Landscape, wealth & dispossession 9781999897901, 1999897900, 9781999897925, 1999897927

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LANDSCAPE, WEALTH & DISPOSSESSION “ A result is given to us: the problem is to find cause and pro cess.”

Image 1: Manmade Landscape: Ladybower Revoir, Derbyshire

Nick Ashton-Jones

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FW Maitland

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession

Parker Street Publishing 74 Parker Street Derby DE1 3HF www.nickashtonjones.com Copyright © Nick Ashton-Jones, 2018 IBSN 978-1-9998979-0-1 Editing advice from Word Centre www.wordcentre.co.uk Layout and design by Nick Ashton-Jones with advice from snakelanedesign Printing by snakelanedesign www.snakelane.co.uk

2018

Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession

Part One

HUMANITY Dedicated to Graeme Frall, conversations with whom, at an impressionable age, started me on the tortuous journey that brought me to this publication.

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‘And the Life of Man . . .’ .................................................................................. 4

2

The Given Landscape .................................................................................... 12

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2.1

A Brief Geographical Description ....................................................................................... 12

2.2

The Unborn Landscape ..................................................................................................... 16

2.3

British Regions ................................................................................................................... 21

2.4

Scarplands of South Britain & the Laws of Geology........................................................... 23

2.5

Lifeless Geography ............................................................................................................ 30

2.6

The Living Landscape ........................................................................................................ 30

2.7

Ecology .............................................................................................................................. 31

2.8

The Three Laws of Ecology and Viability ........................................................................... 35

2.9

The Post-Ice-Age Landscape of Britain ............................................................................. 37

2.10

And the Answer Does Lie in the Soil .................................................................................. 39

2.11

To understand British soils is to understand British wetlands ............................................ 45

2.12

The Stamp of Mankind ....................................................................................................... 49

Homicidal Hominoids ..................................................................................... 50 3.1

The Lively Planet ............................................................................................................... 50

3.2

The Hominoids Are Coming! .............................................................................................. 50

3.3

The Hominoids Are Here – Pastoral Britain ....................................................................... 56

3.4

And the Evidence Also Lies in the Soil............................................................................... 74

3.5

The Political Landscape ..................................................................................................... 81

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The Five Powerful Forces of Landscape Formation – Epilogue to Part One... 86

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Bibliography for Part One ............................................................................... 89

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Index for Part One .......................................................................................... 93

Author references are underlined in the text.

Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession

1 ‘A ND THE LIFE OF M A N . . .’ 2 The steepness of the slopes, the heavy rainfall and the acidity and thinness of the soils on the Arran granite and on its metamorphic aureole have limited the cultivation and improved pastureland to the narrow coastal margin, where raised beaches overlie the fringe of sedimentary and metamorphic rocks. The remainder of the northern portion is left as rough moorlands occupied only by deer and sheep. Thus the landscape is one of large-scale grazing farms with irregular field boundaries and a few settlements clustered into the ancient pattern of the ‘clachan’. 3 AE Trueman, geographer Image 2: Arran and Goat Fell, 2018

The families ‘were evicted in 1829 to make way for a large sheep farm at Mid Sannox, and a smaller enclosed farm at the Cock’ at the insistence of the Duke of Hamilton. The Duke proposed that the residents should emigrate to Canada, and in his benevolence offered to pay half the fare: he even made arrangements for their reception on the other side of the Atlantic, in what used to be French Canada. Thorbjørn Campbell quoting Frederick Marryat

She is not – this Mrs Willis – one of those people who feels guilt for not having commenced, let alone completed, a task she has set herself. But, she does take up a book, and begins to read: The Suderlanders who did remain in the Red River and Rainy Lake country were perhaps the best – Mathesons, MacBeths, Bannermans, Gunns and Mackeys. They faced the harsh lands with courage. They carried muskets in their hands as they walked behind their ploughs. They fought Métis and Cree to defend the Red River Colony, and they called their land Kildonan. It is still called Kildonan. 4

Thomas Hobbes, 17th century. A clachan is a Gaelic term for an informal settlement of stone houses. 4 The Highland Clearances by John Prebble. 2 3

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Mrs Willis is attached to the Highlanders driven from their homes. She inherited the attachment from her father, the South London radical, who was incensed by the idea of people being driven from the land by some bloody capitalist bastard who wants it all and leaves nothing for the rest of us. He was writing a paper for the Fabian Society at the time, about the European settlement of the Kenyan Highlands – but she agreed, finding it difficult, all the same, to get her head around the spreading circles of injustice. The Mackeys had fled to the Red River Valley. But what about the Métis and the Cree they displaced? 5

The Highlanders were driven by rage and retribution. Their hearts were hardened by anger and grief. But oh – the things they must have seen that day. They must have known it was wrong. . . Later the cover-up would begin. They came back, loaded the bodies into bullock drays, dumped them and burned them amid the dunes on the beach. Now they truly were a band of brothers, bonded together by their secret. . . In 1839 McMillan was railing against the mistreatment of the convicts at Camden; by 1841 he had taken up ‘hunting blacks’ as a favoured pastime. Perhaps there is a name for this systematic snuffing out of Aboriginal society: Genocide. Cal Flyn, traveller and writer

My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here, My heart’s in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer; Chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe, My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go. Robert Burns, 1789 Image 3: Arran, Allt Burican, OS NR 947263, April 2018

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Mrs Willis reads in the novel ‘Books People Discard’ by Nick Ashton-Jones.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession

Sweet Auburn! parent of the blissful hour, Thy glades forlorn confess the tyrant's power. But now the sounds of population fail, No cheerful murmurs fluctuate in the gale, No busy steps the grass-grown foot-way tread, For all the bloomy flush of life is fled. Ye friends to truth, ye statesmen who survey The rich man's joys encrease, the poor's decay, 'Tis yours to judge, how wide the limits stand Between a splendid and a happy land. Oliver Goldsmith, from the Deserted Village, 1770

There was a time my bit of ground Made freemen of the slave The ass no pindar’d dared to pound When I his supper gave The gipsey’s camp was not afraid I made his dwelling free The vile enclosure came and made A parish slave of me. 6 John Clare, ca. 1825

Image 4: 18th century enclosures, Mackworth and Kedleston, Derby, 2010

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A ‘pindar’ is one who impounds stray animals.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession

. . . between 1834 and 1847 every workman saw himself exposed to the danger of imprisonment . . . with the break-up of his family and home at the dictation of the Poor Law Commissioners [who] stood for an alien power, inaccessible to pity or justice. The Bleak Age, The New Poor Law, by JL and Barbara Hammond In 1844 the Health of the Towns commission published its first Report . . . Fifty large towns were surveyed. In 42 the drainage, and in 31 the watersupply, were decidedly bad; there were only six in which the water-supply was good, and scarcely one in which the drainage was good. The Bleak Age, The Battle for Public Health, by JL and Barbara Hammond

I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit then the better it is for the human race . . . If there be a God, I think that what he would like me to do is paint as much of the map of as Africa British Red as possible . . . Cecil Rhodes, about 1890

Slavery officially began in the North American British colonies in August 1617, when a Dutch vessel, coming from the Caribbean brought twenty black indentured servants into Jamestown, Virginia. That same year, the Virginian House of Burgesses had met in Jamestown and approved indentured servitude. Thereafter, white and black indentured servants were traded there and in other major slave markets, such as Charleston (South Carolina) and New Amsterdam (New York). According to the law of that day, indentured servants worked for a period, on average, of seven years, then they were freed with full rights of citizenship. But as the plantations expanded and the demand for laborers increased, the enslavement of Africans was legalized, first in Massachusetts in 1641, followed by Connecticut in 1650, Virginia in 1661, South Carolina in 1682; Rhode Island and Pennsylvania in 1700, North Carolina in 1715, Georgia in 1750. Patricia and Frederick McKissack

In the original state of things, which precedes both the appropriation of land and the accumulation of stock, the whole produce of labour belongs to the labourer. He has neither landlord nor master to share with. As soon as land becomes private property, the landlord demands a share of almost all the produce which the labourer can either raise, or collect from it. His rent makes the first deduction from the produce of the labour which is employed upon the land. Adam Smith, 1776, Of the Wages of Labour

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession . . . and late in February, in fulfilment of an obligation to his landlord, he borrows a second mule and, with a two-horse plow, runs up the levees, that is, the terraces, which shall preserve his land; this in a softening mild brightness and odoriferousness of presaging spring, and a rustling shearing apart of the heavy land, his mules moving in slow scarce-wakened method as of work before dawn, knowing the real year’s work has not started yet, only made ready for. It is when this is done, at about the first of March, that the actual work begins, with what is planted where, and with what grade of fertilizer, determined by the landlord, who will also, if he wishes, criticize, advise, and govern at all stages of planting and cultivation. But the physical work, and for that matter, the knowledge by which he works, is the tenant’s and this is his tenth or his fortieth year’s beginning of it, and it is of the tenant I want to tell. James Agee, USA, late 1930s

Nowhere in Derelict Britain is there a more dismaying example of man creating wealth while impoverishing his environment than in the Lower Swansea Valley. By 1880 Swansea smelted more than two thirds of all the copper ore imported into Britain, and other heavy industries were growing apace. By then there were also five spelter or zinc works and Swansea became the nation’s principal centre of zinc production as well. The first tinplate works . . . By 1890 Swansea was the centre of the nation’s tinplate trade. At Landore in 1868 the first openhearth steel works had come . . . by 1878 [it] was making 1,000 tons of steel a week and was one of the largest steel works in the world. By 1931, all that was left was: Zinc soured soil, flooded pits, piles of furnace debris, copper-stained earth, [and] a rubble of decaying buildings . . . John Barr, an American, ca. 1960

UNEP OGONILAND OIL ASSESSMENT REVEALS EXTENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONTAMINATION AND THREATS TO HUMAN HEALTH DRINKING WATER POLLUTION IN SOME PLACES SO SERIOUS IMMEDIATE EMERGENCY ACTION NEEDED FULL ENVIRONMENTAL RESTORATION MAY TAKE UP TO 30 YEARS WITH CALLS FOR AN INITIAL US$1 BILLION FUND TO KICK-START CLEAN-UP Abuja, 4 August 2011 – The environmental restoration of Ogoniland could prove to be the world’s most wide-ranging and long-term oil clean-up exercise ever undertaken if contaminated drinking water, land, creeks and important ecosystems such as mangroves are to be brought back to full, productive health. A major new independent scientific assessment, carried out by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), shows that pollution from over 50 years of oil operations in the region has penetrated further and deeper than many may have supposed. United Nations Environment Programme Press Release, 2011.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession

Image 5: Crude oil spill at Shell location. B-Dere (Naaben community junction), Gokana Local Government Authority, Ogoni, Nigeria, Nnimmo Bassey, 2017

The Renaissance liberated people from the chains of God and church. It represented the undisputed triumph of humanity. Did this victory, however, result in the people attaining true freedom? Or did they instead lose the means to discipline themselves and end up enslaved to systems and ideologies, to science and technology? Daisaku Ikeda, Buddhist mentor, 1995.

All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. Adam Smith, How the Towns Improve the Country, 1776

Stockport . . . lies in a narrow valley along the Mersey . . . the railway from Manchester to Birmingham passes over a high viaduct above the city and the whole valley. Stockport is renowned throughout the entire district as one of the duskiest, smokiest holes, and looks, indeed, especially when viewed from the viaduct, excessively repellent. Frederick Engels, 1844

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression . . . On Liberty, John Stuart Mill, 1859 The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Great Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain . . . What Utilitarianism Is, John Stuart Mill, 1861

This increment or excess over the original value I call “surplus-value.” The value originally advanced, therefore, not only remains intact while in circulation, but adds to itself a surplus-value or expands itself. It is this movement that converts it into capital. Karl Marx, The Transformation of Money into Capital, ca. 1860 The surplus-value generated in the process of production by C, the capital advanced, or in other words, the self-expansion of the value of the capital C, presents itself for our consideration, in the first place, as a surplus, as the amount by which the value of the product exceeds the value of its constituent elements. Karl Marx, The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value, ca. 1860 Thus the original conversion of money into capital is achieved in the most exact accordance with the economic laws of commodity production and with the right of property derived from them. Nevertheless the result is: 1) That the product belongs to the capitalist and not to the worker; 2) That the value of this product includes, besides the value of the capital advanced, a surplus-value which costs the worker labour but the capitalist nothing, and which none the less becomes the legitimate property of the capitalist; 3) That the worker has retained his labour-power and can sell it anew if he can find a buyer. Karl Marx, The Accumulation of Capital, ca. 1860

In following the growth of the megalopolitan culture to its conclusion we reach a whole series of terminal processes, and it would be simple-minded to believe that they have any prospect of continuing in existence indefinitely. A life that lacks any meaning, value or purpose, except that of keeping the mechanism of breathing and ingestion going, is little better than life in an iron lung, which is only supportable because the patient still has hope of recovery and escape. Lewis Mumford, mid-20th century

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession

But there came a day when, without the slightest warning, without any previous hint of feebleness, the entire communication-system broke down, all over the world, and the world, as they understood it, ended. EM Forster, 1909

At 9.15 am on Friday, October 21, 1966 a waste tip slid down a mountainside into the mining village of Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. It first destroyed a farm cottage in its path, killing all the occupants. At Pantglas Junior School, just below, the children had just returned to their classes after singing All Things Bright and Beautiful at their assembly. . . Down in the village, nobody saw anything, but everybody heard the noise. Gaynor Minett, an eight-year-old at the school, remembered four years later: ‘It was a tremendous rumbling sound and all the school went dead. You could hear a pin drop. Everyone just froze in their seats. I just managed to get up and I reached the end of my desk when the sound got louder and nearer, until I could see the black out of the window. I can't remember any more but I woke up to find that a horrible nightmare had just begun in front of my eyes.’ The slide engulfed the school and about 20 houses in the village before coming to rest. Then there was total silence. George Williams, who was trapped in the wreckage, remembered that ‘In that silence you couldn't hear a bird or a child’. 144 people died in the Aberfan disaster: 116 of them were school children. About half of the children at Pantglas Junior School, and five of their teachers, were killed. 7 Aberfan – Government and Disaster, Iain McLean & Martin Johnes

. . . those men that take their instruction from the authority, and not from their own meditation . . . be as much below the condition of ignorant men, as men endued with true Science are above it. Thomas Hobbes, 17th century

Aberfan – Government and Disaster, Iain McLean & Martin Johnes, Dragon Books, Welsh Academic Press, 2000. 7

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession

2 THE GIVEN LA NDSCA P E 2.1

A BRIEF GEOGRAPHICAL DESCRIPTION

The British landscape began about 15,000 years ago when the northward-thrusting peninsula emerged from the ice. Here, human explorers found a pristine landscape; frozen and inhospitable with a view, even in summer, of snow on distant hills, and with little in the way of support except for a few days’ midsummer fishing amongst the maddening mosquitoes. However, with rising temperatures, conditions improved: primitive plants – lichens and mosses – began to take hold as nutrients built up in summer meltwaters. A fragile skin of soil developed upon which annual herbaceous plants grew in summer. With deeper soil came tentative shrubs and small trees able to survive milder winters – mostly birch but also, in the south, pine. In this way an environment was created in which the larger animals, including humanity, could survive the summer months even if, at first, they retreated south – via the chalk ridgeways – back into the continent. Summer temperatures were cooler than today’s, the ground wet when not frozen solid in winter. About 9000 years ago the British climate was warm enough for trees: ‘Willows settled round the meres and on the wet ground of the lowlands, while birches, and a little later pines, spread over the uplands. There were also present, in some places, hazel, oak, elm, and alder . . .’ 8 A land connected to Eurasia by an alluvial plane of wide horizons, clean, overarching skies and soft colours, of slowly moving rivers, marshes, lakes and islands of birch woodland. The newness of the land and its northerly latitude limited biological productivity, but it was attractive to people who hunted with dogs, fire and primitive weapons. The woolly mammoth they harried to extinction, but wild cattle, bears, beavers and elk, lynx and wolverine survived to modern times. Beautiful in our memories but to our ancestors a ruthless, unforgiving world in which they struggled to survive: misjudge the seasons or the movements of the animals and you’re finished. Death trailed them like hungry wolves, catching them early. Britain is the ninth-largest island on Earth, nearer the North Pole than the Equator. It is on the same latitude as Quebec and Sakhalin but does not share their modern tundra conditions because, lying off the west side of Eurasia, it benefits from southwesterly winds bringing warm air from the sub-equatorial southwest Atlantic, and also from warm ocean currents moving in the same direction (the ‘Gulf Stream’). No part of Britain is more than 100 kilometres from the sea’s moderating effect, warming the winters and cooling the summers.9 Significantly also, the British Isles extend from the Channel Islands below 50oS to the Shetland Islands above 60oN, a distance of 1200 kilometres making a striking climatic difference between north and south:

8 9

AG Tansley. DC Money.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Table 1 – Climate of Lerwick and Jersey10 Latitude Climate Shortest Day, December Longest Day, June Avg. January maximum Avg. January minimum Avg. July maximum Avg. July minimum

Lerwick, Shetland Islands 60.15o north Maritime sub-arctic 5 hours 49 minutes 18 hours 55 minutes 5.9oc 1.8oc 14.3oc 9.9oc

Jersey Airport 49.21o north Maritime temperate 8 hours 12 minutes 16 hours 14 minutes 8.3oc 4.3oc 20.4oc 13.9oc

The growing season in Devon is eight months; less than six in the southern uplands of Scotland; five in Caithness. The carrying capacity of sheep on a Devon farm is said to be four times that of the Cheviot Hills. The climate gradient between the sub-arctic north and the warm temperate south of Britain works with the island’s physical structure to make two distinct geographical regions. The hard igneous and metamorphic rocks of the north and west give mountainous uplands emphasising a northerly, Atlantic climate. By contrast, southeast Britain is characterized by softer, younger rocks resulting in rolling and often flat lowland country that enhances the less rigorous climate of lands facing the southern North Sea and Europe. The division is reinforced by consequent rainfall patterns – wetter in the higher Atlantic northwest where average annual rainfall is above 1000mm: drier in the lower southeast protected from the Atlantic by the northwest uplands and more subject to drier continental influences, where annual average rainfall is below 1000mm. Image 6: Landscape of boundaries. Near Leek, Staffordshire, 2017

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Meteorological Office UK.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Figure 1: Temperature and rainfall

Average rainfall distribution. Crown copyright

Average mean temperature. Crown copyright

The characteristic topography and climate of the northwest highlands and islands of Scotland arises from their position on the northern tip of the British Isles, thrusting up into the North Atlantic towards the Arctic Circle. Move south and east, less than a couple of hundred kilometres, and you’re in another climate, where the southeast lowlands of Scotland are protected from the rigors of the north Atlantic by the most elevated, wild and rugged part of the Britain, the Grampian Mountains. Although the average winter temperatures of the southeast lowlands of Scotland are similar to those of the highlands and islands, and actually a little lower than at similar altitudes on the Western Isles, which benefit from the Gulf Stream, summer temperatures are warmer; no cooler than lowland areas hundreds of miles to the south. Similarly, mean annual rainfall, incidence of snow and sunshine hours are the same as much of lowland England. The climate gradient between the north and south of Britain is further emphasized by the geographical law that makes temperatures fall with rising altitude.11 Walk to the top of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, 251 metres, on a mild November afternoon and you’re likely to meet a raging storm, the landscape having a definite air of being eternally blasted by marine winds and not a tree in sight. At the same time of year, at the same altitude on the North Downs of Surrey, one has the comparative impression of being in a garden with the obvious possibility of planting trees. The northwest of Britain has a mean temperature below 9oC, the southern and eastern lowlands above 9oC.12

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With rising altitude, air becomes less dense. Meteorological Office UK.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession The central part of Britain is also protected from the prevailing, water-laden, westerly winds of the North Atlantic by Ireland. This further enhances the protection already given by the northwest uplands to central England and to all the eastern coastal lowlands between Aberdeenshire and the Thames Estuary. Therefore: ‘The British Isles shield the North Sea from the force of the Atlantic Ocean. But . . . [the Atlantic] Ocean currents bring warm water from the south and transfer some of their heat to the prevailing westerly winds passing across them.’13 This gives to the North Sea some of the characteristics of an inland sea, across which animals may move with comparative ease, the Strait of Dover being only 33 kilometres across. So massive is the Eurasian continent, so near and comparatively small is Britain, so extensive is the North European Plain, defined by the Ural Mountains, 3000 kilometres distant, that the central continental climate of hot, dry summers and bitterly cold winters inevitably influences Britain to an extent nonetheless limited by the Atlantic westerlies and by the western uplands so that the western margins of Britain experience climates remarkably mild for northern latitudes.14 Figure 2: Geographical position of the British Isles

The British Isles, showing their proximity to Eurasia, and how they were joined to the continent when the North Sea was a gulf bordered in the south by a low plain not much more than 50 metres above sea level. The North Downs continued across the south of the plain until breached by rising sea levels less than 10,000 years ago. Today, the dominant westerly winds bring moist, warm air from the Atlantic. At times, these winds are storm-laden, driving heavy rain and high winds across northwest Scotland and southwest England. The east coast of Britain and central England are protected by the northern and western uplands, and the entire centre by Ireland. The Gulf Stream brings warm currents to the British Isles modified somewhat on the east side by Arctic influences driving into the southern North Sea.

