Necessary wildness

The Goodman’s Croft, by Meg Bertera-Berwick

Jan 05, 2024

I’ve reached a stage where I’m less fussed about staying up till midnight on the 31st December and more eager to see in the new year by getting up and out for sunrise on New Year’s Day. In recent years we’ve rolled out of bed at daybreak and plodded our way through the mud and up a nearby hill to catch the sun coming up if it’s visible, and even if it’s not, as was the case this year, we still set out for a walk regardless.
This January the first, despite it being grey and overcast, we made our way up the hill.
When we reached the vantage point where we stop to take in the view (and sunrise on clearer days) I was taken aback to see that the field on the south/south-east-facing slope directly below had been completely razed to the ground.
I loved this particular view down through this field to the countryside beyond. But what had been a scrubland of grasses, wildflowers and shrubs had been cleared, apparently for rearing pigs on.
In the years we’ve been walking here, this small field had been left to grow uncultivated. I think it might have had sheep grazing parts of it at one time but I can’t recall ever seeing any and it had a wild, overgrown, magic feel to it as you picked and wended your way through the tussocks of grass, enormous thickets of brambles (that produced the plumpest blackberries last summer) and tangles of Clematis vitalba (old man's beard or traveller's joy) to come out the other side and up onto the footpath running perpendicular along the top.
I had often wondered why this funny little triangular field had been left seemingly untended and whether it was intended. Either way, I was glad for it. It was such a delight to reach as you crossed ploughed and cultivated fields before getting to it. I had felt and enjoyed its wild beauty enormously every time I hiked up through it. So I was extremely sorrowful to see it bare and stripped, not knowing when I last walked it back in the summer that it would be the last time I would see it as it was then.
Where there had been abundance, green growth, food, habitat, shelter there was now churned bare earth, destruction and metres of new stock fencing and gates erected all around to demarcate paths and paddocks.
Looking down through the field it was as though a gash had been cut open through the landscape.
I felt a pang of sadness and loss and I thought of these words that Meg wrote, which I share now, below.
Before reading Meg’s article I had never heard of goodman’s crofts before, but they certainly strike me as something we could (re)learn from. Perhaps we could do with guidance from tales like these. Perhaps then the longevity of wilder spaces wouldn’t always feel quite so fragile and precarious.

Sunrise beyond the scrub. Clematis vitalba and brambles in the foreground.

The Goodman’s Croft, by Meg Bertera-Berwick

Early in October, the Irish comedian Killian Sundermann (@killersundy) shared a video called, “Irish people being not superstitious.” Playing both an Irishman and an American, he cuts back and forth between the two as they stumble across a fairy fort somewhere off-screen in the Irish countryside. The American is intrigued; the Irishman quickly suggests they keep moving. The American teases, “You don’t believe in that stuff do you?” and urges them to have a closer look at the pile of stones before announcing, “You know what? I think I might take one.” The Irishman, laughing nervously, repeatedly discourages the American before growing suddenly serious as the American gets closer. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. This time of year?” “What do you mean, this time of year?” Eventually, when asked what’s the worst that could possibly happen, the Irishman snaps, “They could take away your voice! They could make everyone you know forget who you are! They could make your arse your face and your face your arse! Ok? So just leave it alone!” The punchline comes when the American asks what the fairies look like and when told they’re like humans but “smaller and slighter with, like, very vivid eyes”, he panics, “Like jockeys?!” and immediately joins the Irishman in running away.

I laughed, because of course it feels like being a little bit called out. I have certainly been both characters: doubtingly superstitious in the Catholicism I grew up with, unknowingly sacrilegious as an American newcomer. I sent the video to my Scottish partner, who laughed too. I thought about it with a chuckle in the days leading up to Halloween (“This time of year?”). But as discourse on garden rewilding was once again stoked in early November, following an interview with a certain celebrity gardener who had termed “wild gardening” as “puritanical nonsense”, I thought about the fairy fort itself. I thought about the fairies, once euphemistically-termed “good neighbours”, and the rarity now of a place left alone out of such fearful respect. I thought about the impossibility of such a place in my urban Glasgow landscape. From the depths of my rattling mental archive of Scottish agricultural folklore, it reminded me of the goodman’s croft.

