The Oxen
‘Lugging the earth, the oxen bow their heads.
The alien conscience of our days is lost
among the ruins and on endless roads.’
Geoffrey Hill, ‘An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England’
The constellation Taurus is visible in winter in the Northern hemisphere. At this moment in early December, when the Northern Taurid meteor shower can be seen falling slowly through the night’s sky, it is furthest from the sun and at its brightest. The identification of the constellation as Taurus is extremely old. We have been watching this bull toss the sky on his horns since the Neolithic period.
The cattle are lowing. Not a peaceful sound, hymnal, as we might expect. Instead, it is like an antique horn sounding across the marais and through the trees, sonorous with a catch at the edges. Wherever you walk here, eventually you will encounter the heavy forms of cattle. Through gaps in fences comprised of a single strand of bailer twine, glimpsed in pixels through hedges almost denuded of leaves now. Often they break free of their pasturage. Move down the voie vert at speed, forcing you into a ditch, and to fish around, down there in the bronzed fronds of dead ferns, for the local knowledge that will tell you whose stock they are, and how to get them home. Once we came upon them massed at the bottom of a dead end, loose of their pasture and staring back at us sceptically. On another occasion, glimpsed from the car window: a lone bullock ambling along an empty lane, as if to keep an appointment. In early November calves are weaned from their mothers. Then the air is filled with torn bellows of rage and confusion, which quiet slowly, until as advent approaches, a near silence falls over poached gateways deep in sucking mud, and over pastures patrolled now only by egrets, stark white against the darkening earth. Dairy goats remain dotted around. A pair, one pure black with neat horns, another speckled with white and grey, appear and re-appear like familiars, tethered by long chains at various points along the stream which runs through the village and into one of its lavoirs. They have intelligent, querying faces, and look as if they might speak with you.
It is possible to chart the hyperlocal geography of this place in cattle. The two Friesian bullocks, children’s toy farmyard cows, that keep a vigil over an opening in the voie vert and regard you solemnly, wet muzzles glinting in the afternoon sun. The herd of Brahman Angus hybrid young stock, whose black coats soak up all of the light and whose long low backs break up the rise of the hill, as though they have been put forth by the land itself. Pale golden Charolaise, muscular and gleaming above their mud-dipped hocks, sculptural and still. Then there are the Dalmation-spotted Normande cattle, Bos Taurus, named for this area, who graze pasture which has been re-claimed from a parkland outside Lithaire, their tan and black pied hides visible in between wide avenues of mature trees along which phaetons used to rumble. The chateau the parkland served has been demolished and the avenue leads nowhere, a vanished vanishing point. Not unlike the Normande breed itself, produced by crossing English Durham and Alderney cattle with local breeds: the Augeronne, the Cauchoise, the Cotentine. All now extinct. Their eyes are framed by dark rings. They peer at you through their spectacles.
Normandy is France’s second biggest dairy basin, with much of that production concentrated in the area around Barnville-Carteret. There are 537,000 dairy cows grazing here alone. 13% of the organic milk produced in France is produced here, and it was here, in 1905 that the first dairy co-operative in France was formed, now called the Maitres Laitiers du Cotentin. Today the MLC is responsible for dairies including REO, Isigny, Tribehou and Valco, whose original dairy sits abandoned on the main road out of Valognes now, its dirty white façade emblazoned with the flowing blue ribbon of the Valco logo.
To understand milk you have to locate it culturally. I don’t mean merely in terms of that notoriously indefinable French phrase ‘terroir’. How we think about milk, what we do with it, if and how we consume it, the associations it has, have been churned through time and place. Here it is symbolic of a particular food culture, a signifier of the land’s ability to provide. Norman food is rich, heavy, redolent with fat and with comfort, underscored by the whisper that things may not always be so. Grass can fail, cows dry up, rain refuse to come. Eat now, while you can.
Starting early, taking the dog, I walk along the flank of the cattle farm at the top of the village. It is their young stock which I have glimpsed through the bones of the bocage these past few weeks. The temperature has dropped sharply. My breath, and that of the dog, hangs in the air, two parallel vapour trails. She stops dead next to an opening in the hedgerow, shorn recently and brutally of most of its vegetation. At the centre of the field stands a bull. He has stepped out of all his myths, stepped from the cave walls in Lascaux, stepped out of the heavens to stand, just here, just now. His shaggy coat is the colour of pale straw and steam rises from his body, wreathing his horns which form a shallow semi-circle above his ears, a bow ready to be drawn. He fixes us both, dog and woman, with a steady stare which I return for a breath-shaped age, until, as if by mutual agreement, we both incline our heads, and walk on into the morning.