A common land year, September

helenbaczkowskaLeave a comment

Flordon Common

Rachael asked me ‘how did it survive?’. We were sat on a fallen tree beside a beck that moved swiftly over stones. Running water is not a noise I hear often in Norfolk, a county of low hills and quietly moving rivers. It is a sound I seek out when I can. Between Rachael and I were our flasks of tea and the biscuits I had bought on the way. Both of us were dressed in boots and work trousers, our untidy hair tidied loosely back, although Rachael’s is a shade lighter than mine, more strawberry blonde than my red-brown. As well as the biscuits, we also shared the ease of a long-established friendship.

Around us Flordon Common was so tangled it felt like a place that had rarely changed in a thousand or more years. The marshy ground had been lightly grazed by a herd of cattle that now slept beneath trees across the beck, sedges and reeds grew in tussocks. Willows and alders cast dappled shade around us and I knew that if I touched the water, it would be cold, despite the warmth of the afternoon. Like many Norfolk streams, this one is born from the deep bedrock of chalk beneath East Anglia and rises clear and icy, even in on a sunny autumn day.

I knew too what Rachael meant by her question. How did this land survive the enclosures of commons, the ploughs and the agricultural sprays, and the endless tidying up and homogenising of the Norfolk countryside? The ripping up of hedges and copses, the filling in of ponds and straightening of rivers into deep, unnatural drains. How did it manage to escape, so that the willows and alders grow tangled and wild, so that the summer orchids flower and the meandering stream are still here?

Art critic Lucy Lippard writes that all places are stories waiting to be unearthed. Flordon Common will have its story – a hunt through archives and old maps would reveal some of it, although much might not be written down. Sat on the fallen tree, I answered Rachael with a guess that this was once a part of a large village common, where cattle were grazed and firewood gathered. On our visit, and despite a summer of drought, the land was damp after recent rain; likely then it would once have been too hard to drain or to plough – the returns not worth the investment. Both of Racheal and I had parents who grew up in a Norfolk where horses were still used on the land; it feels so long ago, a time when effort and labour were measured differently from now. Being difficult gave this land a chance of survival.

Perhaps, too, it was left as common during the great waves of enclosure that swept Norfolk, and indeed the rest of Britain, from Tudor times until the early nineteenth century. Locals may have put up a fight to retain it. Too poor to employ lawyers, they may have refused to leave their mark on legal papers, damaged fences or whispered sedition in the pub. More likely, it was left as a place where a few villagers could carry on collecting wood and grazing stock – a crumb of land thrown to the poor as compensation for the common fields that were being fenced in for crops or for sheep. Helping those dispossessed by the loss of their commons was not only a matter of humanity or Christian charity. Many enclosures took place in the decades after the French Revolution and the land owners of Britain saw helping the poor as a way, quite literally, of keeping their heads. ‘Poors’ land, also known as ‘doles’ or ‘charity lands’ can be found across Norfolk still; some were leased out for money that was distributed to the poor of the parish, whilst others had rights for firewood or grazing granted to local households. Even now, some poors lands are overseen by local committees ruled by the local squire and the church.

When Rachael and I got up to leave, I scattered a few biscuit crumbs on the ground. It is an old habit from my youth, from the days when I lived out on the land, squatting among woods and hills threatened by road building. A little thank you to a place, an acknowledgement of its lives, both present and past. As we followed the stream back to the road I recalled, to myself, the words that George Eliot wrote at the end of Middlemarch, ‘the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs’. I said to Rachael that whatever actions people have taken to ensure Flordon Common could survive, I wanted them to know I was grateful.

A common land year, August

helenbaczkowskaLeave a comment

Between the stones and the sky

Writing in September, I’ve almost forgotten how my mid-August journey to Moscar Moor scared me. All through the heatwave of May and June and July, the clay soils of my home ground held on to a few drops moisture, helping the oak trees behind my house to keep their dark leaves despite the drought. Even after the hay was baled and removed, the common grew a weak but hopeful sheen of green. My journey took me through west Norfolk, out across the Lincolnshire Fens, over the hump of the Wold and down into the Trent Valley. The roadsides offered too little shade and too many trees were turning brown as if autumn had come early. The grass was the dry gold of sand, and I felt hounded by heat, unable to escape it. The almost lush trees and fields beside the rivers of the Peak District were a welcome relief at the end of my travels. The colours were deceptive however: wildfire warnings were posted on gateways, telling every visitor that the land was tinder-dry, vulnerable to a single spark amongst the heather and gorse.

Derbyshire is not mentioned in The Common Lands of England and Wales, written in 1963 by two of the most eminent geographers of their era – WG Hoskins and L Dudley-Stamp[1]. The book covers the character, wildlife and significant commons of every county in England and Wales; I’ve checked a few times, but Derbyshire is not there. At first, I thought that this could not be true, for the unfenced acres grazed by sheep, bracken and heather and gorse look like upland commons from Dartmoor and Bodmin to Cumbria and Wales. Stamp and Hoskins were right, however, and the Derbyshire hills are not commons any more. Instead, they are enclosed lands belonging to farms, or are rented for sheep grazing.

On the afternoon that I walked up Hordron Edge, the speckled grey and white face of an ewe and her lamb peeked warily from the bracken; her face was the colour of the sky. I was grateful for a day of clouds that made being outside before dusk more pleasant than it had been for weeks. This was my second walk on the ridge – the night before I’d headed up with friends to watch the Perseid meteor shower, the bright points of light and their fading tails falling amongst the shadows of hills and a wide sky of stars. Alone and in daylight now, I stood on the exposed rocks the top of the Edge, facing west and glimpsing the waters of Ladybower Reservoir between the hills. There should be a word in English for standing on a hilltop or ridge, for the sense of calm exhilaration, the impossible-to-deny urge to be still and quietly gaze at the view.

On the edge of the cliff, a single grouse scuttled into the bracken, head held high as if alarmed and a dark eye turned towards me. It was young bird, its characteristic red feathers only just emerging through the pale ones of its fledging. Watching it I recalled that this was the week of the ‘Glorious Twelfth’, the start of the grouse shooting season, and I wondered how much longer the little bird would survive. Like all red grouse it was dumpy, almost comical, and a reminder of another reason why the commons of the Derbyshire hills were enclosed. Grouse shooting has shaped this land as much as sheep grazing has, with many moors enclosed by Victorian land owners eager to bring their friends and their guns. Across Cutthroat Pass, north of my vantage point, was another legacy of grouse shooting, visible as a hillside with the green and almost black stripes and squares of heather burning. Here, over time, and on rotation, old heather had been burnt off to encourage the growth of new sprigs – the main food plant of grouse.

