Helen Baczkowska

The following extracts are my contribution to a collaborative project that charts the course of the river Wensum as it flows across Norfolk. Writers including Nick Acheson, Caroline Davidson and Jos Phillips contributed work on history, personal memories and nature from the source of the river to its merging with the river Yare east of Norwich. The final piece formed part of a publication sold in aid of the campaign to stop the Norwich Western Link Road. For more on the campaign, visit https://www.stopthewensumlink.co.uk.

All illustrations by Kate Baczkowska

Bintree

A borrowed moment, tucked in between my work and my daughter’s college timetable. Just the two of us today. At seventeen, she has the luminous beauty of youth: dark eyes, a tangle of red hair and a sense of the romantic that makes her say, ‘here. This is where we should stop’.

Here is a strip of grass between the river and a lane so quiet that no traffic will disturb us. Its an adolescent river at this point, not far from its source and in a hurry to be somewhere else. Green streamers of weed move restlessly with the current and yellow water lilies float on the surface – their flowers the only hint of sunshine in an afternoon that smells of soil and grass after rain. Sitting on my coat, I make tea in a flask and we drink it strong and black from tin cups, sharing a tub of sunflower seeds, dried fruit and bitter, dark chocolate.

‘Remember the otter?’ Kate asks.

A few months before, we’d been swimming in another Norfolk river and were letting the warm sun dry us as our feet still dangled in the water. A soundless change in the ripples of the river caught our eyes and a large otter came close, trod water for a moment and watched us, quizzical and unafraid.  It left without breaking the surface of the river, more water than muscle and flesh, so at home in its place I was left feeling a splashing and clumsy intruder.

I’m tempted to slip into the cool caress of the river today. It’s not just the cold that stops me. A recent report has shown how England’s rivers are contaminated by sewage and chemicals from farming: the water in front of me looks clear, but what it carries, unseen, is in question.  Once, millennia ago, the people of these islands left offerings of bronze and gold in their rivers, swords and shields and daggers laid in the shallows like a prayer. Now we see them as drains to take what we do not want out to sea as fast as the waters can flow. What will it take, I think as we leave, what will take to once again honour the life and the lives of our rivers? I don’t have a bronze dagger to offer, only a fragile hope that things can change and handful of sunflower seeds. We scatter the seeds on the bank and smile as a robin darts towards them.

Deal Ground

Metal gates, padlocked across a track between empty buildings. Sparse words and a fresh, neon pineapple scribbled on red bricks and boarded up windows. This time, I cannot get in.

Years ago, a council official opened the gates and left me alone to survey the marsh between two rivers: the Yare to the south and the Wensum to the north. I walked to where the land ran out, mapping willow scrub and reeds, stumbling on tussocks and hidden ditches scented with water mint. A muntjac had scuttled for cover and I’d looked for otter spraint beside the Wensum.

On the river bank, more derelict buildings mark the Deal Ground, where once boats brought cheap pine or ‘deal’ to make crates for the nearby factories. A ghost-name, a reminder that the river once carried the wealth of the city: shoes, spices and mustard, flour, wool, coal and steel; wood to be sold on Timber Hill and madder plants for the Madder Market. Dye from the tiny flowers once leached from a textile factory in the city and stained the Wensum as scarlet as blood.

Soon the ruined sheds will be replaced with houses and apartments. Their views will be expensive, across a marsh protected and re-branded as a nature reserve. The latest plans show the houses raised above the increasingly likelihood of floods. Leaving the locked gates, I wonder about those plans and if building on stilts will be sufficient; enough to survive the changes humanity has wrought on the water and tides.

My home is built both on and of common land; two hundred summers ago, the walls of a row of cottages were raised, here on the southern edge of this patch of Norfolk common. Only houses for the poor of the parish could be built on commons and the original copper-plate deeds of my house record it as one of a row of paupers cottages. The medieval boundary ditch still runs along the back of the gardens, as deep as a man is tall.

The walls were made from clay and straw and dung, trampled by oxen, formed into rough blocks five times the size of a house brick and dried, pale and hard, in the sun.  The pit they were dug from is just a few metres out from the front of the house and now a pond with reeds and newts and a winter’s murmuration of starlings.

