13 : Today and Tomorrow

Previous posts sketched the history of the rocks and roots that shaped the regions' landscape. Now I want to hurry through more recent changes, reckoning that many will be familiar to you. 

Between the latter part of the Enclosures, through the Industrial Revolution to today, the population of England has risen, from around 10m in 1800 to perhaps 30m in 1900 and 55m today. A lot more people needed feeding, housing and a place to work. 

The medieval transport network was threadbare. The responsibility for maintaining the roads rested with the parishes, so they were usually just rough tracks.  

Things got better from the 1600s. The Enclosures and other innovations in farming increased trade and this, coupled with the increasing use of wheeled vehicles, demanded new or improved roads. Many fords were replaced by bridges and turnpike roads were introduced, run by trusts established by Parliament. The first, in 1663, is now part of the Great North Road. If you want to see where your local turnpikes were, try the link below and look for roads with milestones and wide verges. These characterise both the turnpikes and the roads often required by Parliamentary Enclosures.  Link: Turnpikes Maps 

The rivers had always been well used. From the later 1700's, they were augmented by the canal network which, in this region, was focused on trade with London. Much of it is still there, mainly used for leisure, although the smaller branches are often disused and overgrown.

Newbury / Reading Milestone

By the mid 1800s, the role of the canals as trade arteries had been supplanted by the railways and, by the 1900s, the ever-spreading network of tarmacadam roads. If you sit on Pitstone Hill near Tring, perhaps on the ancient Ridgeway track, and look down into the valley of the River Gade, you can see the canal, railways and road all threading their way through the gap in the scarp. Four generations of transport infrastructure in one spot! 

Increasingly, farmers shifted from producing food for themselves and their neighbours to meeting the demand from the growing towns. An example on the edge of the region was the Greensand Ridge that runs northeast from Leighton Buzzard towards Sandy. Infertile soils meant little was grown there until better transport created new opportunities. The sandy soils warmed quickly in spring, so vegetables were cropped and sold before produce from other areas could reach the markets.

At the same time, demand for more housing led to the rapid growth of the brick-making industry, extracting sand and aggregates from the deposits laid down millennia earlier by the rivers and streams flowing from the melting glaciers. The exhausted pits became the strings of lakes at Marston Moretaine near Bedford and, later, the Colne and other river valleys. Many are now used for recreation.

The Grand Junction Canal c. 1800

The impact of the Victorian period and beyond is more visible and understood so I will not delve into it now. If you want to see the agricultural kit used, there is a rusty display at College Lake near Tring. 

Early 19th c type horse drawn plough

All this time the pattern of land use was changing. The tendency was that the land specifically suited to arable farming (e.g. below the Chiltern Scarp and on the River terraces) and for raising livestock (old pastureland, meadows and parts of the clay vales) stayed that way, but the intermediate quality land swung between the two depending on circumstances and the poorest land between occasional use and abandonment. 

In the first part of the 1900's, there was a general decline in agriculture and a further shift from arable farming to animal husbandry. This trend perhaps owed more to policies and prices (which were increasingly affected by imports) than location and soils. It reversed when exigencies of food supply in wartime resulted in government prioritising the higher calories per acre from arable farming. Much of it stayed that way afterwards, partly because improved machinery made sowing and ploughing easier. Less affected were the mixed farms in the Eastern Cotswolds and Chilterns and those in the open downland and the clay valleys. 

Modern Plough

In most places, the broad pattern of farming established by the Enclosures remains, albeit modified by further later consolidation of land ownership. But the romantic notions of the farming life, which often masked a reality of relative poverty and hard grind, now hide an industry dominated by large, capital-intensive organisations, well-fed on public subsidies and run by spreadsheets.

This led, in parts of the planned countryside in particular, to the recreation of vast open 'prairie' fields and the destruction of hedgerows and older boundaries. They have begun to resemble the long-lost open fields of the early medieval champion countryside while simultaneously destroying many of their remaining traces. Even the newer farm buildings are often eyesores, with aluminium-clad warehouse-style sheds reminding us that this is a business, not a rural theme park.