The patterned ground of moorland burning and grouse shoots also occurs on moorland commons across England. Over the past twenty years, I have sat on common land committees where both supporters and opponents of shooting and burning have been passionately vocal in their views. I have heard the supporters maintain that carefully controlled burns remove accumulations of dry, woody material that poses a wildfire risk. They pointed too at the income and employment that shooting brings to rural communities, and how moorland management for grouse also encourages birds like lapwings and curlews. When I first started attending meetings, the opponents spoke mainly about the shooting and poisoning of buzzards and red kites and hen harriers that will predate on grouse. Other arguments followed – how the draining of moors for shooting exacerbates wildfires, how adder populations plummet when grouse numbers are high, as the birds pick off the pencil-slim juvenile snakes, and, with increasing urgency, how some moorland management damages one of Europe’s greatest carbon sinks. When the peat is drained and then charred as the heather above it burns, it dries out and loses its ability to lock-in carbon, turning these habitats from carbon stores into carbon emitters.

The arguing has grown louder in recent years, with protests and legal challenges, highlighting opposition to moorland burning and management for grouse. There has also been legislation and new codes to limit the burns, as well as funding to re-wet the peat so that it can sequester carbon and be more resilient to wildfires. The recently burnt patches on the hill across the valley from Hordron Edge, however, were an indication that the arguments carry on – another of the many conflicts that surround Britain’s common land.

In the heat of August, after months of no rain, fire in this land was a terrifying thought. As I stood on the top of the Edge, the peat soils beneath my feet were dust-dry, as frightening as the desiccated land I had travelled through to get here. Behind me, the Bronze Age stone circle at the top of Hordron Edge was half-covered in tall heather and bracken. When I walked over to the ring of low stones, laying my hand on their lichen covered tops, I found a Brigid’s cross at its centre. It was woven from rushes, with a single feather, the grey-white of a pigeon laid across it, echoing the colours of the sky and the speckle-faced sheep. Both the cross and the feather were weighed down by a pebble. Maybe it was visiting pagans, or perhaps someone’s whim, nimble fingers weaving the green stems into an intricate shape that was once believed to bring blessings and protection. I touched the offering gently with my fingertips, whatever the intent, it brought me back to the moment and stilled the turning over of common land arguments in my mind. Sometimes it is enough to just watch the view, and to remember that people across millennia have heeded the call of high hills, acknowledging a place that stands between the stones and the sky.

[1] The Common Lands of England and Wales, Dudley Stamp, L & Hoskins, WG, New Naturalist, London 1963

Whispers of better things

helenbaczkowskaLeave a comment

A common land year, July 2026

The evening air was still hot as I walked towards Sheep’s Green. It felt only slightly cooler than the relentless sun of the day, and the people around me still wore shorts, t-shirts and the lightest of dresses. When I reached the Green, a small dog was running in circles, two children chased each other over the dry, brown grass and small groups sat in the shade of the trees.

Sheep’s Green is one of a series of commons that edge the old part of Cambridge, the part where the stone-walled colleges, with their porter’s lodges and neatly mown quads, nestle into a curve of the river Cam. To the north and east of Sheep’s Green is Midsummer Common and nearby is Lammas Land – both names a legacy of how the land was once managed, with the grazing closed, or ‘shut up’ until after midsummer on one and after Lammastide on August the first on the other. Sheep’s Green is mostly likely named for its grazing flocks and just north of it is Launderess Green, which author Margaret Keynes thought originated in the use of the land by the washerwomen of the colleges and the two adjacent parishes[i].

Urban commons like Sheep’s Green and its neighbours occupy the fringes of many of England’s cities. Norwich, a few miles from my home, has the sandy hummocks and hills of Mousehold Heath, Newcastle has Town Moor (‘moor’ originally indicated unenclosed land), and in Southampton the sprawling wildness of the Common feels like a fragment of the New Forest, stranded now in an ocean of busy streets. Once these commons were grazed by the dairy herds that supplied milk to citizens, and stood at the end of the drove roads, where geese and cattle and sheep were brought for market and slaughter. John Constable’s paintings of Hampstead Heath, dating from the 1820’s, show cows and donkeys grazing on the hills above London, as well as labourers with carts who could be collecting stones, or might be dumping waste from the rapidly expanding streets of the city below. Constable did not, however, paint the squatters who lived in hastily-made tents and shacks on Littleworth Common, just north of Hampstead. A commentator at the time called it one of the few places close to London where ‘a displaced and impoverished rural population could build hovels and supplement casual jobs with a little livestock grazing, rabbiting and pilfering’.

Littleworth was far from the only informal camp established on common land in British history; in 1381, the outraged people of the Peasants Revolt, protesting about a poll tax and common land enclosures, established themselves on the unenclosed acres of Blackheath on the edges of London. In 1549, Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk was the biggest of a series of uprising across England resulting, again, from enclosures and taxes passed on to the poorest of the land. Robert Kett and his followers lived all summer on Mousehold Heath, before being defeated in a bloody battle at Dussindale, on its eastern flank. Kett himself was eventually captured by soldiers and hanged from the battlements of Norwich Castle, his body left on display as warning to other would-be dissenters.

Three hundred years later, in 1848, Chartists gathered on Kennington Common south of Westminster, this time just for the day. With fluttering flags and speakers standing on the back of a cart, they issued their demands, originally set out in the long charter that gave them their name. They were seeking to level the political playing field, for adult men at least, and called for universal male suffrage, a secret ballot, annual elections, equitable representation and salaries for Members of Parliament, enabling those without a private income to be elected. At the time these were considered deeply subversive and armed guards were placed around notable London buildings on the day of the rally. Today almost everything the Chartists called for is enshrined in Britain’s laws. One response to the rally, however, was to quickly enclose Kennington Common, turning it into a formal park, with fences, shrubberies and flowerbeds installed to deter further gatherings.