Once a fairly common tradition through the British Isles and parts of Europe, the goodman’s croft referred to a section of arable land set aside to go untilled, uncultivated, and ungrazed in hopeful exchange for the health of one’s cattle and crops. There were many names for this practice: the given ground, the gun rig, the clootie craft, the devil’s craft, the gudeman’s craft, the guidman’s fauld, the black faulie, the guidman’s grunde. The “goodman” referred to the devil, named respectfully so as not to offend him and incur his spite. But the practice likely originated long before the advent of Christianity, invoking the protection of pagan deities and spirits. The earliest records of the goodman’s crofts come from 16th and 17th century Scottish kirk officials, who discouraged farmers from the custom, and unsuccessfully petitioned Parliament to make the act illegal. Despite rampant accusations of witchcraft at this time, there is no record that possession of a goodman’s croft ever led to a witchcraft trial; however, in 1598, Andro Man of Tarbruich in Rathven (on the modern-day coast of Moray) was accused of being a creator of such crofts, by placing four stones at each corner of the piece of land and charming them, thus hailing the guides that would preserve the land against disease.

The tradition didn’t disappear completely until the 19th century, and was not always scorned by the church. Sir James Young Simpson (the first physician to demonstrate the anaesthetic properties of chloroform in childbirth) recalled in an 1861 lecture to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland that his own uncle had established a goodman’s croft almost as soon as he took possession of a new farm. However, the parish clergyman confided in Young that his uncle might have been “far from acting honestly with Lucifer, after all, as the corner which he had cut off for the ‘Goodman’s’ share was perhaps the most worthless and sterile spot on the whole property.” It was important that the croft be arable and fertile, set amongst the best ground the farmer had to work with. It was important that the thistles, gorse, and brambles that grew within this enclosure were not disturbed, trod upon, cut back. The land was allowed to lie fallow for however long the cultural memory of the practice stayed alive in the community.

Imagine that, in a landscape already full of natural life to a degree that would astonish us today. In our time, where constant interference and tidiness signal care, where not even the verges are allowed to grow nettles, where front gardens are paved for parking and back gardens are carpeted and hoovered, it feels like a utopian fantasy to imagine so many people supplying good ground for tenacious “weeds” and shrubs to develop right in the middle of their most important crops. Those of us who occupy spaces of land justice and decolonial ecologies spend a great deal of time trying to convince others to do what feels new and risky to them: welcoming the “weeds”, learning what they communicate about the quality of earth, leaving some areas unmown, untrimmed, uncultivated for the benefit of the non-human. And yet, there is nothing new in this at all. Cultural memory of this mode of existence – of living cheek-by-jowl with plant life, of respectfully allowing land to grow its own way, and keeping this land in such close proximity to cultivated space – all of it was dissolved in the colonising force of Christian individualism and white human supremacy that preceded European imperialism and capitalist exploitation. What feels new and risky is, in truth, a circling back to something older.

I am moved by the folklore of the fairy forts and goodman’s crofts because I can’t imagine living alongside uncultivated land that is never at risk of being destroyed, that never disappears one day in the unsettling drone of strimmers and chainsaws. Wildness – by which I mean any place left to grow its own way – is impossible to sustain where caretaking is decided by council workers and landlords, whose only fear is being inconvenienced by complaints of neglect and the expense of care. The goodman’s croft keens eerily with the same dread we know in the unpredictability of our collapsing climate, in our beseeching of many powers to preserve the health of our home. But our fearfulness is no longer embedded socially in widely-held folklore; the powerful immediacy of superstitious dread can’t be invoked to dissuade neighbours from laying fake grass, or to stop the council from felling healthy trees, or to prevent the factored landscapers from blowing the leaves away and tearing out the ivy. Landlords aren’t cowed by a fear of consequences if they don’t let us grow food and flowers on the land where we live. Council workers shrug when you tell them to stop spraying glyphosate along the river banks.

We know the worst that could happen is far more dangerous and far more likely than everyone we know forgetting us, or body parts suddenly getting switched around. We know the people to blame are not small and slight spirits that look like jockeys, but are councillors, MPs, senior ministers, developers, landlords, world leaders, war mongers, and oil companies. What I’m not sure we know is that there is a historic precedent for everything good and tender we do in relationship with our ecologies. The goodman’s croft fascinates me as proof of possibility, as evidence of rich, lively, resilient “wildness” being feasible in domesticated places. And not just wildness as raw beauty or astonishing biodiversity: wildness as a necessary actor in the health of what we make. Wildness as a good neighbour.

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