Hills of the North

 

On Monday a schoolteacher called Dave Clark was killed by cows near Richmond in North Yorkshire. Apparently he was walking his dogs.  Death by cow is always a slightly unbelievable yet surprisingly not infrequent fate. Statistics are dodgy (aren’t they always ?), but supposedly around 74 people died in this way in Britain between 2000 and 2015.  Which, of course, raises the perennial question of how any one herd of cattle, or individual cow, knows to desist once the national annual target has been achieved. And more fundamentally how a docile cow, or even several of them, low on brain power, sluggish and unweaponised, seemingly not highly motivated nor obviously well organised, can trample or kick to death an alert and fully grown man. All too easily, it appears.

As a child, while warned to be wary of bulls, cattle in general were not considered by my relatives to be particularly dangerous. I remember being nervous, though, once while on a walk with Grandad that took us through a field towards a slightly sinister area characterised by wild pigs, patches of black soil, gorse bushes and hidden mineshafts, when some cows blocked our path. I was mildly alarmed that Grandad – a strong but kind man - saw fit to aim his walking stick and gently whack the backside of the nearest animal that was in our way. I couldn’t see the beast being exactly very pleased, and doubted the wisdom of the act, but Grandad knew best and, as a Welshman, would surely be familiar with such situations. We went on our way, and the cow did too.

Cows are probably best when on the other side of a fence. Monday, the same day as  the unfortunate fatality even further north, saw us among northern hills, obtaining a picturesque view of variegated cattle all pointing the same way, more or less due south, towards the sun. If only our fellow citizens could behave like that during a pandemic. Cattle don’t need to undertake complex activities requiring them to poddle off in conflicting directions.  They’re content with one thing at a time. They have no need to go to Ibiza or Zante, or to work in strategically vital industries like fingernail painting. Or even hoof-care. For all that, they don’t appear particularly disadvantaged and in some respects lead a superior existence. No commuting, no miserable boss, no rule of six. Clearly, they have something going for them – even if it’s only an elderly man waving a walking stick. Not only that, but they are instinctively positively heliotropic, natural sun worshippers, or maybe their posteriors are negatively phototropic. Or magnetic. Or something. They are also photogenic, although given their evident homicidal capabilities they’re surely not as butter-wouldn’t-melt as they would have you believe.

 

The British structural psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener (1867-1927) - who became a professor at Cornell University in New York State and who in 1909 was responsible for coining the word ”empathy” - claimed to have a fixed mental image for every word. A cow was “a longish rectangle with a certain facial expression, a sort of exaggerated pout”. Looking at the photograph above, how could you possibly disagree? But why are they pouting? Is it just for the camera? Is it vanity or are they just biding their time, planning another lethal ambush, honing their strategy, even scheming how to demolish the fence? They have all the time in the world.

And those northern hills. Magnificent, as was and is the hymn “Hills of the North, rejoice”, always a favourite of school assemblies. When we sang it I invariably felt mildly slighted at having to wait for the fourth verse, for the direction with which I was most familiar, the one leading to my Welsh relatives, including my grandfather with his somewhat cavalier attitude to matters bovine. What was so bloody special about North, South and East ? I hardly ever went to those points of the compass. Why was it that West always had to wait until last? Couldn’t they shuffle the verses about a bit occasionally?

“Shores of the utmost West,
Ye that have waited long,
Unvisited, unblest,
Break forth to swelling song”.

Well, yes, thank you, about time. The tune is by Martin Shaw, and is called “Little Cornard”, after a village in Suffolk. The words are by Charles Edward Oakley, and were published posthumously in 1870.

“Shores of the utmost West”. Fabulous. I don’t think Oakley necessarily had in mind Colwyn Bay pier, the Ukankuminandhavsumfun slot machine arcade in Rhyl, or the pleasures of hurling large stones into the sea at Llanfairfechan, but on a wet Monday morning before double physics it provided a safe geographical focus for daydreaming. Curiously, Oakley died in Abergele, on the North Wales coast, in 1865. Perhaps that’s why he kept that direction until last.