13 14

Malcolm MacGarvin. At 54 million km2, Eurasia is twice the size of the next largest continent, Africa.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession

2.2

THE UNBORN LANDSCAPE

Figure 3: Topography of Britain

The reader should refer to a good physical map of Britain. I include the map to the right only for quick reference. The specific mountains shown are those above 799 metres, the reference being Mt. Clisham, on the island of Harris, in the Outer Hebrides. At this moment of writing (26 April 2018) I have just returned from the Isle of Arran. On 9 April I walked up the highest point of the island, the mountain known as Goat Fell, just below 875 metres. At 850 metres I was driven down by intolerable cold and dangerous wind. The path to the summit lay under snow.

Like every other part of the world, the natural landscape of Britain is related to geology by three geological principles. The first is underlying geology, which determines topography. The rocks that define underlying geology are of three types: •

Sedimentary, the young, soft and easily folded rocks formed by the deposition of mostly inorganic particles (sand, dust, sediments, animal shells etc) to form, most characteristically in Britain, limestone, chalk, and clay. A typical sedimentary landscape is the Thames Basin and the surrounding chalk hills of the Chilterns and the North Downs.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession •

•

The harder and generally older igneous rocks, like the granite outcrop of Arthur’s Seat, resistant to all that the weather can throw at it. Igneous rocks are formed from magma that has flowed from beneath the earth’s crust and solidified either within it or above it (as volcanic eruptions). The best-known igneous landscapes of Britain include Dartmoor, the Cheviot Hills and the Cairngorms. And the metamorphic rocks, which have been transformed by heat and pressure. Being brittle, they to resist folding. They include slate, marble, coal and sandstone.

The second geological principle that relates landscape to geology is erosion and deposition to which all landscapes are subject because of climatic and environmental agents. The prime force of erosion and deposition is gravity: landscape formation always tends towards the flat, and towards the lowest altitude. In the few thousands of years since the retreat of the ice, shallow lakes and ponds have filled up with silt becoming wetland or dry land depending upon the porosity (or otherwise) of the underlying geology. Rivers are a primary agent of erosion and deposition. They wear down landscapes, carrying material from the uplands to the lowlands and out to sea. In natural conditions, slow-moving rivers meander across a flat landscape shaping and reshaping it so that landscapes can change dramatically over a few human generations. As a river meanders across an alluvial flood plain, snakelike curves move downstream, exaggerated as sediments are deposited on the outside and alluvium is eroded from the inside. The curves tend to get larger and the necks narrower until they cut through to form oxbow lakes. Such a lake will fill up to become a back swamp. When the river floods – periodically or regularly as seasonally or daily tides cause the waters to back up – sediments are deposited on the valley floor creating levees as the heavier, sandy and gravelly material is dumped on the river margins when it floods. In this way, the river plain exhibits a pattern of arc-shaped, sandy-gravelly ridges, peaty swamps and shallow lakes, made more complex as tributaries and neighbouring rivers collide and interconnect. Where water is trapped in depressions or behind some sort of barrier then as vegetation grows out from the drier and more established edges and as sediments settle in the basin there is always the prospect of drier land evolving upon which trees – alder, willows and aspen – may establish. The third, and final, geological principle that relates landscape to geology is superficial geology, which is the result of erosion and deposition acting upon the underlying geology. It is, by definition, younger than the underlying geology. In Britain, superficial geology is related to the most recent glaciation, when ice ground out and smoothed the u-shaped valleys and rounded hills of the highlands. Rubble, made up of anything the glacier could carry, was dumped on the lowlands to form terminal moraine, a most dramatic example of which is the great ridge of North London known as the Northern Heights. Most significantly, however, the ice left behind layers of soil substrate known as boulder clay (or glacial till) and glacial sands and gravels, the latter, the outwash of the great volumes of water released by melt-water into temporary rivers and lakes. The landscape of lowland Britain as far south as the Chilterns and the Thames Valley – the southern margin of the ice sheets – can be

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession described as a boulder clay landscape, and so thick is the Boulder Clay in the North (the Scottish central valley, and around the northern Pennines) that little ranges of smoothly rounded, egg-shaped hills have been formed known as drumlins. Rocks that do not belong to the underlying geology, scattered all over Britain, are erratics, dumped by a glacier and therefore different from the underlying rock. Image 7: British boulder clay – Nithsdale, Dumfries and Galloway, 2018

Image 8: British boulder clay – Drumlanrig Park, Dumfries and Galloway, 2018

Image 9: British boulder clay, Erratic, Drumlanrig, Dumfries and Galloway, 2018

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Image 10: Boulder clay soil, exposed by grazing, OS NR 974204, Arran, 2018

Image 11: Boulder clay landscape, Corriells, Arran, 2018

Image 12: Boulder clay soil, OS SK 337228, Derbyshire, 2018

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Image 13: British boulder clay, extent, 400km2 around Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire

Image 14: British boulder clay, Kedleston Hall Park, Derby, 2006

Within the geological environment, water has formed and continues to form the British landscape; as ice, as rain, as rivers and as the sea. With the significant exceptions of the Severn and the Mersey, the major rivers run eastwards into the shallow North Sea – Spey, Forth, Tyne, Trent/Humber, Thames – eroding and depositing material downstream and along the coastline most noticeably south of the Humber, creating Spurn Head, thence into the Wash and along the East Anglian coast to the Thames Estuary. This process of coastal formation is counterbalanced by the erosion of the underlying coastal geology wherever it is made up of soft rocks, particularly sedimentary rocks overlain by glacial deposits. Moreover, as a hydrological reality, Britain is wet and humid not only because of high rainfall and low rates of evaporation but also because natural drainage is restricted over much of the island. Image 15: Thames Estuary at Rainham, Essex. Noel Cottrell, 2016

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession

2.3

BRITISH REGIONS

The four subsidiary regions of Britain are defined by underlying geology: three upland regions of the North and West, and a fourth region defined by the gentle lowlands that make up the south-eastern portion of the island: The northern uplands, containing all of Scotland, the Cumbrian Mountains, the hills of North Yorkshire, the Cheviot Massif and the Pennines, poking south. The Welsh massif, emphatically cut off from the northern uplands by the Lancashire and Cheshire plains. The southwest peninsula of Devon and Cornwall, even more emphatically cut off from Wales by the Bristol Channel, and buffeted by the full force of the Atlantic currents that pass north into the Irish Sea and south through the narrow Strait of Dover into the resisting North Sea. The southern lowlands, taking up not much more than a quarter of the whole but entirely within England. Viewed from the south, the northern portion of the lowlands wrap around the southern Pennine intrusion, the plains to the west of which link the centre to the Irish Sea, while to the east, the Vale of York is protected from the North Sea by the Cleveland Hills. Emphasising the fact, the River Trent, rising east of the Pennines, also wraps itself around the hills to flow north along the eastern margins and issue out into the North Sea via the Humber Estuary. South of the Trent, the central plain is confined in the west by the Welsh massif and to the south by the oolitic limestone scarp known as the Cotswolds.15 In the east, as the Cotswolds peter out, the central plain expands into the most extensive region of glacial and subsequent alluvial deposits in Britain, taking in the Vale of York, the great low country known as East Anglia – in places and times indistinguishable from the North Sea – and the Thames Estuary; one of the most agriculturally productive areas in the world. Image 16: The uplands meet the lowlands at The Roches, Staffordshire, 2017

Jurassic oolitic limestones were laid down between 200 and 145 million years ago when tiny particles of sediment were swilled around in shallow, warm seas acting as seed collecting layers of calcium carbonate. Oolitic means egg-like. The stone is particularly valued for building and has characterized a great swathe of the built English landscape since Roman times, extending from Lyme Bay in Dorset, through Bath, Oxford and Stamford in Lincolnshire. Bath is particularly an oolitic limestone city: the creamy grey of the 16th century Perpendicular Gothic abbey, the cream of the 18th century Royal Crescent and the yellow of 19th century. 15

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Image 17: Oolitic limestone, All Saints, Rempstone, Leicestershire Wolds, 2013

Box 1: Geological time Geological time is differentiated as eras. An era is divided into periods according to the characteristic geological and biological events. Thus, the Primary or Mesozoic Era is divided into the Triassic Period (when dinosaurs appeared), the Jurassic, when dinosaurs dominated, and the Cretaceous, by the end of which the non-avian dinosaurs had vanished. The Secondary or Mesozoic Era covered 187 million years and was followed by the Tertiary or Cenozoic, divided into the Paleogene Period (65 to 23 million years ago), when modern mammals and birds evolved, the Neogene, when modern plants and animals evolved, and 2.5 million years ago, the Quaternary – the Period within which we live now – and which started with our hominoidal appearance. This information can be checked on Wikipedia but for a more warm-blooded account see, again, Sir L Dudley Stamp. Beware, however, that Stamp defines the Quaternary as an era, while more recent geographers and geologists define it as merely a period, because it has, so far, lasted a relatively minute geological twoto-three million years. A period is divided into epochs. Thus the Quaternary Period is divided into the Pleistocene Epoch describing the Ice Age, and the Holocene Epoch describing our modern period when the most recent ice sheet began to retreat about 15,000 years ago.

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2.4

SCARPLANDS OF SOUTH BRITAIN & THE LAWS OF GEOLOGY

The geological structure of the British lowlands is best understood in relation to the configuration of what are known as the Scarplands.16 Figure 4: The Scarplands of southern Britain

The Scarplands make a great banana-shaped curve of scarps extending from the south coast of Dorset, where the oolitic limestone of the northwestern edge and the chalk of the southeast edge almost converge before diverging near Bath northeastwards to the Wash. From the Wash, they curve northwards to the Humber where limestone and chalk almost meet again, the chalk defining the southern side of the Vale of Pickering and the limestone the northern rim of the Cleveland Hills. In this way, the Scarplands embrace the southeastern side of the Midland plain and the eastern edge of the Pennines. They are comparatively impressive in a lowland landscape that has always contained about 60% of the British population on rather less than 25% of the area, although, geologically, they are merely localized wrinkled bedding arising from a recent episode in geological history. The landscape of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland is far more dramatic and the geology no less interesting but, never containing much more than 1% of the British population, they are less significant as a foundation of British human activity. Image 18: The Chilterns – The Chequers Estate near Aylesbury. Susi Arnott, 2014

16

Sir L Dudley Stamp first coined the phrase in the 1940s.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession To understand the geology of the Scarplands is to understand the geology of the British lowlands east and south of the Pennines, and indeed, the nine principles of sedimentary and associated metamorphic geology generally: i. Sedimentary rocks – sandstone, limestone, shale and chalk – are laid in horizontal beds according to the law of gravity. ii. Newer deposits overlay older deposits according to the law of time. iii. The resulting sedimentary beds may be hundreds of metres or only a few millimetres thick. iv. Soft sedimentary deposits become harder rocks due to chemical and physical processes. One example is the formation of coal, which starts as peat over which sediments are deposited. The weight of the deposits creates pressure and heat. This transforms the peat first into lignite, containing substantial amounts of water and inflammable gases. Then, having been subjected to temperatures of between 100°c and 200°c, the lignite transforms into bituminous coal and finally into anthracite, the hard, shiny, black stuff, which breaks along horizontal planes, we know as coal. Anthracite contains about 10% moisture and gas. The process takes about 300 million years. v. The Earth is in a state of constant geological evolution, forever resisting the tendency of the agents of erosion to wear its surface flat. Continental masses of rock shift around because they are floating on molten rock called magma. These continental rafts collide, and in the process, mountains are raised and layers of rocks are bent, broken and sometimes folded to such a degree that sedimentary beds are turned up on end or even upside down. vi. Sedimentary rocks tend to crack along planes of deposition; also, as a result of being hard and brittle, they crack at right angles to the plains of deposition as they are subjected to various continental movements. These cracks are called faults. A fault that separates a sequence of sedimentary beds may cause the rocks on either side to shift in opposite directions. vii. The agents of erosion will exploit the weaknesses of rocks. Different rocks erode at different rates. Limestone, because it is subject to dissolution by water both above and below the surface, erodes faster than sandstone resulting in the sandstone domes on the top of the Mendips from which the younger limestone has been eroded away. This can result, also, in caves below ground, the roofs of which may eventually collapse to form gorges. Sandstone in turn erodes faster than granite which is why the granite dome of Dartmoor stands above the surrounding sandstone landscape. viii. Where rock beds are approximately horizontal, as in the Mendips, hills and ridges tend to be flat topped, the sides having similar gradients. Pictures of the Grand Canyon National Park show an impressive ‘mesa’ (table) landscape where the sedimentary deposits have remained horizontal and subjected to millions of years of wind erosion. ix. However, where the sedimentary beds are tilted for some reason the hill tops are not flat plateaus but dipping slopes. The profile of the hill, or ridge, is wedgeshaped, the long slope, the dip slope, corresponding to the angle of the tilted rock bed, the short slope being the scarp, the foot of which is often hidden by debris which has fallen off the slope above.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Image 19: ‘Mesa’ formation, Crook Hill, Peak District, Derbyshire, 2016

The Scarplands are geological sheets on, as it were, the same bed, which is why they tilt in the same direction so that the scarp slopes face northwest and the dip slopes slope to the southeast. South of the Chilterns the geological pattern is less simple: the chalk of the Chilterns dips down to form the clay-filled basin in which lies London, reappearing on the other side as the North Downs. The scarp of the North Downs necessarily, therefore, faces south. This introduces the Wealden Sub-Region where the rock strata swelled to form a chalk-covered dome which was subsequently worn down so that the chalk of the Chilterns and the North Downs has disappeared from the middle but reappears on the other side as the South Downs, the scarp facing north. Box 2: The Wealden Sub-Region The Wealden Sub-Region is one of the most geologically complex parts of Britain, a distinct area in the shape of the lid of an oval casserole dish. The Downs are the rim and the rise in the middle is the Weald itself. The southeast part of the lid has been and is still being washed away by the sea of the English Channel while the southwest is confined in the southwest by the Hampshire Basin and in the north by the London Basin. The sub-region is merely the western projection, cut off by the English Channel, of a larger geological complex that includes the Paris Basin and much of Belgium. The North Downs continue across the Channel as the Boulonnais country in the Pas-de-Calais. ‘Weald’, incidentally, derives from the Anglo-Saxon (Old English) for woodland as does Wold and the German Wald. The underlying geology of the Weald, exposed by erosion, is Wealden clay, Wealden sands or lower greensand. These are all sedimentary rocks, the latter (known as the Woburn Formation) containing elements of clay and limestone. Land-use on the sandy formations remains heathland and associated woodland today while the heavy soils on the clays will have discouraged intensive farming until modern times. For these reasons the Weald, as opposed to the intensively grazed Downs, would have remained wooded throughout the early medieval period and hence the name.

