Like the 19th-century poet John Clare, I have derived great pleasure in my time from the humble ragwort, writes Frank McNally
Clare loved to see the yellow plant appear in neglected places, where: ". . .everywhere I walk/Thy waste of shining blossoms richly shields the sun-tanned sward in splendid hues that burn/So bright and glaring. "Me, I just enjoyed hacking it to pieces with a scythe.
Of course I was only obeying orders. For several years, growing up, it was my job every summer to clear the hill behind our house of ragwort. The terrain was too steep for a tractor, or at least for our Massey Ferguson 165. So the job had to be done manually, with the help of an implement that even then appeared to belong in a museum.
The scythe was a relic from John Clare's world. It had a five-foot handle - about as long as I was at the time - which, for reasons never apparent to me, was crooked. The angle of the blade seemed eccentric too, at least when you were cutting ragwort. In fact it was perfectly designed, when in the right hands, for slicing through thin swathes of hay or grass. But this was a skill I never mastered.
Grass would just lie down in front of my scythe, occasionally bruised but never seriously injured. The yellow-flowered weeds, on the other hand, were an easy target: crashing before me like miniature trees felled by a giant. Not that the overall task was easy. It used to take two days to clear the hill (I worked short days, admittedly) by which time my hands would have an extensive collection of blisters.
But it was thoroughly enjoyable work. The sun would be shining. There was a lovely view across the drumlins to South Armagh and the Mournes. And even in my herbicidal frenzy, I think I experienced some of the joy Clare felt when he surveyed ragwort-covered fields: "Rich with the tints that harvest's plenty yields".
Enjoyable as the job was, it was also - looking back - completely pointless. Not only did I fail to uproot the weeds. I never even gathered up the ones I cut. I just left them to wither away, ensuring that even as they died they planted the seeds for another generation.
Then again, as I realised when reading Michael Viney elsewhere in this paper recently, the exercise was probably cosmetic. It may have had its origins in 1936, when the government rounded up the usual suspects - ragwort, dock, and thistle - and imprisoned them in the Noxious Weeds Act. Thereafter, farmers lived in fear of the "thistle man": a travelling inspector who levied £20 fines on those who visibly failed in their duty.
I don't remember a thistle man in our parts. But his shadow must have lurked still. At any rate, our hill was highly visible from the main road, which must have been a factor in the annual ragwort slaughter.
A perceived threat to livestock was hardly the motivation, or else leaving the weeds to wither would have been more dangerous than not cutting them at all. Dried ragwort loses the bitterness that might warn off horses and cattle, while retaining all the toxins that can kill them. But there were no horses anywhere near, and the hill was little grazed.
The quadruped most at risk then, I recall, was my pet Labrador, Rover. Once, he made the mistake of lurking in a dense patch of growth, where all three of the proscribed plants conspired to cover him up, even as I came slashing through them with the scythe.
Suddenly, I heard an anguished yelp; and my blood froze as a blurred black shape approximating to the dog shot out of the weeds, howling. When he stopped running - quite a while later - long enough for me to examine him, I did so with trepidation. It was a relief to discover that he was missing only a tiny piece from the top of one of his ears.
I learned never again to swing a scythe carelessly, and Rover learned something too. For long afterwards, whenever I tried to interest him in a run across the hills, he would become briefly excited. Then his Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder would take effect. The excitement would drain from him and he would skulk back to his kennel, staring out at me as if I was a murderer.
In fact, the only thing I was guilty of killing (and never permanently) was the ragwort. And even if I had the law on my side, I vaguely regret now my persecution of the plant: especially whenever I read John Clare. When the "peasant poet", as he was called, writes that wild flowers were "sent to gladden hearts as mean as mine", it feels like a rebuke.
But then Clare may have identified personally with weeds, since they existed - as he did - on the margins of "culture". (It's a big irony that his legacy has been the subject of a long-running dispute over who owns copyright, and whether the poems should retain the punctuation and spelling corrections imposed by his first editors, or appear in their original, wild form.) Anyway, ragwort is arguably a plant as much sinned against as sinning. It can at least plead mitigation of its crimes. Clearly it needs to be kept away from horses and cattle (sheep seem to eat it with impunity). But against the danger it presents to farm animals, as Michael Viney has pointed out, it can produce excellent character references from a whole range of smaller life forms, including 27 different species of moth.
A poet from the Isle of Man - where ragwort is called "cushag" - has pleaded for qualified tolerance: "Now, the cushag, we know/Must never grow/Where the farmer's work is done/But along the rills/In the heart of the hills/The cushag may shine like the sun."That seems a reasonable compromise to me too.