Country Mouse

have the title deed after so many years of struggle. And how much more powerful an object than a sheaf of papers in a solicitor’s safe.

We do not know how many boatloads – in a strange foreshadowing of today –of dark Iberian farmers arrived in boatloads on the southern and western shores of the British Isles in neolithic times. The owner would have brought the axe with him, having fashioned it himself, and it would have been part of the toolkit, along with flint sickles, used for forest clearance so that the first cornfields could be sown.

It is good practice for all growers to observe crop rotation – it is the cornerstone of organic gardening.

But with my patch being the size of a London-square garden, it makes sense to break new ground when I’m planting potatoes. Potatoes love fresh soil, especially where tall flowering nettles have graciously enriched it with their peaty roots. I was pleased to read that the variety I favour, the Red Duke of York, was also recommended by the great organic gardener Lawrence D Hills, founder of the Henry Doubleday Research Association.

During the site preparation, a strange, inanimate artefact literally flew out of the ground, as though in a hurry to be reunited with a living soul.

Or so I fancied as a student of Carl Jung’s acausal connecting principles –illustrated by strange tales of lost wedding rings being improbably reunited with their owners.

The find was only three yards from my boundary fence and I recognised it as an artefact. Very old, made not of flint but of gritty volcanic stone – so not from round here in Wiltshire. But I foolishly mistook it for a sharpening stone.

I stood corrected on the internet by a man in Ipswich, a dealer in Stone Age artefacts to whom I had emailed the image.

He replied, ‘Your item appears to be a late-neolithic, coarse, hard stone axe, dating to c 3000-2000 BC. It would have been hafted into a wooden handle for use, utilising tree resin and/or sinew to secure it in place.’

There’s nothing like one amateur archaeologist, in a profession characterised by obfuscation, to take the wind out of the sails of another.

He told me ‘for nothing’ that it was not that unusual a find and, ‘with some slight damage to blade edge, would probably realise £100, after buyer’s commission, postage etc’.

A hundred pounds to a cottager is still undreamt-of riches. Its financial value is more than that of my entire crop of potatoes.

Of course I wouldn’t dream of selling it. It will be an heirloom. It may be mounted in a case with printed commentary on a strip of pale canvas as in the Wiltshire Museum.

It increases the timeline of this property’s human settlement by up to 5,000 years – to put such details into the property particulars, were we to sell, would be an estate agent’s dream.

Jung said that each man must create his own myth and to me the find is

These farmers displaced the huntergatherers, who had been dependent on scavenging whelks and berries. Once food supplies could be controlled, you could swell the population.

Was the axe-owner nagged by his wife? Did he sleep, like Asterix the Gaul, on a bed of stone? These are the questions that arise as I roll the pleasingly cool and heavy object, over and over in the palm of my hand.

It is not fanciful to ascribe to my farmer a belief in a deeper reality lying behind the world of appearance. We know from their chambered barrows and tombs that neolithic farmers venerated the dead and raised megalithic structures in their honour. So they must have been capable of abstract thought.

They also feasted near Stonehenge – a tradition we continue in Wiltshire to this day; indeed every day, if Waitrose can only get its supply chains in order.

A hunter-gatherer could just about survive in drought by feasting on carrion, but a farmer, or a vegetable-grower like me, relies on rain – and rain cannot be controlled. This neolithic farmer would need to propitiate the gods.

Once again, a severe drought is predicted. I asked Mary to remind the vicar at our church to pray for rain. Meanwhile, this pagan will consult The Golden . The timeline for our tenure in Wiltshire has been so far extended by this axe head as to make Christianity a relatively recent development.

Could the discovery supply me with the sense of belonging that I have been searching for – an object that connects me to an ancient past and validates my

Only last week, on an orchid-spotting downland walk with wildlife writer Peter Marren, he reminded me that ‘change of ownership’ is one of the greatest enemies

‘Stay put,’ he told me. ‘Better to protect your own plantation from the next round of forest clearance.’