In 1865, the Commons Preservation Society (called the Open Spaces Society today), formed to challenge the enclosures of Wimbledon Common, parts of Hampstead Heath and other common land around London. Led by early Socialists, including the designer William Morris, enclosures were fought through the courts and by supporting the tearing down of illegal fences. In July 1871, as a court case challenging enclosures on Epping Forest, an outdoor meeting was organised to oppose the building of houses on Wanstead Flats to the south of the Forest. The open land of Epping Forest was known as ‘the Cockney Paradise’, with tea houses, and amusements that were enjoyed by workers from the East End. As the fences went up at Wanstead, posters displayed across London urged ‘working men’ to ‘attend by thousands’ and challenge the illegal enclosures created by Henry Wellesley, the younger brother of the Duke of Wellington. Attend in their thousands they did, both men and women incensed by the loss of a place where they walked and played; I imagine too that, with the years of Chartism behind them, they had a growing sense of their own agency.

In the following decades, a series of new laws recognised the importance of common land as places where urban populations enjoyed a right to ‘fresh air and exercise’. Octavia Hill, a founder of the Commons and Open Spaces Society (and later of the National Trust), phrased this more poetically, ‘We all need space’ she said, ‘unless we have it, we cannot reach that sense of quiet in which whispers of better things come to us.’

Despite the children, picknickers and dogs, enjoying their rights to fresh air and exercise, Sheep’s Green, when I cross it, appears very different from a park. It has an irregularity to it, with humps and bumps from old stream channels or pits and odd tangles of bushes. It might be my imagination, but it feels like the ghost of the ramshackle commons of lowland England. Like the other commons around Cambridge, there are also reminders that this land is still grazed – kissing gates or turnstiles at the entrances, small cattle grids on the cycle paths, and litter bins designed to deter the noses of inquisitive animals.

In recent years, the long tradition of grazing of Cambridge commons has been threatened as the city council has sought to axe their funding for ‘pinders’. Pinder is a medieval term, usually applied to the officer of a manorial court who was responsible for impounding stray animals – often those that should not have been loosed on a common. In modern Cambridge, the pinders rescue animals that get in trouble on the commons – a consequence, often, of their close proximity to people and bicycles and roads. The cattle owners have stressed the high risks of grazing urban commons and the importance of cows grazing the commons – reducing mowing costs and helping nature conservation. The council just says it needs to cut spending and that the graziers should shoulder the additional costs themselves. From where I stand, on the sidelines, it is proof, if any was ever needed, that common land is still shrouded in conflict.

Heading back to the station from Sheep’s Green, detouring via the Lammas Land, I wondered how much sustenance there was for grazing animals in the grass this year, and wondered too when the rains would come to bring the dried brown leaves back to life. I thought of how the conflicts surrounding Cambridge’s commons, as so often on common land, stem mainly from how many different expectations we have of it. Only five percent of England and Wales is registered as common land, but for over a century now these have become not just places where people graze animals or collect fuel, but where they seek many forms of fresh air and exercise – cycling, horse riding, running, walking, giving pet dogs a run. So many expectations in so few places is proving hard to manage and leaves me thinking that what we actually need is more space not more laws, more common land where we can all seek out those whispers of better things.

Long horn cattle grazing on a common in the East Anglian Fens

[i] A house by the River, ME Keynes 1976

You can also find me on Substack: as commonplace 92

A common land year, June

helenbaczkowskaLeave a comment

The year tilts in the days and weeks that follow the summer solstice. I’ve noticed already how the season of growing and blossoming has tipped towards one of harvest. In the past week, I have filled my freezer with gooseberries and beans, and my hung drying herbs in my kitchen – rosemary, thyme and sage to flavour cooking, comfrey for making salves and mint for tea through the winter. On the common, tiny red berries are forming on the hawthorn bushes and soon there will be blackberries, rosehips, elderberries and sloes. If rain falls while the soil is still warm from the summer, the broad brown heads of parasol fungi will appear and, in the autumn, there will be gaggles of teenagers, hunting in the grass for magic mushrooms.

In her book on the social impacts of the enclosure of common land[i], JM Neeson writes of how women were often at the forefront of resistance to the landowners’ fences and ditches. In the period she writes about, 1700 to 1820, much of the dissent was by refusals to sign papers, pretending to be out when the surveyors arrived, and a range of similar foot-dragging obstructiveness. My favourite story in the book is that of an old woman who said she would sign away her rights when the oak trees she had planted reached maturity. The role of women in these quiet and stubborn acts of rebellion make sense. The use of the commons extended far beyond grazing and firewood and hay, further even than the cheeses that could be sold in local markets and geese fattened for selling for Christmas tide feasts. Women and children knew where bedstraws could be picked for stuffing into mattresses, or fleabane gathered for drying into a powder used to keep away biting parasites. On the commons there was yarrow and selfheal for wounds, gorse flowers for wine and the first flush of nettles for a welcome green food after winter.

Neeson’s research focuses on a few parishes in Northamptonshire, not far from where the poet John Clare grew up, and was gleaned from parish records and transcripts of court hearings. My instinct is that the same stories were playing out in other places all across Britain, although, as Neeson’s work shows, unearthing the histories of the rural working class is painstaking and slow. To the enclosers, the financial independence of the commoners was viewed as both insolent and objectionable. Tales were told of labourers turning down work when the wages offered were too low, confident that they could live on the resources of their commons alone and ill-inclined towards doing the lord of the manor’s work for so little return. The Board of Agriculture, founded to promote agricultural innovation in Georgian England, hoped that enclosure would annihilate that ‘nest and conservatory of idleness and misery, which is uniformly to be witnessed in the vicinity of all commons’.

Only three percent of England and Wales is now common land, but the spirit of independence lives on among the commoners that are left. I’ve felt it myself when someone objected to me keeping my pony on my common – I answered every phone call and email with a shrug. Let them complain, I said, my rights are my rights. In Britain’s uplands I’ve heard commoners wearied by park runs that upset their cattle, by people who drive too fast along unfenced roads where animals roam, and by the endless ways that their way of life struggles to fit into the constraints of modern agriculture. Disease testing, restrictions on the movements of livestock and stipulations on grazing levels or seasons can be hard to deliver when your animals free range across hundreds of acres of moorland or fell.