For readers who want more information about scarp geology see Box 3 at the end of this section on page 27. The subsequent topographical framework of southeast Britain is a series of scarps radiating towards the northeast and southeast like the spokes of a wheel, the centre

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession of which is Lyme Bay.17 Clockwise, the first spoke and most culturally significant of the scarps is the 300-kilometre Jurassic Scarp, including the Cotswolds and extending north to terminate as the Cleveland Hills, 400m above the North Sea. Associated with and underlying the Oolitic limestone of the Jurassic Scarp, and therefore exposed on the northwest of the scarp slope, are a variety of older rocks deposited in seas that were deeper and therefore colder than those in which the oolitic limestone was incubated. These rocks, sometimes called lias, include, in addition to oolitic limestone, sandstones, mudstones and various consequential rocks such as the ferruginous limestone known as ironstone. At two o’clock is the great chalk ridge that sweeps north-westwards from Salisbury Plain to the Chilterns to peter out as the gentle East Anglian uplands upon which Cambridge has developed. To the west of these uplands there lie alluvial fens and to the east, the coastal lowlands that are the northern extension of the London Basin and Thames Estuary. Only at the Wash does the drama of these mild uplands become apparent as the crumbling cliffs of Hunstanton, which suggest not only the vulnerability of the chalk to marine erosion but also that the chalk ridge is likely to reappear somewhere on the other side of the Wash. This is indeed the case, except that it has been stranded about twenty-five miles inland by recent alluvial and coastal drift deposits (south of The Humber). The chalk continues north of the Wash as the Lincolnshire Wolds that continue beyond the Humber Estuary as the Yorkshire Wolds curving south of the North York Moors and the Cleveland Hills, from which the Wolds are separated by the alluvial Vale of Pickering (the northern extension of the Vale of York). Between the Cotswolds and Chilterns an ever-widening plain becomes the Upper Thames Valley until Oxford (more oolitic limestone), where the river turns south through the Goring Gap to Reading and thence London. From Oxford, the plain opens out as the flatlands of Cambridgeshire, East Anglia and the Fenlands around the Wash. Continuing clockwise from Salisbury Plain the chalk divides as the North Downs at three o’clock, the South Downs at four 4 o’clock and, at about half-past four, the remnants of a chalk ridge that defines the structure of the Isles of Purbeck and Wight. Image 20: Leicestershire Wolds near Loughborough, 2014

17

British Geological Survey: 1:1,584,000 Geological Map of the British Islands, Solid Geology.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Box 3: More about scarp geology The scarps visible as the steep edges of the Cotswolds, the Chilterns, the North and South Downs, the Pennine periphery and elsewhere across lowland Britain are the result of subsequent geological processes acting upon the sequence of rock strata once the strata has been exposed. Scarps are formed in two ways: when the folded rock strata are eroded, exposing sections of the strata; and when the horizontal strata slip along vertical fault lines. As already implied sediments are deposited horizontally according to the laws of geological deposition, the older deposits (mostly but not exclusively alluvial and marine) lying below the younger, and all subject to rock formation through time by compression (the weight of succeeding deposition), and a variety of physical and chemical changes caused by environmental agents including heat, hydrology and tectonic movement. A relevant example of sequential deposition is found across southern and southeastern Britain within which have been formed the chalk scarps of the Chilterns and the North and South Downs: •

The lower greensand, laid down in the warm seas of the Cretaceous Period more than one hundred million years ago. ‘Cretaceous’ from the Latin for chalk, creta, because it was the period when, amongst other rocks, the chalk strata were uniquely formed. ‘Green’ because the sandstone rocks that dominate the greensand series have a greenish tinge arising from the presence of the green iron mineral, glauconite, which nonetheless oxidises to a pale yellowy-brown colour when exposed. As is the nature of deposition, the greensand stratum involves other rocks, significantly including calcareous sands, sandy limestone (of which the famous Kentish rag building stone is a well-known example), iron stones and clays.

•

Gault clay, as a narrow band of around five metres, sometimes lies above the lower greensand. It is a stiff, dark-grey sandy clay that fires as a diffused pink-to-yellow brick.

•

Upper greensand, deposited rather less than one hundred million years ago as a stratum extending up to twenty-five metres. The upper greensand series sometimes contains bands of ‘chert’ nodules. Chert is a hard rock invaluable for the crafting of stone implements. It is assumed to be formed by a metamorphic process less intense than that which creates the true metamorphic rocks (see 2.2 The Unborn Landscape, page 16) and should not be confused with obsidian, which is a brittle, igneous rock resulting from the cooling of lava so rapidly that glass rather than crystals are formed.

•

The chalk that forms the Downs of southern England was laid down around ninety million years ago as the minute shells of micro-organisms living in a deep, warm Cretaceous sea. It is associated with clays, including, in places, gault clay, and with chert nodules generally known, when associated with chalk, as ‘flint’. Trueman suggests that the silica from which flints are metamorphically made arose from the skeletons of marine sponges. These rock strata, initially laid horizontally according to the law of gravity, were subject to geological processes during and after deposition and transformation: most significantly for the scarp formation of lowland Britain, the folding of the young rocks caused by the up-thrusting of the Alps during the time of the chalk formation. This folding created what geologists call synclines and anticlines thus: Figure 5: Geological syncline and anticline

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Above the chalk lie the Tertiary deposits laid down between the end of the Cretaceous Period (the final period of the Secondary Era, see Box 1: Geological , on page 221) and the current Quaternary Era of the ice ages. The Tertiary Era deposits sequentially include, for instance, the Reading beds made up of clays and sand, and the London clay that fills much of the syncline of the London Basin. Above the clay lie the gravelly Bagshot Beds giving rise to the heathlands that are characteristic of Surrey and Hampstead Heath. Subsequent erosion during the current Quaternary Period, which commenced as its Pleistocene (Glacial) Epoch about three million years ago, and continues as its current Holocene Epoch beginning in Britain with the retreat of the last ice sheet, has significantly altered the Tertiary deposits. For instance boulder clay was deposited over much of lowland Britain north of the Thames (roughly marking the southern limit of the last ice sheet) while the Thames has cut down through the London clay creating a series of river terraces upon which are stranded the riverine sands and gravels that it has itself deposited (Hyde Park quite obviously sitting on such a gravel terrace once you know what you are looking at). Inevitably there is a predisposition for an anticline to be eroded because, bulging upwards and convex, it is exposed to the eluvial agents of erosion that cause the loss of material. Contrarily, the syncline, sinking downwards and concave, is subject to illuvial deposition, although some of the deposited material will be subsequently removed by river erosion (creating, for instance, the Thames Valley terraces already mentioned). In this way, as the softer folded rocks of what is now southeastern Britain were eroded by millions of years of weathering and by the sea (levels rising and lowering in relation to the land by hundreds of feet) and by rivers, the harder rocks remained proud. This is explained in the section by Trueman that I use below: Figure 6: Section folding, erosion, deposition & scarps

The scarp ridge is sometimes known as a cuesta (from the Spanish for a slope), which is a geographical term that usefully describes scarp formation:

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Figure 7: Cuesta characteristics

Scarps are also formed where vertical faults fracture horizontal rock strata, which slip when subjected to pressure: Figure 8: Fault scarp

The Cotswolds are an older rock formation than the chalk Chilterns and Downs that enfold the London Basin. Older by about a hundred million years. The characteristic Cotswolds rock is oolitic limestone, already described (see page 21, footnote 15). Older and harder, therefore, the Cotswolds scarps are as likely to be the result of faulting as of the erosion of anticline folds.

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2.5

LIFELESS GEOGRAPHY

The dynamic interaction of geology, climate and water is the science of geography, the understanding of which enables the further understanding of landscape formation in terms of topography, local climate and hydrology. All this neatly describes a lifeless planet, which the Earth manifestly is not. But only by understanding the inert geographical structure upon which landscapes are formed, is it possible to appreciate the impact of life, of biology, upon the nature of landscapes. Diagram 1: Components of lifeless geography

It follows, therefore, that geography plus life delivers:

2.6

THE LIVING LANDSCAPE Geography + biology = the living landscape

And, because life is a dynamic process that interacts with its environment, the living landscape is described as an ecosystem and therefore, a landscape is the physical manifestation of an ecosystem. An ecosystem ceaselessly evolves in a dynamic way and thus a healthy ecosystem – a healthy landscape – is ever-changing and, at the same time, always stable. As William Golding has said about cycling through our lives: ‘. . . the bicycle that stops . . . and no longer relies on the balance between change and stability, will fall off the road . . . We are not taken in by the snapshot, pretty as it may be.’

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Image 21: Bradgate Park, Leicestershire, 2017

In our emotional response to landscapes we are taken in by the snapshot. That is the problem. We are seduced by its momentary prettiness or drama and subsequently deluded by our distorted memories: “that is what it was like when I was younger and I want it to stay like that forever.” We disregard landscapes as living things forever changing by interaction with the environment of which they are a part, and, thereby, reflecting the culture from which they derive. The grounds of Kedleston Hall, over which I have roamed for years, are not an eighteenth-century landscape laid out by Capability Brown but a modern landscape subject to the socio-economic, and subsequent environmental, phenomena of the 21st century. A landscape is a breathing lawn, not a plastic replica. To understand a landscape is to be able to analyse its:

2.7

ECOLOGY

2.7.1 What is ecology? Ecology is the science of ecosystems. It is the study of the relationship between living things and their environment, and a basic knowledge of geography and biology, together with an objective understanding of history and the nature of economics, is what is required to understand ecology. The environment, with which we humans have an intimate relationship, is the product of the dynamic interaction of: • climate • soils • microbes • plants • water, and • animals 2.7.2 Abstract ecology For analytical purposes, the natural environment is manifested as the vegetation climax for a given climate. That is, I stress, the environment – an environment – without humanity. This is because, just as an understanding of the inert geographical nature of the earth, as an abstraction, enables the understanding of the impact of life (as biology 31

Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession acting upon lifeless geography), so an understanding of the earth’s liveliness without humanity, as an abstraction, enables an understanding of the devastating impact of human activity upon our living planet. 2.7.3 The eight analytical steps Understanding a landscape as an ecosystem means understanding the relationship that its components have with one another, often, in any event, an automatic, almost subconscious, response. Why is that woodland where it is and why is it characterized so? Why that farming pattern? Why is that town there? What will this landscape look like in twelve months; in a hundred years’ time? Such analyses are approached by eight analytical steps, each being necessary to an understanding of the next. 1. Defining the geology and topography of a landscape, including altitude, and global and continental position. 2. Defining the climate. This depends on latitude, continental position and altitude, and on local and regional topography including seas and mountains. 3. Defining the hydrology, including water quality, the characteristics of which are a function of geology, topography and climate. At a given place at a given time, water may arise either locally, as stored groundwater or rain, or from outside as upstream water or downstream tidal pressure. Daily tidal variations will be considered, in addition to seasonal change, and the subtle relationships between fresh water and salt water. 4. Defining the soil forming processes as a function and unique expression, specific to place, geology, topography, climate and hydrology. 5. Defining the natural vegetation climaxes that are determined by soil. Vegetation is sometimes usefully geographically described in terms of ‘latitude, altitude and climate’. But this description is not sufficient for ecological purposes: the soil will be understood first because natural vegetation climaxes are as varied as the soils that determine them. In terms of plant diversity, the general rule is that the warmer and wetter the climate, the greater the diversity. 6. Defining the animal communities and habitats within a given environment. This requires an understanding of the habitats (aquatic and terrestrial) that specific animals require within a wider understanding of their inter-species relationships.18 7. Defining the dynamic ecological relationship between soil, vegetation and animals because not only do soils and climate determine vegetation, but also vegetation influences the soil: change the vegetation from woodland to farmland Life is classified under five kingdoms: Prokaryotae – single-celled bacteria, important in breaking down dead matter, and in fixing atmospheric nitrogen, Protoctista – multi-celled organisms that photosynthesise and absorb nutrients from water: seaweeds and the green algae that grows on stagnant water, Fungi – which absorb nutrients from dead matter (saprophytic fungi) or living organisms (parasitic fungi), Plantae – plants, and Animalia – animals. 18

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession and the nature of the soil changes. Animals influence vegetation by their eating habits, by the deposition of their waste products, by burrowing into it and, at death, by becoming part of it. 8. Defining the impact of humanity upon ecosystems that are the consequence of the dynamic interaction of the preceding seven components. Since the retreat of the ice, the British ecosystem evolved from the beginning, with human activity, as a human ecosystem. 2.7.4 Ecological classification Ecology classifies landscapes in terms of life, hence the terms ‘bios’ being ancient Greek for life), biosphere, biogeographical regions and biomes, all defined in the footnote below. 1. The biosphere – that part of the earth in which life occurs: from the bottom of the deepest ocean trench to the heights where the strongest bird can fly. 2. Biogeographical regions – divide the biosphere into regions of distinct and characteristic combinations of plants and animals across a gradation of climates. They are divided by oceans, deserts and massive mountain ranges. Ecologists differ on the specific definition of the biogeographical regions but a useful classification defines eight: the Nearctic region – North America; the Neotropical region – South America; the Palearctic region – Eurasia and North Africa; the Afrotropical region; the Oriental region – India and South-East Asia; the Australasian region; the Oceanic region; and the Antarctic. 3. Biogeographical sub-regions – define the biogeographical regions in more specific terms and are more closely related to geographic factors such as climate and relative isolation. The European Environment Agency defines eleven regions in Europe: Arctic, Boreal, Anatolian, Continental, https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/report_2002_0524_154909/biogeograp hical-regions-in-europe/continental_biogeografical_region.pdf Mediterranean, Alpine, Atlantic, Black Sea, Macaronesian, Pannonian and Steppic. The British Isles lie within the Atlantic region. 4. Biomes – large areas containing characteristic communities of plants and animals; for instance, the Cheviot Hills straddling the border of southeast Scotland and England. 5. Biodiversity – the number of species in a defined area. 2.7.5 Landscape mechanics The mechanics of landscapes are described by ecosystems, being areas within a biome that can be given a physical boundary for convenient ecological study. These can be: 1. Places recognized within their general surroundings, such as Machrie Moor on Arran or a piece of woodland stranded within arable fields such as Carvers Woods Nature Reserve, South Derbyshire 2. Places defined by the predominance of one plant species, such as the beech woodlands of the Chilterns, or 3. Places defined by the territory of one animal species, such as the indigenous ponies of the New Forest, or the introduced goats of the Great Orme.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession 2.7.6 Sub-ecosystems Ecosystems can be sub-divided again and again. Within the ecosystem of a piece of woodland, sub-ecosystems can be recognized according to soils and drainage, and so on to the sub-ecosystems of individual trees or even of individual leaves. Image 22: Machrie Moor, Arran, 2018

Image 23: Carvers Woods, South Derbyshire, 2018

2.7.7 Some useful ecological terms • A natural ecosystem – is largely determined by the natural environment as opposed to one that is largely determined by humanity. • An ecozone – is an area within a biome that has characteristic ecosystems, such as the peat bogs of the Cheviot Hills. • A sub-ecozone – is one of the parts into which an ecozone can be broken for the purposes of study, such as a specific peat bog. • An ecotone – is the transitional zone between one ecosystem and another, such as the banks of a river. • A species – is made up of all the plant or animal individuals which can successfully reproduce with one another. • A species population – is the number of individuals of a species found in a given area. • Species diversity – is the number of species in a given area; also described as biodiversity.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession • • • •

The evolution of species – is the divergence and extinction of species through natural selection. A niche – is the home of an organism in all its dimensions, or how it fits into and makes a living in its ecosystem. A habitat – is the viable ecosystem required to sustain a species. Conservation – is the wise use of resources and the management of the environment so that all species, including humanity, can survive in a viable ecosystem.

2.7.8 Ecosystems and evolution Ecosystems are the dynamic workshops where plant and animal species co-evolve. They are described in terms of plants or of animals but because plants do not move, their relationship to the environment is different from that of animals. The components of an ecosystem that determine plant characteristics, species diversity and populations are water, temperature, mineral nutrition, and competition with other plants and with animals. Plant species create microclimates for themselves, for other plant species, and for animals. This is how life colonises initially hostile environments. In contrast, an animal can change its environment quickly by moving location; even moving between aquatic and terrestrial environments. This may arise from physical parameters such as temperature or humidity, or because of a search for resources such as food, shelter, or a mate. Similarly, an animal can move to escape a competitor or a predator. Plants have evolved other mechanisms of protection such as thorns or a bitter taste. A plant can store energy in its roots and grow new parts after a predator has eaten them. Aquatic and terrestrial animals have different ecological requirements. Aquatic animals require water as a medium, having evolved to occupy every aquatic niche from drops of moisture in the rainforest to the deepest and darkest ocean trenches, according to the condition of the water: dissolved salts and oxygen, currents and levels of light may be critical. Terrestrial animals need water no less but climatic conditions are especially important; particularly temperature. The great annual migrations of birds between Europe and Africa are the result of seasonal climatic changes.

2.8

THE THREE LAWS OF ECOLOGY AND VIABILITY

2.8.1

First law: ecological cycles, in the end, define one ecosystem, which is the biosphere While ecosystems can be conveniently described simply in terms of plants (the beech woodlands of the Chilterns) or animals (New Forest ponies), plants and animals have a dynamic ecological relationship; a relationship where animals are particularly dependent upon plants. This is most obvious in the procurement and use of energy. Plants convert the sun’s energy into carbohydrates, which can then be stored for future expenditure. Animals consume plants or parts of them or eat other animals; food from which fat is processed for future conversion into energy. In this respect, autotrophs are the primary producers: the photosynthesising plants and plankton that

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession can convert water, together with the sun's energy and inorganic substances, into the living matter upon which heterotrophs depend.19 Heterotrophs are consumers. They include: herbivores, animals that eat only plants; carnivores, animals that only eat other animals; omnivores, animals that eat plants and animals; and decomposers, animals and plants that live on dead and decaying material called detritus. This last group includes the primary decomposers – bacteria and fungi – that mineralize detritus thus releasing nutrients into the soil. Grass converts the sun's energy into carbohydrates, rabbits eat grass and foxes eat rabbits. Thereby, energy is dispersed through an ecosystem. It is stored, transferred, and lost as heat by combustion and metabolism. Energy is the one essential component of an ecosystem that comes from beyond the biosphere. It comes from the sun; all the others are recycled. Grass grows in the sunlight but it is nothing if it does not get water and nutrients from the soil. The nutrients arise from inorganic sources released in solution in soil water, and from the decay of organic matter that is either animal wastes or detritus. Detritus is broken down by the decomposers – worms, carrion birds, the primary decomposers – that mineralize it, transforming it into nutrients for plants that can be eaten. Nutrient recycling can be most easily understood through the ecosystem of a single tree: leaves fall to the ground; they decay with the help of the primary decomposers; the minerals so formed dissolve in soil water to be taken up by the tree’s roots and to become leaves again. If larger animals eat the leaves the cycle is enlarged and nutrients do not reach the tree again until they have been processed to become animal waste or through decomposition. The nutrient cycle just described is one of the many inter-related bio-chemical cycles that define the dynamics of ecosystems. Related to the nutrient cycle, the movement of carbon or nitrogen can be described within their own cycles. Therefore, although ecosystems are analysed as self-contained entities in order to understand the dynamics of their natural relationships, the study of which defines ecology, the interrelation of ecosystems stresses the truth that in the end there is only one ecosystem: the biosphere. 2.8.2

Second law: a defined ecosystem is the sum of nine conceptual components: 1. Dependency, because all living things depend on others to survive: to give them immediate sustenance and to create for them the right environment. 2. Mutual coexistence and competition, because, although the habitat of a species is a unique niche, an ecosystem involves the interdependency of species,

Photosynthesis is a chemical reaction in the green chlorophyll of plants that uses the energy of sunlight. In this reaction, carbon dioxide from the air is combined with water from the soil to make sugar, releasing molecular oxygen as a by-product. Oxygen is vital to aerobic respiration in both plants and animals. Sugar, as glucose, is a source of energy for the plant, or a precursor to more complex molecules (such as the starch in potatoes). These products are used by the plant itself for further growth, and then eaten by humans and other animals. 19

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession which may also compete for certain resources. Individuals also compete with members of their own species for resources, for mates and for living room. Energy flow, whereby energy enters the ecosystem by photosynthesis and is lost only as heat generated by the activities of animals and during decomposition of detritus by decomposers. Biomass, because the total mass of life within a defined ecosystem at any one time is both the result of productivity and an indicator, as mass per unit area, of the productivity of the ecosystem. Productivity, which arises when primary producers convert sunlight and inorganic material into living matter. Rabbits eating grass are secondary producers that depend upon primary producers. Productivity depends on inorganic resources such as water and soil nutrients, while production itself is activated by energy. Resource cycles occur because grass takes its nutrition from the soil, rabbits take theirs from the grass, and the poacher’s family take theirs from a rabbit pie. Unlike energy, which is lost as heat, chemical resources are retained in a functioning ecosystem because nutrients are returned to the soil by the decomposition of detritus. Bioactivity, which is the combination of energy flow, productivity, biomass and the resource cycles, measured by the speed of the resource cycles. Balance, because detritus is recycled through the system as new production so that decomposition balances production, and Viability, because a healthy ecosystem is a system of component inter-acting energy flows and cycles that defines the interdependency of living things. An ecosystem that is productive in a balanced way is a viable ecosystem.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

2.8.3 Third law: a viable ecosystem sustains Itself A viable ecosystem is, like a healthy body, able to withstand and recover from massive shocks: volcanic eruptions, floods, droughts, hurricanes and glacial incursions; even oil spills. The biosphere is the global ecosystem, made up of an almost infinite number of subsystems. The current impact of humanity upon this naturally viable ecosystem is destructive and threatens life on Earth. The human ecosystem of the 21st century is not viable. And yet a mere ten thousand years ago the British landscape was as pristine as any landscape can be.

