ancient earthworks, cairns, sites of Iron Age settlements, traces of a Roman road known as the Devil’s Causeway, remnants of Cistercian monastic granges and the ruins of a sixteenth-century castle are place names which give an indication of their history. Doe Hill was presumably a piece of good, sheltered land where does calved in the spring; Heron’s Close, perhaps a wood where herons nested; Harelaw, a grassy hillock frequented by hares during the rut and Haredene, the little wood adjacent to it. Garrett Lee Wood and Geordie Bell Plantation are named after people long forgotten, but whose names live on in history; Todburnis a small stream near a fox earth; Whinney Hill, where gorse would be encouraged to grow for winter feed; Linden Hill Head, the hill above a wood of lime trees; the Birks, a birch wood; and Gallows Shaw, a wood where there was once a gallows or a hanging tree. Beggars’ Bush denotes a hawthorn spinney; a hawthorn was known as a beggars’ bush because vagrants often slept under them, the dense branches offering some weather protection. ‘Who shall never tarry with master, but trudge from post to pillar, till they take up beggars’ bush for their lodging.’ The saying ‘go to the beggars’ bush’ was subsequently usually applied to people who had brought about their own ruin. Ewesleys was a productive pasture for pregnant ewes; and Sheep Wash a field adjacent to a stream where sheep used to be washed before shearing, to remove the sulphur grease rubbed into their fleece to prevent parasites and maggot fly. The Chirm (as in charm) was a copse noted for little birdsong; Pie Hill, from its circular shape and round, flat top; and Whitham’s Hole, a bog.
Place names are the windows that give us an insight into our most precious historic document; the landscape contains most of the evidence of our past and provides unparalleled revelations about our ancestors’ way of life, their hopes and aspirations. The intricate pattern of farmland, woods, forestry, villages, market towns, follies, sites of ancient settlement, earthworks and chalk carvings all play their part in the complex story of these islands.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE BRITISH LANDSCAPE
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
