The old farm

It has been 25 years, probably more, since I last walked the footpath down the hill to Sturt Farm. Back then it was little more than a narrow, sunken track running across a series of fields, a crease in these old sheep fields rather than anything more substantial. In the winter, when it snowed, we used to bring our sledges here and hurtle down a slope that steepened towards the bottom, accelerating you towards the barbed wire fence that marked the farm’s western boundary.

The slope, the fence and the path are all still there but the path itself has changed dramatically. Another fence, presumably added to keep children on the path and out of the field, has allowed a tangle of vegetation to develop unchecked. Bramble, bindweed and bittersweet clamber over nettle and hawthorn, a new generation of ruffians exploiting the landowner’s lack of interest in this small part of a once bigger plot. The top of the biggest field has sprouted the beginnings of a wood, with clumps of hazel casting damp shade on this humid morning. The air under the trees resonates as if charged with static electricity, the whine of dozen of hoverflies, holding station.

While the view from the path has been lost to the clambering plants, there is something deeply comforting about the tunnel of green that the path has now become. The prying eyes of the houses that push up against the farm’s boundary can no longer gaze on those few souls who use the path. It is the silken nets of spiders, the lack of litter and the way that the vegetation presses in, that all speak of a path little used. Running down from the ridge, the path would have once been well used, its sunken state testament to the footfalls of generations past. Even though the landscape has changed, the path seems rooted in the history of this place. It is a link back through the years, first to my childhood and then far beyond. Two hundred homes are intended for this plot of land, the planned access road to follow and replace this ancient path. The landscape changes and we mourn its passing but it remains resilient beyond the timescales that we can comprehend.

Town versus country

Writing in 1906, Ford Madox Hueffer described an English countryside very different from what we see today. Through his book ‘The Heart of the Country’, Hueffer explored the tensions that existed between town and country, identifying how the different physicality of the countryside and the nature of its human community served to alienate those whose origins were in the town.

Heuffer’s exploration of town and country, although very much shaped by the ‘Fin de siècle’ literature that preceded him, in terms of style and perspective, still has relevance today. In many ways the tension between town and countryside still exists. Despite the move away from the land that came with industrialisation and the increasing mobility of our population, there is still a real division between the two. Many of the youngsters born to our inner city estates will never experience the countryside from anything more than a seat on a train or in a car. A sense of isolation can also be seen in some rural communities.

Heuffer was writing at a time when great changes were happening within the countryside and for England herself. Many of those living within the ‘dark, toilsome town[s]’ had been brought up in the countryside but could only carry the remembrance of it in their hearts. While the same is true today for some of our urban dwellers, for many others the town is all that they have ever known.

One important consequence of being divorced from the countryside is that people have a much-reduced sense of ownership over it. It is no longer the place that provides the backdrop to their formative years or sustains them through their working lives. It has less significance and its value is lessened in our increasingly urban-focused gaze. And this is where the tension begins to develop, as our towns are viewed in isolation from the countryside that surrounds them. There is a real danger that the voice of the countryside is being lost and this is something that needs to be addressed. It is not about maintaining country traditions, though this is where the more vocal protests are heard, it is about maintaining the link between town and country and re-establishing the bonds that once existed.

The road less travelled

Our landscape is criss-crossed by track-ways and paths, not all of them the product of human activity. Enter a wood or a meadow and you will find the tracks created and maintained by other creatures, from the temporary meanderings of a fox made through wet grass to the more regular routes of commuting badgers.

Our own tracks and paths tend to have more permanence, especially those built, through the use of tarmac and stone, to resist colonisation by nature and to provide a flat surface for feet and tyres. Such creations bully nature into submission, our technology able to deliver roads and paths that are not constrained by the landscape but instead thrust their way across it – the shortest journey between intended destinations. The journey (and the road or path itself) no longer matters when using such conduits; our focus shifts towards our intended destination. We no longer have the time to meander or to take in the landscape; we simply need to get from ‘a’ to ‘b’.

One strange feature of the road is the way in which we describe it as ‘going’ somewhere – ‘that road goes to Norwich’. Of course, the road doesn’t go anywhere – it is immobile and rooted in the landscape and it is we who are the travellers. I have little time for the modern road and favour older routes that are more sensitive to the landscape and whose journeyings follow the contours of the hills and the crossing places of the rivers. Such routes slow your journey and present you with views of landscape that would otherwise have been constrained by cuttings, embankments and roadside plantings of amenity trees and shrubs.

Better still are the ancient track-ways, whose former routes can still be found as echoes within the landscape. These have been colonised by nature and only remain open, in parts, through use, providing a sense that they are in keeping with the land rather than a challenge to it. These old routes require you to walk rather than drive, removing you from the air-conditioned cocoon and rewarding you with exercise and stimulation. Such journeys made on foot also provide a link back to our nomadic past, a past when we were more in touch with the world around us.

