Introducing our correspondent…
I was born in Holland, but have lived on various locations in the countryside in Wales, England and Scotland since 1987. I studied history in Cardiff, Durham and Edinburgh, where I gained my PhD in medieval history. I have since taught in Edinburgh and Glasgow and am the senior research supervisor for ecclesiastical history at the Maryvale Institute.
Maryvale is located on the edge of Birmingham and is a Catholic long-distance learning institute that was once the home of Britain’s newest saint, Blessed John Cardinal Newman. I contribute regularly to the Catholic press in Britain, Holland and the US.
Like so many, my family has left the land in the last half-century. One of my great-grandfathers was a small-holder and carter, another worked as a farrier, as did my maternal grandfather. I grew up in a mixed world of urban shopkeepers, military people and those still working the land, a world now vanished.
With my wife, small son and daughter I now live on a small farm in Perthshire, there where the Lowlands and Highlands meet. Our world consists of some fields, ancient woodland, larch plantation and a small loch, and is filled with wildlife and chickens. Harry Schnitker, 2011
Harry writes...
Getting the greenery for Christmas can be a bore: driving through heavy traffic to a place with piped music, a large queue at the till and a hefty bill to follow. Not so here. A walk through the sodden field is followed by a climb up the cliff behind the house. From up on the ridge, the view is, well, arctic, frankly. Long streaks of newly-fallen snow sneak out from the white caps on the higher mountains. Brown bracken breaks the white, with some bottle-green Scots pines and the twisting trunks of oaks complementing the scene. All over, young birches, or birks as they are called here, are shooting up where the intrusive conifers of the plantation years have been felled.
Apart from the oaks, the scenery has changed little since the last ice retreated here, some 10,000 years ago: I am on a bit of tundra, a feeling increased by the whipping snow showers, blown in on winds from Greenland and Iceland. It can be hard to believe that within a few hundred yards from our back door the land can be this wild. From on the ridge only a few yellow-green fields with some sheep in the valley below, and the smoke curling from where I know our chimney to be, reveal anything vaguely human.
It is all a far cry from summer. The land is open and the colours steely, betraying the cold. Winter so far has been less white than last year, but more ferocious. Winds that sounded like Old Norse tales of the voices of Thor and Odin blew at over 100 miles per hour, flattening trees, fences and people. Rain redefined itself. No longer did it fall in drops, it simply came down as if tipped from swimming pools. Roads have become rivers, and the small bridge that links our fields has vanished.
It has been amusing to see how the different animals view this run-up to Christmas. Our Aylesbury ducks love it all: the mud, the rain, the huge pools. They even love the driving snow, perfectly insulated in their down and fat. We thought we had lost them this week, in the eye of a swirling snow storm. The gamekeeper had been, and we had heard shooting. When the time came for the ducks to go indoors for the night, they were nowhere to be seen. Rather than being trussed for Christmas, however, they were blissfully enjoying themselves in a newly-formed pool, further from the barns than they had ever ventured before!
The other animals are less content. Our Scots Dumpy cockerel cannot stand the weather. He sits, surrounded by an equally miserable harem, on the woodpile, calculating how swiftly he can return to the barn without losing his dignity. The three pregnant cows out-wintered beside our garden wall are also rather morose, sinking in the gooey stuff that was the field, happy only when food arrives. The sheep, finally, could not care less. Like all good Scots, they moan about the weather and then just get on with life.
Christmas is just around the corner, and our farmhouse will be filled to the rafters with family. For once, all is organised. A huge woodpile will ensure heat, even if the electric fails, which it often does. We have plenty of candles and a full larder. I am looking forward to it. Most of all I am looking forward to midnight on Christmas Eve. Then I will go out to the barns, wish our animals a merry Christmas, and give them an extra portion of food. All the animals, except for the bees that is; I do not think they will take kindly to having their roofs lifted in the middle of a cold winter’s night! Merry Christmas.
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