Once there was a farmer who so loved his land that he disliked anyone human walking across it, except of course for his wife and needed workers. He only had to see a child crossing his bottom field, taking the short cut to the woods, or to the village, before his face itched, his nose reddened and he ran across at them with his gun cocked, shouting, “Get off! Get off! This isn’t your land!”

He was fond of saying: “We Rylands have worked hard for this property, we put our hearts into it and souls and bloody hard labour in all weathers. We don’t want strangers sharing it. If they wanted land of their own they should have worked harder to get it.”

People were afraid of crossing Ryland’s land but still they did it; hesitantly, warily, tiptoeing around the cowpats as if they were poisonous mushrooms. For some kids from the local village, crossing Ryland’s land was like an initiation test, or the biggest dare on late winter evenings. Some even went as far as building straw houses from the bales in the summer and watching out for old Ryland while they smoked or played cards, or played with each other.

Ryland’s wife, Rosalind, a sensible woman, told him to relax. They weren’t doing no harm, just crossing to the woods and to the bigger village of Tresibbett, where the shops were and the school. “It’s a long way by road, and really not many of them do it. Just a few.” She tried to soothe him with tales of his bank balance, full to brimming like the biggest butter mountains in Europe. (Even though people thought him mean -not even having a phone in the house. Instead, he relied on people coming to his gate with news. The village felt sorry for his poor wife, who either wasn’t strong enough to change him, or didn’t really care enough to. No one really knew. They could never imagine someone like Ryland having a caring wife. It was a miracle he was married at all.)

But all Ryland could think of was his sheep: such timorous beasties, easily affrighted and so vulnerable to nasty sheep-hating dogs. Each ewe lost meant money to him. And he resented losing money when it could easily be avoided by just keeping people away from his property! He put up the usual fences and the usual threatening signs, which some boys scrawled rude retorts on to rile him. And he was easily riled. Old Ryland worked himself up into a terrible temper. At night, in dreams, he would grab boys by the scruff of their neck and shake them violently before flinging them off his property. He would wake shaking and rush to the window looking for intruders walking on his land. Dog walkers, hikers, picnickers. He slept little and in the morning always looked awful. Eyes dark, skin pale, limbs heavy and listless. Rosalind, fussed around him, trying to do the right thing, but he always rushed out without breakfast to look at his land, to patrol his land on a fast small mini tractor that he used to herd sheep. One day he found a herd of strangers cutting through from the pub, drunkenly in waving lines, drifting across his fields like inebriated soldiers, and this made him ignite like an old boiler. His eyes widened, his mouth opened, his arms shot into the air: a madman on a tractor lunging towards the revellers, like a mobile assassin, eyes brimming with obsession and fury. The drunken party scattered, at first laughing, pretending Ryland was a bull. A mechanical bull. They ran, they taunted him. They ran. He got closer; he slowed to fire. They ran faster now, like pistons, as a couple of them realized this was no game. The line broke and Ryland went after the slowest, a man, just like a big cat hunts out the weakest wildebeest. The man, Martin, a computer programmer visiting a friend in the village, hid behind a pyramidal granite boulder. Bracken was all about him. Ryland saw him disappear and went after another man, a straggler, racing spiritlessly for the fence. On the other side of the fence, presuming safety, the three friends, two female, shouted to the straggler. “Colin!” they yelled, “Colin! You can do it, Col, you can do it. The old coot won’t get you.” Martin, the one who had taken refuge behind the boulder, raced behind Ryland, running like it was the Olympic 100 metres final, swerving past the back of the buzzing tractor, curving away from Ryland like the throw of a long ball in the sky and overtook little Colin with his little bendy legs and said not a word as he leapt towards the fence, hearing the buzzing of the tractor and the yells of reddening Ryland.

All this just wasn’t working. Ryland was exhausted. Exhausted and angry. He sulked for days. Not one rational word could persuade him of any different notion. Rosalind cooked him his favourite meals – beef, and Yorkshire pudding, stewed lamb and onions, aromatic casseroles full of homegrown meat and peas, beans and rosemary. But not even these could persuade him to think rationally about his land. His wife Rosalind tried next to make him forget his problems by playing canasta, and getting him to help with choosing colours for the back bedroom.