The chimney of the house rises unevenly through the two original rooms, one up, one down.  The fireplace is for more than the warming of dark, cold evenings; for tradition dictates that rights to the common are attached to the hearth of the house. These rights turn the common into land that is no one person’s and land that in some ways is everyone’s: they give it the oldest, original definition of common land (land over which a person has a right of common), they restrict what the owner, the “Lord of the Manor”, can do with it (nothing that interferes with the rights) and since the year 2000, open it up for all to access.

Across Britain, each of these elements of common land has been hard won over decades: the right of access, the right to the products of the common, the limiting of the landowner’s powers.

That struggle is more than our history, it is also our present.  As I travel the common lands of Britain, I record not only the on-going fight for our commons, but the wonder that is common land, the wildness, the people whose lives centre around them and the new ways that communities are seeking to bring back the ethos of land held in common.

Claylands Diary, January

Although I am an enthusiast of wild flowers, January walks are strangely a joy; for once I am not distracted by the delights of stitchwort or speedwell, by trying to sort greater from lesser bird’s foot trefoil. Instead, I can look out on landscapes, study bare trees and cold winter ponds with a different eye.

On a walk through the heart of the Norfolk Claylands, my brother, an archaeologist, slowed us down by lightly kicking at molehills. One revealed the treasure he sought – a thin, curved blade of flint I would not have looked twice at. The chipped edge he showed me was human made, one of the thousand upon thousand Mesolithic flint tools discarded across these lands. Most, he explained, were found on dry sandy soils, the reasons uncertain, yet how, he asked, had they recognised these places? For an ecologist, this one question begs many more about how the vegetation of Britain developed as the last glaciers retreated to the north and as herds of large herbivores, from prehistoric bison, to deer and ponies, spread out across the cold steppe grasslands and scrub. One thing I could certainly say is that even today, the patches of sandy soils left on the edge of the ice sheets can be easily distinguished amongst the ground up chalky clay of South Norfolk; earlier walking over the common at Wood Green, we had crossed an area of gorse and fine grasses, visible even in winter. In summer, heath bedstraw and heath speedwell grow here, although most of the common is clay, with meadow vetchling, meadow buttercup, cowslip and black knapweed.

Nearby Fritton Common is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, with orchids and ponds were great crested newts breed, but in the bleakness of January, my attention was drawn to the almost straight rows of oak trees, most noticeable on the western boundary. Some of these are huge old trees, the largest in the south-west corner showing signs of pollarding – a way that small wood was once produced by cutting and re-cutting above the height of grazing stock. Collecting small wood from pollards was often the right of the commoners, whereas the timber trees themselves were the property of the lord of the manor. In the centuries when barns and houses and especially warships were built on oak frames, these trees were valuable, their management and planting central to a farm’s income and survival; it is likely that the amount of oak across many English counties is not a virtue of ecology, so much a legacy of old economies and the insatiable need for timber for ships. Today, being winter bare, these trees make curious shapes, with a large, gnarled trunks and many holes; invertebrates inhabit the crevices and barbestelle bats, which are have been recorded hunting over the common, no doubt find a roost in the cracks and fissured bark.

The lines of pollards continue south of Fritton Common, along a sinuous path, known locally as Snake Lane. Hedges in the Claylands are often tall, with mature trees and a flora suggesting these are old fragments of woodland. The wide hedges of Snake Lane indicate long generations of woodland management, with pollards of oak and field maple; between them the pale slender trunks of hazel show signs of past coppicing. Like pollarding, this produced small wood for hurdles and tool handles by cutting and re-cutting, but this time at ground level; the re-grown trees have many stems and a distinctive stump or “stool”. A few hornbeam grow here too, their bark smooth and twisted into long creases, their timber once famed for its hardness.

Returning home, across Morningthorpe Common, a whisper makes me look up. With a sound like the lightest of summer breezes in tall trees, a flock of fieldfares is heading to roost. I have spotted a lot of these large, grey-backed thrushes over the past week, no doubt forced briefly south by cold weather.

By the end of our walk, dusk is wintry, grey and damp; warmth and hot tea beckon, but so do more days of walking the quiet, hidden tracks of the Claylands, exploring the endless, inseparable layering of human and natural history.

Crow Green, an almost triangle of common land, half a mile south of my home, is wooded with ash and sycamore and an impenetrable tangle of blackthorn.  A black and white aerial photograph from 1946 shows the common more open and grassy and my father remembers cattle here, a few years after the photograph, when he crossed it each morning, heading for school.

