I was briefly a member of a group that organised regular walks in the XXXXX Mountains, until I was barred (by a person who had taken it on herself to be the leader) for being too slow. Not because I walked slowly, but because I was constantly delayed by wanting to identify a flower, watching a bird, orienting the map to see which distant hills were which, or speculating about ancient tracks and fields systems in the valleys below. Sometimes I wanted simply to enjoy being up on the mountain rather than yomping as fast as possible back to the car. I could understand the pleasure of walking briskly through invigorating landscapes, but the more interesting the landscape the more difficult I found it to keep up.
These essays originally aimed to lift the lid a little on the countryside, for those who are interested in the back story and not just the beauty. There may be a similar need for guides to country walks that go beyond route planning. Each ‘walk’ might treat of what underlies a particular piece of countryside and illuminate it in a particular way, with the structure of the piece dictated not by literary considerations but by what unfolds as one follows the footpath, being careful not to annoy the landowner, and it is in that same spirit that I have introduced the now fashionable redaction, having found a child who could show me how to do it, although I now see it does not copy to this site and I have had to use XXXXXs instead.
This walk starts, then, at the site of XXXXXX XXXXX, map ref XXXXXXX . When you park by this ancient Neolithic chambered tomb you may spot a single plant of wild thyme flowering on the dry slope around the monument. This is now a rare plant in this area because it likes the dry soil on the tops of anthills, and anthills are rare because there is so little truly permanent pasture and so few farmers who are prepared to tolerate the slight inconvenience of anthills.
The Large Blue butterfly needs to lay its eggs on wild thyme on the anthills of a particular ant species. Like the cuckoo, it is a brood-parasite, relying on another species to raise its young. The caterpillars feeding on the wild thyme exude a sweet liquid that the ants drink, and these red ants eventually take the caterpillars into their nests, where they feed, treacherously, on the ant larvae. Without wild thyme and those red ants the Large Blue butterfly cannot exist, which is why it had been extinct in the UK for many years before a recent reintroduction programme brought it back. Perhaps even more extraordinarily, the Pearl Bordered Fritillary butterfly is also involved in the same complexity. Red ants bring seeds of violets into their nests; the Large Blue caterpillars can cause the desertion of the ant colony as a result of eating their larvae, and the Pearl Bordered Fritillary prefers to lay its eggs on violets growing on these extinct ant hills. The Green Woodpecker, too, is also heavily dependent on anthills and has an extraordinary tongue so long that it has to coil behind the skull, over the eyes and into the right nostril in order to fit inside the bird's head when it is not being used to lick out the ants.
I doubt whether the Large Blue flourished around here any time recently, but the discovery of its life-cycle was important because it started the slow process of making (some of) us aware of the infinite complexities of the interactions and interdependencies of the life of this planet, and maybe helped us to challenge the hubris of the agrochemical industry.
This ancient tomb has always been a special place, since long before ever I first cycled here as a boy on my pride-and-joy Dawes racer. For honey bees it has been important for untold bee generations as a drone congregation area, where male honey bees come on hot days in May and June to mate with young queen bees. They mate fairly brutally in mid-air, the drone’s genitals being ripped out at the end of mating , staying in place long enough to emit a pheromone signal which lures another drone to follow in… what I was going to call his footsteps, and share his fate. The queen bee mates many times – a fact that was censored by beekeeping writers during the reign of Queen Victoria, although we now know from her diaries that she too liked to mate many times - before flying back to her hive with a lifetime supply of sperm. Lie down quietly on the capstone of the tomb on a sunny June afternoon and you may hear the buzzing of the drones yourself.
While you are lying there you may like to reflect that this place, high among the Welsh Border farmlands, is at the very nexus of farming history and of what we like to think of as the development of civilisation, a place at the centre of life in the period we call the Neolithic, when hunter-gatherers were beginning to give place to early settled farmers. This chambered tomb is now known to be part of a complex of Neolithic monuments all along this ridge, valued for their prominence and visibility by Neolithic man as well as by bees.
