A Living Landscape

It began, I seem to remember, with a grown-out hedge: four huge ash trees bordering a Hampshire footpath, all with the same odd kink in their trunks. The pleasure of recognition, of being able to look at them and know that those kinks were the result of a hedge-laying technique called pleaching that had been done to the young trees several generations ago, had me hooked.

The ghost of a hedge, now long gone; copses planted as cover for foxes; a huge pollard oak once used as a boundary marker; a dew pond winking like an eye in a field: these features, gleaned from Oliver Rackham’s wonderful Illustrated History of the Countryside (1994), can turn a walk into a kind of exhumation, the silent landscape giving up clues to its past at every turn. Ditches and field drains speak; woods disclose their secrets; and the land becomes legible. It’s thrilling stuff. The Illustrated History is the sister volume to Rackham’s original work The History of the Countryside (1986) and swaps the latter’s diagrams and drawings for invaluable photographs, thus making it a more practical (if somewhat less portable) guide. Both books build on the work of W. G. Hoskins, whose post-war book The Making of the English Landscape (see SF no. 4) is rightly considered a pioneering work in the area now known as ‘landscape archaeology’ – but Rackham’s more up-to-date, illustrated book is, for me, the key to decoding the countryside I love. My copy, gleefully discovered in a charity shop, has a red ‘Withdrawn from Stock’ stamp on the opening page, and I often wonder which library it began its life in, how many times it was borrowed, and by whom. I hope they are out there now, kicking through the spoil from badgers’ setts looking for flints or searching for oxlips in a stand of small-leaved limes, evidence of a wood over 350 years old. The book’s chapters each deal with different types of landscape, exploring the marks history has left on woodland, wood pasture, fields and their boundaries, open grassland and heath, marshes and fens, as well as discussing wider topics such as wildlife, conservation and highways. There are also eight walks, covering the country from Aberdeen to Cornwall, in which you can follow in Rackham’s footsteps while he explains the features around you as you walk. The one I know best is on the North Downs, near Guildford, and passes Second World War pillboxes, ancient yews, more recent yews (dating from about 1817, he tells us, when there was an agricultural depression following the Napoleonic Wars), clay vales, chalk grassland, wood pasture with ancient pollard beeches, and younger, dead trees that met their end during the drought of 1976. The richness of the detail he teases out makes the walks absolutely central to his project, as armchair observation (like armchair anything) can only teach you so much. To become a true landscape archaeologist you have to don walking boots, sling some binoculars around your neck, pocket a compass and a cheese sandwich, and stride out. And it is the fact that Rackham is so clearly an inveterate walker and explorer that helps to make this book such a joy. Originally a botanist, his vast and wide-ranging knowledge of the countryside was in great part self-taught, born of his own curiosity and driven by on-the-ground observation rather than distant theorizing. Now, having written many books on the subject, he is acknowledged as the country’s leading landscape expert – and iconoclast. Often, when the story the land tells differs from that of established history, it is history that must give way. Rackham comprehensively overturns received wisdom when it comes to subjects like the farming ability of the Romans, the damage done by acid rain, our image of the Dark Ages as a time of desolation, and the supposed deforestation of the countryside by the charcoal-burning iron industry – and he does so by getting out there and interrogating what remains. ‘Woods result from long-running interactions between human activities and natural processes,’ he writes. ‘Their history should never be based on written records alone . . . things people have said about woods have an unreasonable fascination for scholars, who retail them at face value without investigating the woods themselves.’ It’s the same bracing, practical attitude that Rackham extends to all the types of countryside the book explores. He discovers healthy elm trees living fugitive all over the country, ready to make a resurgence, rails against the expensive and unnecessary modern fad for tree-planting (‘as if it were the only way to create new woodland . . . like all gradual changes which cost nothing, succession to woodland often goes unnoticed’) and takes to the ground to show that a great many of our hedges, often slighted as a recent imposition on the land, in fact date from much further back than the Enclosure movement. This is important, given how keen we have been in recent times to grub them up; it is very often the longest-established and most stable of our landscape features that support the greatest numbers of species, and with biodiversity in the British countryside in freefall, understanding which of our local habitats goes back furthest may be the first step in protecting them. Rackham has published several other books on woodlands, and this is the area he’s most knowledgeable about. Not only can he read a wood like some kind of modern-day Sylvanus, divining, from ditches and banks, growth patterns and ground cover, its age, use, health and current management (or lack of ); he also sets about reeducating us in what a wood really is, its care and purpose. ‘Woods result from long-running interactions between human activities and natural processes,’ he writes, dispelling the particularly modern myth that woods are somehow entirely natural, unlike, say, farmland; and that to fell a tree is to commit a crime against nature. ‘Woods do not cease to exist through being felled,’ he goes on. ‘A wood is self-renewing, and is no more destroyed by being cut down than a meadow is destroyed by cutting a crop of hay.’ Indeed, he makes it clear that a far greater threat to our woodlands than a chainsaw is the lack of one: without the regular coppicing and pollarding that broadleaved woods used to undergo, many valuable and rare woodland species simply decline due to lack of light. Fortunately, many landowners such as the National Trust and the Forestry Commission now understand that traditional land management techniques are vital to the preservation of different sorts of habitat. Nowadays, techniques like coppicing and successional woodcutting are again being seen, and cattle and other grazing animals are being used on heaths and commons to keep down scrub and control bracken. But in 1986, when we had not yet come to realize that many conifer plantations were gloomy monocultures and that cutting ancient hedges with tractors was slowly destroying them, many of these seemingly common-sense ideas were revolutionary. Finally, we seem to be coming round to the idea that our forebears knew a thing or two, and that to preserve the richness of the land that we have inherited means borrowing some of their techniques. These days Oliver Rackham is a Life Fellow of Corpus College, Cambridge, where he has also served as Master and still acts as Keeper of the College Silver. His authority, when it comes to the countryside, remains undiminished – despite the pace of change when it comes to green issues, and the new-found popularity of landscape archaeology, conservation and ‘nature writing’. When called upon to comment on the latest ecological trends he has not been slow to respond, telling a reporter from the Guardian, for instance, that asking people to plant more trees to reduce global warming was ‘like telling them to drink more water to keep rising sea levels down’. That no-nonsense voice is to be heard throughout The Illustrated History of the Countryside: humorous, trenchant, wry and with a pleasing directness of expression, one that never condescends, instead addressing the reader as a fellow enthusiast and pleasant walking companion. He quotes medieval court rolls as easily as he refers to Renaissance engravings and lists of Viking place names, drawing one inexorably into the story of, say, Roman roads, or the formation of moorland, but wearing his scholarship lightly at all times. That said, Oliver Rackham intrudes in a personal way into the text barely at all. His book is the story of the British countryside, not the story of his discovery of it, or his relationship with it; and there is nothing in the book about how he came to write it. He is only really glimpsed, as it were, once or twice, though he allows himself a moment’s personal reflection in the discussion of English country churchyards – which, he tells us, he has estimated to contain an average of ten thousand bodies. ‘The nettles and cow-parsley are a memento mori, for in them is recycled, while awaiting the Last Trump, part of the phosphate of 10,000 skeletons,’ he writes, cheerfully. ‘A characteristic churchyard plant is meadow saxifrage (Saxifraga granulata), which grows on my grandfather’s grave and will one day, I hope, adorn mine.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 43 © Melissa Harrison 2014