Escaping a car with a popped tyre, Sally McEnallay connects with the unseen ecology of the edgelands.
Margins are easy to ignore because they are places where nothing seems to happen. A motorway verge seen through a car window is a blurred, weedy strip that separates six lanes of traffic from farmland, new housing estates or the squat out-of-town warehouses of delivery companies. This edgeland is merely a liminal space between spheres of human activity. We have no reason or opportunity to visit unless accidents land us there.
Last July, driving from Oxford to London, a sudden pop and flail of rubber forced me to swerve across two lanes onto the hard shoulder of the M40 motorway. My car was no longer a protective shell but a cracked carapace from which I crawled shaking. Ejected from the traffic flow, now I was jetsam on the side of the road.
‘If you feel sure it’s safe to leave the vehicle, do so through the left-hand door and stand well clear of the vehicle and moving traffic – preferably behind the barrier (if there is one) on the embankment or verge and upstream of oncoming traffic. Remember the grass verge may be soft or uneven underfoot.’ (Automobile Association)
But the knee-high aluminium barrier that marked the border between hot tarmac and weedy wasteland offered little protection. I climbed awkwardly over it, stinging my hand on a hidden thistle, and dropped to a crouch on the uneven ground, my back to the motorway. Behind me cars streamed through the gap in the Chilterns heading for the city and Sunday evenings crammed with food prep and laundry – these high chalk cliffs a portal between country weekend and suburban working week.
Did someone see me there squatting beyond the fence, register brief sympathy and then turn to calm fractious children or retune the radio to the news? I had slipped out of human time and my passage back depended on a stranger in a tow truck whose arrival was unspecified and whose palm would need to be crossed with plastic before they would ferry me home.
Feet behind me lorries thundered past on monster tyres and the Oxford Tube cruised by — its passengers cocooned in airline comfort, headphones on. As I crouched in no-man’s-land sharp stones shifted under my weight and the barrier dug into my spine. The summer afternoon yawned ahead of me. I mourned the abandoned pub lunch by the river with friends — slow-roast beef, giant Yorkshires, pints of golden cider. I dug a melted chocolate bar from the pocket of my jacket and washed it down with a mouthful of warm water.
Ahead the scree slope dipped to a green ditch then rose to meet a straggle of trees through which I glimpsed the ridges of a newly harvested field. The slope was steep and the ditch full of nettles. Thunder clouds threatened rain and the air felt sticky. Over to my right a thin line of willows sketched the course of a tributary of the River Cherwell, flowing unseen beneath the leaves. I longed to sit, trousers rolled, dangling my feet in the cool water while water boatmen skittered round my ankles and pond weed tangled in my toes. There might be dragonflies dipping on the surface and the green smell of crushed summer grass. Already my leg muscles ached and the tang of burned rubber coated the back of my throat. But I couldn’t answer the river’s call without forfeiting my chance of rescue.
In 2009 Canterbury-based artist Edward Chell was stuck in a traffic jam on the M2. This enforced period of stillness with close access to the verge inspired Garden of England, a series of six paintings of the motorway verges of Kent. Chell exhibited three of these paintings on the walls of Little Chef motorway cafes along the M2 and A2. Customers were able to examine the richness of the verge as they tucked into an all-day breakfast. Chell traces a connection to the tradition of eighteenth-century landscape gardening, in which sweeping vistas were created to be viewed while travelling by carriage or on horseback through the English countryside.
‘Similarly, as we drive, our relationship to the sculpted ravines of motorway gorges, sudden lateral views, and bridges changes: different vistas open up and suddenly shut down as we move through the landscape at high speed. My paintings interrupt this commonplace visual experience to give people a kind of laterally viewed clip of a landscape, normally encountered in milliseconds.’ (Chell, 2009)
That afternoon I found myself in one of Chell’s paintings. Inches from my nose, bees danced like tiny boxers to stay in contact with the flower heads as their stems flexed and whipped in the backdraft from the cars. When the sun broke through the clouds, four butterflies resumed their elegant courtship of the willowherb and purple scabious. At ground level a yeoman army of slaters, spiders and beetles marched across the tangled mat of leaves and grasses. There may have been birds, but their songs were drowned by the roar of the motorway. At the edge of my vision a clump of grass twitched as a cricket, or maybe a frog, made an exit. Stems of ‘sticky willy’ clung to my socks; the toothed seeds caught in the wrinkles of cotton. Trapped on this gritty strip between field and road, I started to experience the verge as a landscape in miniature. As I stretched my stiff neck and shoulders back, I saw a familiar shape sweep the skies above me.
Red Kites are so common over the M40 now that it’s rare not to see at least a pair glide above you as you drive through the chalk cliffs of the Aston Rowant nature reserve. But these iconic predators used to be rare. As my 1988 edition of the RSPB Book of British Birds records, ‘Once Red Kites were common scavengers, even on the streets of London, but improved sanitation, loss of suitable habitat and, most important, persecution by man almost wiped out the species. Only ten pairs remained in central Wales at the beginning of this century.’ In that year Red Kites were reduced to a single breeding site in Wales. The bizarre repatriation of 13 pairs from Spain by British Airways in 1990 reintroduced them to the Chilterns and the RSPB now estimates the UK-wide population as more than 2,000 breeding pairs. This success has ignited enthusiasm for a slew of rewilding projects to restore other iconic species like the white stork, bison and even the lynx and wolf to the wild places of Britain. The badgers, hedgehogs and rabbits that blunder onto the motorway at night are convenient protein for the Red Kites. But roadkill alone cannot satisfy such numbers. As the Kites forage more widely, they compete with other predators like barn owls in their shared taste for field mice and voles. In trying to restore the balance we have once more upended the scales.
The spectacular Red Kites of the Chilterns are a triumph of the visible, drawing photographers from across the country to try and capture their aerial majesty. Yet down at the grassroots the butterflies are dying. Of the 48 native species of British butterfly over half are now endangered. The four species that spun around me that afternoon — Cabbage White, Small Brown, Red Emperor, Admiral — remain common. Where are the rest? Butterflies are particularly sensitive to habitat loss and changes of temperature or weather patterns. These tiny heralds of damage frantically semaphore their own demise, but no-one is watching. We celebrate the return of the osprey, the beaver and the Red Kite and yet we continue to dig up or tarmac over the ordinary homelands of the common wildflower or humdrum beetle.
Hard lines have been ruled at the margins. The tiny communities of the verge are impossible to connect with from an air-conditioned car. It’s easy to miss the pattern of emerging leaf, lush summer growth, autumn seedheads, winter shelter and nest-building that mark their lives. To see those, we would have to visit often and there is no compelling reason why we would choose such ordinary places over the craggy majesty of a mountain or the lichened magic of a woodland.
As I climbed back into my car with its shiny new tyre, I knew that the wind would erase my imprint from the crushed grass of the verge. Flattened stems would right themselves with only a kink or torn leaf evidence of my visit. It is my ambitious hope that species we have damaged and scattered might mend and regroup in the changed conditions that we have created. But I also fear that unseen landscapes can be easily erased. Verges are edges and edges erode, as any coastal dweller will tell you. But every time we feel the tug of a spider’s web on a morning walk, or lock eyes with a nightwalking urban fox we cross into no-man’s land. These cross-border encounters are precious chances to acknowledge that we all stand together on the verge of an unknown future.
*
Sally McEnallay is a writer of narrative non-fiction and memoir who hails from Scotland and currently lives in London. She is interested in exploring the relationship between human and non-human nature in the hope that it has a future. When not writing she is often to be found walking a spaniel or reading three books at once. Follow her on Instagram here.