Wolds World: Waxing lyrical on the delights of harvest time

The combine has done its work and the grain has long gone.

The straw bales await the tractor and the land is ready to be ploughed to begin again the annual cycle.

This year, September has been a glorious month, day after day of unbroken sunshine.

The sun’s angle is gradually lowering in the sky; the shadows are growing longer and there is a chill in the night air as we await the first frost.

Apples are plentiful this year and I, like many hereabouts, have had a bumper crop of September tomatoes, grown outside as nature intended.

October is now nearly upon us; the season of ‘mists and mellow fruitfulness’, and the darkening nights!

Looking back through September there was a special anniversary that went largely overlooked.

‘Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness’ is the glorious opening line from the poem ‘To Autumn’ by John Keats.

Keats wrote his poem 200 years ago in September 1819 while walking along a river not far from the beautiful Cathedral city of Winchester.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Keats wrote to his friend Josh Reynolds:

“How beautiful the season is now, how fine the air a temperature sharpness about it. I never liked stubble fields so much as now, better than the chilli green of spring.”

A field of stubble somehow reflects the September sun.

I made the long journey to the East End of London in mid September and took the scenic route via Horncastle, Long Sutton, Wisbech, Ely with its Cathedral of the Fens, Newmarket with its heath and stables and finally through Essex to Chelmsford with its beautiful cathedral.

The best part of the route? Why Caistor to Horncastle through the Wolds of course!

Autumn in 1819 when Keats wrote, was warm just like autumn so far in 2019.

A word of warning though! On October 22, thick snow fell upon the South of England which heralded one of the coldest winters of that century.

Keep your fingers crossed and fear not for the winter ahead; just celebrate both the beauty and the bounty of the autumn as we mark ‘harvest home’ on farm, at pub and in church.