hiking

Whispers of better things

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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

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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