common-land

A common land year, September

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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

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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

Nant Glas

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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

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/