2.9

THE POST-ICE-AGE LANDSCAPE OF BRITAIN

‘At . . . their greatest extent, ice-sheets covered practically the whole of Britain north . . . of the Bristol Channel and the lower Thames. Since the Great Ice Age is comparatively recent in terms of geological time and no major earth-building movement has taken place since, it follows that the scenery of Britain is the scenery of glaciation, of a country but recently vacated by ice sheets.’20

20

Sir L Dudley Stamp.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession The Great Ice Age, known by geologists as the Pleistocene Epoch (the first of the two epochs that make up the Quaternary Period in which we live now – see

Box 1: Geological , on page 21) lasted two to three million years. It included no less than four glacial and three inter-glacial periods of increasing mildness. The fourth glacial was mild enough for humans to inhabit the limestone caves of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire throughout the year. Image 24: View from Thor’s Cave, Derbyshire on a warm summer’s day in 2017 There was a much harsher climate and landscape 12,000 years ago

The evolution of the living landscape of Britain commenced with the retreat of the most recent ice sheet, fifteen thousand years ago, heralding the current geological period called the Holocene. Seven-and-a-half-thousand years later – BC 7500 – the climate was warm enough in the south of Britain for a landscape of familiar plant communities to evolve. As the temperate climate moved north so rich alluvial and brown deciduous woodland soils (also known as brown earths) spread across the lowlands as an incoming tide of plenty. Milder conditions fostered an ever-increasing diversity of life, the source of which was the contiguous European Plain, which was carried by every geographical agency including humanity and its hunting dogs. Willow and alder on the wetter, floodable soils; pine on the northerly, exposed hills; oak and ash lower down; and behind a band of birch and aspen woodland advancing across the vanishing tundra a great wave of lime and elm with an understory of hazel and holly. the rarer native trees, juniper, box and yew, provided something suitable for every ecological niche. A variety of British thorns and shrubs resisted and revelled in the wildest of Atlantic storms that battered the coast. Until . . . in our romantic, primeval memories, we overthoughtfully create a golden age, a woodland idyll where summer is always promising and a red squirrel might scramble from branch to branch between Land’s End and John O’Groats, knowing not the clean woodland floor.

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2.10 AND THE ANSWER DOES LIE IN THE SOIL Inescapably then, British soils are post-glacial phenomena. Subsequently, they have been, and are, subject to the physical and chemical laws of soil formation as a dynamic interaction of geological and topographical conditions with the climate and vegetation. Soil formation is the best evidence of the dynamic ecological relationship between geography and biology. Image 25: Shallow soil profile, Arran, 2018

See also Image 29 on page 44. 2.10.1 A natural soil profile is explained by four horizons: The A horizon, or eluvial topsoil, dominated by eluviation, the downward movement of nutrients, having four component layers. from top to bottom: • • • •

recognisable plant litter; detritus; humus, containing nutrient-rich, fully decomposed, organic matter, noticeably stained black or brown, and a light-coloured layer, from which nutrients have been leached by drainage water to the B horizon below, and in which there is little root activity.

The liveliness of soil is epitomized by humus formation initiated by earthworms that take bits of debris down into the existing soil to digest them leaving the cellulose framework of plant tissues – lignite – to be further decomposed into carbon dioxide and humus by fungi and bacteria, a process for which free oxygen and water are essential. Humus contains all the essential plant nutrients and is vital to the maintenance of fertility and structure: it holds nutrients that would otherwise be leached away; it lightly glues together the poorly structured, sandy soils; and it opens out heavier clay soils, by chemically driving the plate-like clay molecules apart. The B horizon, or illuvial topsoil, dominated by Illuviation – the acquisition of nutrients carried down by drainage water from the A horizon. For this reason, the B horizon is darker than the A leached layer above it. The C horizon, or subsoil, made up of broken-down parent material and elements of the B horizon.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession The D horizon, the underlying parent material, or substrate, which may be, for example, rock, glacial boulder clay or alluvial deposits arising from ancient glacial meltwaters or recent river action. A natural soil profile may extend to tens of metres, with the four horizons obvious, or may be only a few centimetres deep having horizons that are difficult to distinguish. 2.10.2 Soil formation Humanity depends on healthy soils for the related plant life, not only for the photosynthetic production of carbohydrates at the beginning of the food chain, but also for the oxygen that plants produce during photosynthesis. The plant’s roots, below the surface – no less active than the stems and leaves above – depend upon the soil for anchorage, nutrition, water supply and the free oxygen dissolved in soil water. Soil and plants have an obvious living relationship, the one dependent upon the other as a dynamic process where soil is formed and plant communities develop from a mere stain of life. lichen, growing upon a willing rock, gives the clue to the truth that soil is the connection between lifeless geography – the geography of a planet lifeless for all its energetic geological activity containing the physical laws and elements of the universe – and life, likely to be as apparently insignificant as the photosynthetic, single-celled algae and its mutually insistent mate, a simple web of embracing fungal strands, which create lichen. Lichen takes nutrients from the rock and gases from the air, and lives as the beginning of a living community that includes the soil that follows. Soil, in its turn, is the living foundation of the plants, the fungi, the predominantly microscopic animals, the bacteria and the viruses that fill the biosphere. Soil, the essential component of the living mantle that covers natural Britain from seashore to hilltop, from the deepest of the exploratory roots of trees that open the closest of fissures in the bedrock, to the air above the tallest trees on the highest ground, saturated with life. A breathing, ever-renewing mass of life able to enliven the most resistant geology. After the nuclear winter, life will survive in the soil, ready to burst forth again, even if it takes ten thousand years. Soils in temperate regions, like Britain, that have experienced glaciation arise from the dynamic interaction of five geographical factors: 1. Parent material, or soil substrate, determining the physical and chemical characteristics of a particular soil: sandy or clayey; alkaline or acid; inorganic or organic; dry or wet.21 2. Topography, even small undulations bring about significant variations in soil conditions in relation to slope, known as soil catenas. Thus we have:

Acidity is measured as the ‘power of hydrogen’, pH, expressing the nature of hydrogen in a solution (in our case, a soil solution). A preponderance of unattached hydrogen ions is an acid solution; a preponderance of hydroxyl ions (OH) is an alkaline solution. An equality of H and OH ions is a neutral solution. The lower the PH, the more acidic the solution. Lemon juice has a pH of about 2, vinegar about 3, potatoes about 6, milk about 6.5 and drinking-water from calcareous aquifers up to 8. 21

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession −

the eluvial soils, on the top (of the ridge, plateau or terrace), tending to be comparatively coarse and well oxidized because lighter material and water move downward (eluviation)

−

the colluvial soils on slopes, which both gain and lose material, and which tend to be deeper and less well oxidized towards the foot of the slope, and

−

the illuvial soils below the slopes, which accumulate material and are less well oxidized and less well drained than the soils above but potentially the most fertile (illuviation).22

3. Hydrology, because not only does water move soil-forming material according to laws of gravity and velocity in relation to particle volume and density, but also because of the chemical reactions that occur in water. Clay, for instance, disperses according to its chemical nature and concentration. Water is a solvent: rich in humus it will be more acidic than if it is rich in calcium minerals dissolved out of calcareous rocks. 4. Climate, because the biogeographical region determines the broad nature of the soil: temperate Atlantic or Alpine; tropical humid or highland; tundra. Within the biogeographical region, climate is related to location; most importantly to altitude but also to aspect, exposure and association with significant bodies of water. Microclimates are influenced by the nature of the vegetation: an open, grassy terrain is more subject to extremes of climate than more protected woodland. 5. Vegetation has the most intimate and formative relationship with the soil, giving it its final characteristic within a classification relating to the climate. For instance: the temperate brown woodland soils that will develop in undisturbed lowland British woodland. Upon this dynamic natural soil system, humanity makes its mark by exploiting the soil: ‘The area is defined by an underlying geology of Mercia mudstones overlain with a variety of fluvio-glacial, periglacial and river deposits of mostly sand and gravel, to form terraces flanking the rivers. The gravel terraces of the lowland village farmlands form coarse, sandy loam whilst the riverside meadows are predominantly a heavy clay loam. Locally distinct to the Midlands and occurring only in a few areas south of Derby, at Stenson Fields and Sinfin Moor, the wet pasture meadows are characterised by grey, calcareous clays affected by groundwater and occasional flooding. These variations in soils and levels have determined the nature of agricultural practices and settlement . . .’ 23

Oxidation, reduction and anaerobic conditions: oxidation is the addition of oxygen to a physical or chemical system; reduction is the loss of oxygen. A well-oxidized soil has a high level of free oxygen dissolved in the soil water, while a reduced soil has little. Where there is no oxygen in the soil water, the soil is anaerobic. The flooding of a soil containing decomposing organic matter may cause anaerobic conditions because the soil microorganisms that enable decomposition use up available free oxygen dissolved in the soil water faster than the oxygen can diffuse in from the surface. 23 Derbyshire Landscape Character Assessment. See also footnote: 40 on page 55. 22

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession 5Image 26: River Trent below Melbourne, Derby, 2014

Humanity has taken the natural conditions – substrate, topography, hydrology and drainage – within the mild and damp English Midlands climate to convert natural woodlands and wetlands into a sophisticated agricultural landscape, including irrigated water meadows.24 On higher ground, not far to the north, we can assume a more rocky and rubbly postglacial substrate upon which, after a couple of thousand years, a thin grassy soil forms but within which the superior horizons are barely distinguishable. Nonetheless, a thin layer of decomposed material evolves, containing tiny bits of the substrate, the whole mixture darkened by the humus arising from decomposition. Image 27: Gåla, Norway, 2004

Something we recognize as soil and upon which, when climatic conditions are right, a birch seed settles, germinates, sends down a tap root, sends up a juvenile stem with leaves that survive the predations of the weather, grazing animals and a man’s clumsy foot. A tree, albeit shrubby, and stunted, is started! The tree is tough, its descendants capable of breaking open concrete and penetrating asphalt roads. As the little tree draws up dissolved nutrients from the substrate so it begins a nutrient cycle, its leaves dropping in the autumn to create a layer of litter more substantial and nutrient-rich than the grass that it will eventually overshadow and with its fellows, Archaeological evidence suggests that significant human impact began about four thousand years ago. 24

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession crowd out. Its roots break, a little more, into the substrate as each year passes so that a C horizon begins, enriched by the humus of decaying roots. More litter is added, the A horizon becoming richer in humus and deeper despite eluvial processes as nutrients not caught by the roots, move down to create a rich illuvial horizon (B) that mixes intimately with the substrate of the C horizon. Image 28: Pioneer vegetation on Putney Heath, 2004

The inevitable tendency for nutrients to move down through the profile is enhanced by rainfall and the permeability of the substrate, but is retarded by the biological activity of the living soil. The greater the mass of roots, the deeper the litter, the better are nutrients held in the A and B horizons.25 Also, the greater the biomass, the greater tends to be the biodiversity, so that the very success of the birch tree ensures its demise as the other species, which it has generously nursed, outgrow it to be bigger, with roots stronger and more deeply penetrating. More litter, more burrowing animals and an emerging understory all limit the tendency of nutrients to leach and wash away or to concentrate as a pan or strata of concretions at the B/C transition. This soil evolved on a free-draining substrate usefully rich in mineral nutrients and well but not excessively drained. Over hundreds of years thereafter a brown woodland soil, typical of the best agricultural lands in the temperate zones, formed having a loamy texture and a high level of humus.26 Undisturbed, such soils become deeper at an accelerating rate. Under different environmental conditions, the nature of soil formation changes. At higher altitudes for a given latitude temperatures are lower causing lower levels of biological activity and biodiversity. The position of the soil in the soil catena (see item 2 on page 40) will affect chemical and physical properties in relation to the nature of the substrate. The nature of the eluvial soil on the top relates to the substrate that might be a permeable sandstone, or an 25 26

‘A’ could just as well stand for ‘Active’. Loam: sand ca. 40%, silt ca. 40%, clay ca. 20%

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession impermeable clay; an impermeable acidic igneous rock (volcanic granite) or a metamorphic rock that might be a clay-based shale or marble.27 It might be permeable limestone or chalk suggesting an alkaline soil, which may be acidic thanks to the accumulated depth and unimpeded drainage: ‘Beechwoods . . . are found on the deep loams overlying the chalk plateaux on the South Downs . . . and on the Chiltern Hills . . . These loams belong in general to the “brown earth” type of soil . . . Some of the shallower plateau soils of the South Downs . . . contain a fair amount of calcium carbonate, while the (deeper) Chiltern plateau soils are destitute of it and are in fact markedly acid . . .’ 28 Image 29: Beechwood over chalk. Here, on the South Downs, Susi Arnott

The nature of the illuvial soil of the depressions – at the foot of the catena slopes, in any place where soil and soil substrates collect – similarly depends upon the underlying geology, especially upon its permeability. Where water is held, causing water-logged and therefore anaerobic conditions, organic soils are formed known as peat. Such soils may be transitory or permanent depending upon the degree and timeliness of waterlogging. Immediately following the last glacial period illuvial wet conditions were the typical environment of soil formation, acting as sinks for meltwater and the associated detritus and debris issuing from retreating glaciers filling the depressions, valleys and coastal lowlands that constitute a significant part of the British landscape. The disappearance of the ice heralded a warmer period when trees invaded the landscape, and when rising sea levels (offset to some degree by uprising land enabled by the withdrawal of the weight of the glaciers) began to cut Britain off from the continent when, as already described, a mild Atlantic climate took over from a more extreme continental climate of hot, dry summers and sub-zero winters.

The former arises from pressure and the latter from pressure and heat that causes limestone to re-crystallize. 28 AG Tansley. 27

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Peat soils are significant in the British landscape although they most often occur in the more remote locations of the uplands. I have already made twenty-two references to peat, and there are five more to come! The primitive British soils were as significantly formed on organic substrates as they were on naked inorganic rock, alluvial deposits and bolder clay, thereby creating a great division of soil types: Inorganic On substrates from which pre-glacial soils had been scraped On boulder clay

& Organic In Tundra conditions where low temperatures limited biological activity Wetland soils, which formed on coastal plains, and in any depression allowing the accumulation of organic substrates

This division should not be confused with the great NW/SW regional landscape divide between upland and lowland Britain. Every landscape has its own comparative uplands and lowlands: Cambridge, at 12 metres above sea level, sits upon a mere scrap of the chalk ridge that is the Chilterns further west but it is a significant upland above the flat fenlands to the north. Carsington Water, in Derbyshire, is, at 200 metres, a comparative lowland area – which is why it makes a suitable location for a reservoir – in the upland Peak District of the South Pennines.

2.11 TO UNDERSTAND BRITISH SOILS IS TO UNDERSTAND BRITISH WETLANDS Regardless of altitude, a wetland is an ecosystem consistently and significantly influenced by water. Wetland is a transitional zone between water (pond, lake, sea, river) and dry land in both place (between dry land and water) and time (where a wet depression, for instance, is filling with the products of erosion on its way to becoming dry land). The Cambridgeshire fenlands are transitional between the East Anglian lowlands and the North Sea. In time, the transition may be diurnal, subject to tides: water meadows or ponds that dry out in the summer; or geological where, for instance, a wet depression is filling with eroded material, transforming into dry land in the process, or where sea levels are rising or falling in relation to adjacent land. Most British wetlands have been influenced by human activity. If not destroyed altogether, they have been created: drainage, filling and flood protection make wetland dry; poorly designed engineering projects such as railway and road embankments impede drainage; mining alters drainage patterns where, for instance, deep mines cause subsidence thereby forming surface ponds, and where subsurface material is removed by open-cast methods in areas where the water table is high thereby creating shallow lakes, most obviously gravel pits; and by urban and industrial infrastructure that has spread over a significant proportion of the valley floors, estuaries and coastal plains.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession The three important types of British wetland are related to: • • •

freshwater ecosystems marine ecosystems, and wet peat bogs.

Freshwater wetlands include: rivers, lakes and any depression that fills with fresh water; and plains subject to flooding and to permanent or periodic high water tables. The soil-forming nature of these ecosystems depends upon vegetation defined by properties of water depth and movement. In this way, three zones are identified in a slow-moving river, backwater or pond: −

Deep water, where only submerged primitive aquatic plants can survive, some attached to the floor, others free floating.

−

Edges, where roots are submerged in water or mud but the leaves are aerial. Reed swamp is typical. Climax vegetation includes alder, willow and aspen. Alder roots carry nitrogen-fixing bacteria, explaining their tolerance of waterlogged conditions.

−

An intermediate zone of plants rooted on the floor with floating leaves (water lilies).

Image 30: Wetland, River Soar, near Loughborough, Leicestershire, 2014

Where water flows slowly or not at all, each zone is transitional to the next creating a succession of communities transforming from deep water to marsh to fen and ultimately to dry land.29 This succession again indicates transition in place and time: the pond is there in name but is filling with debris and detritus upon which a dry soil will form able to carry woodland. Marine wetlands extend along the thousands of kilometres where the land does not meet the sea as a dramatic upland cliff, but where it is permanently or periodically influenced by sea water: ‘. . . essentially areas of accretion, the land gaining on the sea by the accumulation of mud and sand brought in by the tide and by piling up of blown sand on the dunes.

