THERE ARE few rural interruptions to the capital’s rhythms. Apart from the occasional visit of campaigning foxhunters, or the odd Freeman of the City who, availing himself of some archaic right, drives a flock of bleating ovines across London Bridge, the capital remains cosily locked inside urban routines.
But is life beyond the sodium-lit boundaries of the M25 really so alien? This month the bucolic is shepherded into a white cube. As a show of photographs and sculptures — the result of a 15-month project in which the artists Kate Bellis and Sally Matthews set out to chronicle the life of a remote Northumberland hill farming community — opens at the Robert Sandelson Gallery in Cork Street, visitors are invited to participate in an important rural gathering.
Typically, farmers are not fanciful creatures. They stomp their muddy acres contemplating crop yields and subsidies and quotas. Amorous frolics and flute playing are usually far from their minds. But it was not ever thus: at least, not in the traditions that Theocritus inspired. He was the first to conjure images of an idyllic golden era when the bucolic fellow, without EU bureaucrats to bother him, could spend his time flirting with river nymphs and holding singing contests.
His legacy has been deeply embedded in our culture: in our poetry from Virgil through Spenser to Wordsworth and Blake; in our painting from Poussin and Claude to Constable and Palmer, in our music from madrigals to Vaughan Williams. It is an integral part of the Romanticism that — as Peter Ackroyd suggests in his wonderful new BBC2 series that begins this Saturday — has so effectively shaped the modern mind.
And so it is that the hill farmer becomes the custodian of one of our most significant cultural traditions. For all that his daggy-tailed flock might look more bedraggled than the milk-fleeced lambs of the idyll, for all that his wind-scraped uplands may be less enticing than the blue-hazed hills of Arcadia, the farmer preserves our pastoral dream even as he preserves the look of a landscape that his specialist farming methods have over the centuries created.
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The hefted flocks that graze down the scrub and the seasonal burning of heather have created not only a unique habitat in which hundreds of species can flourish, but also a niche in which that most susceptible of creatures, the Romantic soul, can still thrive.
And this is why the very same people who would campaign vociferously to save some great cultural treasure should now be speaking out on behalf of our hill-farming community. The lifestyle that is chronicled in the exhibition, Gathering, is under immediate threat. Hill farmers can only survive in the modern agricultural climate because they receives allowances — subsidies that keep them struggling on in the face of wind and rain and crippling overdraft rates so that our Wordsworthian landscapes will look nice for us in the summer when we arrive to breathe in great bracing draughts of Romanticism, and drop litter.
But this year is the last of the hill farm allowance. Margaret Beckett is to announce a replacement funding scheme next summer. Unless she can better previous schemes, the uplands face a bleak future. Every year flocks are being brought down from the hills, never to be sent up on to the heights again. Skills such as the hefting of sheep will be lost, along with sufficient grazing animals to preserve the landscape. It will be incredibly difficult to introduce these in the future. Unless we act now, in the present, it will be too late.
The next time some Freeman of the City of London chivies his flock across the bridge, I hope he will do so in the name of those far-off hill farmers who have created the landscapes that lie within our urban minds.