A sense of place

Although I have been living in Norfolk for more than 20 years, I still feel a comforting rush of familiarity whenever I return to the Wealden landscape of my youth. It is a strange feeling, delivering an air of homecoming security and the sense that I have never really been away. It is the woodland in particular that helps to shape this response; this part of the Surrey-Sussex-Hampshire borderlands is the most wooded part of lowland Britain, cloaked with hazel, beech and other deciduous trees. These trees were the backdrop to my childhood. They were the architecture to youthful adventures, providing the dens and sticks for our games and hosting the wildlife and fungi that so fascinated my first nature rambles.

I often wonder if my attachment to this small corner of England goes beyond the simple nurturing it provided to my early years. A dabble of curiosity a few years ago led to the creation of a family tree and revealed that generations of my family had lived, worked and died within just a few miles of each other, here in this tucked away corner of the county. Knowing this strengthens my connection with the landscape, making it all the more personal and giving support to the possibly fanciful notion that this landscape is in my blood. The sense of historical depth adds to the feeling that this is my landscape and that I have been as much part of its creation as it has of mine.

There is no doubt that I am not alone in having such feelings and many readers will carry with them a sense of place that will never leave them. The increasing mobility of our lifestyles suggests that succeeding generations will have less of a connection with particular places. The links across generations will be the first to be lost and, with more people now living urban lives, there is a real risk of a disconnection between the landscapes that make up England and its inhabitants.

While there has never been a single ‘England’, the individual ‘Englands’ of succeeding generations have been an important part of our social fabric, delivering a sense of community and place. To lose them would be a terrible thing.

Downland

Once a backdrop to my youth, the vast chalk downlands of southern England still retain a strong hold on me and I think of them often. Steep slopes, rippled by thin soils that creep downhill under the pull of gravity, with domed summits and dipping valleys, their presence lingers deep within me, a comforting sense of something ancient and unchanging. It is of these slopes that I think when I hear the pomp of Elgar, delight in the lines of Edward Thomas or gaze on the works of Eric Ravilious. Such strong attachment underlines the spirit of place, a sense of one’s roots and the shaping influence of the landscape within which one grows up. Had I been born on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors or deep within the fens, it would have been a different landscape that would now exert its hold on me.

I am interested in the way that the southern downlands have become something of a symbol for lost Britain, the echoes of a golden age where our touch upon the land was somewhat lighter than it is today, where space remained for nature and where an outdoor childhood was the norm and not the exception. At such a remote distance there is a risk of shaping the past, rose-tinted, into something else, something that it is not. You only have to look at the nature writing of the time to discover writers who, like me, looked back fondly to a much earlier time, when our presence was less heavily borne by the land.

It would be fair to say that the downs have suffered fewer intrusions than many other parts of Britain. With slopes too steep for arable they have stocked those livestock able to make a living on the thin, relatively poor soils. True, they have provided the lime that fertilised those early crops and their lower slopes have been striped of timber, but their imposing nature has stifled urban sprawl and they remain sparsely populated. While many of the villages may have lost their sense of community, watered down by the commuter families unwilling to put down roots, others remain connected to the land and each other, maintaining the bond between landscape and its people.

This connection with the land is something that we need to see reinvigorated in the young. While we are an increasingly urbanised population, there is still an opportunity to get youngsters reconnected with the natural world around them and, perhaps more importantly, with a sense of their heritage and their origins. We need these urban communities to share this feeling of belonging, of having a connection with the landscape and an understanding of why this matters.

A changing palette

It’s early, though only if you judge the day by the time of its dawn. These short late autumn days give me longer in bed in the morning, the dogs stilled by the lingering dark outside, but soon after first light I am out in the forest. In many ways these December mornings are richer, the colour palette firmly based in deep blues and a raft of browns now that the dominant greens of summer have been sloughed. Although weakened, there is enough strength in the rising sun to draw out the tanned chestnut browns of the beech and soft yellows of the birch, leaves that have clung so late this year.

On days when rain waits in close approach the sky is a deep paynes grey. This dramatic backdrop frames the stand of beech, less than a dozen trees deep, that separates the forest block from the road beyond. The air is damp and holds within it the richly rounded scents of earth and wood. The resinous smell of freshly cut pine reveals some recent felling, a windblown giant cleared from the main track. At my feet, the rains from earlier in the week have rearranged the soil’s surface. A dark, serpentine shape has been revealed, as water has found the path of least resistance, carrying off the lightest grains of fine sand to expose the darker, more solid geology beneath.

Elsewhere in the forest, on the scruffy triangle of land where the Willow Warblers had their nest, the bracken has collapsed upon itself in a great seething mass. Its rough undulations give the appearance of a flooding torrent, swollen with browns of varying shades. Where the bracken has grown up through the scattered hawthorn it takes on a more dynamic form, appearing as waves of decaying fronds breaking up against the hawthorn.

