The winter solstice is well passed, and as the days lengthen so do my forays out into the valley below our farmhouse. Our valley hasn’t changed much over the past 500 years. A reservoir was dug in the Sixties, the odd timber-framed house has gained a television aerial but that is about it. As I walk around the valley, I have been trying to imagine my way further back, to the time of Merrie England, a medieval land full to brimming with feasts and festivals. In East Anglia you are never short of a church or two and as I looked down the valley towards ours I was struck with the thought that there was a time when our churches were emblazoned with bright paints, their interiors catching all the colours of summer and preserving them throughout the winter for the benefit of their congregations. As a gardener who spends most of the year thinking about the palette of colour only available in high summer, I find this instinctively appealing. Sometimes you can still see the odd stain from the colours they used in among the sea of grey stone. This same colourful vigour fizzed out into the surrounding countryside and into the lives of ordinary folk, touching even the smallest details of their lives. Take St Mark’s flies: you know the ones, they buzz around with their legs hanging down on or around April 25, which makes for a handy way to remember the saint’s day. St Mark’s flies still go by the same name. They survived Henry VIII’s innovations even if the bright medieval paints did not. The countryside, it turns out, is a handy place to hide.