As you rise out of the ploughlands of the Golden Valley, the hedges get more bushy. The fields are mainly rough grass and sheep, more wire-fenced than hedged. I don’t know if these fields are good for anything else and I’m not sure the farmers do either, though I saw a patch of fodder beet. A pair of curlews try to breed here every year and fail, their eggs eaten as likely by sheep as by badgers, though farmers would much prefer to blame the badgers. As you turn down towards Tredomen the old hazel hedges form a tunnel and the nuts crunch beneath your feet; the fields shrink and the landscape becomes more intimate. There are Welsh place name here left stranded as the tide of the Welsh language has ebbed across these borderlands. Some of the field names are a mix of Welsh and English, such as Cae Rabbits, and below across the dingle is Common Bach, maybe in a bilingual patois of the peasants who lived the ancient landscape of small fields and lanes, and held on to the language of the ancient Britons until sometime in the late nineteenth century, when eventually they conceded (according to the local vicar/diarist Francis Kilvert) that the fairies with whom they had shared this ancient landscape had finally died out. They and their language followed soon after, but maybe they lingered in this place until the last.
Where we are going the names are suddenly quite different, mostly English, and they have a single theme. There is Old Lodge and New Lodge, and Pen-y-Park, and Park Wood, and in the centre of this suite of names is West Lawn Common. To the south is the castle of Urishay, and it is this word hay that takes me back to a summer day in Sweden when I was young and easy and my friend Bertil showed me his haga, which maybe you need to know about before we walk on.
Bertil’s farm had a huge red timber barn that we were working on that summer, and a white modern bungalow with a bidet full of dirty socks, set in a clearing among hay meadows. All around were forests of birch and pine and spruce, filling the summer air with the fragrance of hot resin. We were looking for another fragrant plant that afternoon, bog myrtle, to stuff into our bottle of moonshine to make a special Swedish aquavit. Bertil took me down a cattle track through the forest and opened a gate into a stone-walled enclosure, the haga, where suddenly the trees were all deciduous, oaks and aspens chiefly. The cattle had sculpted this place for many generations, hoofing their tracks between huge granite rocks, grazing among patches of meadow flowers and browsing favourite bushes, their udders tickled by the campion and ox-eye daisies. Cattle were once forest animals, and this haga was cow heaven, but there was another ancient reason for its existence. Before haymaking was invented cattle survived the winter in the barn, browsing on sheaves of branches, dried with the leaves still on, harvested from these deciduous trees and stored for winter fodder. Leaf sheaves were an ideal food for old breeds of cattle built to browse, a food that modern cows could not digest. In 1850 nearly 200 million leaf-sheaves were fed to livestock in Sweden, which resulted in maybe a million hectares of forest managed as haga or deciduous wood-pasture. The haga was central to the farming of the Vikings of the Norse countries, and they took both the idea and the word with them when they settled first in Normandy and then moved in, without a by-your-leave, among the Welsh peasantry round here. How much of this Bertil knew I have no idea, and he’s dead now, but I am glad to have remembered him today and to have brought the idea of him briefly back into the sunshine.
At this point on the lane you step aside onto a bridle path, where the roots of an ash tree form braided steps down to the brook flowing through the dingle over steps of the stone slabs the peasants used to roof and floor their houses. You step out of the alder dingle and up a steep path through the bracken towards sunshine on the common. Wasps are hunting through the ferns, and the crane flies that have lived as larvae in the roots below the tangled turf are emerging everywhere. In the edge of the bracken along the path there are autumn crocuses, and up to the side a hedge has become a row of hazel trees. I realise suddenly that flying above it there are swallows. It takes me a minute to be sure because these are young swallows and they lack the long streaming tail feathers of the adults, but the way they tuck their wings back as they swoop is unmistakeable, as soon as I have overcome my wonder at seeing so many of them.