Marsh is a waterlogged area with a mineral soil – having an inorganic substrate. Fen is a waterlogged area based on peat. 29

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession ‘The three main types of ‘accretional’ habitat – tidal marsh, dune, and shingle beach – are commonly found in close association, and are linked together through the processes which build them up. ‘Salt-marsh vegetation occupies the mud and sand of those marginal parts of tidal estuaries or bays which are protected . . .’ 30 Conversely however, the accretional nature of the maritime wetlands – aided by dykes and other barriers – is often frustrated by storms and unusually high tides. This is particularly the case in periods when the sea level rises in relation to the land, as happened during the 2nd century AD when rising sea levels resulting from global warming destroyed the Roman drainage infrastructure of the fen country around the Wash. Image 31: Raised Beach, Kilbrannan Sound, Arran, OS NT 885295, 2018

Wet peat particularly (although not exclusively) forms in the humid conditions of the northwest uplands, where anaerobic soil conditions caused by waterlogging prevent oxygen-starved bacteria from completing its breakdown. The peat soils of the wet moorlands that dominate the wettest upland areas of Britain are formed by sphagnum moss. Mosses are primitive plants, more advanced than the algae and fungi of lichen but less advanced than ferns. Together with fungi and ferns, mosses reproduce by sporulation. Spores arise by way of a cycle known as ‘alternation of generations’. A first generation ‘parent’ has male and female cells that fuse as a secondary productive cell that grows into a second generation. This, in turn, and while still – usually – attached to the parent produces the capsule (sporangium) containing the spores. In the right conditions, the sporangium bursts distributing masses of tiny spores widely dispersed in the air and in droplets of water. Sphagnum spores are distributed by the wind so that in the right conditions the moss community spreads fast. Mosses absorb water through all their cells and most have 30

AG Tansley.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession root-like structures called rhizoids that anchor the moss to its substrate but are not, like the roots of true plants, the prime location of water uptake. However, uniquely amongst mosses, sphagnum has no rhizoid, but not only does it absorb and store prodigious amounts of water in the cells that make up its living green, red, yellow or brown photosynthetic leafy branching structure but also it holds water in its dead cells. In this way Sphagnum moss keeps growing, and having got going, and where the environment is wet and humid, it can blanket entire upland landscapes. The lignin that forms the cell walls of sphagnum moss is especially resistant to breakdown, resistance enhanced by the acidic nature of sphagnum moss caused by taking up and therefore rendering useless nutrients such as calcium and magnesium, which would otherwise reduce acidity which would, in other words, raise pH. As Nyle C Brady says: ‘. . . as the exchangeable calcium and magnesium are lost by leaching, the acidity of the soil gradually increases.’ Sphagnum moss creates raised bogs and blanket bogs. Most raised bogs started as lakes left behind by the retreating glaciers. As the vegetation around the edges of the lake – predominantly Cyperaceae fen communities of sedges and rushes – extended into the lake, depositing peat in the process, so the lake filled up until it was a peat bog. Then the bog was colonized by sphagnum spores so that a mat of sphagnum moss began to spread over the surface of the fen. Eventually the surface of the bog rose above the surrounding country to become the classic raised bog. Such raised bogs are still common in Scotland but rare in England, so thoroughly have they been drained, planted (with pine trees) and mined for peat. I have expended a valuable 400 words on describing sphagnum moss because, as I describe in the following chapter, its relationship to humanity is significant. Before the manifestations of industrialization and urbanization, before the scientific innovations that enabled humanity to reconfigure the chemical nature of the Earth’s natural resources, before the predations of the internal combustion engine so dramatically changed the hitherto slowly evolving green landscape of agricultural Britain, the nature of the human relationship with the soil was the most subtle and profound illustration of humanity’s power over ecosystems characterized by landscapes. In this respect two of the most dramatic examples of human British landscapes are the upland sphagnum moorlands and the podzolic heaths. Image 32: Sphagnum moss with Cyperaceae and Molina, Machrie Moor, Arran, 2018

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2.12 THE STAMP OF MANKIND In order that the full impact of human activity can be appreciated, I have, in this part of Landscape, Wealth and Dispossession, described a process by which lifeless geography interacts with the forces of life to give the lively planet upon which we live. The process is summarized by continuing the flow diagram on page 30 (Diagram 1: Components of lifeless geography), so that the living planet is understood by the study of ecology; the landscape being, in the end, the manifestation of an ecosystem, the most significant and subtle component of which is the soil. Thus:

Diagram 2: Components of the Lively Planet

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3 HOM ICIDA L HOM INOIDS 3.1

THE LIVELY PLANET

The Earth has been a lively planet for about 3,800,000,000 years: ten million times the time since Stonehenge was erected. During these millions of years, the Earth has been a perfect ecosystem and for most of the 3.8 billion years – 99.9% of the lively Earth’s history – nothing like mankind was around. To put time into perspective, the Cretaceous Period ended 65 million years ago with a mass extinction of plant and animal species. So sudden was the extinction that geologists have postulated a meteoric bombardment of the Earth causing such an upsurge of dust and debris that in addition to physical damage, the planet also suffered a long night of months if not years. Starved of sunlight, plant life above ground withered and died and with it, many leaf-dependent herbivorous animals, including most of the dinosaurs. 31 Modern mammals and birds evolved in the geological period following the trauma, the Paleogene. (See

Box 1: Geological on page 221.) The Paleogene was followed by the Neogene – 23 million years ago – during which our recognisable plants and animals appeared. Thus, for 10 million years or so, in a place that might have been Britain, oakwoods thrived, season after season acorns fell to the ground, germinated and survived the predations of other life forms to struggle alongside other oak trees and competing tree species – hornbeam or beech – with the holly and the hazel of the understory, to become mighty examples of their genus. With ecological good fortune, a single oak tree lived for hundreds of years, maybe a thousand, autumnal leaves falling, decomposing and becoming part of the soil system and the nutrient cycle. Millions of autumns, battered by summer storms, drenched with winter sunlight, the calls of the woodland animals, a blackbird’s evening warning, the rumble of thunder, the moonlit undergrowth thrashed by startled deer, and silence. But never, through a deceptive eternity, a human foot falling upon the woodland debris, as tree after tree works its way out of the soil, stretches to maturity, drops its seeds, shrinks, hollows out, dies, honourably. A mighty oak is felled by the vicious wind, slashing through the dense woodland, detonating an explosion of eager young life excited by the novel summer light that strikes the woodland floor. Generations of oak trees rise from the earth; fall back into it, ten thousand times, fifty thousand times. Through fire and flood, the woodland resists destruction. Adapting to climatic variations through genetic selection, it endures. Then . . . hominoids!

3.2

THE HOMINOIDS ARE COMING!

Our distant primate ancestors appeared in the tropical zone rainforests during the Paleogene period; living in the treetops; avoiding predators on the ground. After some tens of millions of years, the earliest human primate came into view; taking to the ground when it was safe; handling sticks and stones. A mere three million years ago (a few thousand oak tree generations) our Homo sapiens ancestors were walking upright, able to use fire and model advantageous tools. This human animal was already beginning to be less a natural part of its environment and more a manipulator and conscious exploiter of it because, despite nature being the giver of all things, the 31

Amongst the survivors, small seed- and carrion-eating dinosaurs survived as the birds.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession hominoids felt oppressed by a force, against which they battled for survival. They considered their place in the natural world, worrying and hoping about the future; planning ways in which they could confront the vicissitudes of their environment. And with this intellectual ability came emotion, a willingness not only to suffer fear and pain but to consider its alleviation; a willingness also, to prolong pleasure and joy. I will die of old age and of wearing out but my children will continue my line and thus my determination to protect them. To survive I must either allow the family, my clan, my tribe to subsume me or I must make it an extension of myself and dominate it. Within the past half-a-million years Homo sapiens, a hominoid animal endowed with speech and artistic skills, had evolved, diverging about 140,000 years ago as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and as Homo sapiens (sapiens), the former dying out as the ice retreated from Britain.32 To analyse the impact of human activity upon the natural environment – ie the biome without the activities of mankind – it is necessary to understand what the environment was like before the destructive human onslaught that is the global characteristic of our times. This requires understanding what the environment would be like had mankind remained in the comparatively primitive hominoidal state of 500,000 years ago. Such an understanding raises two initial questions: 1. When did mankind cease to be a natural part of the ecosystem it inhabits? 2. And, since I have inferred that human activities are not natural, what do I mean by natural? Answering these questions raises a third, more specifically ecological question: 3. Given that mankind has made a significant, specific, impact upon the biome, at what point in time did the impact become significant? Which raises a fourth question: 4. What do I mean by significant? Therefore, and answering the questions in reverse order: what do I mean by significant? I mean that human activity so damages an ecosystem that either it is unable to ever recover ecological viability, or it is unable to recover without human assistance, or it is unable to recover within a reasonable time, which I would say was within the human memory of three generations. When did the impact of human activity upon the biome become significant? It became significant when the damage done was such that an ecosystem could not recover viability naturally, a local example being the degradation of Swansea Bay – South Wales – by copper and zinc production. Here, the local ecosystem had been There continues to be a debate about the relationship between the two sub-species, so closely related that they interbred. Possibly, although the Neanderthals had genetic superiority in a cold climate, the marginally superior intellect of modern mankind better exploited the warmer conditions that prevailed forty to twenty thousand years ago. The Neanderthals were pushed to the margins finally expiring as remaining individuals were hunted (just as Europeans hunted Tasman Man in the 19 th century) and subsumed into the communities of the genetically superior H. sapiens sapiens. DNA research suggests that modern, at any rate western, humanity contains about 3% Neanderthal genes. 32

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession destroyed by the 1860s and had not recovered a century later. Had humanity quit the Earth about 1850, the evidence of its residence would have been largely expunged by now, the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere raised in the Industrial Revolution, beginning in Britain about 1760, having returned to pre-18th century levels. Quitting in 1900, the evidence of human industrial activity would still be evident one hundred and twenty years later but the ecological viability of the Earth as a whole would be intact. Quitting today, the ecological change wrought to the biome would be irreversible but liveliness would survive, life sufficiently robust to have recovered much of its pre-industrial ecological health within, say, 30,000 years, nuclear contamination remaining. A further conceivable scenario suggests that if draconian action is not taken by existing power structures to rein back humanity’s poisonous activities now, then the liveliness of the Earth has a good chance of expiring altogether, a few billions of years before its time. Although, even in this dire case, human ingenuity, driven by human vanity, is likely to maintain a genetic lifeline for itself together with essential supporting species. Geologically, however, thanks to humanity, the Earth is already experiencing species extinction on a scale equal to that which ended the Cretaceous Period, and whatever else happens, unnatural human wastes will form a geological stratum evident in hundreds of millions of years. Image 33: South London, from, 2004

What do I mean by natural? And by implication, by unnatural mankind? I mean that the human impact has altered ecosystems to the point where they are non-viable. Human activity has been unnatural since hominoids began to use tools, fire and language, able to plan and act as a community that considered itself (cooperatively or hierarchically) separate from its environment. But although humanity had an unnatural and arrogant relationship with its environment, ‘nature’ retained the upper hand. Conflict between groups, and disease stabilized populations at a level that the

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession ecosystem could support.33 In the end, humanity is not natural because human technology manufactures unnatural poisonous substances.34 And, at last, the first question: When did mankind cease to be a natural part of the biome? In this respect, the concept of the unnaturalness of tool-wielding humanity should not be taken too far, thereby vilifying the very existence of Homo sapiens. Hunting the European woolly mammoth to extinction and the introduction of rabbits to Britain are natural events. But at some temporal point between the extinction of the mammoth and the manufacture of synthetic plastics and the herbicide 2,4Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D), splitting the atom and the modification of genic codes, humanity ceased to be a natural part of the environment, and became an unnatural, extraterrestrial corruption capable of wilfully destroying all life and thereby making us, the latter-day humanoids, a uniquely destructive form of life. In retrospect, humanity has always had the potential to be unnatural but its unnaturalness only became significant when it began to prove its ability to destroy ecosystems irrevocably (Swansea Bay) and therefore, as HG Wells recognized in the 1890s, the ability to destroy the biome. At what date did humanity become an unnatural part of the ecosystem? When a hominoid first deliberately picked up a stick or a stone and began to shape it to make a better tool? No. Because the biome was still a viable ecosystem; had humanity been wiped out at this point, the oak woodland would still have continued generation after generation, evolving into something more perfect or until challenged by some extraterrestrial cosmic force that was not human. Humanity passed the inhuman point of no return when its relationship with its own environment promised a time when the relationship would not be viable. That is when the British factory system had been perfected and when coal was the major source of power (for steam engines). This freed industry from the fast-flowing, narrower sections of rivers that had, heretofore, been the necessary location of mechanized manufacture.35 That was between 1760 and 1860, the horror of the Industrial Revolution apparent to the whole world by the 1840s.

Hearsay evidence collected in the 1990s suggests that the population of Ogoniland in the Niger Delta remained stable until the establishment of an effective British colonial administration in the 1920s, which, by including health facilities, enabled a heretofore stable human population to rapidly increase to a point where a resulting non-viable ecosystem was unable to withstand the onslaught of oil mining in the second half of the 20 th century. 34 In a purely biological sense humanity – men and women – are natural phenomena. Human technology, on the other hand, is not natural because not only does it defy natural laws (things that happened naturally when mankind was not around) but also because human activities uniquely threaten all life, including its own. This point is reinforced by the human ability to challenge natural physical laws: it can knock the Earth off its axis for a start and is able to defy the Earth’s gravitation attraction by travelling out of orbit. 35 For instance, the River Wandle in Surrey, the Derbyshire Derwent, the Yorkshire Calder, and the Upper Clyde in Lanarkshire. 33

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Image 34: The factory system, Longs Mill, Derby, 2006

A mere century. The horrible nightmare of ecological suicide achieved within a tiny fraction of the time in which oak woodland evolved. Conceivable that billions of years of creation was aimed at creating paradise for an intelligent animal that snuffed it out in a few seconds of indifferent carelessness, selfishness, vanity and greed! My grandfather’s grandfather was born in the 1780s in full view of the pre-industrial age. He witnessed the coming of the railway along the valley below Manor Oaks Farm, in Norfolk Park, on its way to Sheffield. Calm assessment of the human debacle puts emotion to one side. A scientific understanding of the human impact upon ecosystems, upon the Biome, simply involves an environmental impact assessment (an EIA) of human activity. The significance of the impact is assessed by comparing with and without scenarios: what are the differences between an ecosystem that has evolved and operates with the presence of humanity and one that has evolved and operates without humanity? This allows a landscape to be viewed back through history with reference to all human activity or a specific activity. It is a straightforward process, but it requires not only an intelligent knowledge of geography and biology but also of history and of the associated way by which human society and economics work. It requires also the rare ability to view history objectively, avoiding preconceived moral judgements. If landscapes are not assessed in this way (and we sentimentally make a judgement every time we look at a familiar landscape lamenting the changes wrought by time, by technology and – rarely with any appreciation of the fact – by our own way of living), then our personal understanding, and the institutional understanding of organizations like the National Trust and of society as a whole expressed by government, are unable to face up to the environmental and socio-economic issues that the landscape manifests, let alone deal with them as problems or opportunities. This concept of the evolution of ecosystems as an historical reality of the human impact upon the environment needs to be grasped if we – as intelligent and interested commentators and observers – want to understand the evolution of the British landscape, which is, in many ways, a microcosm of the universal human landscape. For a start it shows that mankind has been involved in landscape evolution for a long time. The most recent ice sheet stopped well short of the Thames Valley but was fronted by a tundral plain – extending across to what are now the low countries – inhospitable to humans in winter but attractive to summer hunters, Mesolithic (Middle

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Stone Age) people as sophisticated as anyone reading this but who were not concerned with agriculture.36 They operated up to the edge of the retreating ice, hunting with dogs, treading footpaths, making temporary camps and dropping things including seeds. In this way, and most significantly, Homo sapiens ‘britannicus’ did not inherit a readymade, post-glacial landscape of climax woodlands but rather helped to shape it, burning nascent woodland in the drier and most accessible locations before ecosystems had a chance to reach a ‘natural’ woodland climax.37 Box 4: More about environmental impact assessment In the previous chapter I described the British ecosystem and its associated landscape as if its evolution occurred without the presence of humanity. I did this to emphasize the significance of human activity upon ecosystem evolution. I suggested a hypothetical analysis of the evolution of the post-glacial British landscape without human interference. The hypothetical analysis is then compared with a real analysis of evolution of the post-glacial British landscape with human interference. This is environmental impact assessment, by which the significance of a human activity upon its environment (ecological, social and economic) is measured in terms of the differences between with and without scenarios. EIA thereby recognizes that landscapes are dynamic: that they interact and perpetually change, even where a proposed activity – say a mining project or a woodland conservation project – is not, after consideration, applied. How, for instance, would the ecosystems of the hills and valleys of the Cheviots or the Chilterns have evolved had humanity never been a part of the picture? Not only would different plant and animal communities and associations have evolved but also different soils. Comparing the with and without scenarios of the human presence accurately indicates the significance of human activity upon a landscape. Also, the use of with and without scenarios avoids the unscientific approach to assessing the impact of a human activity as if the environment is a static phenomenon. This would involve the unrealistic comparison of before and after scenarios, which forget or ignore inevitable and continual change. The use of with and without scenarios is especially important in the understanding of the relationship between human activity and global warming. The EIA of historic human activity enables, as another instance, an appreciation of the drama of the southern uplands of Scotland, the impressive bleakness of central Wales, and the clear sweep of the South Downs of southern England as landscapes that are not only the product of a wool-based economy and the industrial revolution but also as the product of human activity from their very inception.

The human stone age is divided into three periods for convenient reference: Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) covering about 250,000 years up to the time when the ice began to retreat; Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) until the beginning of agriculture; and Neolithic, when agriculture became common practice but metals were unknown. 37 Pinewood, birchwood and willow, oakwood and aspen or lime and elm with alder, according to latitude, altitude, aspect and local and global climate. 36

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3.3

THE HOMINOIDS ARE HERE – PASTORAL BRITAIN

POST-GLACIAL BRITISH LANDSCAPE From the beginning then, mankind was intimately involved in the evolution of the British landscape. But this early involvement was in dynamic competition with other animals. I may have suggested that without human interference, a woodland landscape would have prevailed – drainage conditions, altitude and aspect allowing, but just as humans exploited the ecosystem in front of the retreating ice so also did herbivores like the red deer and the ancestors of modern cattle, the aurochs. Their grazing habits repressed the generation of woodland plants in favour of grasses and shrubs, avoiding wet ground because the gap between the two lower toes of the cloven-hooved herbivores tends to retain mud and moisture thereby fostering footrot. The drier continental climate of early post-glacial times – before the continental land bridge was finally breached seven or eight thousand years ago – especially favoured grazing animals, their numbers probably reduced thereafter, as an isolated island was subjected to wetter Atlantic conditions. All the same, grazing animals thrived in the climatic variations of the post-glacial environment. So, also, therefore, did their predators: giant cats and wolves, and humans.38 For this reason, even without humanity, a British landscape would have evolved containing significant grasslands in the drier, warmer, southeastern portion of the island; areas where, today, dry calcareous downs and heathlands prevail. However, because grazing animals would have been checked by predators, the succeeding cool, temperate, Atlantic grasslands would have extended only into locations conducive to comfortable grazing, shunning steeper slopes, wetlands and the heavier soils that, under woodland conditions, developed where superficial glacial till overlies earlier clay formations. Such sedimentary formations cover a large swathe of Britain extending roughly from Morecambe Bay and the mouth of the Humber towards the Thames Valley. A typical example is the Vale of Gloucester where the sedimentary formations are Triassic and Jurassic clays that have produced a poorly drained landscape characterized by heavy, sticky, clay soils.39 Trueman describes the area nicely: ‘This clay belt was originally wooded, and it was only gradually that parts of it were cleared for cultivation, long after the tracts of lighter soil (for instance on the Cotswolds) had been developed. On such clay ground the dominant natural . . . dense forests together with the marshy nature of the low clayey country rendered passage through the area difficult.’ Not that passage by either man or beast was precluded altogether. During the drier prehistoric periods the ‘dense forests’ to which Trueman refers offered plenty of scope for hunting and gathering, and were thereby influenced in the usual ways to 38

Other large animals included wolverines, bears, wild horses and wild boars.

