14 : Today and Tomorrow

The previous posts unearth the roots of the scenery we see in the the region today. Now I want to look at how we got from then to now. 

Better transport hastened change. The medieval transport network was threadbare. The waterways were well used but the roads were usually very poor and with responsibility for their maintenance rested with parishes. Things started to improve during the 1600s at the same time as the enclosures and farming innovations were gathering pace. Many fords were replaced by bridges and turnpike roads were introduced, run by trusts established by Parliament. Look out for roads that have milestones and the wide verges which characterise both the turnpikes and the roads often required by Parliamentary Enclosures. The dictatorial highway planning that we experience today, has a long history!  

Newbury / Reading Milestone

The population of England was steadily rising, from around 10m in 1800 to perhaps 30m in 1900. More people to feed and house! The canals appeared later, at the end of the 1700s, followed in the mid 1800s by the railways and in 1900s by an ever-spreading network of tarmacadam roads. Increasingly, farmers shifted from producing food for themselves and their neighbours, to meeting the demand from the growing urban areas. 

An example was the Greensand Ridge that runs east from Leighton Buzzard. Infertile soils meant that little was grown there until new techniques and market opportunities arrived. The sandy soils then offered an advantage, warming quickly in spring and allowing vegetables to be cropped and sold before produce from other areas could reach the markets. 

At the same time the demand for building materials led to the growth of a massive brick making industry and the extraction of useful aggregates from the deposits laid down millennia earlier by the braided glacial outwash rivers. The exhausted pits became the groups of lakes, Marston Moretaine near Bedford. 

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 that the Victorians used, they have a rusty display at the College Lake Visitor Centre near Tring. 

Early 19th c type horse drawn plough

All this time the pattern of demand for the produce of the countryside 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) tended to stay that way, but the intermediate quality land swung between the two depending on circumstances and the poorest land between grudging use and abandonment. 

In the first part of the 1900's there was a general decline in agriculture and a further shift away from arable farming to 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 encouragement for arable farming and much of it stayed that way afterwards, partly because improved machinery - those monster machines you see nowadays made sowing and ploughing easier.

Modern Plough

Change arrived by road and was driven by the need to provide food and leisure opportunities for the urban masses. 

While in most places the broad pattern of farming established by the enclosures remains albeit modified by further later consolidation of land ownership. The urban romance with the farming life often to used to mask relative poverty and hard grind. If you look behind it now, you see a mechanised industry dominated by large organisations, well-fed on public subsidies, which has wriggled out of many environmental regulations. 

This has 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. Some began to look, once again, like the open fields of the early medieval champion countryside, while simultaneously destroying many of its remaining traces in the process. Even the newer farm buildings now are often eyesores, with aluminium-clad warehouse-style sheds reminding us that this is a business and not a rural theme park.

The new prairies

This process wasn't as marked in the Ancient countryside where there was less scope to sacrifice the traditional arrangements to facilitate use of massive machinery. More of the odd fields, hedges and footpaths survived. 

It cannot be emphasised enough that all of these patterns played out in different ways in different places. Local context is always important and I have tried to add some of that into my bike route descriptions. If you want more fine grained detail, check out my other relevant blog posts. 

The world weary moan about the fields disappearing under concrete and of course everything is still changing. Sometimes it runs slowly and, to quote Joni Mitchell 'you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone'. The tangle of Victorian railway branch lines has come and mostly gone, truncated in the 1960's by Dr. Beeching's guesswork followed by axe work. The replacement is bigger and busier roads and HS2 slicing through the area. 

Beeching's Pill 

Joni's paradise' was replaced by a parking lot, a pink hotel, a boutique and a swingin' hot spot. (For post-boomers, she was a singer some fifty years ago). Now, we certainly have more 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.

My impression is the system of rights of way has shrunk a bit, but in many places is now better maintained. There are more protected landscapes and leisure facilities ranging from play farms to mountain bike trails. Meanwhile, the medieval legacies, the old aching bones of England, are still just about visible if you look for them. 

Beyond that it rather depends on what you want. We get our kicks in different ways. 

Robert Macfarlane in particular writes wonderfully about the natural world and the plants and wildlife in 'close-up'. Sadly, his insights are easier to appreciate when walking rather than cycling.

I am more 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 butter it with fantasy, seeing Tolkien's Barrow Downs, Robin Hood’s forests or Constables rural arcadia. 

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. Some of those old churchyard yews are older than Methuselah, but even they will eventually die.

Over time other species will replace those lost. As it warms up, we might see more stone pines, laurels, and both fruit and nut trees. The plane trees could thrive in more places and some types of fast-growing eucalyptus might become a commercial option in the longer term. I am not an expert on this stuff, if you can add anything please let me know.  

In the meantime, there is an effort 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. one and I gather there are proposals for something larger in Marston Vale near Bedford. Frankly these are miniscule and a homeopathic response to the need to mitigate the climate problems. 

New Heartwood Forest / St Albans 

In the fields, there has always been wheat, more beige than golden to my eye. Beyond that, it varies depending on everything from the weather to what sells at any moment in time. You still see quite a bit of barley, sugar beet, and the usual mix of vegetables but there seems to be less of the 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 baffling, 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 these suffer from heat stress. New varieties will appear and we are already seeing a few farmers planting the types of wheat used to make pasta. Maize might be grown for uses other than sileage. Vineyards are now common although usually small, while on the hop farms traditional varieties like Fuggles and Goldings will struggle. You might even see the odd field of purple lavender or linseed. 

Dedham Vale Vineyard, Suffolk 

The region is not overflowing with grazing herds and flocks and they have been declining over a number of years anyway. (DEFRA data. You see, I do some proper research!). 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 used to provide horse riding opportunities 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 preserving habitats and wildlife biodiversity and whatnot. Most schemes seem to rely on government financial or policy support or happenstance. Given that most land is held privately with the aim of profit, I do wonder how much this will catch on although some marginal fields will probably 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. Maybe we could recreate a mammoth with extracted DNA? All this would at least increase the variety and interest of 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; love ‘em or laugh at ‘em. 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 films. 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 back-yard. IGranted that the latest are taller than the Statue of Liberty so you can't really hide them but it does seem a bit hypocritical but also unsurprising. 

In Victorian times, there were many objections to the new-fangled trains. Many hated the newfangled bicycles too! Now, (excepting of the excrescence that is HS2) 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 in the same way we treat the windmills, once a necessity and now an adornment or at least more attractive than a coal fired powers 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 remain to discourage public access even on rights of way 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

On which point, we need more homes and we don’t need the grey bits of the greenbelt. Agreed?

New towns perhaps? Another Milton Keynes? If only it were that simple. While the housebuilding rhetoric of the new government is a drastic improvement on its craven predecessors, it still yearns to have its cake and eat it and its ambitions 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 windfarms for a letter to the Telegraph. EMail mail@mickbeaman.co.uk