Earlier this year, the commoners of the New Forest, on England’s south coast, were recognised as a national minority by the Council of Europe. The status puts them on a par with the Cornish, the Ulster Scots or the Welsh. The recognition followed a campaign by the commoners, who wanted greater safeguards on commoning culture and better representation in land use decisions like forestry and development. I followed the story with interest – in 1996, I spent six months working as a ranger in the New Forest, mostly leading walks to show tourists bats and plants and nightjars, but sometimes cycling all day on bumpy tracks to check on the condition of cycle routes. One morning I observed the Verderers Court, which has dealt with offences against the Forest for nearly eight hundred years. I sat on a wooden pew at the back of a dark and timber-framed hall as the officials, known as Verderers and Agisters, gathered. Long ago these officers of the Court would have spoken about threats to the oak trees planted for ship-building and damage to fences around the plantations. Today the concerns are a mix of the old and the modern – the condition of grazing stock, the breaching of byelaws, who was grazing what animals where, illegal enclosures, dog attacks on cattle, ponies or sheep, collisions between free-roaming animals and cars, and the need for road signs. Common land, I realised that day, is much more than history, and the conflicts surrounding it rumble on.

The continued recognition of commoning as a way of life and the inclusion of commoners in decision-making are things that I can celebrate. Yet, the political divisions of the times we are living make me wary of discussions around identity; it feels too easy to let our allegiances become weapons and to be used to exclude or attack those who are not like ourselves. Identity is a slippery object, hard to hold and to truly define – I’ve known the common where I live all my life, but it was a place of refuge for my Polish grandparents, the place where they settled after World War 2, when the westward expansion of the Soviet Union meant that they could not return home. When I walk periphery of my common in the long evenings of mid-summer, I often think of how, like most of us living in Britain, I am part of this place, but with a heritage that stems from somewhere else. Usually, on my rambles, there are bats overhead, their quick movements no more than a flicker on the edge of my vision, sometimes an owl calls in a nearby wood and white moths rise from the long grass. Every common in Britain has its stories, both human and wild, and listening to them teaches about both the present and the past.

Parasol mushrooms on a Norfolk common

[i] Commoners: common right, enclosure and social change in England 1700-1820, Neeson, JM, Cambridge 1993

Nant Glas

helenbaczkowskaLeave a comment

Leigh guided me out of the farmyard behind her mum’s house, through a rusting wrought iron gate, and onto a path not marked on any map. Leigh was dressed for her morning run, light-footed in trainers and with her long, dark hair gathered back from her face. I stomped after her in my boots. We’d left the house before my brother Jon, who is also Leigh’s partner, had woken up; above the trees that lined the narrow trail, the sky was the blue of an early summer morning, promising a warm day with barely a breeze. ‘I love this path’, said Leigh. It runs a short distance between two farms, but must, we thought, have been walked by generations of neighbours. Halfway along, we stopped for a moment on a bridge of a single plank across the Nant Glas stream: nant translates as ‘stream’, but glas in Welsh could mean blue or green or even silver. The running water looked dark and small below us and Leigh thought the levels were low for the time of year, adding that it had barely rained through the winter; ‘not like it used to’, she said.

After the stream, the path crossed a track that ran uphill to the common. Meeting people who grazed livestock on the common was the reason for our morning walk, but before we’d set out, I’d looked at the common on an OS map. It had told me that the track ended in sheepfolds – pens where the animals were once held for shearing, trimming feet or moving on somewhere else. The map showed the common as the pale beige of open access land, looped around with darker brown contour lines, cramped together to indicate slopes. There was evidence of centuries of land use too – prehistoric burial cairns, disused quarries and, marked by the gothic script that signifies antiquity, an old settlement high on the common. I had to remind myself that I was here to look at the common as it was now and not be distracted by its past.

Leigh led me across the track and into a farmyard, with orange baler twine twisted into a metal gate and a lightly rusting tractor parked among hay bales in a barn. The dusty smell of the hay mingled with sharp scents of diesel and the earthy aroma of cattle. At the farmhouse door, Leigh introduced me to Joe, before heading back to the track for her run. Joe, thin and bearded in his work-worn jeans, showed me through to the kitchen; the house reminded me of Leigh’s mother’s home, with low rooms of beams and dark wood, a modern extension on one side, and a sleek kitchen of straight lines at odds with the uneven, white painted stone walls.  

In the kitchen, I met Joe’s wife Pam, she was small and dark and spoke as if she tolerated little nonsense in her life. Neither of them, they told me, is Welsh. When I asked about their relationship with the common at the end of the track, there was a moment of silence. For a moment I wondered if this was normal for them, if they were quiet people who thought before answering a question, or if there was some awkwardness they were considering before voicing a reply. In the end, they admitted they had stopped keeping sheep on the hill, firstly, they said, there was so little money in sheep farming, with fleeces worth less than the cost of shearing and meat prices impacted by cheaper imports. Then, Pam continued, she worries about the health problems that can happen when flocks from different owners mingle on the common. She chooses her words carefully, treading softly around a disquiet that other farmers show less concern about the wellbeing of their animals than she does. ‘We’ve opted for cattle instead’, says Joe, Welsh Blacks that can cope with the weather, poor grazing and uneven ground. Even so, Pam works to supplement their income and it seems as if there is little return on the hours they spend tending their beasts.

When I left Pam and Joe, and headed back along the path across the Nant Glas, my head was still full of questions. As an ecologist, I have long been aware of the debates over sheep grazing on Britain’s upland commons; decades ago, friends of mine used to call them ‘woolly maggots’, devouring vegetation and stripping the hills of scrub to shelter birds. Sheep grazing also reduces plant diversity and leaves the ground exposed in heavy downpours, reducing a landscape’s resilience to flooding. Yet the annual cycles of shearing, lambing, and gathering together to move flocks on and off the commons are anchor points in the year of hill farming communities. Swapping from sheep to cattle, as Pam and Joe have done, is often better for the land, as it allows steep slopes to grow scrub or even woodland, and reduces the close-cropping of plants carried out by sheep. It also requires new skills, different farming methods and capital investments many hill farmers do not have.

I was still mulling these thoughts over in the afternoon, when Jon and Leigh and I walked up to the summit of the common. My brother, who is six foot and blonde, scrambled among the rocks of the cairn at the top; in our youth we were both rebellious – me living on protest camps and he playing music at illegal raves. Now I am an ecologist and Jon is an archaeologist and his knowledge always gives me a deeper time history of the places we visit. I see medieval commons and later agricultural changes, whilst he spots Bronze Age field systems and Neolithic burial sites. Below us the land looked tightly grazed, with short grasses and bracken and no sign of trees. Leigh pointed out a criss-cross of shorter vegetation, where the grass and bracken had been cut in the autumn to create a break in case of wildfires. The summer has barely drawn breath, I thought, but wildfires have already burnt hilly commons to the north of the land above Nant Glas this year.