39

The physical nature of the soils arises from the glacial till (boulder clay), while the underlying clay ‘rock’ makes the soils poorly drained. See Box 1: Geological , on page 21.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession produce a human, albeit wooded, ecosystem. Not until the introduction of the irontipped plough sometime around the end of the first millennium BC (but not widely used until Anglo-Saxon times) and of drainage technology that did not reach its maximum impact until the beginning of the 19th century, was the full agricultural potential of these clay soils realized, either for grazing or arable purposes. A glance at the geological map of Britain showing the sedimentary formations shows how similar conditions extend from the Vale of Gloucester into the Vale of Evesham and the midland plain, and thence northwestwards along the Trent Valley into the Vale of York. In the northwest, the Cheshire Plain is underlain by the same Keuper marls as are found in the Vale of Gloucester as is the Lancashire coastal plain north and south of the Ribble estuary.40 A belt of clay also opens out south of the Humber running south and broadening out between the calcareous Cotswold and Chiltern scarps (Figure 4) then turning southwest to Oxford on the Thames. South of the Chilterns, the London clay dominates the London Basin and south Essex. A band of (Wealden) clay practically encircles the high Weald, while in the west, more fragmented regions of Keuper marl underlie the low country of Somerset and Dorset. For most of Britain’s post-glacial history – until the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the 18th century and to some extent even today where agricultural, recreational and suburban activities predominate – these naturally badly drained lowlands have exhibited a wooded landscape in dramatic contrast to the wide open pastoral spaces of most of the countryside between Cape Wrath and the Solent. This should not suggest, of course, that upland Britain is universally well drained. Far from it, but there are other environmental factors that militate against trees in the highlands; first the geographical limitations of latitude, altitude and exposure already discussed and then, as discussed later, not only are there inherently poorly drained highland plateaus and valley bottoms, but also soil podzolization arising from human interference has created extensive sphagnum mosses in the highlands and the lowlands. Otherwise, until industry, rather than agriculture, came to dominate the economy, the greater part of the British landscape presented a pastoral aspect, and although I am, at this point of my narrative, referring only to prehistoric, pre-Roman Britain, as Tansley pointed out in 1966:

Keuper marls: the term has been rendered obsolete by the British Geological Survey – http://www.bgs.ac.uk/Lexicon/lexicon.cfm?pub=MMG – by combining the various Keuper marls described by geologists for generations as the mercia mudstone group, which describes layers of mud and silt-stones deposited in a great Triassic lake (Lake Keuper, probably named after the German geologist who first described the series). The nomenclature may have changed but the geology has not and many of the best references relating to geology and landscape were written before re-designation. The Keuper marls / mercia mudstones yield particularly good clays for making typical Midland red bricks. Keuper marls overlie the Keuper sandstones, locally valued for building, grey tinged with yellow, or dramatically red. Under the new BGS designation Keuper sandstone is Helsby sandstone (after the Helsby Hill quarry in the village of that name in Cheshire), overlying Sherwood sandstone. 40

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‘. . . built-up areas still occupy not much more than a tenth . . . of the whole surface of England . . . The rest of the country is covered with vegetation of various kinds. Before the Second World War over half of the whole area was grassland of one kind or another . . .’ Scotland and Wales were and still are significantly more pastoral and less urbanized than England. Interestingly also, a study of photographic evidence suggests a more wooded landscape in some pastoral areas today than was the case a hundred years ago. (I do not mean the extensive pine plantations planted on the uplands and heathy areas across Britain since the Second World War.) For instance, I am looking, as I write, at photographs of Broadway Tower on the top of the Cotswolds scarp taken from Broadway (Ordnance Survey reference SP 113 362). The 2018 view suggests masses of trees most of which have grown up in the hedgerows that run along the contours. The hedgerows have been abandoned in favour of wire fences so the hawthorns planted during enclosure have been able to grow up as trees (or else have disappeared altogether) while other trees – mainly ash but also sycamore – have become naturally established, as is often the case, under the protection of the wire. Old photographs taken in 1896, in the 1930s and about 1940 show a hillside more barren than today. (See Houghton, Darien-Jones and Jones NJ.). A similar situation has been noted on Wimbledon Common with the departure of grazing animals since the First World War (cattle and sheep but also rabbits reduced by myxomatosis). As observed by James Reader at the end of the 20th century: ‘. . . open spaces and vistas that once stretched from Parkside to the . . . to the Windmill are no longer there . . . Some members of the Thames Hare and Hounds Running Club recall that they used to run to the Windmill using the Windmill as a visual point of reference. This is no longer possible as the Windmill is now obscured by trees and scrub . . .’ This is borne out by comparing aerial photographs taken in the 1920s, 30s and 40s with current satellite photographs.41 The rapid growth of woodland scrub – within a few decades – stresses how quickly the landscape can change once human activity changes or ceases altogether. Areas cleared for arable, grazing and settlement in the British lowlands can quickly become an impenetrable scrub of brambles, blackthorn and holly once abandoned. The podzolic nature of the Wimbledon Common soils encourages the rapid establishment of birch woodland. Elsewhere, abandoned water meadows may rapidly become alder woodland and swamp. The evolution of the post-glacial landscape was a human undertaking that started in earnest about twelve thousand years ago (BC10,000) when the ice sheets had largely disappeared, and warmer sub-arctic, tundra conditions predominated. The low-lying plain that was to be inundated by the North Sea enabled herds of wild grazing animals and their associated human hunters and domesticators to at first visit

41

Go to https://britainfromabove.org.uk/ and search for England, Wimbledon Common.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession during the summer months and then to settle as conditions became more conducive. These Stone Age people were not agriculturalists only inasmuch as environmental conditions militated against agriculture. But as soon as the land bridge between Britain and Europe disappeared under the sea, a more Atlantic, cool, temperate climate prevailed – with some chilly fluctuations – about eight thousand years ago (BC 6000). Agriculture got going against a background of woodland, first dominated by willows, birch and pine and then, as the annual mean temperature climbed, hazel, oak, elm and alder barely established in the best agricultural locations before humanity challenged the boreal environment for arable and pastoral activities. Image 35: Cotswolds, overgrown hedges, looking towards OS SP 115379, 2018

Seven thousand years ago (BC 5000) an advanced human culture was established across Britain (as across northwest Europe) defined most essentially by its agriculture, shaping the landscape with the clear message We Are Here to Stay. Archaeologists call this culture the Neolithic (the New Stone Age), differentiating it from the preceding Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) culture precisely because of its agricultural activities (the special and temporal transition described as the Mesolithic – Middle Stone Age). Although agriculture signalled the end of the freer, nomadic hunting-and-gathering way of life that had endured for hundreds of thousands of years, its restrictions and drudgery allowed mankind to sit down and think, to compete and cooperate more structurally and to develop hierarchical societies, to plan for the future, and to shape its environment more deliberately. Five thousand years ago (BC 3000) in a warm, temperate climate, no less than a couple of degrees warmer than the second half of the twentieth century, with wild cattle, bears and beavers, elk, lynx and wolverine surviving in areas less frequented by humanity, Neolithic humanity began to more consciously shape the landscape of Britain: stone structures were erected, settlement and farming commenced, human ecosystems evolved, landscapes began to be managed and ridgetop ways were made by the tramping of human feet. A rapid cultural formation of the landscape as humanity realized the fruits of the cognitive revolution, exemplified in countless ways in a geographical setting that was particularly attractive to settlement. Stonehenge, in southwest Britain, is a monument to this energetic and calculated human activity.

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Historic England suggests that: ‘The Mesolithic environment around Stonehenge was one of mixed pine and hazel woodland with extensive open areas, a suitable habitat for large game animals . . . The latest evidence suggests that Salisbury Plain . . . never was entirely covered by dense woodland. However, numerous ‘pockmarks’ . . . do suggest the removal of hundreds of trees . . .’ The subsequent early Neolithic period up to and by no means beyond BC 3000 exhibits human activity on Salisbury Plain that is revolutionary in its British novelty. Within the 26-square-kilometre Stonehenge World Heritage Site lies the Stonehenge Cursus, exceeding 2 kilometres in length and one of the largest Neolithic monuments in Britain, and no less than four significant barrows.42 Stonehenge, however, is only a small, albeit dramatic, fragment of a surviving Neolithic landscape that covers Britain from Cornwall to the Orkney isles. The west coast and associated islands of Britain are particularly rich in evidence of Neolithic activity, expressing the relative attractiveness of life on the bountiful seaboard compared to the contemporary interior. This interconnected Stone Age landscape – conspicuous once recognized – includes ridgeways and holloways, henges (circular embankments enclosing spaces that rarely contain evidence of contemporary permanent occupation), circular and elongated burial mounds that often form significant landscape features, cursuses (parallel ditches and/or embankments, enclosed at either or both ends, sometimes several kilometres long), and standing stones. Mesolithic and Neolithic infrastructure has influenced the pattern of modern Britain as much as have coal seams, railways and the motorways. Archaeological evidence suggests technologically sophisticated societies living in Britain during the ten thousand years prior to the Roman occupation but little about how people thought – as groups or as individuals – how they organized themselves and how different groups interacted. At any time there is likely to have been a range of social and cultural organizations based on survival techniques that may have concentrated on a narrow way of life or, more likely, have involved a combination of activities determined by geography, by the seasons and by the interaction of groups, Joshua Pollard says that cursus monuments ‘. . . comprise parallel ditched earthworks with internal banks enclosing an area up to 100 metres wide and anything between 50 metres and 10 kilometres long . . . Around one hundred examples are known . . .’ Evidence of curcuses is confined to lowland Britain. Pollard also says that surviving earthen long barrows ‘. . . are visible today as large rectangular or trapezoidal mounds, 15-125 metres long and up to 4-5 metres high. Excavation has shown that the mounds frequently comprise the final stages of complex constructional sequences . . . many began as small embanked timber linear mortuary chambers . . . (that) might be covered by flint cairns . . . then sealed by long covering mounds, which extend well beyond the area of the chambers themselves.’ Significantly he continues: ‘The megalithic tombs of western and northern Britain form the counter-parts of the earthen long barrows of the south and east.’ Entombed themselves in earth, such monuments are superficially, to the untrained eye, similar to earthen long barrows. 42

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession closely or distantly related. Human societies are opportunistic, and the earliest postglacial hunting and (more commonly) gathering groups, more dexterous and quickwitted than ourselves, beginning to undertake agriculture and to take an interest in livestock, would not have allowed any opportunity to slip from their grasp. There are thousands of Stone Age sites across the British Isles, each having a unique story to be investigated and deduced. Machrie Moor, lying in a shallow valley on the west coast of the Scottish island of Arran, in the Firth of Clyde, is protected from the worst of the Atlantic weather by surrounding hills. Hazel groves colonized it ten thousand years ago as a post-glacial pioneer species, the nuts gathered as an important food source by Mesolithic gatherers. Beneath the peat, archaeologists have found small stone tools and artefacts – microliths – suggesting Neolithic settlement surely related to activities on the nearby raised beach of the seashore including the occupation of caves and the formation of mounds of discarded sea shells (‘middens’). Beneath the peat also, archaeologists have proved agricultural activity beginning around BC 3000 and continuing to about BC 700 when, in common with much of northwest Britain, a combination of soil exhaustion and a deteriorating climate caused the formation of heathland, an invasion of wet peat and the effective end of arable agriculture. Massive standing stones – megaliths – erected during this period attest to the importance of an area now shunned by farmers. Image 36: Megaliths, Machrie Moor, Arran, 2018

Finally, as we briefly focus on Stone Age Britain, some particularly interesting genetic information has recently (as I write) come to light, according to a paper published in the weekly scientific journal Nature (Olalde et al., 2018, ‘The Beaker phenomenon and the genomic transformation of north-west Europe’, Nature 555). The beaker phenomenon involves the appearance and rapid spread of bell-shaped beakers throughout Europe towards the end of Palaeolithic times. I quote from the review by Katheryn Krakowka: ‘More than 4,500 years ago, a hugely popular phenomenon – today known as the Bell Beaker Complex – captured the prehistoric imagination, flourishing across much of Europe. Archaeologists are still deliberating over how this Complex, first identified in the 19th century, developed so quickly and effectively. Now the largest DNA study to-date has shed revolutionary new light on the question, with surprising implications for our understanding of ancient populations – particularly that of Britain, which seems to have undergone an 61

Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession almost complete genetic turnover in just a few centuries.’ Conventional wisdom assumed that the manufacture and use of bell-shaped beakers spread rapidly throughout Neolithic Europe as a contagious idea. However, advances in analysis of ancient DNA from the remains of people who lived during the period of the bell beaker phenomenon – ca. BC 4700 to BC 800 – suggest that the peoples associated with the bell beaker, which was in universal use by about BC 2450, were not the same peoples as those who pre-dated the bell beaker. The DNA of 155 British individuals who lived during the transition period was analysed showing that the British pre-beaker genome was entirely replaced by the continental bell beaker genome: ‘After 2450 BC, when the Beaker Complex first arrived in the region, all sampled individuals from Britain show an abrupt change in the genome, with central European Bell Beaker-associated lineages suddenly accounting for the vast proportion of their overall ancestry. Over the next few hundred years, the proportion of the migrant DNA continued to vary slightly, indicating that some mixture with local Britons was ongoing – although it still accounted, on average, for at least 90% of ancestry. But by the end of the Beaker period the population had completely homogenised, and it seems that the Neolithic peoples of Britain – the ones who built Stonehenge . . . – had all but disappeared.’ According to these results – assuming that they are correct and that the ancient samples represent the population at large – then the peoples who initiated the Bronze Age in Britain were different from the Neolithic peoples they replaced by no less than 80% of their genes, the transformation occurring over a few hundred years – perhaps only a dozen generations. Thus the question is invited: Why did the earlier population die out? And die out in such a short space of time? No one is yet willing to assert the answer! PASTORAL BRITAIN Whilst ‘Neolithic’, ‘Bronze Age’, ‘Iron Age’ and ‘Roman’ are the useful cultural tags in relation to technology, and are used to describe British history between BC 5000 and 500 AD, in relation to land use and the subsequent landscape, Pastoral Britain is no less appropriate. The dominant economic, social and environmental fact during three thousand years was the grazing of domesticated animals. This pastoral Britain had a low human population more evenly spread than today’s. The total was unlikely to have exceeded four million, even in the most prosperous Roman period – the first and second centuries AD – and otherwise varied between a half and two million. Human settlement was densest where desirable natural resources were most easily exploited and where the climate was the kindest. Abundant stocks of fish and birdlife, in addition to fertile soils, made the margins of wetlands – more extensive than in our own excessively drained times – and rivers, providing useful means of communication, especially attractive to human settlement. In contrast, windy, rocky, exposed highlands or cliff tops were no more favoured than they are today, although they were exploited for summer pasture.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Image 37: Nomadic Fulani cattle, Weppa Farm, Nigeria, 2005

There were few areas of complete wilderness in pastoral Britain. The entire landscape was exploited to the maximum degree that contemporary technology and numbers of people allowed. On all land permanently or seasonally dry, grazing was the dominant land use, as upon much of the dry uplands of Africa today. Where cattle and sheep flourish, the effects of their grazing dominate the view: everything edible grazed down, trees surviving only where protected by manmade or natural obstacles. In addition to cattle and sheep, the sight of which, the smell and sound of which, were constant, herds of pigs were driven through the woodlands, especially where oak was present, while in and about settlements they rooted around, from Iron Age times onwards, with the chickens and the house geese, the latter also collected as impressively large flocks. Herds of cattle were a status symbol: the number you owned indicating the amount of grazing land you controlled. Dowries were made up of animals, and young men were started off in life with animals, the number a father able to give dependent upon his wealth. Kings and paramount chiefs, both British and Anglo-Saxon, maintained herds containing hundreds of cattle, bred and selected to look alike. Romano-British landlords had a similar mentality. Like all stock-farming societies, both settled and nomadic, the farmers of this pastoral Britain raised stock numbers to the highest level possible, the absolute limit being winter grazing and the ability to produce and store fodder. For this reason, the greatest slaughter, for a variety of products in addition to food, was at the end of the summer. The great pagan festivals, marked by the sacrifice of animals and feasting, were therefore at the beginning of the winter. Given low population densities, stock farming is a good way to live, especially when supplemented by hunting and gathering, and by grain production around the home. Driving animals under a wide sky gives life a greater sense of freedom, however illusory, than plodding along with all the arduous work of arable farming. For this reason, the Romans – on villa estates – were only able to produce the large quantities of wheat required for export to other parts of the empire by using slave labour and

