwork is all about. It may not have the grandeur of Cumbria or Snowdonia, but there is something hugely impressive about the way the local climate gives you hail and sunshine at the same time, while primroses and celandines flower in the shelter of old drifted snow.
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Other moors may be wilder, but Exmoor has a strangely barren, frontier feel to it. Stolid, white-rendered farmhouses stand at intervals across the hillsides—the legacy of John Knight, who bought the old royal forest in 1818. His tenant farmers fought to reclaim the sodden peat soil for agriculture with varying degrees of success, but their own legacy—stern stone boundaries and squat buildings—speaks volumes.
But stand by the Bronze Age round barrows near Kinsford Gate in the half-light, with low cloud whipping past you and the hiss of the wind through the rushes, and it is easy to feel the presence of a much older group of builders. Just keep looking over your shoulder. Those first locals would surely recognise the moment when—after hours of numbing work and sleet roaring uphill at you—a single stab of sunlight sneaks between cloud and hilltop to light up the combe below. And only a solitary, bronchitic ewe is there to share the fleetingly beautiful moment.
As part of the research experience, I discovered that it is even possible for fieldwork to add significantly to the local folklore. My colleagues kept a careful record of my scary ability to choose nightmarish weather to do my sampling. There was even a graph of rainfall versus fieldwork dates on the wall of the lab.
Very funny. Except that later I discovered others had also noticed the correlation. From Dulverton to Challacombe, Oldways End to North Molton, it took only a glimpse of my battered van lurching through the lanes for farmers to abandon silage cutting and stomp off indoors—while others raced out to get the washing in. I was oblivious to all this, until one day a friendly farmer introduced me to his mates in the pub as “The Weatherman”—a nom de guerre, delivered in deep Devonian, which conferred on me the mystic aura of some darkly pagan harbinger.
Not a bad moment.