The country around Stanford on Avon is ribbed with the bones of an ancient landscape showing through a thin green skin of the pastures that replaced the open fields, the landscape changed for ever by the Enclosure Movement. It is about fifty miles to the village of Helpston, the home of the poet John Clare, who lamented the enclosure of his village in the early 1800s. As I drive out of the village I see wide ridges in the fields, curving parallel with each other, running under and through the modern landscape, below all the enclosure hedges. This is the old open field landscape. At the centre of the lands of the village was an area of arable land where strips of land were worked in common by the villagers, growing corn and beans and peas to feed their families, and flax too to make their textiles.
Another thought-provoking article. Your depth of personal knowledge and experience is astonishing!
Thanks for another informative and enjoyable article Richard.