This has been farmed country to some extent since the Neolithic period maybe six thousand years ago. This must have been a place where early people began to move from being hunter-gatherers to being some kind of farmers, a change often called the Neolithic Revolution. This involved a certain amount of domestication of animals and plants. Instead of living in nature, seeking out a huge range of plants and animals and having a vast inherited knowledge of the natural world, Neolithic farmers settled down among a small number of domesticated plants and animals, and began, instead of ranging the wilderness, to toil in the new fields.
Domestication of animals and plants involves many changes to their genetics and to their behaviours. It is vital, for instance, for these animals to become more placid, less acutely aware of their surroundings, and it is possible that as cattle became more ‘bovine’, similar changes were taking place in human beings, as they and their plants and animals became dependant on each other. Neolithic people, living in a revolutionary community of domesticated animals and plants, with all the pests and commensals (the rooks, sparrows, rats , mice and cockroaches attracted by farming) among the concentrated faeces, parasites and diseases of all these animals, may be thought of as also domesticating themselves. Being a hunter gatherer is likely to have been both an easier and a healthier life, and it is not entirely clear why farming was thought to be such a good idea.
You are then, lying on your back on that big stone, at the place where the farming revolution hit the Welsh Marches, a revolution that is often seen as integral to the development of civilisation. We, the farmers, have seen farming as a victory and like all victors we have written the history. But farming then, like farming now, may be due for a little reappraisal. Hunter-gatherers had a far better diet than farmers – on one hunter-gatherer site remains of192 food plants were found, whereas farmers might have lived principally on one or two cereals. Our bodies began to suffer from poor nutrition when we turned to farming; the gradual increase in human stature we have noticed in recent generations is actually the return to the stature of prehistoric hunter gatherers with a better diet. It has taken thousands of years for us to recover from the defective diet that resulted from farming, and we are still trying to cope with all the animal (zoonotic) diseases jumping species as the result of domesticated animals sharing our space. We are still dealing with the latest (Covid) which will certainly not be the last. Or the most deadly.
Farming is said to have made possible the development of states, of poetry and culture, and allowed a surge in population. (Hunter-gatherer women cannot carry with them more than one young child at a time). A surge in population does not now seem automatically like such a good idea, but if you ran an early state – the Egypt of the Pharaohs, say, in the days when there was always ‘corn in Egypt’ - you needed large numbers of people to till the land, to build your pyramids or your chambered tombs and stone henges, and to create a surplus to enrich the ruling classes (Sound familiar?). Writing and number were invented initially to record how much tax your subjects owed, and wheat was the most popular crop because it was easiest to tax, being harvested all at the same time, and therefore easily collected, stored, dried and carried off to the granaries of the tax-collecting rulers. The early farming states needed a lot of labour and their cultured elites, like those who owned the country estates around here, lived at least partly on the profits from slavery. The walls around these states, whether in China or at Hadrian’s Wall, were more likely to keep the slaves in than to keep the barbarians out. The barbarians – the hunter-gatherers - had an easier and healthier life than the farmers, spending much less time finding food and with leisure for song and story-telling, For those tied down as slaves or serfs on the farms (or unhappily bound to their lords and masters) to run away with the hunter-gatherers, or the Raggle Taggle Gypsies, has always been attractive.
But we are where we are, sitting up now on the capstone of XXXXXXX XXXXX, facing a wicket gate that is the starting point for today’s walk, a gently sloping route down to the picturesque village of XXXXXXXX in the XXXXXX Valley, through a pastoral landscape on a path entirely through a single farm. Away to the west are the ridges of the XXXXX Mountains, bare and treeless but still beautiful as the sun and the shadows or the moonlight strike them, sometimes detailed and sometimes little but silhouettes as the sun shining low in the west shuts down your pupils until you can see nothing but the blue outlines. At other times the light even at this distance highlights the diagonal tracks along their flanks, the rhiwau, that were used to reach the mountain commons. And at night, sitting on Arthur’s Stone as Orion wheels above the valleys ranged before you, you can feel that the Neolithic was but a blink ago, as indeed in the eternity of time and space it truly is. And between you and the XXXXX Mountains are more valleys, these with more woodland. Much of the land before you formed deer parks attached to the several Norman castles in the XXXXXX Valley, and place names such as Park Farm and New Lodge remind us of this past. One of these parks still survives, full of ancient trees and fallow deer, a relic of a carefully constructed Norman arcadia beneath the landscaping of the Picturesque movement. The abandoned parks are now small fields and mingled woodlands that contrast with the hard-farmed monocultures of the valley of the River XXXX below you, where the huge steel-framed farm buildings dwarf the village houses.
