Summer gold

We follow the dry-mud, crunchy stone and pebble-strewn paths, steering bicycle wheels around the potholes and away from the deep, grassy ditches that border the fields of sunflowers. The farmers are haymaking. From a distance their powerful tractors and bailers shrink to murmuring, shuddering matchboxes; miniature machines working their way up and down this vast, flat landscape, a summer counterpane stitched from barley, corn and long grass; golden, warm-hued, wind-rushed life rippling against the pale-blue evening sky.

The beauty of this landscape overwhelms me.

But Anne-Marie, a farmer’s daughter, tells me with regret that farming, and the landscape she grew up with, has changed.

“These huge fields,” she sighs. “They were created for industrial farming. They took away the hedges. Now we have enormous fields for enormous tractors. It makes life easier for the modern farmer, but it has stripped our landscape of its beauty.”

To my English eyes, to eyes so used to Devon’s undulating, hilly, hedge-bordered, tree-capped meadows, the Poitou landscape is a huge relief; a great heavy, hefty breath of stretching physical freedom.

Anne-Marie interrupts my thoughts. “Some farmers are seeing sense,” she says. “Thankfully they are beginning to replace the hedges; they are trying to remake the land as it was.”

We cycle home. I revel in the long avenues, the little, hot, cracked roads, where grass grows high and wide down the middle; the ancient pathways that time and the motorist have forgot, but which the lucky cyclist discovers and remembers.

Tomorrow evening I will be back; moments from my tour marked by the quick spark of a tortoiseshell butterfly as it spirals up from the course grass, its wings dark against a flashing, dusk-time rainbow halo of sand and dust.

And I will measure my height against the thick, water-crunch stalks of the sunflowers; vast fields of innocence, beauty and hope, sprinkled with summer gold and growing near my new home.