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession labour tied to the land in various onerous ways.43 But whilst Roman taxation structures coerced smaller wheat farmers, who would also be encouraged by high prices from time to time, a thriving export trade in British woollens and British hides to the continent made stock farming more attractive. In less peaceful times and in the less secure parts of Roman Britain, livestock was preferred because it can be driven out of danger while standing crops are abandoned to the enemy. No better way to humiliate your adversary than to steal or kill his animals.44 But in addition to war, disease also controlled livestock populations. Numbers would rise to some critically unsustainable level in relation to resources and prevailing climatic conditions only to crash under the pressure of disease. An especially cold winter or an unusually hot and dry summer made matters worse, and made war on your neighbours a necessary risk: a necessary thrill; a necessary evil. I do not want to give an impression of some sort of golden age when people roamed around the countryside enjoying an idyllic life. This is nonsense and although life was undoubtedly filled or at any rate punctuated with the joy of living, it was at best tough, enduring winter a test of endurance and faith in the future. In many ways pastoral British society was as organized and circumscribed as it is today. You were stuck within the boundaries, physical, political and traditional, that might oppress you and to resist was to challenge the foundation of society and thereby risk ostracization and even death. This is especially the case following the Beaker Complex revolution. For a start, as SE Winbolt noted eighty years ago (although it would now be more accurate to say gene rather than people): ‘The Beaker People . . . saw the New Stone Age out and the Bronze Age in.’ The transition from Stone Age to Bronze Age in Britain occurred about 4500 years ago (BC 2500).45 The Early Bronze Age was characterized by the continuing shaping A villa was the centre of activity for the local exploitation of resources, just as the later medieval manor house, and the big house of a large 18th or 19th century estate. 44 Herds of cattle were also used to trample down an adversary’s standing crops. 45 The use of ‘Bronze Age’ as an historic tag is valid describing a period when the metal alloy was produced, becoming the predominant metal for the manufacture of artefacts both decorative and useful. However, the tag popularly suggests a time when every European community was madly making the metal, converting it into weapons, pots and ornaments, having discarded stone and not yet discovered the more useful if less decorative iron. This is wrong: manufacture was focused on the centre of innovation, beyond which the metal and its artefacts were made familiar by trading. Centres of secondary manufacture arose where political conditions were favourable. From the secondary locations bronze items spread by trade and as spoils of war and theft. Farther out, there existed communities that did not know and never would know about bronze because they were too far away in time and space for bronze, in any form, to become familiar. In Britain, when the ‘Iron Age’ was thriving in the southeast (about the time Julius Caesar was showing an interest in the island), the North Atlantic part of Britain was only just beginning to acknowledge the Bronze Age, although irontipped spears were so manifestly superior in killing to anything else that their use outran the general use of any other metal. (When I first went to the Wahgi Valley in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea in 1980 and climbed the hills into the mountains, I met an old man who had witnessed the entry of Europeans in the 1930s. I asked him how his life had changed. Without hesitation, he said that everyone chucked away their stone axe heads – he gestured chucking something over his shoulder – and took to steel axes, willing, he implied, to do anything to get hold of the wretched item.) The human response to bronze metal technology, in Britain as elsewhere, was not a response to ecological conditions but a unique 43

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession of the landscape to levels of increasing grandeur, monuments dominating open grasslands of plain and plateau. A time when, for a thousand years or so, a warmer British climate enabled settlement and tree growth at altitudes not since attained. As HH Lamb describes: ‘During the third millennium BC late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age people occupied sites . . . on the 600-800 m high plateau of the Pennines . . . This occupation seems to have ended when it was overtaken by peat formation in the succeeding millennium.’ (Peat formation is the result of wetter, cooler weather coupled with a exhaustion of the soil as described later.) It was the period when Stonehenge was made its most magnificent with the erection of the outer (conceivably incomplete) sarsen circle with its curved lintels and the famous inner ‘horseshoe’ of trilithons, the great uprights carrying their massive rectangular lintels containing the second circle of bluestones carried all the way from the Preseli Hills of North Wales.46 Image 38: Stonehenge in 1920

phenomenon that arose in one place (and might, like steel axes in the PNG Highlands, have come from outer space) and spread fast because of its manifest usefulness. The grazing of animals by H. sapiens, on the other hand, arose throughout the Northern Hemisphere and at about the same time, in response to suitable ecological conditions. Human ingenuity, one could say, plus natural grasslands plus grazing animals was bound to innovate a pastoral society. 46 Sarsen stones are hard silicate sandstone blocks found on Salisbury Plain. A trilithon is a structure of two upright stones supporting a horizonal third – from the Greek, ‘having three stones’. Most of the Stonehenge stones are sandstone. The Preseli bluestones are igneous.

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The British landscape was, by the beginning of the Bronze Age, becoming a seamless matrix that enmeshed a common British culture but it was also a time when, with monuments like Stonehenge, the monumental approach to the landscape reached a climax. Thereafter, the more pragmatic Beaker Complex intelligence (that might be interpreted as some sort of political deviousness, a lunacy hitherto unfamiliar to Britain) ushered in what archaeologists call the Middle Bronze Age, characterized – in addition to metal – by a more subtle but no less revolutionary landscape dedicated more to economic imperatives than to religion. The Early Bronze Age British landscape suggested highly sophisticated agricultural and social control systems. Before I describe the Middle Bronze Age landscape in more detail, two issues need to be understood. The first is the dates used by archaeologists: • • • •

Early Bronze Age Middle Bronze Age Late Bronze Age Iron Age

BC 2000-1500 BC 1500-1000 BC 1000-700 BC 700-1

Dates necessarily approximate in time and space but a necessary mental anchor for navigating what is, from a 21st century British perspective, a confusingly extended prehistoric period of thousands of years; no First World War, Battle of Hastings or Alfred burning the cakes to define the illusive nature of time. The name tag Bronze Age is significant inasmuch as it defines the introduction of metals into humanity’s practical life but more importantly the availability of metals changed people’s psychological attitude towards the material world: a cutting edge more subtle but less intimate than stone, and an agricultural tool more efficient than wood, but, above all, a more malleable material able to interpret, as decoration, the intricate workings of the human mind. More prosaically, the ‘Middle Bronze Age’, as I am about to explain, usefully labels a period when the Beaker Complex intelligence, having perhaps devised the processing of metals, organized, or rather reorganized, society upon the basis, it seems, of landed property and the practical management of agriculture in a process that was intimately and necessarily feudal, as defined in Part II of Landscape, Wealth and Dispossession. This reality is manifested in the appearance of the field systems, as sophisticated as any in agricultural history, that define, as much as anything else, the Middle Bronze Age in Britain. The second issue around which we need to get our heads is the nature of the pastoral landscape of Bronze Age (and subsequent Iron Age and Romano-British) Britain, which was not, in fact, different from the nature of all pastoral landscapes. Agricultural land was used for three purposes: arable farming, intense livestock management and, most significantly, the extensive ‘free’ grazing of livestock across the entire landscape under a variety of proprietorial and management systems subject only to ecological limitations already described, and to spatial and seasonal limitations set by arable farming. Whilst arable farming did not dominate the wider landscape, it was most likely to have been the most important social and economic activity of the Middle Bronze Age. The production of grains and pulses required complicated management

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession (nonetheless coming naturally to members of an agricultural society), involving cultivation, weeding and the exclusion of livestock and wildlife, not least birds capable of devastating crops. Also, and most importantly, soil management, which included (as it still does!) rotation (of crops and land), the various strategies to mitigate the tribulations caused by drought, heavy rainfall, poor drainage or excessive drainage, and the maintenance of good structure and fertility most importantly by manuring but also by the applications of marl (clay) on lighter land and calcium. The indicator of success, no less than today, was unit return for unit input. At best a unit of Bronze Age wheat seed produced, on average, two units of useful grain, half of which had to be retained for next year’s seed. Arable failure was a disaster but one relieved by the products of a benevolent ecosystem not overburdened by its component human population, and by a variety of food preservation and storage technologies enabled by a settled way of life. Nonetheless, although Bronze Age population densities were very low by modern standards – not more than a million people in Britain, perhaps half that amount, at the beginning of the Iron Age – the contemporary agricultural technology made for intensive competition for the best arable land. Such competition made its mark on the landscape and it is reasonable to assume an associated robustly structured society necessary for food security. Bronze Age arable farming was a serious business but in the end it was spatially limited to what was required to supply a small population with products that could not be obtained from livestock either wild or domestic, mostly food but also non-food products such as fibres, medicines and dyes. Therefore whilst arable farming, including processing and storage, occupied – I guess – about a third of Bronze Age human effort, and accounted for the same proportion of the economy, its impact upon the landscape was nowhere near as proportionate. The area, say, of medieval Surrey possibly contained 10,000 people in the Middle Bronze Age, who arable farmed, at any one time, no more than 10,000 acres making up about 5% of the area. Occupying a similar area was the intensive management of livestock: paddocks, drove roads, stock yards and associated infrastructure including simple but sturdy buildings such as sheepcotes. Finally, extensive grazing, regardless of technological, proprietorial and social management, covered all the landscape where grazing was possible; in Bronze Age Surrey, for instance, no less than 50% of the area. This was certainly the case for the Middle Bronze Age where, as I have already explained, extensive grazing, regardless of its economic importance, dominated a landscape within which arable farming was seasonally inserted on land, the fertility of which was maintained by the manure from livestock and by fallowing. Pastoralism became more the defining feature of the landscape as improved agricultural technology allowed the heavier lowland soils to be cultivated, incidentally allowing the lighter upland soils of southern Britain to be left to grass. This pastoral aspect was the reality of the British landscape until the 1740s and in rural areas until the drive to increase the national arable production in the 1940s. But returning to the prehistoric pre-Roman landscape, the extent of the open savannah-type landscape reached its apotheosis in the Early Bronze Age. Thereafter, a settled and increasingly organized society, in which the economic imperative became, if not paramount, then ascendant, wealth understood as the

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession foundation of political power, began to create a matrix that enabled the union of Britain within a common culture and economy. A union, one may imagine, of a common idea of cultural identity only fractured by the profoundly disturbing Roman invasion and settlement of what was to become England. Box 5: Nomadic herders and settled farmers A third issue interests me but into which I will not delve here because it is supposition on my part and not backed up by any British archaeological evidence of which I am aware. This is the issue of nomadic herders existing side by side with settled agriculturalists but living in different ways while cooperating in the use of resources, or else competing for them. Each group belonging to different cultures and, no less likely, to different genetic groups, as is the case throughout human history and in parts of the world today (Fulani herders and Hausa farmers in northern Nigeria). It is unlikely that this was not the case particularly in upland, northwest Britain where it would have been feasible for nomadic herders to continue an older way of life while farmers settled in the valleys below. Who, after all, were the Pennine Brigantes, and how did they live? Such nomadic groups would have eventually lost out to settled farmers: farmers sit where they are, fighting to the death if threatened or else moving on to stubbornly sit somewhere else. As boundaries and fences multiply so the nomadic herders (and hunters and gatherers) must conform, accept confinement in some sort of reserve, accept massacre (having failed to massacre the settling farmers who are only replaced by others no less determined to survive), or else disappear.

The Early Bronze Age culture enlarged, with the availability of metal, upon the Neolithic, but the Middle Bronze Age is notable for, and to a great extent defined by, its apparent rejection of the monumental, religious landscape, tending to use its features only as useful landmarks for new boundaries. As a whole, the Bronze Age was a time when social infrastructure became an increasingly significant feature of the British pastoral landscape. As the centuries passed so human activity etched patterns deeply into the surface geology of the island: ridgeways and holloways; hillforts and enduring settlements, the remains of which often show evidence of textile production; the mining of metal ores. More subtly, coasts and river were adapted for useful exploitation of wetland resources and transport. The intensive nature of Bronze Age agriculture made an ecological impact upon the landscape in the usual ways by altering the dynamic inter-relationship of soil, vegetation and animals. David Thomas Yates says that archaeological evidence in the Weald, for instance, suggests significant woodland clearance: ‘. . . during the late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, with settlement . . . retreating as the soils became exhausted.’ Thus, conceivably, encouraging: ‘. . . significant woodland clearance around the River Arun during the Later Bronze Age (involving the) felling of lime trees . . .’ . . . and the evolution of heathland during the Middle to Late Bronze Age. Bronze Age farming particularly degraded the ecosystem in the uplands, inducing the proliferation of sphagnum mosses, podzolization and peat formation, and, on the lighter soils of the calcareous scarplands, accelerated eluviation and illuviation, in other words soil erosion. Yates again: ‘On the chalklands . . . the defining features are ‘lynchets’. . . consisting of soil which has crept downhill under the influence of repeated ploughing and slopewash, accumulating at the lower edges of each field. . . The result often resembles a kind of terracing . . .’ 68

Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession BRONZE AGE FIELD SYSTEMS A most significant shaping of the landscape that began to emerge in the Middle Bronze Age was the field systems that are erroneously called ‘Celtic fields’. Archaeological evidence suggests that by the end of the Middle Bronze Age, sophisticated field systems covered most of the best agricultural land in Britain south of the Cotswolds and extending into the southern part of Norfolk. Except for a few isolated examples (for instance near the Humber estuary in north Lincolnshire), which seem to prove the rule, there is no evidence of field systems further north; nothing has been found in the Trent valley or in Yorkshire and certainly not in upland northwest Britain. Moreover, these field systems seem to have fallen into disuse at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age when there was what archaeologists call ‘the hiatus’ after which field boundaries again become a feature in the landscape at the beginning of the Iron Age largely ignoring their Bronze Age precursors.47 The Iron Age boundaries covered larger areas to include more indifferent agricultural land, and emerged further north, continuing to be developed into the Roman period. A sense of the time scale over which these fields were set out, altered, obliterated and then replaced earlier systems can be understood from the fact that they became enmeshed in the superficial geology. Yates says: ‘Lowland prehistoric . . . fields in Southern England exhibit a repetitive stratification. Hidden by hill- or river-wash or backfill, the first formal Bronze Age land blocks are invariably succeeded by a later phase of Late Iron Age / Romano-British fields. . .’ As Yates points out again and again, Bronze Age fields were confined not only to the south of what is now England but also to the very best agricultural land: ‘Much of Southern England was not enclosed by such land allotments and in the lowlands regimented land divisions are restricted to distinct enclaves or clusters commonly found on the coast, in estuaries or along major rivers and their tributaries. Some of these regions seem to have been used so intensively that Bronze Age land divisions extend into adjacent areas with heavier, poorer soils.’ Referring to the valley of the River Stour in Suffolk, he points out that the location of the fields presents stimulating agricultural conditions with well-drained soils based on glacial sands and gravels with plenty of fresh water, and a good transport route (the river) giving access to the wider world. Significantly, also, such good agricultural locations experienced a climate that was, and still is, warmer than places with similar soils and water supply further north, say on the Northumberland plain or in Nithsdale (Dumfries and Galloway). It is notable that the field systems described in Yates’s

A ‘hiatus’ is a break in the continuity of a series or process or activity in time and/or space. An historic hiatus is often caused by revolution or war or natural disaster. Often the continuation of the activity after the hiatus is in a form different from that which was before. There was a hiatus in monarchical government in France between the abolition of the monarchy in 1792 and, depending on the interpretation of history, Napoleon Bonaparte’s ‘election’ as First Consul of France in 1799, his coronation as emperor in 1804 or the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1815. 47

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession book mostly fall within the area of the highest mean annual British temperatures (Figure 4). Moreover, areas of potentially good soils and locations in river valleys further north and west experience higher rainfall and hydrological regimes more prone to flooding. The Trent Valley, for instance, will have been not much less prone to flooding in the Middle Bronze Age than it is today with periodic high volumes of water coming off the Pennines degraded somewhat by Early Bronze Age farming (Figure 4). Referring to the country along the River Cam in East Anglia, Yates says that: ‘Settlement and managed lands did gravitate to the islands of gravel terraces along the rivercourse, tending to avoid clay lands.’ Bronze Age fields were not anarchic conglomerations of boundaries budding out pragmatically and organically as farmers decided they needed another paddock or wanted to enclose additional bits of land. Rather they were formal grids having all the appearance of being planned and laid out on a large scale in order not only to control the economic use of the land but also to control the people who worked it. Some grids seem to have been laid out all at one time while others show a slower rate of development nonetheless according to a regular design: Yates says, again (and I couldn’t describe things any better) that the field boundaries both Bronze Age and later Iron Age / Roman are: ‘. . . distinctly rectilinear creating a grid of fields. They may be ‘coaxial’ or ‘aggregate’ in layout. A ‘coaxial’ field system has one prevailing orientation. Most field boundaries follow this axis . . . or run at right angles to it. . . The size of coaxial systems and their inflexibility tends to make them terrain oblivious. . . They take no account of existing land division, nor do they normally take account of established monuments in their path. . . Integrated ‘droveways’, marked by paired division or other divisions, may be incorporated to ensure controlled movement through the Later Bronze Age field systems. . . The most striking feature of the coaxial systems is their size . . . the two largest Dartmoor systems each cover over 3,000 ha and commercial work around Heathrow airport suggests land appropriation extending to 5-15,000 ha. Such earthworks cover much of Salisbury Plain Training area. . . There appear to be two major phases of prehistoric coaxial landscaping; the Later Bronze Age and Late Iron Age / Romano-British era. Rectilinear fields where one layout axis is not dominant over the other, are referred to as ‘aggregate’ field systems. Field blocks were clearly added to one another on a piecemeal basis rather than in adherence to one plan.’ Yates’s illuminating book, ‘Land, Power and Prestige, Bronze Age Field Systems in Southern England’, which represents decades of work, brings together archaeological research on the subject covering the last fifty years. It convincingly presents a picture (referring in this case to the Thames Estuary) of: ‘. . . considerable agricultural activity from at least the middle of the second millennium BC with indications of intensified clearance and land reform during the late Bronze Age . . .’

