Month: May 2026

The running man and the pony

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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

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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

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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

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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