nature

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, 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

A Common Land Year

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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