This field lies about a mile north of the village in the flat low meadows of the Hollowmarsh. A field fringed with Oak trees, densely filled from spring with wild flowers and high grasses. Then last winter as I walked the field edge I saw it had been sprayed and ploughed. The ring of burnt oak branches that had lain at the field edge for years had gone. The earth claggy, sticking to my boots, scored marks from the plough, claw marks through the turf.
I avoided walking the field for a long time, too worried over what I would find when I next walked its boundary.
Seeing this photograph of the field full of buttercups in the summer of 2022, I knew I needed to see the damage done if only to make a record of the desecration. I revisited the field exactly a year after the buttercup photograph was taken.
This might be a small and fairly unremarkable piece of landscape, but still. What we so casually destroy.
