was but a happy memory and a hill farm that had once employed two shepherds could now only afford one.
AGRICULTURE HAS STEADILY DECLINED AS A LAND USE, DESPITE THE RISE IN DEMAND FOR HOME-GROWN AND ORGANIC FOOD, GIVING WAY TO LEISURE AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT. PATTERNS OF OWNERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT HAVE CHANGED, PARTICULARLY WITH VARIOUS TAX INCENTIVES DESIGNED TO ATTRACT NON-FARMERS TO BECOME LANDOWNERS.
During the nineties, persuaded as much by increasingly powerful conservation lobbies as the embarrassing situation of overproduction, the government began reversing the previous policies and, instead of paying farmers to intensify, they now paid them to put the countryside back the way it was. Agriculture has steadily declined as a land use, despite the rise in demand for home-grown and organic food, giving way to leisure and urban development. Patterns of ownership and management have changed, particularly with various tax incentives designed to attract non-farmers to become landowners. The complexities of the Common Agriculture Policy and fiercely competitive international food prices have led to a ridiculous situation where we have a population of 60 million and yet British agriculture provides less than 1 per cent of gross domestic products, employs only 2 per cent of the workforce and the majority of British farmers survive through a system of grants and subsidies.
It is important, however, that there is never a repeat of the government follies of the sixties and seventies. The British countryside should be a place where farmers can work and earn their living and the decision makers, whether here or in Brussels, must appreciate the fragility of our historic landscape. Farmers and landowners are the stewards of our countryside heritage, and between them own many miles of historic field boundaries, thousands of traditional farm buildings and most of the ancient archaeological sites. An enormous amount was lost during the post-war period of intensification and, once gone, they can never be replaced. Changes in attitude now provide an opportunity to prevent further destruction whilst allowing farmers to fulfil their historic role of feeding the nation.
Immediately after World War II, my father bought a farm in that lovely part of the High Weald in East Sussex, on the northern edge of the Ashdown Forest. This is a landscape of rolling hills, sandstone outcrops, little streams running through steep-sided ravines, scattered farmsteads with small, irregular-shaped medieval fields linked by sunken lanes and paths, amongst areas of ancient broadleaf woodland.
Some of my earliest memories are of my sister and me being taken on afternoon walks through the woods on the farm by our nanny, the redoubtable Nanny Pratt. The woods were a mix of coppiced ash, hornbeam and sweet chestnut, known as underwood, growing in clusters from single stools, and individual oak standards scattered about, trees allowed to grow for their timber without being coppiced. Nanny Pratt always carried a trug on our walks to put wild flowers in for the nursery or edible plants, berries and nuts. In the early spring, she would look for wild garlic plants growing in damp glades or the banks of the little streams, where the water ran reddish brown from iron ore deposits in the local clay. By May the woodland floor was a carpet of bluebells, wood anenomes, woodruff, wood sorrel, and shiny-leaved Dog’s Mercury, wild arum, white hellebore, little purple orchids and wood spurge. As the summer wore on, herb bennet, primroses, foxgloves, fig-wort, meadowsweet and purple-flowered Enchanter’s Nightshade could be found.
The woods were a haven for wildlife and a constant source of delight and fascination. A stick poked among leaf litter would be guaranteed to produce something of interest: a disgruntled ground beetle, his glossy blue-black carapace glinting in the sunlight; a Longhorn beetle with waving antennae; or a thrilling, fast-moving Wolf spider. Even woodlice and millipedes had their entertainment value. There were hoverflies, brightly coloured weevils, caterpillars, and where the sun shone through the overhang, any number of beautiful woodland butterflies-White Admirals, Purple Emperors, Commas – and a whole range of woodland fritillaries. Nuthatches or tree creepers scuttled up and down the trunks of the old standard trees and we would often hear the rasping curse of a jay or the silly laugh of a green woodpecker. Cock pheasants might be seen scratching for food on one of the bridle paths and there was always a background of twittering, whistling little woodland birds such as chiffchaffs, warblers, tits, robins, wrens and blackcaps. We might see a hedgehog rootling for slugs, an adder curled up asleep on a sunny bank or find ourselves watched by a timid roe deer. In the autumn, when the leaves turned golden and the ferns began to die back, fungi would appear. Clumps of yellow honey fungus, beefsteak, velvet shank or beech tuft on old stumps; oyster mushrooms, chanterelles, boleti, Caesar’s mushrooms, morels, puffballs and sometimes fly agaric and death cap. To all of these, Nanny Pratt would cry, ‘Don’t you go near them.’ Autumn was nutting time, when the trug was filled with clusters of hazelnuts in their little green caps, sweet chestnuts or blackberries and rose hips. Winter was my favourite time of the year. I loved the silence of the woods, the long shadows and the stark eeriness of bare trees, the red, citron, russet, black, bronze or copper of fallen leaves and the musty, mouldy smell of decay.
Sometimes, when the frost was hard on the ground, we would smell wood smoke and come across the farm men coppicing chestnut trees for fencing stobs. They would cut the poles to length and stack the ‘cords’ to dry until the following winter, or split dry poles from the previous year with sledge hammers and chisels, loading the split wood onto a four-wheeled box wagon, whilst the carthorses stood patiently in the shafts. The woods were coppiced on a rotational cycle and the areas to be cut were known as coups. Hazel was coppiced every six to eight years, chestnut every ten to fifteen years, ash every twenty, hornbeam twenty-five, and oak, around fifty years.
One winter, a family of charcoal burners set up camp in Drew’s Rough, a hornbeam wood to the north of the farm, cutting and stacking the wood to dry for burning. Their arrival was an endless source of rumour and gossip among the farm men: charcoal burners lived in huts made of turfs and were worse than gypsies for thievery and poaching. They ate badgers, hedgehogs, squirrels, snails and little woodland birds which they caught with bird-lime made from fermented holly bark; were immune to the bites of adders, which they caught with their hands, skinning them and selling the fat to people who believed it cured deafness and rheumatism. I thought they sounded fascinating, and my one ambition was to be taken to visit the camp, but needless to say, as far as Nanny Pratt and indeed everyone else on the farm was concerned, Drew’s Rough was a place to be avoided.
In the early spring, Nanny Pratt took her annual fortnight’s holiday and she was replaced by a young woman from an agency. By then, all anxieties over the charcoal burners had been forgotten. They kept to the wood and were rarely seen; nothing had been reported stolen, nor had any of them been caught poaching. With my sister away, there was no one to contradict me when I suggested to Miss Knowles that Drew’s Rough would be a pleasant place for our afternoon walk. I did not actually know where the charcoal burners were working, and I suspect that my curiosity would have been satisfied by simply watching them unobserved from the safety of the trees, if we ever found their camp.
As it happens, one moment we were ambling along the old, sunken, leaf-filled drove road that ran through Drew’s Rough and the next we came round a bend to find ourselves in a clearing, where the filthiest man I had ever seen was shovelling earth onto a circular pile of logs. A horse and cart laden with cut cords was being led down a track into the clearing by another man, whilst a third loaded cords from a stack onto a wheelbarrow with four uprights rather than a body, known as a ‘charcoal burners’ mare’. There were the
