For around 18 months, since before the Landing Project officially began, I have been made welcome to visit and explore Berllan Deg farm at Rhosweil, Weston Rhyn; home of Oliver Kynaston and Molly Brown. As the project secured funding and evolved, the frequency of my visits increased so that Molly and I could work together, to plan and deliver the various public events. Through that time, it has been my privilege to get to know the land here and also at the nearby Templefields, Olly and Molly’s agroforestry trial site.
Olly and Molly established professional careers elsewhere before farming, although both have a family heritage in farming or caring for the land. Unlike many farmers they are not entirely reliant on making an income from the land and so are, perhaps, fortunate in being able to take a little more time to be curious, to experiment and to plan carefully for the future.
Prior to their arrival two years ago, Berllan Deg had not operated as a dairy farm for a few years. The beautiful old buildings, including the shippon milking barn and the historic farm house itself will, as time and money allow, require some attention. It will be fascinating to see how the site develops.
While I have been visiting, Olly and Molly have planted a new hedgerow, re-established an orchard for fruit trees, begun steps towards recreating a hay meadow, started up an array of vegetable and fruit growing in a polytunnel and in the garden. This year, they brought three pigs into the farm, and more recently Molly has begun to look after her own small flock of Black Welsh Mountain sheep. Other farmers rent fields on the farm to graze cattle and sheep.
Meanwhile, over at Templefields, a more experimental venture is underway combining sheep grazing amongst fruit trees and various rotation arable plots including Winter wheat, Spring barley and herbal ley plus poplar, willow and other trees for coppicing and biochar. This is an ongoing investigation into how effectively regenerative agroforestry methods can perform against biodiversity, carbon, food production and financial metrics. This year, I was able to observe the harvest of the site’s first crop of barley and wheat.
Watch the following video for my photo sequence for Templefields:
As with other residency sites, I have made a large number of sound recordings, including in the pond, in the soil and of some the fabulous trees near the house. Whilst listening to the old yew tree, next to the house, I noticed a regular knocking sound, which I worked out must be a nuthatch who likes to eat the arils/seeds – toxic to most other creatures. This was one of many treasured observations of wildlife, which make their home around this land of increasing biodiversity. Olly had earlier reported seeing an otter where a stream crosses beneath the lane just a few metres from the house.
Some of the soundscapes I have edited together featured in a self-guided soundwalk at the Berllan Deg Open Day in early November, encouraging visitors to explore the land for themselves. These works in progress will be developed further and some may feature in a longer term geo-located sound walk that will be publicly accessible along the right of way that passes through the fields.
Whenever I travel along an access lane into a farm, I have a sense of passing into a different time – not necessarily back in time – but into a space that is somehow disconnected from other, generally more urban places where the passing of time is dominated by the busy activities happening and interacting in the moment. Here in the rural fields, the passing of the seasons and the slower pace of trees and plant life assert themselves. Berllan Deg has an enchanted, almost dreamlike quality despite being located within a busy transport corridor, with the busy A483 Oswestry to Wrexham road and Ellesemere Canal to the east and a railway to the west. The ancient yew tree, rolling glacially created terrain and pond combine to make a link to a prehistoric past.
OS maps from the 19th Century indicate the farm was situated just a few metres from the pit shafts of Preesgwyn Colliery, where there was a smithy. There were brick works and clay pit by the canal at Rhoswiel, and the Glyn Valley Tramway passed west to east across the northern edge of the farm connecting Trehowell Colliery and Quinta Colliery into the canal basin. Echoes of this industrial past can be found in the rusting iron fragments of machinery and structures in the patches of woodland around the farm.
The farming life is not all peaceful however. The photo sequence which records my walks around the site belies some of the more dramatic action that has taken place – life and death of living beings are something that farmers must face up to on a near daily basis.
Watch the following video for my photo sequence and recorded sounds for Berllan Deg:
I mentioned in a previous post about the repetitive relentless patterns of some farm labour, but there are also sometimes more sudden, almost violent bursts of activity. We observed the TB testing of cattle owned by local farmers Rob and Rich. In an eruption of clattering and clanging metal, shouting and mooing, the team of five men and women herded the huge, heavy beasts through a large metal temporary construction and quickly examined each one to check that there was no reaction to the test. An anxious time for the farmers but there is no room for sentiment here. Thankfully all the cows were in the clear this time.
The "data" I have collected and artwork I have made so far are a baseline to inform later work. The more I look the more there is to find in the underlying mystery of the place. There is an ongoing interplay between feral nature and the need for control and no nonsense practical action to produce food which will be hard to capture.
I can well understand how anyone could be drawn deeper into the compelling drama of life in the fields. Here Molly and Olly are investing of themselves into the soil with a caring spirit of generosity and love, open to sharing some of what they nurture into being with their local community.
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