Helen Baczkowska

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.