“What use is there for colours in the world when my land is not my own?” He howled, throwing down his gun on the kitchen table. Rosalind just looked at him and frowned.

Ryland went out in the morning after porridge; he went out after a bite of a beef and mustard sandwich in the evening. He watched on Saturdays, on Fridays, Mondays. One Tuesday he was watching from the farmhouse situated in the middle of his land and on a slight hill. Here he could see how special his land was; how the hills folded over like baker’s dough and how trees clung to the valley sides creeping downwards to the valley floor where a stream raced through as if scared to linger on Ryland’s land; he could see the patterns the hedges made zigzagging over the doughy hills. Ryland could see the animals moving in herds upwards and down and he could see the crops growing and the land changing colours. He could also see clear down to the valley, down to the other village where people walked to the pub. He was watching for people but no one came. For days no one had come. Winter was fading slowly, lambing had just begun, and no one had ventured across his land to the pub for days, for weeks even.

“In the Spring,” he thought, “they’ll be back. When it’s really Spring and the hedges are in bloom and the stream babbles and the lambs are bigger, then they’ll come. They cannot help themselves.” He thought then of lambing. Mucous-new fresh-born lambs molested by dogs, ewes frightened into birthing prematurely; he thought of miscarriages and abortions. He thought just of blood till all he could see in his field of green were bloody placentas, half-born lambs, flowing blood as if from endless knife cuts. Lambs crying, the bloody wails of terrified sheep and Mr Ryland began to cry. Cry for his animals; cry for his bank balance no longer growing fat. As tiny tears snagged down the length of his face, he watched a crow, black, sleek and maniacal fly from tree to tree and flop down onto the floor and begin to pick at the ground. It was dusk and rabbits appeared sudden and unexpected in the fading light.

The next day, Wednesday, he watched again as a buzzard circled and swooped. Already there were corpses. In the night a lamb had died. Ryland rushed over to where it lay. No other sheep went anywhere near it. The buzzard took to the sky with a pitiful scream and Ryland shouted at it to leave the poor mite alone.

The lamb itself too was pitiful. Ryland looked away quickly. As used as he was to death it always hurt him to come across it. A fox had got it.

“How dare it come on my land and get my lambs!” he thought, cocking his gun and firing at the disappearing bird. “How dare it! How dare the buzzards come down and get it. How dare the rabbits eat my grass. How dare the crows eat my seeds. How dare they. How dare they. How dare the birds cross my land, roost in my trees. How dare they. How dare they.” He put the corpse in the back of the tractor trailer and drove away.

Overnight he had a vision and on Thursday, he began. He didn’t do all the building himself. His lands were large, not as large as some, but large enough, covering 200 acres. He started with the field close to the village of Tresibbett, and he roped in as many lurking layabouts as he could and within the week the trenches were dug, the concrete mixed and the foundations laid. Friday week he moved on to the right side of his land, the side that edged the church and the big stream.

More people were needed. At the Jobcentre he culled another herd of layabouts. By Saturday, he had thirty people building the wall. In teams and singing. He didn’t like the singing and wanted to shout at them to stop. They continued singing, almost as if they were happy. Mr. Ryland felt like the first emperor of China. He strolled about the wall, in his big boots with his dogs permanently crouched at his side, like statues, around his men working, looking at the streaming sweat falling from their bodies. Watched as they grew in stature from weasels to bears. By the fourth week, the wall had grown miraculously to 10 ft high, heaving with the fetid breath of the unemployed, and had formed a massive perimeter around his land. His whole land was walled off.

A wall of granite – stones picked up from the neighbouring fields, backed with breezeblock and filled in with ready-mixed concrete. The whole village was talking about the wall around his property. Mr. Ryland was so proud of his wall, he couldn’t stop smiling, and daylight was seeing his teeth for the first time in years. Bright pink gums, soft like jelly babies, being brandished to the sky.

