Dramatic Reversal

An entertaining morning taking a short walk, with stops, around FarmEd - an establisment which, in their own words, aims at "encouraging agroecological farming techniques [that] can help make soils more productive, minimize the use of agrochemicals and pollution, and enhance crop diversity. This in turn can make agriculture more resilient."

Today, in co-operation with the local independent theatre, they put on a series of cameos at various points in the fields, all with a local connection, a rural dimension and most with a historical eye. Morris tunes and dancing, trad folk music, and poems (about Roman Britain) by Romola Parish - the Poet in Residence of the Oxfordshire Historic Landscape Characterisation project (after memorising that, the performer found remembering the poems easy!)

Most memorable, though, were three mini-dramatisations of books: 

Lifting the Latch - some oral history, turned into a chronological autobiographical narrative, about a character, a farm-worker, from a nearby village. He would have been a near contemporary of my grandfather, and I enjoyed the book for all the dialect terms that brought back my childhood

Lark Rise to Candleford - self-authored autobiography of a young girl growing up in late 19th century north-Oxfordshire. Cleverly, it was written 40 years after the events it describes, and includes both the child's and the grown-woman's perspectives

Farm Boy - Michael Morpurgo's sequel to War Horse. A hare-and-tortoise tale about a horse-drawn plough taking on the first tractor in the parish

I don't know how conscious this was, but all three are set in the late 19th and early 20th century, as rural areas opened up to mechanised transport, industrial production and mass communication. Centuries old social structures were breaking down and agriculture was becoming modernised, mechanised, capitalised and depopulated. Eventually, in our own time, this led, at its worst, to ecological damage, soil degradation, over-reliance on agrochemicals, pollution, monoculture and vulnerability

Our walk was circular. Q. E. D.