Fallow

A Cuckoo Marans rooster with slate-grey barred plumage in an olive waxed-cotton field jacket with a brown corduroy collar over a cream fisherman's knit, perched on a weathered wooden five-bar gate at the edge of a misty green pasture at dawn, black-and-white dairy cows grazing behind him and a stone church tower on the distant hills

One Summer in Five

Every fifth summer the field is permitted to be merely a field. He comes down to the gate most mornings to watch it do nothing at all, which it manages with a confidence he has spent a lifetime trying to acquire.

27 June 2026