I have scarcely seen a swallow all summer so to see them all here now is a simple and pure joy. There must be hundreds of them, drawn to each other by ancient instincts to flock together to follow in the wake of their parents, who have gone to Africa and left them all behind. As they fly they look for landmarks – lone trees, maybe, or hills, and here the crest of the hedge alongside the common. They need waymarks for the journey south and to remember for the journey back, which is why in a week or two these young swallows may be flying down the coast of Spain, aiming for the rock of Gibraltar high on the horizon. They need food for the journey too, which they are finding on this patch of rare pure clean common land, not farmed, owned by no-one and left to develop as it will. That they perch on the hazel trees between the swooping and the hawking seems true to this ancient place. Since we invented telephone wires they had seemed to have forgotten that they perched on trees before they abandoned caves and multiplied on the beams of our cart sheds and the flies that infested our cattle folds.
Beyond the swallows, what was once common grazing for the peasants has become a wood along the lower steeper slopes, and the rest is thick with bracken. But there are trees and bushes growing among the fronds. I stop to eat handfuls of blackberries and to pick sloes for my sloe gin, always a blend from every autumn walk. Everywhere there is food. As well as the insects sustaining the young swallows, there are, among the bracken, hawthorns heavy with berries. There are crab apples, elderberries, hips and rowanberries as well as sloes and holly berries. This is food for fieldfares and redwings driven south by Scandinavian winters, and for dormice fattening for hibernation. The gorse has flowers in every month should there be insects in need of nectar and pollen. Alongside the brook are alder trees with seeds for siskins, and the birches above on the common bear seeds for birds like redpolls. The hazels and beeches and oaks provide nuts and acorns, handy if red squirrels ever make it back here, and for stray wild boar that arrive here sometimes, a last meal before the farmers shoot them. No commoners use this common now; there is almost no-one to say it is getting scrubbed up or that it is being invaded by bracken. Below the bleakness of the hill grazings this is a refuge for winter wildlife, and you can guarantee that the colder the winter the more Scandinavian and Russian woodcock will be hiding in the bracken. If you stumble on them in the snow they will fly up and drop down as if reluctant to fly, although they have flown hundreds of miles to shelter here, flying high and moonlit with the fieldfares that cluck along the horizon among the rowan berries and the crab apples. This half-forgotten place, covered in scrub and bracken, has more richness than the countryside around by a country mile, and by the chances of history no one can say they own it. Meanwhile I can hear the flails crunching all the hips and haws and nuts and berries of the hedgerows down below in the plough lands as the farmers do their autumn tidying.
Above the common the open wind-swept sheep-grazed fields run up to a great stone-faced bank that runs along Vagar Hill and then down towards the castle at Snodhill. Between this common and the common on Vagar Hill, which is patched with gorse, rowan and thorn, the sheep fields are just short turf and the odd rush clump, where you may very occasionally spot a red hare in its form before it makes a shambling run for it. Inside this ancient boundary wall there are few buildings, and only Twyn Coed (Knoll Wood) has a Welsh name. Everywhere are deer-park names – Old Lodge, New Lodge, Park Farm. Just outside the park fence is Pen-y-Park, the top of the park. Where we are standing, looking down on the bracken on the open ridge of West Lawn Common, with woods below and woods to the side, and Park Wood away to the other side of Snodhill Dingle, we are in a Laund or Lawn, one of the great open spaces of every Norman deer-park, a word imported by the Normans which, in Old Norse (lundr) meant a sacred grove or clearing. For we are at the centre here of the deer park once owned by the lords of Snodhill Castle. Across the valley is the great Moccas Deer Park, now being restored to its original size by the Woodland Trust. Beyond the park wall to the south is Urishay Castle, which must have had a deer-park too, for the word ‘hay’ is the same word as Bertil’s haga, and the owners of the castle were the Delahayes, the people so proud of their deer-park that they made their pride their name. Over there is Old Hay Farm and Old Tay Farm, also names that are likely relic deer-park names, and Dragon’s Pool, maybe a name from before the fairies died out.
A huge chunk of this landscape still owes its character to the idea of deer-parks, a Norman status symbol that grew out of the wood-pasture tradition of Scandinavia, where every farm had a haga. Three ancient deer parks here are almost touching, and much of the richest ecology of this countryside is preserved within the bounds of these ancient places. West Lawn Common, in particular, because it belongs to no-one, seems free from many of the forces threatening these special places, and blessed by a few local people keeping a very quiet eye on it and thinking of its future.