The new prairies

In the Ancient countryside, these changes are not as obvious. There was less scope to sacrifice traditional layouts and arrangements to facilitate mechanisation.  More of the odd fields, old buildings, hedges, footpaths and other echoes of the past survive. However local context is always important and all of these patterns played out in different ways in different places. 

Of course everything is still changing. If nothing else, the increasing population sees to that. It creeps up on us. To quote Joni Mitchell, 'you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone'. (For post-boomers, she was a singer some fifty years ago).  For instance, the tangle of Victorian railway branch lines has come and mostly gone, truncated in the 1960s by Dr. Beeching's guesswork followed by axe work. Apart from HS2 disembowelling the area, the replacement is predominantly busier and bigger roads used by bigger trucks and bigger cars. 

Beeching's Pill 

Joni's 'paradise' was replaced by a parking lot, a pink hotel, a boutique and a swingin' hot spot. Now, we certainly have more ugly car parks, but it isn't all bad. The underused canals, closed railway branch lines, old roads and (sometimes) bridle paths allow bikes to thread their way around the country without risking life and limb on main roads. Old quarries are now landscaped lakes. The example below is at Rickmansworth.

For many, the connection with the countryside comes through the use of the footpath network. Our system of Rights of Way, largely founded on the logic of medieval settlement is, as far as I can see, unmatched in Europe. It has shrunk a bit, but is now better maintained. Along the paths, the wildlife is probably not as rich as it once was, but the aching bones of old England are still just about visible if you look for them. 

We get our kicks in different ways and not all commercialisation is bad news. As you can see from this series, I am primarily interested in the threads of change over time, from the crackle of Stone Age fires to the hard graft on medieval farms and the disruption of the industrial revolutions. 

Some like to butter that with fantasy, seeing Tolkien's Barrow Downs, Robin Hood’s forests or Constable's rural arcadia. If the Natural World is your thing, Robert Macfarlane in particular, writes wonderfully about the plants and wildlife in 'close-up'. Sadly, his insights are easier to appreciate when walking rather than cycling. 

The countryside increasingly offers other ways of enjoying yourself, from the open parkland gardens of the manors to nature reserves, adventure parks, play farms and mountain bike trails. Hurrah for all that. 

So what comes next? Here is my take on some new or potential developments. 

Stuff that grows.

Ancient woods might be ancient but the trees in them are usually not. (See post 13 in this series). As Mother Nature shuffles the arboreal pack, they are as prone to disease as we are. The elms have largely gone, ash trees are being decimated, and oaks are threatened. Climate change is the card sharp and might also affect the beeches, birches and conifers. 

Over time other species will replace those lost. Alders, Hornbeams, Willows and (glory be!) Red Maples all seem fairly happy in warmer, wetter places. As things heat up, we might see more stone pines, laurels, fruit and nut trees. The plane trees could thrive in more places and some types of fast-growing eucalyptus might become commercial options in the longer term.  I am not an expert on this stuff, so please let me know if you can add anything.  

In the meantime, a homeopathic effort is being made to create new forests. Heartwood near St Albans is shown in the aerial pic below and you can gauge its size from the surrounding fields. I gather there are plans for a larger woodland in Marston Vale, where there is also a proposal for a massive and rather cheesy theme park. 

New Heartwood Forest / St Albans 

What of farming? In the fields, there has always been wheat, more beige than golden to my eye, but at least in spring it means the fields are green if the trees are not. Beyond that, it varies depending on what sells. You still see quite a bit of barley, sugar beet, and the usual mix of vegetables, but there seems to be less bright yellow rapeseed now. A decade ago it was popular because it had several uses and could be usefully rotated with cereals. 

If you see something unfamiliar, it might have been planted as 'cover' to improve the soil for future years. The crops in the pics below initially baffled me. The first is a field of Phacelia near Didcot. The second is (I think!) Fava Beans, a cousin of Broad Beans, growing in the thin soil of the Chilterns. 

