Dry season for the ragwort hunters of the Dales

Paul Routledge News from Elsewhere

I MAY be wrong, but there seems to be a lull in the Great Ragwort War. Perhaps it is the unaccustomed heat. It certainly has the weeds wilting, if not their persecutors.

Hostilities broke out into the open three weeks ago when our local paper, the Craven Herald, which still has advertisements on the front page nearly 30 years after the Times caught up with the times, carried an article about the potentially lethal plant, Senecio jacobaea, growing in our midst.

Jennefer Yates, an occupational therapist in our village of Cowling, North Yorkshire, (population about 2,000) warned that this colourful, coarse-growing weed with bright yellow flowers could kill. Its seeds in silage have proved fatal to cows, sheep and horses.

Like us, Jennefer is an "off cum'd 'un", a newcomer to this untouristy backwater of the Yorkshire Dales. Any farmer could have told her that the dangers of ragwort are well understood. It is, after all, listed as a dangerous species by the Ministry of Agriculture. But that did not prevent her from launching a crusade. "Cowling is virtually free of ragwort now," she proclaimed. "But it's a fairly expensive hobby travelling round the countryside pulling this weed up. People say I am fighting a losing battle, but it only takes a few more dedicated ragwort-hunters to get rid of it altogether."

Soon after, we were put on a red alert that the toxins in ragwort could cause cirrhosis of the liver in humans, through eating honey. "Bees are attracted to this beautiful flower," cautioned Jennefer. "I have seen so many bees working in this plant that I cannot believe that polluted honey is a rarity." Ms Yates wants the unemployed and school groups to be mobilised "to eradicate" ragwort.

As I used to say in editorial conferences when the flights of fancy began soaring: Hang on a minute! Even if this tendentious link with the human food chain could be proved, surely one would have to consume a European honey-mountain before feeling any ill-effects. And there are certainly more entertaining ways of contracting cirrhosis - or so they tell me. Other considerations arise. Naturalist Marlene Walker-Coward, of Skipton, who illustrates a Scottish tree magazine, argues that ragwort is a native wildflower of "flaunting golden beauty, the food plant of the equally striking caterpillar of the brilliantly coloured cinnabar moth". She rails against the destruction of any native species that has a place in the natural order. "Man meddleth too much."

Quite so. Man has apparently been meddling in the garden of Ronald Noon, along Gill Lane. He was astounded to watch a car stop outside his home, while someone got out, leaned over his wall and decapitated "a clump of bright yellow flower which had recently brought a dash of colour to that corner". He was furious. It was his ragwort, and he had not given permission for it to be cut. The Senecio jacobaea vigilantes have clearly overstepped the mark. Is this a case for the village's new community constable?

Actually, I can disclose to Ms Yates that ragwort is flourishing a few yards from her myrmidons' latest hit. It is growing by the garden wall of Viscount Snowden. No, not the one who married Princess Margaret. Thankfully, I cannot see him wanting to live round here. I mean the first (and last) Viscount of Ickornshaw, better known to students of political history as Philip Snowden, Labour's first Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was born at Number 1, Middleton, a millstone-grit terrace just across the field.

Backpackers treading the Pennine Way this weekend will pass within a few feet of the modest origins of the Iron Chancellor that Gordon Brown can only dream of being. Glancing back to the difficult scrub of Ickornshaw Moor, or ahead to the 1100ft Cowling Hill, it is unlikely that many will notice the humble two-up, two-down where history was made. But the interested can squeeze through a snicket-gate to see the cottage, which carries a plaque recording Snowden's birth in July 1864. The house next door looks uninhabited. It would make a fine spot for a small museum commemorating the great man, who was Chancellor three times. His books and papers survive in Keighley library, though who knows what happened to his desk. He left it in his will to Lloyd George.

For serious devotees, a diversion of a couple of miles off the Pennine Way will take you to the 9ft high stone cairn where Snowden's ashes and those of his controversial wife Ethel are scattered on the moor. It is a lonely place, surrounded by nettles and chiefly visited by sheep seeking shade. Snowden's role in the National Government of 1931 made him a traitor in the eyes of many in the Labour Party, but the verdict of his village is uncompromising. "In this place," reads the inscription, "mingled with the soil and near the friends he loved, are the ashes of Philip Snowden, 1st Viscount of Ickornshaw, who lived his whole life in the service of the common people and died in the love of his native land on May 15th 1937." Apart from a memorial ash tree planted by the main road to Colne in nearby Lancashire, these are the only public signs of Cowling's admiration for its greatest son.

But his ideas live on. Snowden was the intellectual father of the national minimum wage. In The Living Wage, published in 1912, he advocated an Arbitration Board with powers to fix minimum work rates, starting at 30 shillings (pounds 1.50) a week. The poverty of working people, he argued, was intolerable to "the moral and Christian faith of the nation". The idea never went away. Rodney Bickerstaffe, a fellow Tyke who will soon assume the reins of power in Unison, the country's largest trade union, has a copy of this prescient volume. He calculates that Snowden's formula - never adopted, of course, not least during his Chancellorship - would have given 53 per cent of the Edwardian working population a pay rise. Perhaps the Labour pioneer's proposal could be resurrected if and when Mr Brown does make it to Number 11.

I have to admit that the minimum wage is not the staple topic of conversation in Cowling's two pubs (one of which, the Black Bull, beside the Pennine Way, has not one but two landladies). But they do talk about water, or rather the lack of it. Even though we are not suffering too much yet, if I were a Yorkshire Water fat cat I would leave my hiking boots in the garage. Nightly, the local television news promises stand-pipes in Bradford. This, in one of the rainiest counties in the country, whose water company boasted three years ago of a "water grid to be proud of".

How little changes. In 1895, Philip Snowden campaigned for public ownership by the parish council of Cowling's water supply. Oh, that he were here now for the water bosses to feel the lash of his invective! A better target, you might think, than ragwort.