The bracken is running rampant here across the old Laund now. Someone runs a tractor mower around the common every summer, keeping a few wide pathways open for those who walk and ride here, space for things that like the open grassland. Bracken is really a plant of woodland, a plant that lives in balance with trees and undergrowth in the woods but suppresses most other plants when it grows in the open. Sometimes it marks the shapes of ghost woodlands, where the trees have gone and the bracken has remained; sometimes it has spread in places like this as the commoners died out and the sheep wisely avoided its poisonous fronds. Bracken has the same limitations as any monoculture and this common might be better off with less of it. The common cannot freely rewild itself because the bracken will out-compete young trees and then, collapsing in autumn, will pull them to the ground where they will be smothered as the bracken grows again in spring.
So if someone who cherishes the common (but knows that the bracken would be better competing for the sun’s attention beneath the boughs of trees) wishes to plant a few trees here and there to increase the biodiversity of the common, this becomes a pleasant seasonal commitment.. Trees need to be found in autumn and freed from the dying bracken so that next spring they can rise up above the young bracken croziers, and the bracken around them needs to be trampled down at midsummer. In the winter bare-root trees can be planted wherever you fancy, maybe in clumps so that they can more easily be found. It is always a pleasure to come up here to assist a tree or two, and to be part of a small community that nurtures this land with no other motive than to see a richer and more biodiverse countryside. For bracken, seen as a problem by farmers and some conservationists, in fact presents a really significant opportunity.
The biodiversity of much of our uplands is reduced by the bracken because it is so dominant. Farmers have pretty well given up on eradicating it; sprays are both harmful and ineffective, as is rolling and baling. There is really only one way to bring bracken back to a harmonious role in ecosystems, and that is to plant trees in it. The area of land in the UK dominated by bracken (1.6%) is larger than the built environment (1.4%). The Lake District has 35,000 acres covered by bracken, and there are 14.000 acres of it on Dartmoor. To plant trees in bracken is to use land which hill-farmers cannot use; planting trees there would simultaneously solve the ‘bracken problem’ and increase the biodiversity of the areas now smothered. Planting trees in the bracken seems an obvious way to increase woodland cover and biodiversity, without coming into conflict with any other land uses, because bracken puts land out of use. Stands of bracken are rural brownfield sites, made derelict by poor land-use practices, in the view of the founder of Stump up for Trees, a local tree-planting project which started by planting trees in the bracken of Bryn Arw Common. The commoners agreed to this because it made sense, as does the slow return of trees among the bracken on West Lawn common. A few trees in clumps here and there will gradually shade out patches of bracken, and woodland plants like bluebells and wood sorrel may well reappear when the bracken thins. These trees will in time spread their own seeds as well as creating conditions where trees and woodland plants can regenerate. In time the common may become something between wood pasture and parkland, where bracken is put back where it belongs in a regenerating ecosystem, where the simplicity of bracken domination is replaced by the endless variety and complexity that gives the world true richness. I fantasize about ways to buy the sheep-gnawed pastures between the common and Vagar Hill, to restore them to wood-pasture and spread the richness of this common all the way to the park wall with Vagar Hill Common beyond. Not, these days, entirely fantastical. The Woodland Trust is doing exactly that across the valley in Moccas DeerPark. In the meantime, a few trees at a time, this central core of the old Snodhill Deer Park is being quietly nurtured by its good neighbours.
This walk could take you along the bridle way now called the Three Rivers Ride, or you could follow the footpath over to Old Lodge and past Park Farm and Park Wood, or just stroll anywhere about the common land with no fear of being called a trespasser. I found myself leaning on my thumb stick seeing the prospect of the Golden Valley down below, remembering a friend who used to look, mesmerised, at views like this and say that we were so lucky to live here, my thought bringing the idea of her, like that of Bertil, back into the sunshine.
I turned back to see if the swallows were still there. They had flown on, well nurtured by the riches of this place.
Beautiful - thank you Richard. Really enjoyed reading this from my friend and a fellow lover of the Herefordshire countryside, especially since I walked through this wonderful place earlier this month, while on the first trial walk of Slow Ways Haypet, from Hay-on-Wye to Peterchurch. Here's my review of that walk, with .gpx track and photos: https://beta.slowways.org/user/reviews/10637