Mostly when I talk about commons, people want to dwell about the past, on long-ago enclosures, how they left British people with so little access to land and slowly cut off out connection to it. Yet, this hill, its short grass and dry ground is a reminder that some of our common lands are still here, and they are places where the climate and nature crises are happening in front of our eyes.

Myddfai Common, Bannau Brycheiniog

The running man and the pony

helenbaczkowskaLeave a comment

At New Year, I took on the care of two ponies. Both had been living on the common by my house for some months, owned by Mike, a local man who became too unwell to care for them. They are just two years old and the boy, who I call Little Bob, has one black ear and one white, curved like a yin-yang symbol. My neighbour called the filly Scrufty, a blending of scruffy and tufty, as her coat was a little matted at first. Now she is a girl of brushed flowing locks, as fluffy as a My Little Pony.

Mike had already rescued Scrufty once, as a foal, from conditions that sounded pretty grim. It explains her reticence with humans – Little Bob walks confidently over to anyone, searches their pockets for treats, leans into any hand for a scratch. Scrufty is wary, eyeing people up from behind her exuberant fringe and often walking away with an air of equine indifference. Whatever has happened in her short life has left her hesitant and I am still uncertain how much she enjoys my company. For four months now, the ponies have bookended my days on the common – they get their buckets of breakfast after the hens, but before my own; I check them again at dusk, when the song thrush sings behind my garden and the tawny owls call in the wood. Visiting the ponies has become a focal point for my night time rambles too, and often now I stand with the black and white horses a while in the moonlight and shadow.

One evening last week I spotted the Running Man crossing the common. I don’t know his name, only that he lives in a residential home for adults a mile or so away and has run or walked past my house every day for more than two decades. Over the years, I’ve watched his dark beard become speckled with grey, but we have never spoken. He will raise a hand whilst looking straight ahead, clearly uncomfortable with eye contact or speaking. This time he waved at me, a full-armed and enthusiastic gesture, and walked towards where I was standing with the ponies. I waved back, surprised at his exuberance, telling myself to be calm, to let him take the lead in our contact. ‘I have seen the horses’ he said, ‘I have seen the horses, can I touch one?’

I pointed towards Scrufty, who was nearest to him and muttered something about approaching her quietly. The tall man walked towards her, an arm held stiffly out in front, towering over the little pony. I was worried she would back off, freaked out by this sudden human in Hi-Viz and thinking I’d go over and help if I was needed. Instead, she wandered over to him slowly, sniffed the proffered hand and reached her head up to nuzzle his shoulder. A huge grin spread over the Running Man’s face and he ran his fingers through the softness beneath her long mane. I let them be, alone with whatever communication was flowing between them. Then the man turned to me, held up his hand, and said ‘thanks’. I told him he was welcome to chat to them anytime, but he had picked up speed and was gone into the dusk.

I’ve spent a lot of my life with horses – dun-coloured Zodiac, who I sat on as a child, behind the glasshouse of a market garden, Dougal, who I rode bareback in the fields by a coal yard in Scotland and Perkins, the white and gold pony I drove in a cart down Norfolk lanes for fifteen years. I used to call him my grass-powered pickup truck – one less four-by-four I would say to my friends as we bowled along the lanes to the pub. Each of them, like all horses, lived in the present moment, easily scared, but sensitive to human behaviour. Building trust with them can take time, but once won it feels like the warm depth of falling in love, my heart turning over as they follow me across a field or run their soft lips gently across my palms. I don’t know if the Running Man will visit Scrufty again, but I hope he does – both of them seemed to benefit from that moment of contact and I’d been waiting weeks for little signs that her confidence is growing.

Sleepy ponies. Helen

A Common Land Year, April

helenbaczkowskaLeave a comment

Lark Rise and other ghosts

I am more than a week late writing this, it should have been penned at the end of May, but I spent a long weekend travelling to Wiltshire, losing writing time to walking on chalk downs. On the way home, I stopped to look for a ghost on Juniper Hill. It might have been more than one ghost, for although I have never visited the village, which sits on a low hill north of Oxford, it has a place in my memory. In the summer of 1989, I spent a week in hospital. The nights were hot and I struggled to sleep, so I spent most of each day and night reading. Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford was one of the books I had taken with me. It had been recommended by college lecturer, who talked of how it recorded rural life in the decade or so before the First World War. I was intrigued when he said that Lark Rise was one of the very few books of its era written by a rural working class woman. I’ve re-read it a couple of times since that summer and the prose trips lightly along, weaving Thompson’s own story into the life of the village, its seasonal celebrations, its occasional conflicts and the poverty of her family and neighbours.

Lark Rise was name Thompson at thgave to her birthplace of Juniper Hill and, heading home from Wiltshire, I followed the long straight road to see what was there now. The lane was quiet and ran beside a cluster of houses and wide fields of oil seed rape, flowering yellow beneath a blue sky. There was no sign of any people, only cars parked behind hedges or fences – a contrast to the bustling, gossipy community depicted in Lark Rise.

The ghosts of common land haunts Thompson’s childhood. By the time she was born, the open fields and shared pastures had long been enclosed; replaced with neat hedged meadows and ploughed acres. Yet a memory of the commons lingers on. Thompson writes of her grandparent’s house, with its velvet cushions and dark carved furniture – luxuries she says they could afford because they had had common rights in their younger days. The rights meant they had kept geese and cows on the commons, as well as a donkey to pull a cart of eggs and butter and cheese into market for them to sell. Their income as servants or labourers was supplemented by the sale of these goods, so they had been better off than Thompson’s own family. Even though Flora’s father was a skilled stonemason, her parents were entirely reliant on him finding employment.

Passing through the village, I wondered at the place name too – juniper bushes like chalk downland or open moors and the edges of woodlands. Maybe the village was once surrounded by rough grazing, with patches of trees and tangled scrub. There was no sign of any juniper in the vast fields I saw on my visit, but then I barely left the car, uncertain where to park or where I could walk away from the road.

