12. The Ancient Countryside

'Ancient' in this context doesn't mean 'dead and gone'. Rather, like me, Ancient countryside shows definite signs of antiquity, but is still very much alive. It suffered less from planned Enclosures. Among the hills, valleys and woods, the terrain often made the creation of large, contiguous fields impractical, both before or after the Enclosures elsewhere. Now, it can be hard to understand how what we see, the random pattern of fields, woods and paths seemingly leading nowhere, can have emerged from the tumble dryer of history. It all makes for better pootling. 

In the last post I said the distinctions between the Planned and Ancient countryside could be blurry. (Apologies. One result might be duplication between the notes here and in previous posts). 

In both cases farming had to make some accommodations with practical and legal realities. But surprisingly, the difference between the two is often clear(ish) on OS Maps. I illustrated this in the previous post with extracts from the OS map of Otmoor. Here is another. Contrast the two pics of the land below. They show Chinnor in the Aylesbury Vale. The first is the 'planned' lowland on the clay soils of the valley to the North. The second is on the thinner soils over the chalk of the Chilterns ridge to the South. 

    

Planned fields north of Chinnor

Higher ground south of Chinnor

The land around the village provided good access to water, better soil for crops and pasture for the livestock. The higher ground was a source of brushwood for fuel and grazing for the animals when you didn't want them near the crops! From the outset, the organisation of the Parishes reflected this. Many around Chinnor are elongated to include a bit of both. 

You see a similar pattern elsewhere. In the Cotswolds, the freeholders on the higher land at Dun’s Tew and Wotton were cutting hay in the remote meadows of North Aston and Steeple Aston respectively. You can find similar patterns in Hertfordshire, but you have to look harder. 

The glory of the landscape outside the Planned areas is that it is often an indecipherable historical melange. So, rather than offer specious generalisations, I will highlight some specific characteristics and features you might encounter. 

Smaller farms 

I have already alluded to the value of woodland. The brushwood provided fuel, precious timber for building and 'pannage'. Pigs like acorns! Notwithstanding, many farms originated on land carved out of the woodlands, a process known as 'assarting'. 

They tend to be small, scattered and probably married a degree of arable and pastoral self-sufficiency with tradable produce but increasingly specialised over time. To a greater extent than the planned country, they could benefit from extensive 'Commons', often on land that would not support crops and where they had defined rights formulated to avoid problems like overgrazing. 

Footpaths and winding roads

Every road, by-way or part originally went from somewhere to somewhere. But in Ancient countryside, it is often the case that no one can remember exactly where either 'somewhere' was. 

The quotidian means of getting from 'A' to 'B' would once have been footpaths and the ‘holloways’ etched out by the movement of carts and livestock and avoiding obstacles and the land in use. 'B' in this case might have been their fields and grazing land, woodland for fuel, water, the church, the nearest market or the pub. 

The result was that both roads and paths wandered all over the place, many protected by customary law. Now, while many of the scattered farms, hamlets and the places they linked to have disappeared and the logic of their interconnections has vanished, many routes survive as Rights of Way, mostly as footpaths. Networks like this are rare in Europe, so enjoy them! 

If you can zoom in you can see the pattern of tracks linking high and low ground on this extract from an OS Map.  

Tracks uphill from Great Missenden

You can also see examples on the extract of the map of Chinnor, shown earlier. Here, you have more paths than you would typically get in planned countryside, running north / south across the fields to link the lower and higher ground for the reasons referred to. 

Some of the paths were heavily used for carts as well as livestock. As a result, that were  hollowed out and are now known as 'holloways'. 

Holloway above Quainton 

On lower ground, in places that lie on a logical route towards a large town or London in particular, you find the drove roads, used to take livestock to the markets. These are more likely to survive in Ancient countryside, sometimes as country lanes but often as by-ways. The footsore beasts were often sheep, but also cattle and, as mentioned in the last post, even birds, I referred to geese in the previous post and the writer Daniel Defoe recorded that 150,000 turkeys were driven from East Anglia to London, a journey which took three months.