The path now takes you down across a pasture field. On the tithe map from the 1840s this field is called Kiln Field. The last field on this walk used to be called Old Hopyard. Maybe there was a kiln here to dry hops, or a limekiln, several of which still survive on this ridge, where they made lime to sweeten the fields and to mortar the stone houses, which in this area until quite recently were built with a mortar just made of clay. Other fields on the Tithe map reveal that the Welsh language hung on here until the late 19th century. One bilingual field was called Cae Rabbits, Cae being Welsh for meadow, and another field, now unhedged and part of a larger field we are about to cross, was called Cae Dynor. If your map is a bit out of date it will show the footpath following the line of a hedge, now removed by a previous farmer to gain a little extra grass. In places there are hollows where stone was quarried, and sometimes there is bare stone at the surface, the same stone used to build the chambered tomb we started from. In late summer this field shows dark green rings produced by the rhizomes of a kind of field mushroom which helps to enrich the soil by fixing nitrogen. This is one of the many natural processes disrupted by farming methods that add chemicals to the soil. Ironically adding nitrogen fertilisers stops the natural nitrogen fixing of bacteria and fungi, and it is to the credit of this farmer that not enough bag nitrogen has been added to kill these mushrooms, which I have been enjoying almost every autumn for many years.
Other chemical dangers lurk, though. As the archaeologists discovering the extraordinary monuments on this ridge widen their search, I am concerned that they may get excited by a square underground shape revealed by their geophysics. Many years ago, when it was finally accepted that organochlorine sheep-dips were not just affecting the environment but were damaging the nervous systems of farmers, there was a general amnesty which allowed farmers to return these banned chemicals for safe disposal. A farmer just along below the ridge – let’s call him XXX – is rumoured to have been bloody-minded enough to bury his drums of banned sheep-dip on this hillside instead of taking advantage of the amnesty. They may likely continue to pollute the landscape and the river that runs through the beautiful Golden Valley for years to come. I am tempted to say that this may be extra evidence of the harm done by organochlorine sheep-dips to the brains of farmers.
The path now becomes a track sloping down towards the farm below on the edge of the village. The land forms a bowl, and it is tempting to imagine the farmer’s pleasure that the land is so self-contained , and so little overlooked, a place with a private and enclosed feel, a bowl of landscape with a lake at its centre, likely created by a farmer who liked his bit of duck shooting. It is hard not to envy whoever has found themselves the possessor of this piece of countryside, transformed, like many a farmer around the country, into a millionaire as corporate investment in land drove up the price of land out of all connection with its productive capacity. One could take much pleasure in owning this land, whether it was to look after it, to make money out of it, to shoot animals on it, or to make sure that no-one trespassed on it. I will pre-emptively admit to envy, before the accusation comes, although most of those motives would not apply to me. But the one person whose house looks down on the valley may have felt very differently as the middle distance of her view started to reverberate with machinery and the crashing of trees. The way the countryside is managed allows little voice to the country people. You may feel you have a stake in the countryside, a visceral connection with the place where you were born, but your neighbour for whom a piece of the planet is their business has no obligation even to explain to you what their plans are or to take your opinions into account.
Various of the small patches of woodland in the valley consisted of conifers, of little conservation value but maybe valued as pheasant coverts. Others were poplar plantations, relics of a craze for making money out of poplar for matches and chip baskets, a market that collapsed before many of these trees reached maturity. As I followed this footpath several of these patches of woodland were being destroyed, grubbed up and sawn into logs of little value except for low-grade firewood. This market, in these times of high energy prices, is laying waste many a farm woodland.
Some of the locals are concerned about this tree felling but don’t like to fall out with their neighbours. In this case it was easy to find out from the Forestry England website that the famer has quite properly applied for a felling licence for these patches of woodland, and an exchange of emails reveals that there is an agreement that the broadleaved patches will be replanted with broadleaves and the conifer patches with conifers. All seems to be being done correctly in accordance with the regulations, which are all that stand between villagers who want their landscapes protected and the plans of farmers who seem to think they own the land. (I know nothing, let it be said, but good of these particular farmers and suspect that they are thoroughly decent people.The issue is not so much what they are doing as the regulatory environment in which they are doing it).