The ghosts of commons can be found in place names across England. Within a few miles of my Norfolk home there is: North Green, Bush Green, several Common Roads, Lundy Green, Blythe Green, which is no more than a few trees and a cottage at a turning in the road, Penny’s Green, The Common, now a row of houses next to wheat fields, Harris Green, Silver Green, High Common, Low Common and Cole’s Common. None of them have any common land anymore. The words ‘green’ and ‘common’ were mostly interchangeable in lowland England, once simply signalling unfenced land where people had rights. Further away there are a couple of ‘moors’, which used to mean a rough and unenclosed pasture and not necessarily a heathery hillside. I also think I can spot the outline of lost commons in a few wide verges or where a row of old cottages face onto a track that might once have crossed a common.

When I first moved here, I spent a spring and summer exploring local lanes on my bike, passing by arable fields, but finding road verges rich in wild flowers – ox-eye daisies and orchids, cowslips and lesser bird’s foot trefoil, field scabious and yellow oat grass. I wondered if these too were the ghosts of common land, once grazed and interconnected by trackways. I followed the question with research, mapped the wildflower verges close to my home and found that each one matches the location of a long ago common. Just as English bluebells on mountains or in hedgerows can show where woods used to be, so the plants of old meadows and pastures can show where the commons once were.

Driving home from Juniper Hill in a long, late evening, with the setting sun behind me, I wondered how many other lost commons remained in the places I passed. They may only survive as names, as village greens, a handful of flowers, or odd-shaped corners of ground, but their ghosts are part of how we understand the land and our relationship to it. I am cautious of nostalgia, of romanticising the past – Thompson’s book shows how hard the lives of the rural poor can be – access to commons or not. Understanding enclosure, however, helps us grasp why we are one of the most nature depleted countries in Europe, with land seen primarily as an asset for making money, regardless of the lives, human or more-than-human, who live there.

The loss of our commons as places where we interact with nature is also part of why people in Britain feel so little connection with nature. For centuries, common land was part of many people’s lives – whether they rambled and climbed trees like John Clare or kept cows like Flora Thomson’s grandparents. Commons reached into the heart of medieval towns and cities too, as places for gathering firewood and stones and keeping animals on the nights before markets. A recent study by the University of Derby calculated the loss of nature from people’s lives as around sixty percent since 1800. The decades either side of this date were the peak of the enclosure of commons, and of people needing to seek alternatives to farm work through learning skilled trades or migrating to industrial towns.

Arriving home, I walked the boundaries of the common outside my gate before sunset, thankful to my mum for registering it as common. Every time I do this, I think it is not enough. Both us and the wilder lives we live among need more spaces like this to thrive, to gather blackberries for crumbles and gorse flowers for wine, and, through valuing nature, to act as mum did and protect it. Re-connecting with nature is not just about our wellbeing, but crucial to creating a wilder, healthy world for the future, and, ultimately, to ensuring our species’ survival on this Earth.

The spectres of England’s commons have many stories to tell and I wonder, as I write these words, how many other people out there have the ghost of a common nearby – I would love to see pictures of them and hear their stories.  

Bulbous buttercups at Shelton Spot, the ghost of a common in Norfolk. H Baczkowska

* Modelling Nature Connectedness Within Environmental Systems: Human-Nature Relationships from 1800 to 2020 and Beyond

A Common Land Year, March

helenbaczkowskaLeave a comment

At Swaddy Well

I thought about Swaddy Well all the way from Norfolk to the Northamptonshire village of Helpston. Driving across the Fens, wondered if I could find it, if it would be more than a name on a map and the memory of a place. Beneath the wide, grey skies beyond my windscreen, the reeds in the drainage ditches stood bleached by the winter. March was ending like a pacing lion, the north wind carrying a hesitant drizzle.

In Helpston, I met friends in the café attached to the museum that was once the home of the poet John Clare, who was born in the village in 1793. When we walked through the gift shop to the white-washed cottage, I was struck by the cold. No fire, just the kitchen laid out as if someone had come in from a summer garden and placed apples on the table beside slices of bread and hard, cheap cheese. A small bowl held convincing glass raspberries.

I wondered what rights Clare’s family had claimed on the commons at the edges of his parish, on Emmonsale Heath, the Mores and Swaddy Well. Maybe grazing for a pony, geese or cattle, entitlements to wood for the fire or for whittling into spoons, perhaps a right to catch fish or cut turf – all of them supplementing the living of a poor family. Common rights, like my own at Wood Green, are still often linked to the hearth of a house and are what has defined common land for centuries; no matter who owns the ground, the right holders’ access to the grass and timber should prevail.

Clare’s poem, ‘The Lament of Swaddy Well’, recounts the enclosure of a common into cropped, farmed fields and a quarry. By the time of the Norman Conquest, ‘open field’ farming existed in much of the English Midlands, with villagers having rights on common grazing land and hayfields and ‘owning’ a number of strips marked with posts in the parish’s arable fields – the origin of the term ‘stakeholder’. In 1760, a new legal process speeded up the gathering of the strips into individual farms that could be rented out or farmed for profit more than subsistence. Common rights were dissolved by this process and the pastures ploughed up, whether or not the rightholders agreed. These ‘parliamentary enclosures’ were frequently led by an individual who had acquired most of the strips in a parish and it could be carried out even if the majority of those ‘owning’ land in the village opposed the idea. The deciding factor was not the number of stakeholders who consented, but the agreement of those who owned the largest share of the land. Owning land of significant value was then the backbone of power in Britain and the required route for becoming a Justice of the Peace or a Member of Parliament – the very people who would rule on private enclosure acts laid before them by other landowners. Between 1760 and 1870, nearly seven million acres of common land in Britain were enclosed and commoners, deprived of their rights, were left with only their waged labour to live on[i]. ‘Where profit gets his clutches in’, writes Clare, ‘there’s little he will leave’.

The Lament of Swaddy Well is written from the point of view of the land as it says farewell to the Gypsies who camped among its bushes, to commoners and the wild creatures of its ‘old, green hills’. It is one of the most eloquent texts on habitat destruction in English, voicing sorrow at the obliteration of beetles ‘hiding ‘neath a stone’, flowers ‘that bloomed nowhere beside’ and the butterflies that ‘whirr and come’. I feel my voice wavering if I try to read it aloud, recognising in the words my own landscapes of loss – the chalk hill that was once Twyford Down, with its wild flowers, skylarks and bees, or the old oak trees at Skinner’s Green, on the route of the Newbury bypass. I am not surprised that Clare’s sanity collapsed as the places he knew were destroyed. Many of my road protest friends suffered breakdowns and struggled for years to find their place in the world, yet we had known those woods and valleys and rivers only briefly, whereas Clare was grappling with the destruction of the ‘mossy hills’ and ‘silver springs’ he had walked among all his life.