For obvious reasons they preferred easier routes. A very old example is the valley of the River Gade through the Chilterns. Just north of Berkhamsted, you find the endearingly named 'Cow Roast, most likely once 'Cow Rest'. 'Welsh Roads' or 'Drove Roads' appear in several places, being the routes taken by the sheep to their doom in London. 

Banks & Ditches

You might notice many banks and ditches in the Cotswolds, Downs and Chilterns. These are hard to date but are probably old boundaries, usually of farms and fields but also parishes and hundreds. Sometimes they are topped with the remnants of a hedge and have a ditch on the field side to keep the stock away from the undergrowth, a valuable source of firewood and wattle for building. Some are very old and date back to the Iron Age or earlier. 

You will often see references to 'Grimm's Ditch' and 'Grimsdyke' on OS maps.  In time-honoured fashion, people attributed anything large and puzzling to the Gods. Grim was a nickname for Odin, although I can't see him as an early version of Bob the Builder. Maybe HS2 will be known as 'Grim's Line' in the distant future?

Grim's Ditch nr. Nuffield

Cobblers Pits Sunken Lane : Halton

You might also be thinking that there are too many types of ditches around to make sense of. To make it worse, those in the pic below are not old boundaries or tracks but what's left of trenches built for training recruits during the First World War. These are not uncommon and are usually narrower. 

Pullingshill Wood near Marlow. 

Old Hedges and Trees

Hedges can have a long life, too. The 'Black Hedge' at Monks Risborough is thought to pre-date the Norman Conquest. I would be surprised if many were not older, but sadly there is no good way of calculating their age. One popular but unreliable rule of thumb is gauging the age of a hedge by the number of species it contains or, even more crudely, the size and condition of any mature trees in it. 

In some places, an old hedgerow was left to grow, and has turned into lines of old, mature trees.

Strip Lynchets

As the population grew, more inferior or difficult land was cultivated. On slopes, strips of arable land were created, following the contours to make ploughing easier. The mouldboards on the heavy ploughs piled earth onto the downslopes, creating banks or terraces called strip lynchets. In many places these are no longer ploughed and can still be seen. 

Strip Lynchettes in Wiltshire

Two cautions. When trying to make sense of the patterns on hillside pastures, don’t confuse the lynchets with ‘terracettes’. The former are wider; they accommodated the hefty plough or sometimes served to increase the amount of useful land. The latter are narrower, more like sheep tracks and usually the natural result of soil creep. Gravity is to blame!

In my post on the Medieval countryside, I referred to 'ridge and furrow' plough marks. You can still see these on some hillsides, but they are more common on fields which are more amenable to ploughing and are not 'terraced'.  

Soil creep

Spring Line Villages

In addition, the gravel terraces on the side of many river valleys provided the most fertile arable land and better access to clear spring water. Access to water has always been important and its lack is why you don't see many villages on higher ground, especially where the bedrock is porous chalk. If you look at an OS map you will see that villages strung out in a line below the scarp slopes of the Chilterns and Downs. These follow, the 'spring line' where the layer of porous chalk meets an impermeable layer, and  streams which can't sink any further, emerge from the hillside. 

Villages like this usually came with a more complex pattern of existing rights and interests the value of the water supply and the access to grazing land and firewood on the higher ground. Their long, thin parishes often stretch from the fertile lower ground to the higher ground ,which offered summer grazing and in some places timber. Chinnor (op.cit.) is an excellent example, as are the villages along the Lambourn Valley. 

Greens and Commons

In places that haven't been 'planned', you see a lot of both of these. Both have shrunk over time. Commons are usually larger and more frequently encountered in Ancient countryside, because elsewhere they were logical targets of Enclosure and rationalisation. 

Sarratt

Locals enjoy very specific but usually archaic rights to use them, perhaps for grazing livestock, taking fish and peat or collecting firewood. But there were often constraints on what they could take. For instance taking from trees was restricted to what could be obtained using a hook or a crook, hence the expression.  Both commons and greens enjoy some legal protection but, oddly, you currently have a 'right to roam' on common land but not on village greens. They are there for the use of the locals. 

