Farms

Sometimes, in certain places in the Black Country, you can see a clump of green, and on it, there might be horse, or a goat, or both. By way of example, think of the Thorns Road (it's a dual carriageway); think of the traffic island on the way to Lye. On the right hand edge there, on the Caledonia turning, there's a rectangle of green which can't be much more than the size of a plot for a small house. Well, somebody tethers a goat there. A goat. And if you walk towards Caledonia, on the left, there are patches of green with horses, quite a few. There are also horses tethered up past the flats further down on the right hand side, opposite the back of some factories. We're in the middle of the industrial West Midlands, and there's livestock in spare bits of land. This got me thinking:

When I was a kid, living in Pensnett, I had to walk to school, over the bridge towards Kingswinford, and there was a farm, with actual pigs in the field just next to the railway line. An actual farmer lived in one of the council houses in the street where I lived. During school holidays, I used to go up to Pony Bank (a big hill with a flat top behind the biggest council houses in Tiled House Lane) and get on the back on a horse (no saddle or anything, obviously) and ride it around up there. It is the god's honest truth that there was a particular family who kept a horse INSIDE THEIR HOUSE...This is not a myth. See, everybody thinks the Black Country is factories, industry, grime - and some of it is, of course - but some of it is as rural as it can get. Surprisingly so. Take a walk off the ring road in Stourbridge towards Lye, turn left up Stamford Road and see the viaduct? Climb over that stile and into that patch of land there. The River Stour is a luminous strip on the right and the viaduct forms a slightly skewiff giant up ahead, but...

COME. ON...you could be anywhere. And, I'm telling you, the only sign that you are anywhere near the Black Country, really, is the sound of the traffic rumbling past on their way to and from Lye. Even the air is fresher just there. Look, reading this back, look at the vocabulary: stile, river, viaduct. And look at this picture here: if you walk beyond the viaduct, you're heading out towards the back of what looks like a farm - or what could have been one - and then there are factories, and then there is Lye. These places aren't separate from the Black Country, they're part of it. They're off-grid places in an off-grid place. So, I'm going to write about a farm, in the Black Country. That's all I know just yet.