Beneath the tall trees are a few stout pollards of holly and hawthorn, the knobbly, twisted trunks telling that when they were young, these trees were severed at head height and allowed to re-grow, possibly year after year. The holly would have been cut for animal fodder; the spineless evergreen leaves at the top providing scant sustenance for cattle in a desperate winter. The hawthorn pollards are rarities, something I’ve seldom seen anywhere else. They might have been cut for faggots – bundles of sticks used for bread ovens and fires. Cutting small timber from pollards as once the right of commoners, perhaps from the nearby cottages and local poor houses, such as the one that is now a house to the north, often used faggots for heating and cooking.

The wooded common ends in a seasonal stream, running with late-winter rainwater, forming a parish boundary since Saxon times. Beyond, a complex of ancient woodland and derelict wood pasture has twisting hornbeam pollards, like sentinels along the boundary, leaning out to the light over a deep, dark water filled ditch. These trees, with their hollows and cracks, once had some importance as markers between different landholdings, but now are mostly prized for the home their fissured bark gives to insects and bats. Deeper into the wood are small-leaved lime, oak, silver birch and hazel trees heavy with catkins.

Much of the land here is damp, cold clay, so flowers often come late, yet this year, in sheltered spots, dog’s mercury has been in flower since mid-February, its coy green petals nodding in the breeze, beneath the still bare branches. Winter has taken its toll here, with one of the two black poplars having crashed to the ground in an early February storm. This was a favourite tree of mine, towering above the others and I am saddened to see it down, the splintered, empty trunk revealing that its demise must have been coming for years. This is a tree of hedges and open spaces, so its presence in a wood is an oddity and must hark back a generation or two, when this woodland was a mosaic of pasture and coppice wood. Black poplars have been declining across England for several decades, but they grow well from rooted cuttings, so I remind myself to speak with the landowner and find a suitable place to plant a new sapling or two. In my lifetime, they would only ever be young trees, but someone else, one future day, might also stop to look up at the tallest tree in the forest and run their hands intothe bark’s deep, rough crevices.

 

Hornbeam pollard in summer

 

Despite the warm weather, unseasonable warm, a walk through the South Norfolk Claylands in February still felt very much like winter, with stark trees against a grey sky and the over-flowing ditches that give February its old name of “Filldyke”.

This is ancient countryside, still carrying the imprint of Bronze Age field systems, severed in places by the Roman road that halves the clay plateau from north to south.   The pattern of small family farms, clusters of villages, commons and tall hedges pre-dates the Georgian zeal for improving soils and enclosing commons that changed North Norfolk forever, creating regular fields and neat hedges of hawthorn. Here in the south of the County is a secret countryside of woods and meadows, mostly ignored by tourists on their way to the coast or the watery attractions of the Broads.

From my front door, in the heart of the Claylands, a regular walk takes me through two commons and into an ancient wood. The first common, Wood Green, is open grassland, pock-marked with the ponds found throughout this landscape, the abandoned remnants of old clay diggings. One pond, closest to the path, is now largely covered with reeds and home in the autumn to a small murmuration of starlings; by February, these have long since left, probably to join the larger flocks on the coast. A roost of pied wagtails has replaced them and they circle the common with their dipping flight, chattering between telephone wires and reeds at dusk.

Earlier, at dawn, I’d seen a barn owl here, quartering the rough grass; some years ago, I followed one on my bike and tracked it back to a nearby farm, watching it glide along the edge of a hedge and over the unploughed headland of an arable field. In recent years, rare barbestelle bats have been found in veteran trees and old barns across South Norfolk; doubtless these also forage for food along the commons, field headlands and hedges.   These journeys, these nightly forays and glimpses into other lives, underline the importance of re-connecting the landscape, enabling species to move more freely than now, when scraps of habitats lie disconnected from each other, like islands in seas of arable land, brick and tarmac. This is conservation at a different scale from the ambitions of re-wilding, of bringing back wolf or lynx; this is an intimate vision, a barn owl or bat’s eye view, where hedges and meadows are vital. With climate change already altering the seasons, linking up habitats is vital to allow more wildlife to flourish, to give it the space to move and adapt.

