Best Place in the World

Today

After breakfast this morning, Paul & I sat watching the birds fly around busily in the frosty morning sunshine. Three wood-pigeons sat at the top of their favourite Lombardy poplar at the back of the field, looking so enormous we wondered how the branches could bear their weight. Tits and finches darted about and a fat, fluffed-up robin perched on the alder just beyond our fence.

"Do you remember what we used to say when we first came to the village?" asked Paul. I certainly do.

In My Day

We first saw Stoke St Michael on a damp and dreary day in November 1986. We weren't familiar with the "Mendip Murk" at that time and just felt anxious and apprehensive about the future. We'd abandoned jobs and home to come here and had no idea whether the decision was the right one. Eventually we bought no 7 and moved in just before Christmas Eve.

A local paper described Stoke as a "Grim little settlement" and that just about summed up our feelings. "Where are the trees?" we asked. "Why are there no birds?" The gardens seemed bare and the fields solidly utilitarian, grassy with hedgerows. No trees seemed to border them and the nearest woodland was half-an-hour's walk away. I planted trees in my garden that promptly withered away with the first frost. In 1989 many of the trees that existed blew down in the great gales, leaving the place more bare than ever.

The spring and summer dawn chorus was a paltry affair and we began to wonder whether we could ever be happy here. The second winter Paul gazed at the rain pouring down day after day. "Is it ever going to stop?" he asked. Even the dog hated the dull, wet, shelterless days and would walk glumly with me up the lane, ears down.

Slowly as the years passed, we began to see that people were taking care of their village. The Lombardy poplars were planted at the back of the field, where they make a rustling like the distant sea all summer and whose branches gleam pale gold in the winter sun. I discovered that, by erecting a decent fence around the garden, I could protect my trees until they were established. So I now have a beautiful elaeagnus with year-round gold & green foliage and a viburnum fragrans whose leaves protect many a small bird and whose January blossoms perfume the garden.

The village's Millennium Wood is now ten years old and doing very well indeed. A line of trees marks the skyline to the west of the house, enhancing the sunsets. Neighbours' gardens brim with trees and shrubs, and alder and hawthorn border the stream at the end of the Close. We take the "Mendip Murk" in our stride now and can't imagine why we'd want to live anywhere else.

And the birds? Well, the dawn chorus now drives me mad every spring and summer from about four in the morning!