Over the past few years, and particularly since the rise in energy prices, many woods around here have been degraded. One, bought by people from Bromsgrove who have renamed it ‘Snuffles Wood’ and put up a ‘Trespassers Keep Out’ sign above a path used exclusively by badgers, now has a lawn, two caravans and a big firewood shed replacing part of the woodland, enabled because the trees they felled were too small to need a felling licence. Four farm woods have been replaced by cricket bat willow plantations of little conservation value, by farmers hoping to make a quick buck. Another, a fine oak and chestnut wood, where the newly returned Red Kites used to nest, has been felled for firewood and not replanted and is being grazed by sheep, turning rapidly into a field. Forestry England procedures do not allow any enforcement of fencing and replanting until next autumn, some years after the wood was destroyed. The system that looks as if it was designed to protect our woodlands is failing, in the face of landowners with a sense of entitlement and bureaucrats with budgets slashed deliberately as the simplest way of weakening regulation. By the time the autumn comes the forester responsible for the kites’ wood may have retired, and unless I remind them this wood will join all the other ghost woods on that farm.
Whatever our government may say about safeguarding nature, in practice the UK is not protecting its forests. Between 2001 and 2021 the UK lost 105,000 hectares of tree cover which equates to a 6.9% decrease. Whatever utterances we make about Brazil, we are just as ready to drive railways through ancient woodlands, and in our culture and public policy woods are regarded as land that the landowner has a presumptive right to crop; 85% of our ancient woodlands have no designation or protection in place, and the only forests that are safe are those that come close to being in effect owned and managed by the public through their support of organisations such as the Woodland Trust or the National Trust, or environmental charities such as Trees for Life. We lack the concept of public lands held for the public good and beyond the reach of private profit taking.
The path becomes a track and leads down to the farm and ends at the village below. On this summer day, despite the state of these farm woods, the simple warmth of the sun evokes all that is lovely about the British countryside and has the power, like the smell of the seaside or of fresh hay, to remind of summers past of cuckoos and skylarks and swallows, and Cider with Rosie under the hay wagon. There have never been so many people quite so aware as now of the value of all that the natural world stands to lose, and in the sunshine of optimism and nostalgia it seems possible to dream that we may just be able to get together to turn this thing around. The Neolithic revolution was all about farming. The Anthropocene revolution will have to tackle many problems, not least how to end the destructive land use to which the Neolithic farming revolution slowly led us, but maybe on a good day we can see this change as an exciting prospect. Even without running away with the Raggle Taggle Gipsies there may be possible a better life in a better world than the one we have spent the last six thousand years creating. Maybe when this farmer replants these woods they will be better than the plantations they replace. I shall be watching, you may be sure.
********
I don’t want to load these essays with references, but I would prefer people to believe that my background research is careful. So if, for example, you don’t believe my assertion that farming led in general to poor nutrition and hence to people getting shorter, copy and paste this link into your browser: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17003019/
A researcher into the lengths of female thigh bones some years ago found that the upper class girls had longer thigh bones than working class girls and suggested that this was due to better diet. I suspect things may not have changed much since.
Similarly use this link if you doubt that our woodland area actually decreased between 2001 and 2021, and probably is decreasing still, in spite of all our efforts at tree planting: https://www.bluepatch.org/is-deforestation-a-problem-in-the-uk/#:~:text=UK%20deforestation,ancient%2C%20over%20400%20years%20old
For a fascinating look at the origins and implications of early agriculture and its place in the development of the earliest states, I recommend you read ‘Against the Grain’ by James C. Scott.
That hunter-gatherers have always had more leisure time than farmers is a completely uncontroversial idea among anthropologists, but if you doubt it please paste this link into your browser:
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/farmers-have-less-leisure-time-than-hunter-gatherers-study-suggests
.
Yes, much more fun awa wi'the hunter gatherers
I'd buy it. Though - as an East Anglian resident, not sure I would be able to use it in the field.
Maybe you should call it "I know a bank where the wild thyme used to grow."