13. The Ancient Countryside

I have already made the point that, away from the lowlands,  things didn't change so much. Among the hills, smaller valleys and woods, the creation of large fields was frequently  impractical. In many places only a maniac could have 'planned' what emerged from the tumble-dryer of history. It all makes the ancient countryside a richer hunting ground for pootlers. 

By way of illustration, contrast the two pics of the land around Chinnor in Bucks shown below. The first is the 'planned' lowland and appeared later and the second is the upper dip slope of the Chilterns. The villages in the populated land below the Chiltern Scarp often combined their use of the open fields with rights to land on the scarp for grazing and timber and which was often in the same parish. 

    

Planned fields north of Chinnor

Higher ground south of Chinnor

A similar pattern can be seen 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. Hertfordshire is a mess of both planned and ancient countryside.

There is no single dominant pattern or template for land use in these areas, that is its glory, so rather than offer specious generalisations, I will highlight some of the features that you might encounter. 

Smaller farms 

Farms carved out of the woodlands (a process known as 'assarting') tended to be smaller and scattered. Often, the woodland was worth more than the arable land anyway. Many areas were better suited to pastoral farming than to large fields for crops. Some common land was simply not worth farming while elsewhere efforts to enclose it were frequently frustrated by the many commoners with rights to use it.  You can see the result. In the hills, the fields often remained small and the roads more winding. 

Footpaths and winding roads

Originally, in ancient countryside, the quotidian means of getting from 'A' to 'B' would 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 or the nearest market. The result was that both roads and paths wandered all over the place. Many of them remain, mostly as footpaths, even though the places they linked or the logic of the connection have long since disappeared. You can see the pattern of tracks linking high and low ground on this extract from an OS Map, if you can zoom in a bit. 

Tracks uphill from Great Missenden

Going back to my example from Chinnor, on the map of the planned countryside you can see more paths than you would normally get in planned countryside, running north / south across the fields. On the Map of the Ancient countryside above the village, there is no similar regularity. Quite simply, people in Chinnor farmed the clay lowland, but used the hills for grazing livestock and getting firewood etc. Hence the paths simply link low and high ground.  

Some of the paths might also have been used for carts. Together with the livestock, some paths were both heavily used and literally hollowed out. They became known as 'holloways'. 

Holloway above Quainton 

Banks & Ditches

You might notice lots of 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 remnant of a hedge and have a ditch on the field side to keep the stock away from the undergrowth which was 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 maps.  In time honoured fashion, people attributed anything large and puzzling to the Gods. Grim was a nickname for Odin although personally I can't see him as an early version of Bob the Builder. Maybe in the distant future HS2 will be known as 'Grim's Line'?

Grim's Ditch nr. Nuffield

Cobblers Pits Sunken Lane : Halton

By not you are probably thinking that there are too many types of ditches around to make sense of. Just to make it worse, those on 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 has been left to grow and you now find lines of old, mature trees. 

Strip Lynchets

As the population grew, more of the 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 simply 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! Also if you find an arable field with narrow stripes, that is probably the result of more recent ploughing. 

Soil creep

Spring Line Villages

In addition, the gravel terraces on on the side of many of the river valleys provided some of the most fertile arable land and better access to clear spring water. This was always important and its lack is a major reason why you don't see many villages on higher ground, especially where the bedrock is chalk. If you look at an OS maps you will see that there are 'spring line' villages strung out in a line below the scarp scopes of the Chilterns and Downs. 

Villages like this usually came with a more complex pattern of existing rights and interests reflecting the value both of the water supply and the access to grazing land and firewood on the higher ground. This is often reflected in the long, thin parishes and farms, extending from the low ground to the higher ground which offered summer grazing and in some places timber. Chinnor 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 much larger and more frequently encountered in Ancient countryside, simply because they were logic targets of enclosures elsewhere.  while elsewhere they were victims of rationalisation. Both enjoy some legal protection. Oddly, you currently have a 'right to roam' on common land, but not on village greens which are there for the enjoyment of the locals. The pic below is of the large Green at Sarratt near Chesham. 

Sarratt

Commons are usually very much larger and locals enjoy very specific but usually archaic rights to use them, perhaps for grazing livestock, collecting firewood and even fish and peat. 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 

One other 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 many resulted from digging out quantities of the soft stone to use fertiliser. This is known as 'liming'; the alkaline chalk balances more acidic soils. 

Another type of mine, much older and harder to spot, is where neolithic man dug out flint to use for tools and weapons. In the region covered by 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 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 and these also affected 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 sake, a Forest wasn’t necessarily woodland, but rather 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 naughty for hunting the 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 and provided a playground for King Edward the Confessor, a bloke whose posthumous beatification had all the propriety of a Boris Johnson honours list.  

Is that your Deer?

A good deal of the Chilterns in particular was, and still is, 'ancient' woodland. 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 them that are considered ancient. Before then organised planting was uncommon. If you want to know which woods are thought to be that old, see this map. 

Map of Ancient Woodlands

If you want to see some really old trees, take a close look at the old churchyard yews. They are not even considered 'ancient' until they are over 800 years old and many pre-date the church. 

Functional woodlands

On the chalk hills and the Greensand Ridge, woodlands probably comprised oak and other acid-tolerant species that were useful for coppicing. 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 that 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 from all of this were those with the capital needed to invest in new equipment and methods.