Despite the enclosures of commons that Clare saw in his lifetime, over a million hectares of common land remain in England and Wales today[ii]. More than a third of this area is designated as nationally important for nature conservation, a testimony to its history. The long use by right holders means that commons are not truly ‘wild’, but they have had a long time to develop peat soils, or the plants of ancient grasslands and heaths, and to be a familiar haven for generations of migrant birds. These old lands are, however, still places of conflict. My journey through Britain’s commons, currently being shaped into a book, have taken me to the burnt squares of heather on grouse moors, the enclosure of a common for military training, the industrial scale digging of peat in northern England, and the sheep-cropped turf of Welsh commons. Each of these has a story of carbon capture and climate change, flood control and the continual dwindling of nature; like the Fens that I crossed on my trip to Clare’s cottage, they are stories for another day, or for the longer pages of my book.

In Helpston, the small group of us who had met in the café braved the keen March wind and the drizzle to visit Swaddy Well. A red kite drifted over thorn scrub as we arrived and a flock of black sheep eyed us warily from a distance. The limestone cliffs of the abandoned quarry were still exposed, facing a shallow lake fringed with reeds, young birch trees and the spiky skeletons of last summer’s thistles. Wading into a pond, I found a few great crested newt eggs, tucked neatly under the leaves of a plant. In the shelter of a hut, we took turns at reading out the verses of Clare’s Lament. Tears pricked a little at my eyes and yet, there was a hopefulness in the battered land around us and in the kite, a species returning to Britain after years of persecution and near extinction. Swaddy Well, I found out, is more than a place on a map or the ghost of a common, it’s a reminder of how, with benevolent care, even the most mistreated places can find their way back to the wild.

Dyke looking towards Engine Farm in The Fens; a steam pump bought at the Great Exhibition in 1851 was installed here to drain one of the last shallow lakes of the landscape. H Baczkowska

[i] A Short History of Enclosure, Simon Fairlie, The Land, https://thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/short-history-enclosure-britain

[ii] Foundation for Common Land, https://foundationforcommonland.org.uk/

A Common Land Year, February

helenbaczkowskaLeave a comment

February Filldyke

My neighbour’s sheep escaped again this morning. I spotted them as I walked out of my gate – a small, tight flock grazing around one of the black and white ponies that I keep on the common. I was carrying a bucket of food and the little filly lifted her head when she heard my call, whinnying in reply. There was little other sound, no bird song or wind and only a whisper of rain; the still, damp air deadening the traffic noise from a nearby road. For a moment, I felt caught out of time, stranded briefly in a scene from medieval England, with just the low clouds and animals, the bare trees and short winter grass.

I texted my neighbour, telling her where her sheep were. A few centuries ago, allowing animals to stray onto the common, or grazing more animals than one’s entitlement allowed, or even putting livestock on at the wrong time of year, would have been a serious matter. If the transgressions continued, a quiet word between villagers would have escalated to a visit from the reeve or the hayward – official positions that monitored the use of common lands. Further breaches could have led to the matter being raised in the manorial court, where the lord of the manor exercised jurisdiction over his tenants and issued fines against offenders. The resources provided on common land were never a free for all, but apportioned across right holders and tightly managed. Today, beneath a sky the colour of pale fleece, I helped my neighbour herd her stray animals back into their field and we pulled wire across the gap they had pushed through.

In my childhood, in the 1970’s, traces of medieval commoning still continued in this border land between Norfolk and Suffolk. Several households in the village where I now live kept goats, flocks of geese or hens, and the occasional pony or cow on the common. Meat and milk and eggs supplemented meagre incomes earned from working on farms or in the local mill, but commoning was also a way of life. It involved rising in the morning to feed and care for the animals, standing whilst a whiskery nose nuzzled at a pocket, searching for treats, passing a hand across warm flanks and checking animals by torchlight on dark winter nights. For a couple of decades, the numbers of people using local commons this way were swelled by those who moved here seeking the good life. Disciples of John Seymours’ ‘Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency’ moved to South Norfolk or North Suffolk in the 1970s and made use of the commons beyond their organic vegetable plots. Writer Roger Deakin lived beside a common a few miles from me and was part of the bohemian community that sprung up either side of the river Waveney. They had a dedicated newspaper, the Waveney Clarion, and held summer festivals of music, storytelling and crafts that intentionally evoked the fayres held on the commons of feudal England.

Over the past two years, I have visited dozens of British commons as research for my book, ‘Common Place’. Yet I found only one or two other people who, like me, are not farmers, but use their common as a source of firewood and grazing, working the land the in the way of the long-ago commoners. Sometimes I feel I am among the last of a breed whose origins are older than the Norman Conquest. Almost all of the commons I have visited, from England’s lowlands to the bare and sheep-shorn commons of Britain’s hills, were grazed by commercial livestock farmers or as part of nature conservation efforts. At Greenham Common, near Newbury in Berkshire, a representative of the local Wildlife Trust, who manage the common, told me that most of the cattle on the land are part of large farming businesses now, often leasing or borrowing rights from local commoners. He said that it was hard to know, sometimes, who owned certain cows, or how many had been loosed onto the wide grassland and heath of the common. No wonder, I thought, that the common lands of old had their wardens and courts – commons have a slippery history.

Greenham Common has slid out the public eye in recent decades, but in the 1980s it was a totem of a bleak decade. Several times my mum left our home in the Midlands and travelled to join demonstrations at the women’s peace camp on the edge of the common. The camp had grown up in response to a new generation of nuclear weapons, housed at the American airbase that had been built there in World War Two. The missiles were part of Cold War hostilities with the USSR and located at Greenham as part of a strategy where each side ramped up their weaponry and threatened annihilation. It was known as Mutually Assured Destruction and the acronym speaks for itself.

