My first full day here had fallen on a Sunday. I remember it well. It had consisted mainly of horizons; the Solway was all sky and water and shifting light. The week’s work still lay ahead of me, and I had no idea what to expect. I’d gone for a walk around the reserve with Charlie, a volunteer heading up the natterjack toad project. We’d walked along the beach, where she pointed out the various prints and impressions wild animals had left behind in the sand. Had she not been there, I know I would never have noticed them. Charlie could identify most of the marks: badgers, foxes, rabbits. They were all there, and so were ours now – the prints of our boots trailed far behind us, already vanishing as the wind picked up.
RSPB Mersehead Reserve
‘People come here expecting a natural wilderness, but it’s not like that really. Everything has to be managed.’
This is something Eric, the farmer of the RSPB Mersehead reserve, said to me a few days into my artist-in-residency here. His words have stuck with me throughout these ensuing weeks. As they should do: Eric has worked on the Mersehead farm for fifty years now, long before it ever became a reserve, so his words carry quite some weight around here. And when Eric says ‘everything has to be managed’, he really does mean everything.
Mersehead is still a working farm, so the fields need to be ploughed and sowed and limed and rotated, just as they would for any other farm. Crops need harvesting. Fences need building. Machines need maintenance. But as well as this regular farm work, there are also wildlife surveys to attend to – of nesting lapwing, waders, farmland birds, barnacle geese, foxes, badgers, butterflies, moths, natterjack toads – all happening any time after dawn right through to the heart of night.
Moth trap (which we accidentally set up wrong… oops)
There’s a lively visitor centre to staff, its revered whiteboard listing all the sightings of the week. All sorts are up there, from swallows to hen harriers, buff-tailed bumblebees to painted lady butterflies, hares to roe deer – even a frog that bore a rare, scarlet pigmentation. Eric and the site warden Rowena compete with each other to see who can first spot the most wildflowers of the season. You can catch glimpse of reptiles, too; once, when doing the rounds of a butterfly survey, I saw the flash of a lizard’s tail vanish into the scrub of a sand dune.
Even things I thought were natural features of the landscape are meticulously managed for the sake of habitat optimisation. Take the water, for example. Mersehead is a reserve of wetlands, salt marsh, ponds, merse, and vistas of intertidal sand and mudflats. Creeks run like capillaries through the land. During my first week, myself and Charlie followed Rowena around the reserve’s ditches and sluices, removing and replacing blockades in order to control the water levels of specific field compartments. Ephemeral pools for natterjack toads have been ‘scraped’ into existence by Eric’s machines. Here, water isn’t just a presence in the landscape; it is the landscape, and so much relies on its proper regulation.
The Solway Firth
The reed bed on a windy day
I was surprised to learn that people have actually complained about the visible presence of farm work going on in the fields, but then it is just as Eric already said: a lot of people come expecting the wilderness experience – tractors spreading fertiliser don’t tend to sustain such illusions. But that word. Wilderness. It keeps cropping up. By its very definition it suggests somewhere that remains unaffected by human activity, as though our influence can only ever be a negative and contaminating thing, as though as a species we are somehow historically separate from nature. It seems to betray at once a sense of our deepest self-contempt and our profoundest narcissism.
Mersehead is no wilderness, though it is certainly a place of wild things. Neither is it an instance of our so-called mastery of nature, albeit for a noble cause. It is all much more nuanced than that – a space of complex dialogues, collaborations, tensions, and negotiations between ourselves and our precarious position within the natural world; a place that says we get to choose the marks we leave behind us.
Eric in his tractor, oat sowing
Roseanne Watt, Mersehead Artist in Residence