A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside. Johnny Scott
The landscape today is like a complicated, multi-layered puzzle where ancient and modern places exist side by side, with natural and man-made features inextricably interwoven. It is the variety of patterns created by historic and contemporary methods of land use which gives the countryside its infinite diversity and endless fascination, and it is the analysis of the way these fit together that enables us to map its evolution.
The character of the countryside depends on a number of different factors, but geology and soil fertility are the two determining influences on the way people have interacted with nature to establish the detailed individualism of different areas. The human imprint is fundamental, either through good management practices or by ruthless and destructive exploitation. In some counties the process of change has been continuous for many centuries, escalating rapidly within living memory until the landscape became unrecognisable to those who grew up there. In others it has remained largely unchanged since the Agricultural Revolution, and in a very few places, such as our farm, the present-day surroundings would seem quite familiar to our pre-Roman forebears.
Throughout history farmers have been responsible for the shape of the countryside, gradually clearing the forests of wildwood and breaking in the land. When populations expanded, they extended farming into areas normally considered marginal and unproductive and even reclaimed land from the sea – in Norfolk and Lincolnshire, for example, or the coastal marshes of Kent and Essex. When the population was periodically in decline, as it was after the collapse of the Roman Empire, they abandoned the reclaimed land and allowed it to revert.
For many centuries this trend was cyclical and subject initially to the movements of prehistoric people across Europe to Britain, bringing improved agricultural methods. It was influenced by changing weather patterns, periodic famines, pestilence and war; particularly during the Anglo-Saxon era and later by the conflicts with Wales, Scotland and interminable hostilities with France. Since the Norman Conquest, trends in agriculture have been highly dependent on market demand for certain commodities and the investment response by landlords. Our chalk and limestone uplands were heavily farmed by early agriculturalists but reverted to grass when better land was reclaimed by the Romans and Anglo-Saxons. With the arrival of the Normans these uplands became highly valuable to landlords as sheep grazings and remained so until the twentieth century, when much of it was ploughed out for arable crop production to meet consumer demand. Similarly, the land round my farm had been occupied by Bronze and Iron Age people, was largely abandoned by the Romans and Anglo-Saxons and then became highly sought-after by the wool-producing Cistercian Abbeys. With the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the huge monastic flocks went and the land was crofted by little pockets of subsistence farmers until it became valuable again, when good-quality low-ground acres on which sheep had been grazed were needed for grain.
It is the same story with the great, medieval, open-field, strip-farming systems in the West Midlands and parts of East Anglia, which were converted from arable back to grass in the sixteenth century. An early act of enclosure enabled Elizabethan landlords wishing to benefit from the boom in the wool price to create sheep walks by hedging and walling. By the time the wool price collapsed, the urban population had increased and the land was ploughed out for arable cultivation, removing most of the traces of ancient strip farming.
Equally, if agricultural expansion was influenced by war, famine and market growth, it in turn controlled population growth. By 1750, the population in Britain had reached nearly six million. This had happened before: in around 1350 and again in 1650. Each time, the appropriate agricultural infrastructure to support a population this high was not present, and the population fell. However, by 1750, when the population reached this level again, developments in agricultural technology and new methodology allowed the population growth to be sustained.
OLD FARM BUILDINGS, SIMILAR TO THE EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY STEADING ON MY BORDERS’ FARM, HAVE A SIGNIFICANT TALE TO TELL, AS DO THOSE WHICH WERE ABANDONED AT AN EARLIER TIME AND ARE NOW NO MORE THAN AN UNDULATION IN THE GROUND … THESE TRACES OF LAND USE HELP TO INTERPRET OUR PAST AND UNDERSTAND OUR LANDSCAPE HERITAGE.
What are now recognised as historic landscape features were created by agriculturalists over this long period of fluctuations in farming methods and population growth. Heaths, of which there are 58,000 hectares in places such as Ashdown Forest in Sussex, Delamere Forest in Cheshire, Clashindarroch Forest (one of many in Scotland) or Exmoor in Somerset, were created by long-term overexploitation of poor soils by prehistoric farmers. There are 23,000 hectares of surviving wood pasture in places such as the Savernake Forest, and traces of early soil tillage can be found dotted across Britain, particularly in the Midland counties; reeves, cord rigs, lazy beds and lynchets. Old farm buildings, similar to the early nineteenth-century steading on my Borders’ farm, have a significant tale to tell, as do those which were abandoned at an earlier time and are now no more than an undulation in the ground. Ancient trees are fundamental to the landscape; their presence often indicates an old parish boundary, the remains of parks and wood pasture or the existence of a field. Individually or together, all these traces of land use help to interpret our past and understand our landscape heritage.
About 6,500 years ago, the nomadic Neolithic hunter-gatherers began to establish semi-permanent settlements, clearing the native wildwood and converting the land to agriculture. Trees were killed by copying the damage done by wild animals chewing off the bark; ‘ringing’ with a stone axe or knife prevents sap flow and eventually the tree died, the stumps rotted away, the undercover was burnt and tillage could begin. The population at that time was probably about 80,000, made up of small farming families organised into farmsteads and hamlets along similar lines to that we see today – namely that the lowland valley of the south east of the country was best suited to the production of crops while the more upland areas elsewhere were suited to pastoral farming. The new land, cleared so laboriously, was farmed for about twenty years until fertility was exhausted and production dropped below a level sufficient to sustain the settlement, at which point the community moved on to clear new land and start afresh. Land that was abandoned then reverted to scrub and woodland, before the cycle started again and it was cleared once more.
The climate was warm and wet, and primitive species of wheat – emmer and einkhorn – were easily grown, as were barley, beans and pulse. Neolithic man was also heavily dependent on the early spring growth of wild plants that thrive near human habitation, such as nettles, orache, fat hen and Good King Henry. Soil preparation involved scratching the ground with an ard – a primitive plough consisting of a frame mounting a nearly vertical wooden spike, dragged through the soil by human effort. Rather than cutting and turning the soil to produce furrows, it breaks up a narrow strip of soil, leaving intervening strips undisturbed. Cross-ploughing was often used, where the soil is ploughed again at right angles to the original direction. Harvested crops were stored in pits which allowed surplus produce to be used in times of need.
Storage, more than anything else, allowed the development of farming and, ultimately, civilisation. Sheep, goats and cattle were kept as well as domesticated wild pigs. Within the limitations of stone knives and axes, the wildwood conterminous with settlements was coppiced. Towards the end of the Neolithic period, settlements became permanent enough for causeway enclosures to be built as communal meeting places, for example at Coombe Hill, near Jevington in Sussex, or Flagstones in Dorset. Chambered long barrows were also constructed to house the dead, such as the one on Gussage Down in the Cranborne Chase area of Dorset, Barclodiad y Gawres in Anglesea, Belas Knap near Cheltenham, Maeshowe on Orkney, or Stoney Littleton Long Barrow. The first of the henges were painstakingly erected – testaments to Neolithic man’s commitment to settling where these were built, including Ballymeanoch, in Kilmartin Glen, Scotland; King Arthur’s Round Table and Mayburgh henge, near the village of Eamont Bridge, Cumbria; the Ring of Brodgar in Orkney; Thornborough Henges, near Masham in North Yorkshire; Maumbury Rings, near Dorchester in Dorset and, of course, Stonehenge in Wiltshire.
During the 1,500 years of the Bronze Age, from roughly 2100 to 750 BC, there was significant population growth as agriculture expanded throughout most of the country. Recent research suggests that the population may have exceeded a million by 2,000 BC. However, within the huge time period