The pic above is of the large Green at Sarratt near Chesham. The pic below is the Common in meadows at Sudbury in Suffolk. Squint and you can see cows grazing in the distance! 

Sudbury Common Lands

Chalk Hollows and Dells 

Another feature that you might notice in the chalk hills is the hollows or dells. You also get some in limestone areas like the Cotswolds. There are a variety of reasons for these. Many are natural, but in chalk areas some resulted from mining or digging out quantities of the soft stone to use as fertiliser. This is known as 'liming'; the alkaline chalk balances more acidic clay soils. 

Another type of mine, much older and harder to spot, is where Neolithic man dug out flint to use for tools and weapons. The most famous is probably Grimes Graves, but in the region covered by my bike routes, the only proven example I know is Martin's Clump in the Test Valley, near the the village of Palestine, apparently so-named since Roman times. Some believe that Pitstone Hill near Tring is another. (You will also find a 'Grimm's Ditch' and a Holloway there). 

Chalk pit in upland woods

Forests and 'Ancient' woodlands.  

The Lords and landowners arranged many more things for their profit and convenience which affect what you see today. An increasing amount of land was enclosed as ‘demesne’ (pronounced like domain) for private use or designated as deer parks or ‘forests’. Again, the Normans didn't introduce these; they simply formalised them. 

For clarity's sake, a Forest wasn’t necessarily woodland, too many trees would obscure the hunter's view of the deer. Rather, it was a legal designation of an area in which the rights of the common folk were restricted. Sherwood is the famous example where, as you know, Robin Hood was deemed a deviant for hunting deer. More local examples include Savernake, Windsor, where the forest dominated what is now Berkshire until the mid 1200s, and Bermwood, which at its height at around the same time, comprised much of the land to the East of Oxford. It was a playground for the Saxon King Edward the Confessor, a bloke whose posthumous beatification had all the propriety of a Boris Johnson honours list.  

Is that your Deer?

You will often see references to 'Ancient Woodland' in guides and on maps. To be clear, that doesn't mean that the trees are ancient. A few are, but not many. Rather, it means that old maps and documents show that the area was wooded around 1600. In other words, it is the woodland as a whole rather than the trees within it that are considered ancient. Before then organised planting was uncommon. A good deal of the Chilterns in particular was, and still is, 'ancient' woodland. If you want to know which other woods are thought to be that old, see this scarily comprehensive map. Map of Ancient Woodlands

Oaks can live for a long time, the wood gets stronger with age and was always valued for building everything from houses to ships. The result was that the best examples are now seen where they were protected from felling. Take a look at the landscaped parkland around the great houses. The oldest are usually the fattest.  

If you want to see some really old trees, take a close look at the churchyard yews. A Yew is not even considered 'ancient' until it is over 800 years old so many pre-date the church. There are many speculative 'explanations' about the relationship, ranging from their use by Druids, as umbrellas for itinerant preachers, to keep cows out of the graveyard, as a symbol of eternity and as stock for making longbows. You takes yer' pick. 

Functional woodlands

On the chalk hills and the Greensand Ridge, woodlands probably comprised oak and other tolerant species useful for coppicing for fuel. The cities cried out for firewood! Later, once coal could be shipped by barge, the demand fell away. 

Some trees were planted to meet specific needs. For instance, the beech trees which are a feature of the high ground in the Chilterns today were planted in the 1800's for use in furniture manufacture. The craftsmen were the original 'bodgers' and not for nothing are Wycombe Wanderers F.C. known as the 'chairboys'. 

Coppice Trees

This highlights the increasing orientation of the countryside towards meeting the needs of London and other rapidly growing towns. The people who benefited most were those with the capital needed to invest in new equipment and methods. In contrast to the Planned Countryside, what we now call Ancient countryside was not so comprehensively remodelled to serve that purpose. But there was no blanket immunity! In the next post I will cover how it has been affected up to the present day.