“This will stop them crossing my land. This will stop the birds landing on my ground. This will stop the fox killing my lambs. Only I can set foot on this property. Only I…”

“So I’m not allowed?” Rosalind stood behind him, having come silently out of the gap that was the perfect size for his tractor and jeep. “Really, Freddie, you are getting far too possessive.” She walked into the village and away from him. He never saw her again.

In the fifth week, the wall seemed to have grown. He was examining it one morning when he discovered another layer of rocks on top of his last added layer. This intrigued him. He walked about his land trying to catch whoever was doing it, putting up a thick wooden gate without gaps and smiled. Nothing could get in.

Sometimes birds flew down impertinently but they were easy to shoot within his enclave. For the first time ever his land was truly his own. He slept well now at night.

In the morning he took sheep to market and on his return found the wall had inched higher again in places; so now he took to sleeping close to the wall at night but every day he discovered that no matter where he slept, the wall maker had spent the night increasing another part of the wall. Freddie Ryland never found him, never saw a dark figure leaning on a ladder, placing bricks one by one on the wall.

One day Ryland found his gateway gone. He searched his wall for evidence of where the gap had once been, thinking perhaps it wasn’t where his memory had once told him it was. He searched every inch of his perimeter, and sat back in his farmhouse with its aga blazing and the dogs snoring, and began to panic. His panic took form of standing stock still in the living room while the clock ticked and the dogs scratched and the coal in the aga burned to nothing. He stood for hours trying to imagine where the gate had been, trying to think of all the things he should do. He missed his wife. He missed his beef and mustard sandwiches.

Ryland walked to the walls, which were now at least 15 ft high. Too high for an old man like him to climb. He would fetch ladders but they were gone. He spent the night shouting for someone to find him. No one came. He shouted till he was hoarse.

There were enough groceries for a while but still no one came. He had milk and beef and lamb aplenty but after a few weeks he was sick of lamb, sick of beef and took pot shots at pheasants, pigeons. This was his sixth week and he was alone on his land. Completely alone. Nothing came near him anymore. No birds fell from the sky; even though lamb carcasses were strewn across his green and pleasant land like fallen warriors from a battle. But what would he do when the food completely vanished? There didn’t seem point to the land anymore.

On the Tuesday of the seventh week after first building the wall, market day in the neighbouring town, and instead of being there making conversation, buying stock, selling stock, calling in at The White Hart to have a long pint with his fellow farmers, Ryland was crawling along the floor in search of his glasses. The last few days had been hard for him. He could no longer shout – his voice had vanished, and his fingers ached and bled from trying to climb up the walls. He had even tried waving flags from the upstairs bedroom at distant cars heading along the ridge to the village but his house was too far away from everything.

And now proud Ryland was covered in blood from a recent kill, having slaughtered another lamb. It was in this slaughtering that he’d dropped his glasses into the cavernous centre of the carcass. Freddie Ryland delved his hands into it to grab them, as he did so he slipped and fell on the carcass, emerging saturated with blood. As he began to crawl on the floor an enormous buzzard, or was it an eagle, flew down into the enclave, lifting up the tiny Ryland in its talons, and took him away to the hills.

His glasses dropped from his suspended petrified hands to the ground outside the wall, shattering in minute pieces.

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Jai Clare – dark blonde by nature, highlighted by design – lives in Cornwall. Farmers live in Cornwall.

Her other recent work can be found online at : Barcelona Review - Issue 23 March/April 2001: "Ramblista"; Absinthe Literary Review Summer 2001:"A Man of Shapes" ; In Posse Review: 'Talking to Lily'; or in print: Buzzwords 'Separate Beds' August 2001 (UK); Voyage magazine “Shadows in Light, Issue 10, (UK); Winedark Sea, Volume I, Australia.

As of this minute she is working on 3 novels because she is nuts and an addict. She only has hope in blonde hair – not in mainstream publishing, or love. Reach her at: jai@hexworthy.freeserve.co.uk.