Another line of connection, just west of Wood Green, is a loke, as we say in these parts – a muddy green lane, that runs south to Crow Green, the second common of my walk. Edged with field maple, hornbeam, crab apple and oak, this loke too is a corridor and in quieter moments I have spotted a small herd of roe deer here and watched a sparrowhawk slip soundlessly among the trees, causing a momentary riot of panic amongst the local songbirds. A scatter of feathers, usually pigeon, is the often only legacy the small hawk leaves. Today, a spot a bullfinch’s white rump amongst the bare branches and a field away, even in February, brown hares tear through dark furrows in small groups, stop, then stand up on their hind legs to box.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo: John Volynchook

At a recent conference on biodiversity in churchyards, a handful of us snatched a few minutes to look at the wild flowers of the neighbouring All Saints churchyard, searching for the gone-over heads of meadow saxifrage and the soft leaves of black knapweed, not yet in flower. I asked the delegates that if they took away just one thing from this brief flower walk, I wanted it to be a willingness to look more closely at buttercups.

Buttercups are part of our everyday, holding them under the chin, cursing their tenacity in the lawn or vegetable plot; their glossy yellow petals, of which there are usually 5, are as simple as child’s drawing of a flower, but look more closely and the different species are a key to the place where they grow. Gardeners most often encounter creeping buttercup, Ranunculus repens, with large glossy flowers and dark green leaves; repens meaning creeping or crawling, like the repentant. At All Saints, we hunted for the early flowering bulbous buttercup Ranunculus bulbosus, easily indentified by its smooth yellow sepals; these are the petal-shaped casings that hold the flower in bud. When bulbous buttercup opens, these fold back against the stem, pointing sharply down to the bulbs underground. In creeping buttercup these are pale green and cup the flower in a star shape behind the petals. Once the flowers die back, bulbous buttercup is hard to find, but it is a classic plant of old meadows, as is the tall and slender meadow buttercup Ranunculus acris. Acris, like acrid, means bitter or irritating and indeed, few things eat this unpalatable plant, leaving it to stand tall in older meadows, adding yellow to the greens and browns and purples of meadow grasses. Meadow buttercups reach up to knee height, with fine, almost delicate leaves and pale yellow sepals, also in a star shape behind the flower. When I see meadow buttercups, my heart races a little, for they are sometimes a sign of meadows that have escaped too many fertilisers, sprays or re-seeding and there may be less common gems underneath: orchids or hay rattle, birds foot trefoil or meadow vetchling that scrambles over the tall summer grass; all of these plants are much loved by bees and butterflies and are characteristic of the old meadows and pastures that have all but vanished from our landscape in the past 60 years.

A few weeks ago, I surveyed a meadow in Brundall, tucked on the edge of the Broads, and had to look twice in some places to distinguish meadow buttercup from lesser spearwort Ranunculus flamula, for they are easily confused at a glance. Here they grew side by side, intertwined on the margins of the field’s wet hollows. Lesser spearwort has a much smaller flower, its petals barely 2 cm across, but with sepals very like meadow buttercup and distinctive spear-shaped leaves; it is a plant of wet meadows and pond-edges and at the Brundall meadow, beneath the tall flowers and grasses, were the striking magenta flowers of southern marsh orchids. In case you are wondering, greater spearwort Ranunculus lingua is indeed a larger, but less common, version of the lesser, this time with flowers up to 5 cm across.

Celery leaved buttercup Ranunculus sceleratus, a plant of wet places and the margins of summer ponds, has lobed leaves that do indeed resemble celery, with clusters of small yellow flowers. Deeper out in the water, the white-flowered crowfoots, of which there are several different species, may float on the surface and these too are buttercups, with the same simple arrangement of petals.

Finally, a word of caution, for in many meadows, the yellow, child’s drawing flowers may not be buttercups at all; many, are potentillas, related to roses: creeping cinquefoil Potentilla reptans has five-fingered leaves splayed out like a hand and creeps on long stems, but its five-petalled yellow flower is less glossy than those of the buttercups; tormentil Potentilla erecta, is a plant of heaths and acidic, often sandy, soils with small flowers, usually with four petals, finely dissected leaves and tall uptight stems. Silverweed Potentilla anserina has fronds of feathery leaves, silver-white underneath and cheerful pale yellow flowers, close to the ground.

These brief descriptions are no substitutes for a wild flower book, with their keys, drawings and photographs, but hopefully they will inspire you to search the grasslands around you and take a closer look at these golden flowers of summer.

Also posted on the Norfolk Wildlife Trust blog 2015