A decade after my mum’s trips to Greenham, I lived on the other side of Newbury for most of a year, protesting against the town’s bypass. My memory of that time is of always feeling tired, of rising at dawn to block vehicles that carried chainsaw crews or security guards into the woods along the route of the road, of building walkways and treehouses high up in the branches, of clinging to them as yet another bailiff tried to pull us out, of arrests and court and the sound of two hundred year old oaks crashing to the ground, one after another. The trauma and fatigue of those months left my memory in fragments, but also brought me back to my grandmother’s cottage in rural Norfolk. It was empty at the time and seemed a good place to rest for a while. I didn’t plan to still be here, thirty winters later, helping herd sheep on a February morning.

Unlike the reeves and the haywards of old, I am not worried about my neighbour’s sheep eating the grass on the common. My only concern is for dogs, for the main use of the common now is dog walking and people view the open space as a place to let their pets run free – enjoyable for the dogs, but less so for sheep. The grass itself is plentiful and has kept growing all through this mild winter; this is the norm now, when there is barely a full week of frost in a winter and snow is a rarity. February is, however, living up to its old name of ‘Filldyke’ this year, both on the common, with its hollows and ponds, and in ditches and fields that surround it. Once or twice a week now I have to move the ponies in their temporary fence, avoiding the wettest parts of the common.

Keeping animals on this land has given me a deep understanding of the hollows and the dry ground where the gorse bushes grow, of what plants edge the ponds in the spring and where to find shelter from the east winds of winter. Yet I don’t ‘own’ this place any more than the dog walkers do; it no more ‘belongs’ to me than it does to those who ride their bikes along the rough tracks, who build lean-to dens in the little wood, who camp here in summer or leave memorials to their loved ones below the trees. The other commoners I’ve met on my travels, even those with large flocks of cattle or sheep, have talked about the same connection with their commons, one that is built not on ownership, but on family history, on rights to use the land and a familiarity with all of the lives that live there. Today, walking back home with an empty bucket in my hand, I heard a song thrush warming his voice up for spring, watched the last of the starlings leave their roost in the reeds of a pond and spotted the neat hoofprint of a roe deer, left overnight in the mud. Each of them made me aware, once again, of how many of us value the quiet space of Britain’s common land.

Silo, Greenham Common, Helen Baczkowska

A Common Land Year

helenbaczkowska2 Comments

January

I’m writing about common land. I have enough words for a book now, one that wanders from rain-soaked Cumbria to meetings on Dartmoor, via Gypsy horses in Scotland and herbalists in Wales. Words that return, always, to the common outside my front door. It is a place I have known all my life, sixteen acres of tussocky grassland, scrub, gnarled oak trees and ponds that come and go with the rainfall and seasons. It is a land that has shaped my life too; identifying wild flowers here as a child led to me training as an ecologist and, as I became more aware of the threats to the wild, to me becoming an environmental activist. The commoners that were here in my childhood kept goats, donkeys, ponies and a cow on the rough grazing, whilst their gardens were busy with hens and vegetables and firewood piles. They too inspired my dreams, instilling a desire to live quietly and meet my own needs where I can.

I am writing about common land in Britain today. When I say this, I get one of several responses. Some people are excited and we veer into rambling conversations full of enthusiasm for vegetable gardens and coppice woods. Others tell me all that they know about commons, and a subset of them embark on long rants about enclosure, even though I say I am writing about the present more than the past. I have learned that my role here is to listen, rather than to converse. My favourites are the people who tell me about ‘their’ commons, the places close to their hearts, where they walk, work, graze animals or simply enjoy a landscape that feels rooted in history and nature.

I like to start conversations about commons with a question – ‘what do you understand ‘common land’ to be?’ The answers are varied, with many believing that the land is un-owned, or owned ‘by everyone’ or ‘the people’. I am the buster of common land myths and tell them that are two answers to my query. Firstly, since the 1960s, common land and common rights are defined by registers held by local authorities. If the land does not have an entry in the typescript ledgers and an accompanying, hand-drawn map, it may once have been a common, but it is not now legally one. Secondly, in the past, common land was simply land owned by someone, but over which other people] had rights. Either way, there are usually owners in the form of local farms, estates, local authorities or conservation groups. Wood Green, the common on my doorstep, is registered, along with my rights for grazing animals. On other commons there are entitlements for cutting peat for fuel, coppicing or pollarding firewood, grazing pigs in the oak and beech mast season, for fishing and for digging up road stones.

Once there was common land everywhere, reaching into cities, surrounding villages and towns. Thousands of acres of moor and fen, heath and forest, and rough grass and scrub like my home ground. Over hundreds of years it was enclosed into privately owned fields, concentrating property into the male lineage of country squires and landed gentry. I’ve spent a long time reading the reasons why enclosure happened and about the consequences on communities and ecology. Those are for my book, or perhaps for later posts in my common land year. I’ve also hunted out where commons hide in plain sight in old paintings and English literature – they are there in the novels of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens; they are in the paintings of Gainsborough and Constable and in the poems of John Clare, who recorded the enclosure of his village commons in the early nineteenth century.

Clare has been a companion of mine since my teens, when my mum came back from an evening class carrying a book of his poems and clearly in love with the words of the long-dead farm labourer from Northamptonshire. Like Clare, I have seen places I loved destroyed, this time for road-building – a chalk hill called Twyford Down, an old heathy common in the path of the Newbury bypass and a small fragment of old common in north-east London. ‘Enclosure like a Bonaparte let not a thing remain’, wrote Clare in his poem Remembrances. ‘It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill’, he continues, and when I read his words, there are tears in my eyes for the lands that both of us lost.

Today, in early January, the ice and snow on the common melted. I carried water and hay out to the ponies that live there, feeling their warm breath on my hands as they searched for treats. Despite the thaw, the ground seems dry, the ponds barely topped up after nearly two years of scant rain. It scares me, this changing and uncertain climate, the questions of ‘what if’. What if the ponds are not full enough for the frogs and the newts and the shy dabchicks who breed here in spring? What if there is barely enough rain for the wild flowers to bloom and if the trees shrink into themselves, as they did last year, shedding limbs and barely growing? What if there are not enough flying insects for the swallows or swifts and the birds fail to return in the first weeks of summer? My love of this common isn’t easy, most days I find some solace in these quiet, but to love a half-wild place is to fear for its future.

I have more than enough words for a book now, they are almost all lined up and seeking a publisher. Yet more keep coming, as if my business with common land is not finished, so these posts will be outtakes that don’t make it to the book, reflecting the commons I visit this year and the people, histories and wildlife I find on them. I am not sure where I am going next. I’ll let you know.

Wood Green, January 2026