Phacelia

Fava Beans

I have no idea what difference global warming will make but nearly all of our crops suffer from heat stress. No doubt, new strains and options will appear, and we are already seeing a few farmers planting the Durum wheat used in Italy to make pasta. Maize might be grown for uses other than sileage. You might even see more fields of purple lavender or blue linseed. Vineyards are now common although usually small, while on the hop farms traditional varieties like Fuggles and Goldings will struggle. That foretells of more gassy, citric beers made from rice as well as barley and using Germanic and American hops. Kill me now. 

Dedham Vale Vineyard, Suffolk 

Animal husbandry has been declining in the region for some time. (DEFRA data. You see, I do some proper research!). People eat more chickens raised in eyesore sheds and fewer grazing animals, drink less cow-juice and more plant-based milk substitutes in their matcha lattes. 

It is hard to know what the future holds for the pastures, not least because many are not well suited to arable use. There is already a lot of land 'repurposed' for horsey types, and some people are keeping 'rare breeds', but surely the scope for all that is limited? Nonetheless you now see quite a  few llamas and alpacas. Please don't insult them by muddling them up. In the pic the llamas are on the right. 

Rewilding

This seems popular with green-tinged policy makers, keen on creating habitats, wildlife biodiversity and whatnot. Most schemes seem to rely on government inducements or happenstance. Given that most land is privately owned for profit, I wonder how much this will catch on and expect some marginal fields to be abandoned. In the meantime, rewilding mostly seems to be a hobby; gardens without the need for gardening! 

There have been efforts to bring back beavers and, elsewhere, wolves. Could we recreate a mammoth with extracted DNA? All this would at least make for more varied roadkill. 

Pimping the Villages

Thanks in part to the demand for content from streaming platforms, film-making is now big business in South East England and atmospheric villages lend themselves to use as locations and sets. Some places already rake in trade and fees from this. I have pointed to a few on the bike routes and written a double post on the massive local film studios. Did you know that Barbieland was in Watford? Tinseltown on Thames 

Hambeldon near Henley is a good example and has the additional advantage of being owned in its entirety by a Swiss billionaire and close to the studios orbiting London. See: Link Culdenfaw : Filming

Hambleden :Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. 

I have started to wonder whether some places are actively trying to ape the film sets. The tick list includes a windmill, wisteria, maypole, village pond, mock timber-framed houses and suspiciously well-maintained stocks. 

Wind Turbines

Many object to these while happily enjoying the electricity they produce in someone else’s backyard. Hypocrites?  

In Victorian times, there were many objections to the new-fangled trains. Many hated the newfangled bicycles too! Now, excepting the excrescence that is HS2, and perhaps because older blokes love the idea of living in a train set, the old trains have achieved ‘chocolate box status as part of the country scene. I doubt that the motorways will emulate that, but maybe one day we will treat wind turbines like we treat the windmills, once a necessity and now an adornment or at least more attractive than a coal-fired power station. 

The Leisure Economy

We have far, far more land devoted to golf courses than other European countries. Many don’t seem to be used much on weekdays but still discourage public access across great swathes of countryside. Bah humbug, you might say, if you are the average age of a mid-week golfer, but my unbiased and entirely objective opinion is that they should be the first candidate for rewilding or housebuilding in some urban areas.

Hostile (golf) territory 

Housebuilding

This post seems to be getting a bit political, but most probably agree that we need more homes, but don’t need the grey bits of the greenbelt. 

What other options are there? New towns perhaps? Another Milton Keynes? Doesn't densification around transport links mean more flats when families, in particular, want houses? There are no easy options and while this government's strategy looks potentially more effective than its craven predecessors, it still yearns to have its cake and eat it. Plans rely on pliant landowners and housebuilders, understaffed planning departments and inadequate funding for land assembly and infrastructure. So believe it when you see it.

Comments on all this are welcome, particularly if you think I have omitted something or made a factual error. But please save any outraged blather about housing or wind farms for a letter to the Telegraph. Email mail@mickbeaman.co.uk