On the duller mornings the colour palette is much reduced, pared back to simple tones: soft brown and charcoal predominate. The landscape feels flat and, at times, almost two-dimensional. On other mornings, when dawn breaks following a clear night, frost tints the forest white. The once straw-brown stems of grass now glisten. Fallen branches from which the bark has been lost take on the appearance of polished bone. Curiously, the presence of a light frost seems to enhance the few patches of green that remain. There is, it appears, some fresh growth even at this season; opportunistic plants that have exploited the unseasonal warmth. Even the grand conifers have toned down their greens, the bright green of summer growth now hardened into darker tones. It is a more brooding palette, one that suggests a land hunkered down and waiting. Come spring, the palette will change again.

Taking a moment

How do you interact with the countryside? Do you use it for recreation? Is it, perhaps, the backdrop to a walk with family or friends? Is it something in which you exercise yourself and the dog? The real question is, ‘Do you ever stop and truly engage with it?’

I know from experience that it is hard to find the time to stop and do nothing, to step outside of your daily life and find a moment when you can become part of the countryside, aware of and immersed in your surroundings. It is something that I don’t do enough, but when I do I find that the benefits stay with me for a long time afterwards. It does require patience and the ability to temporarily switch of thoughts of the things you should really be doing.

The first thing I do is find somewhere off the beaten track, a spot on the river perhaps, the shade of a hedgerow or the middle of some wooded gully. I settle myself down and just watch and listen to what is going on around me. It is the sounds that you notice first, invariably the songs and calls of birds; being able to recognise the different species means that you can soon place the players that make up the soundscape: the distant Chiffchaff, the sweet-sounding Blackbird and the thin song of a Dunnock. Behind these is a deeper chorus; a low, drowsy buzz of dozens of insects, the true background to an English spring. Once you have settled into the rhythm and melodies you then start to pick up other sounds, perhaps the rustling of some small mammal in the grassy sward.

Then you start to pick up movement, your peripheral vision charting foraging birds as they move through the scrubby cover. Now you are settled you become part of the scenery and other creatures pass by unaware of your presence. I have had Munjtac approach to within a foot or so, oblivious to my dappled form, hunkered down in the shadow of a hedge. I have had shrews and, once, a mole, run over me, going about their business at a rate that counters my calm immobility. Very occasionally, if I have not chosen the place of my solitude well, it will be another human being that passes close by, unknowing and blinkered, perhaps deep in thought.

As we have become more divorced from the world around us I feel that our senses have been dulled. With no predators to fear in this pleasant English countryside, our senses are no longer alert to what is going on around them. Taking time out provides an opportunity to re-engage them.

A changing landscape

The landscape around here is changing; each time I visit this far-flung corner of Surrey I find that new vistas have been created by the removal of the mature pines that had come to dominate the poor sandy soils. The clearance of these trees is part of a concerted attempt to re-establish the great blocks of heathland which have been shaded out over the years by the maturing conifers. It is a grand project, made possible by the efforts of the National Trust, but carried out in a way that recognizes the importance of gradual recovery rather than an abrupt overnight change. I have seen similar schemes elsewhere, some of which have left behind them scarred and battered landscapes that will be slow to heal.

That the change should be gradual – a small section here, another there – is important because there are species that will have benefited from the presence of mature conifers and which will now need to readjust their populations to a new equilibrium. Species like Coal Tit and Crossbill among the birds, and many different beetles and other invertebrates among the lower orders. Other species will welcome the change and their populations are likely to expand accordingly. Most of these will be heathland species that will take advantage of the new opportunities on offer. With luck, the Woodlarks and Nightjars will return in increased numbers, bringing their songs back to this part of the county. For mobile species, such as these, there is a good chance of recovery, but other species may need assistance. Some, such as the Heath Tiger-beetle, have declined to such an extent that they may not find the newly restored habitat without some input from us.

This sort of landscape-scale habitat restoration appears to be becoming increasingly common. It is certainly to be welcomed, especially by those of us who feel that nature should be conserved within the landscape rather than within token nature reserves whose diminutive size often isolates the populations of plants and animals from others of their kind. Of course, a landscape-level approach to the conservation of wildlife depends upon the pressures being placed on the land. If there is a pressing demand for land for agriculture or housing then it becomes more difficult to put it aside for wildlife. Actually owning the land makes it more likely that it can be managed in a way that is sympathetic to wildlife and this is why many of our county wildlife trusts, Norfolk Wildlife Trust included, are now buying up land in specific areas to re-establish lost or diminished habitats. Such schemes also increase our opportunities to interact with nature, something which is becoming increasingly important in our busy lives.