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Agricultural activity, as Yates also persuasively presents, of a pastoral nature, livestock farming the preoccupation of the Bronze Age and no less the case of the Iron Age at any rate up to the Roman intervention. All the same, taking into account the necessity of arable farming, the Bronze Age field systems south of the CotswoldsWash line would undoubtedly have been used in a sophisticated way in order to maximize the unit production of grain, meat, milk and wool, and to ensure the intimate control of producing and rearing young stock. The concentrated deposition of manure in a well-drained paddock is a sure way of growing a subsequent high-yielding grain crop, livestock returned to graze on the stubble. And as Yates further highlights in his discussion of the River Welland, which flows into the Fens from the northern limits of the limestone scarp (Figure 4): ‘. . . downstream from Stamford . . . as it approaches the Fen Edge there is increasing evidence of Later Bronze Age settlement and land divisions. . . in terms of planned space the Bronze Age field system has a greater regularity of space and size than may be found from any comparable situation until the Parliamentary enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries . . .’ There can be no doubt about the pastoral nature of much of the British landscape during the prehistoric period and, moreover, the firm archaeological evidence for sophisticated agricultural systems developing soon after the Stone Age agricultural revolution that defines the Neolithic. However, two intriguing questions remain to be considered. I will present them here but only briefly conceive my answers for the time being: 3.3.1

Why is there no, or at any rate little, evidence of Bronze Age field systems further north? The field systems do not occur further north because human settlement pressure occurred, as it always has done, in the southeast of Britain, for the geographical reasons already described. This pressure, this desire to live in areas that, in addition to being more easy and comfortable, gave the best agricultural yields for the human effort applied, caused intense competition for the best land. Competition in turn stimulated innovative agricultural systems including the use of paddocks that have always been necessary for the best livestock management. Inevitable then that the social competition for economic advantage gave rise to political power systems based on some sort of landlord-tenant relationship involving parcelling out land for which ‘rent’ was paid in the form of shares of production and services including military service. Important in this respect not to forget that the Bronze Age and the Iron Age landscapes were not only defined by ostensibly peaceful agriculture but also by extensive military infrastructure. The three-thousand-year-old Maiden Castle on the chalk downs of south Dorset has a history reaching back to the Neolithic subsequently developing over the following millennia to become an Iron Age fort covering 47 hectares. Countless prominent hills throughout Britain display evidence of prehistoric hill forts. Many less strategic but nonetheless defensible locations possess the remains of earthworks suggesting places of refuge.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession 3.3.2

Why was there an apparent ‘hiatus’ in the development of Bronze Age field systems followed by the subsequent replacement of them by larger Iron Age fields? The ‘hiatus’ itself suggests that the large Iron Age fields were not an evolution of the smaller, more precisely located Middle Bronze Age fields. Yates refers to an abandonment of fields in the Blackwater estuary (Essex) towards the end of the Bronze Age soon after a time when, it seems, exceptional pressure on land caused additional exploitation of the adjacent ‘heavier clay lands’. Then, as Yates further suggests, referring to the North Sea coast of England: ‘Following abandonment in the Late Bronze Age. . . there are signs of social change . . .’ Having already declared that, starting in the Midlands: ‘. . . and extending north of the Wash a different pattern of land tenure dominates . . . the 1st millennium BC – a practice of enclosing large tracts of land with linear boundaries . . . In Yorkshire they are part of a system of enclosed territories, not fields.’ Sometime around BC 1000 to BC 500 British society changed quite radically, apparently shifting its focus away from the more intimate agriculture suggested by the Middle Bronze Age fields. Larger but no-less-considered boundaries appear in a way that may have already been the tradition in the more northerly parts of Britain. One scenario that springs to my mind is – as has been the case for much of British history – a subtlety of difference between ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ Britain: complementary rather than confrontational cultures based on the northwestsouthwest (upland-lowland) divide, the former a tougher, less comfortable, but perhaps freer culture compared with the latter’s richer, more comfortable, but perhaps more restricted culture. Such a characterization of the relationship is simplistic because it ignores all sorts of other socio-geographical realities such as, for instance, the tough realities faced by maritime communities all around the British coast, the likely toughness and independence of isolated groups living on the uplands of the south (like the Cotswolds) and in the extreme wetlands (like the Wash), and the economic, cultural and above all genetic interdependence of all the various groups of British people. All the same, the communities associated with the Middle Bronze Age (largely coastal and riverine) southern field systems will have been especially comfortably rich and socially sophisticated, using their wealth to economically exploit their poorer neighbours. Moreover – conceivably – the economic success of these groups caused unsustainably high population densities (given the economic fragility of comparatively primitive agricultural societies) making them not only more susceptible to ill-health and natural disasters such as drought and flood, but also emboldening them to confront their neighbours for alternative resources. In other words, to initiate war that was bound to have been, at some point in time and place, unsuccessful. Moreover, the comparative wealth of the field system people will have excited the envy of their ‘upland’ neighbours who were only too ready to go to war or at any rate undertake raids on livestock (a characteristic of the later history of the border country between Scotland and England).

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession ESTATES In any event, by the beginning of the Iron Age, the ‘uplanders’ were defining, with boundary ditches, earthworks and stone walls, expansive feudal estates, as are defined in Part II of Landscape, Wealth and Dispossession. These estates covered large areas that sometimes evolved into chieftaincies and kingdoms, and in many cases endured through Roman occupation, Germanic and Scandinavian settlement and Norman Conquest to become, in Tudor times, only a few generations before the industrial revolution, parish boundaries. This process resulted in an estate landscape that dominated the British landscape until the end of the 19th century. Nonetheless, while ‘uplanders’ may have eventually overcome the ‘field system people’ such a political shift does not explain why the fields were abandoned. Possible of course that the Middle Bronze Age fields were part of a wider-ranging integrated agricultural system, the fields merely the ‘in-bye’ land of a large estate with a management system that integrated upland and lowland pastoral management.48 This is unlikely, however, because while the location of the fields was a key factor in their establishment (good communications along a safe coastline and/or a river) and while they were likely to have been integrated into a regional economic system the distance between, say the fields on the Blackwater estuary, and the nearest real upland grazing is huge in prehistoric terms and it could only be reached (but reached it could be) by the contemporary trackways feeding into the Icknield Way. And again, all the evidence of military activity in the landscape in addition to masses of Bronze Age and Iron Age weaponry, and the pugnaciousness of human nature suggests confrontation rather than cooperation. Possible reasons for abandonment include: a reduction of population pressure (caused by war, disease, famine and/or, even, emigration) rendering intensive agriculture unnecessary; and climatic change that either rendered the field locations inoperable or made other areas more attractive. In respect of the latter, Lamb says that there was a decline in sea levels between BC 2000 and BC 500 by two metres and more. This would have exposed large areas of good agricultural land around Britain and nicely coincides with the abandonment of the Middle Bronze Age field systems. The flat lands of Holderness, for instance, were cultivated, Lamb says, during the first millennium BC. At the same time, northwestern Britain was becoming more wet due to the intensification of westerly winds, a declining tree line and Alpine glaciers advancing. This cooling climate had clearly reversed by the second century AD when Romano-British ports had either to be modified or left to the depredations of the sea, fen agriculture significantly curtailed. A great deal of conjecture on my part but what ought to come out loud and clear is a British landscape intensely agricultural and pastoral. Pastoral Britain justifiably describes the Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age and Romano-British periods.

In-bye land in Scotland and northern England is comparatively high-quality lowland pasture, within a large uplands estate, used for fattening and for lambing. Essential to the efficient management of upland pastures. 48

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession ENDURANCE OF THE PASTORAL LANDSCAPE As a last word on the pastoral nature of southern Britain, once the clay lowlands could be ploughed with the iron-tipped plough, woodland was even less of a feature in the medieval landscape where an increasingly dense human population took in every bit of land that might be grazed or ploughed, surviving trees lopped and chopped and managed for all the purposes for which wood was essential. Sherwood ‘Forest’ and the New ‘Forest’ in lowland England were not especially wooded but rather royal hunting preserves subject to draconian forest laws that can be traced back to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms probably having origins in Iron Age estates. Referring to Anglo-Saxon charters defining estates granted by the kings of Wessex in the 9th and 10th centuries, Margaret Gelling says: ‘It is not apparent from the records what the North Berkshire estates did for woodland. It is clear from the Blewbury and Uffington surveys quoted here that they had very little wood within their boundaries, though both were well provided with meadowland which would provide vital hay crops. Wood and meadow were both important – the latter essential – to subsistence farming, and a number of Anglo-Saxon land grants give the boundaries not only of the main estate but also of areas of wood and meadow situated at some distance.’

3.4

AND THE EVIDENCE ALSO LIES IN THE SOIL

The pastoral nature of Britain in the Bronze Age manifests the powerful ability of humanity to rapidly shape a landscape even where the human population density is low and technology limited. More subtle manipulation was going on beneath the surface especially where comparatively dense human populations began to cultivate the shallow eluvial and colluvial soils of the better-drained uplands and the illuvial soils on the gravel terraces of the river valleys, locations preferable to the ill-drained, heavy soil on the boulder-clay plains mostly underlain by clay formations. This was particularly the case during the wet Atlantic climatic period when Britain became an island. In any event, cultivation of the boulder-clay soils was not an option given ploughs that were barely able to scratch soil that was best cleared by burning, a process impractical on the more moist illuvial soils. The human impact upon soil formation is dramatically illustrated by Oliver Rackham in his History of the Countryside: ‘The eighteenth century discovery of Grimspound, the great Bronze Age village perched on the top of Dartmoor, began a long series of studies which have proved that most of what is now moorland was quite densely populated in prehistory. . . Cultivation did not last long: at such altitudes the soils become leached of their soluble minerals, the land became pasture and eventually was overrun by blanket bog, and the settlements moved downhill. . . The heyday was the Bronze Age and depression had set in by the Iron Age.’ This happened because in anaerobic conditions decomposition of organic matter is limited, say John and Walter Russell: ‘Although it can be confidently assumed that no organic plant or animal

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession constituent is completely resistant to decomposition under moist aerobic conditions, this assumption does not hold under anaerobic conditions. Lignin, in particular, is not attacked under anaerobic conditions and the partly humified organic debris described as peat can accumulate indefinitely, as long as conditions remain aerobic.’ Thus peat, which arises where the decomposition of organic debris into humus – the vital component of stable and fertile soil – is arrested due to the lack of soil oxygen caused by waterlogging. The peat soils of the wet moorlands and blanket moors that dominate the wettest upland areas of Britain are formed by Sphagnum moss. And, as described in the previous chapter (2.11), Sphagnum absorbs and stores prodigious amounts of water in its living and dead cells, and therefore keeps growing until it blankets entire upland landscapes. In northwest England, such bogs are called mosses (hence, Moss Side in Manchester). Blanket bogs, such as that which covers the Dartmoor plateau, form in a way similar to raised bogs. Indeed, a raised bog may be the origin of a blanket bog. Significantly, however, while raised bogs have natural foundations, which are fenfilled temporary post-glacial lakes, blanket bogs were initiated by agriculture.49 As Rackham indicates, the high altitudes of Dartmoor together with the high rainfall and the humid climate of the far southwest Britain forms wet moorland and blanket bog. Great stretches of heath, moor and bog are typical British landscapes; dry lowland heaths concentrated in southeast Britain, wet upland moors in the northeast. But wild and free as these landscapes seem, they are as man-made as any garden, park or farm. Heaths and moors are degraded ecosystems maintained as open country by grazing and fire. They were initiated by the clearance of post-glacial woodland by grazing or for arable farming. The inherently poor soils thereby lost whatever fertility they had while significant nutrient recycling ceased as soon as the trees were gone. As already suggested, in those areas of post-glacial Britain most accessible and climatically favourable to humanity, woodland never got a significant foothold before hunting and grazing discouraged trees; this particularly occurred in the drier parts of southeast Britain where grazing and deliberate burning to rejuvenate the herbage continues in some areas to this day. Degradation of many upland moors is so total that trees will not establish below the tree line without the help of drainage and fertilizers, but in favourable conditions and especially on the lowland heaths, open Callunetum (Box 6 below) and grass-land is rapidly colonized by trees and shrubs once the agricultural hand is removed.50

A lake is by nature a temporary geological phenomenon, a depression, which fills with water as will any depression. But it will not necessarily become a peat bog. Pure peat formation – mostly in wetter, cooler conditions like those found in northern Europe – generally occurs on plains and plateaus where runoff from surrounding higher ground is limited. Contrarily, a lake set amongst steep hills contains products of erosion from the surrounding country, which dominate deposition material. As country opens up to agriculture deposition rates will increase so that any more-naturally establishing peat-producing fen may be overwhelmed with silt. 50 Periodic burning, incidentally, is essential on upland moors, where trees will not grow, in order to ensure that dead matter does not build up to such a degree that when an accidental 49

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Box 6: The vegetation of British heath, moor and bog Heather is the characteristic vegetation, the most common plant being the pink-and-purpleflowered Calluna vulgaris, known as ling; it is so common that heaths and moors may be referred to as ‘calluneta’. Calluneta are dominated by the acid loving erica family (Ericaceae), mainly shrubby plants including calluna. Other common heathers, which create the great swathes of colour in late summer, include Ericacinerea, the purple bell heather, and the southern heather Ericaciliaris. Another erica, common to the higher and rockier British moors, is bilberry, Vaccinium myrtillus. On the exposed rocks themselves, grow the lichens, a symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae. In slightly better-drained conditions both on the uplands and the lowlands, members of the Gramineae family (grasses) tend to dominate the local ecosystems. The most significant genus in these conditions is Molinia (hence ‘Molinietum or Molinieta’) of which the purple moor grass is the most common representative. Lowland heaths often have patches dominated by common wasteland grasses such as common bent (Agrostistenuis), sheep’s fescue (Festucaovina) and wavy hair grass (Deschampsiaflexuosa). Where conditions are permanently wet or subject to periodic severe flooding, sedges and rushes (Cyperaceae) dominate, including the ubiquitous Cotton grass. (Most of the botanical names come from Rev William Keble Martin.) All the same, local moorland and heathland ecosystems are just as likely to be a complex mosaic of plant communities. So that, for instance, low-quality grazing land may contain a mixture of grasses and sedges, while Una Sutcliffe can say of Wimbledon Common in Southwest London: ‘It is unrealistic to separate the grassland from the heather (Calluna vulgaris) heath, for in many areas they merge. In some places heather is to be found in small patches amongst the grass . . .’ And AG Tansley can say of the South Pennine moorlands that: ‘. . . the Molinieta are nearly pure, many stretches showing no other species, except a few liverworts and algae. Where other species do occur, they are mostly peat plants. The most constant associate here . . . is wavy hair-grass; bilberry is frequent, and while the common cotton-grass, and more rarely the narrow leaved cotton-grass, occur in the wetter, common heather or ling is abundant in the drier places when Molinia is dominant.’ Image 39: On The Roaches, Leek, Staffordshire, 2017

Where Bronze Age communities settled upland areas (the Pentland Hills, the South Downs or Dartmoor), the highest land was used for pasture while the lower slopes were stock paddocks and arable land. In either case, trees disappeared, utility wood being fetched from the adjacent lowlands. Without the trees, nutrients were leached

fire does start in a dry summer it becomes so intense as to not only incinerate the ‘calluneta’ but also ignite the inherently combustible underlying peat.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession out of the soils which were thereby made more acid; on the cultivated slopes soil tended to be washed downhill. This was an accelerating process as soil structure degraded with the decline of organic matter and the associated humus. Moreover, on the level ground of the plateau, the leached minerals collected as a hard pan at lower depths thereby impeding drainage and causing waterlogging. At the beginning of the British Iron Age, the uplands were abandoned, not only because the soils were degraded but also because of the wetter and cooler climate. Heather colonized the wet upland soils making them even more acid and peat began to build up in the wet acid conditions ideal also for infection by Sphagnum spores causing the rapid expansion of blanket bog. The Romans improved agricultural technology and had already influenced southeast Britain from Gaul a century before the invasion of 43AD. Drainage and better plough design opened up more of the lowlands for agriculture during the first millennium AD reducing pressure on the wet uplands while the intensive grazing of sheep and cattle was concentrated on the drier calcareous uplands of southern and eastern Britain (although grazing was taken where ever it could be got). The British blanket bogs probably reached their maximum extent in the 11th century and would have continued to expand to their ecological limits had not the population explosion of the 13th and early 14th centuries initiated their exploitation for fuel. This was the case in densely populated medieval East Anglia where fen peat was dug to create the Norfolk Broads. Box 7: Waves of change The cultural evolution of the landscape, including the evolution of the moorlands and heaths, did not happen simultaneously all over Britain. There were, as there still are, albeit to a lesser degree, waves of change. Before the Roman invasion of Gaul, agricultural technology – all technology – was generally most advanced in the southwest of Britain – Cornwall, Devon and southwest Wales – because trade routes from the Mediterranean hugged the Atlantic coast of Europe: Iberia, Brittany and towards the safety of the Irish Sea. Invasion routes also; hence the importance of Grimspound’s defensible location on the far southwest of Britain. After the Romans opened up Gaul, technological advances, and invasions, started in the southeast of Britain and it is therefore no coincidence that Kent was the first and most advanced of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

An interesting degraded raised bog lies between Windlesham and Lightwater in Surrey in an extensive area of lowland heaths based on the geological formation called the Bagshot Sands which cover over 500 square kilometres between Windsor Castle (sitting on top of a chalk buff into which the Thames has eroded an easily defended cliff) and Aldershot to the south.51 The original raised bog was based on the wetland of the Windle Brook which would have opened out as a lake in the immediate poorly drained post-glacial times. Once formed, the bog itself would have dammed the brook making the site wetter and diverting streams of water around the The Bagshot Sands sub-region nicely exhibits the modern uses to which heaths are put: in the eighteenth century, it was a treeless wilderness but the proximity of London made it a place where the rich built themselves country houses surrounded by parks planted with Rhododendrons and Scots pines that eventually seeded most of west Surrey and the adjacent parts of Berkshire and Hampshire. The coming of the railways encouraged middle-class housing and military training on the well-drained land that had little agricultural value. Today, despite intensive suburbanization, the area is one of the most wooded in southeast England. A significant proportion of the area supplies recreation for the London conurbation of which it is a part. 51

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession edges of the little Windle Valley. The extent of the peat shows up beautifully on the British Geological Survey map of 1910, which shows the area as open heath. Today, the M3 motorway runs through the valley, a housing estate now occupying the southern portion. Keeping in mind that a moor is an upland heath and a heath is a lowland moor, and what they have in common is the presence of Calluneta, a significant feature of their make-up is Podzolic soils, formed by the leaching of nutrients through light, unprotected soils.52This process is especially the case where organic matter content – including the vital humus – is low. As already mentioned, such conditions are sometimes found on upland plateaus but podzolic soils are particularly characteristic of dry lowland heaths where the soil parent material is sand or gravel. Unlike peat, podzolic soils are determined by a well-drained aerobic environment. But like peat, they form in and are generated by acid conditions. In common with all aerobic soils humus is present, but because of the excessively drained nature of the sandy structure and the low-clay constitution of podzolic soils, humus, nutrients and clay are leached down the soil profile to form an enriched hard pan layer which restricts root penetration and which perversely may impede drainage and therefore initiate peat formation. This process is encouraged by acidifying and acid-loving plants such as heather and pine trees. Podzolic soils are common throughout Britain but they are especially characteristic of the sandy heaths of southern and eastern England; the typical podzolic profile exhibits a thin organic layer of decaying plant material incorporating humus overlying a deep ash-grey layer of fine sand from which all nutrients have been leached. Below this layer and above the subsoil collect the products of leaching including organic matter, clay, and iron and aluminium hydroxides thereby forming the hard pan.53 Podzol soils are the result of man’s exploitation of the land and began to form no later than in Neolithic times. Invasion by acid-loving and acid-inducing heather and by acid-tolerating grasses was rapid. The removal of heather for fuel, as trees became scarce, further depleted nutrients.54

In Britain, soils are classified according to agricultural utility. This recognizes that there is not a ‘podzol’ soil but rather a ‘podzolization’ process and I have therefore used the term podzolic soil rather than podzols. Modern soil science was born in Russia in the 19 th century and therefore it is not surprising that podzol is a Russian word meaning under (pod) ash (zol). 53 ‘. . . in essence, therefore, the podsolization process involves the translocation of organic compounds, aluminium and iron.’ According to Mokma and Buurman quoted in ‘Russell’ podzolization follows the sequence: 1. Accumulation of organic matter in and on the topsoil. 2. Leaching and progressive acidification. 3. Weathering. 4. Translocation of organic compounds, aluminium and iron in some form of organomineral complex in the B horizon. 5. Cementation of the B horizon. The ‘B horizon’ is the ‘pan’. 54 Oliver Rackham. 52

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Image 40: Heath on terrace gravel, Wimbledon Common, London Basin, January 2004

Despite the establishment of extensive tree plantations, moorland and heath dominate the landscape of upland Britain and is a significant feature of the English lowlands. The 2007 Countryside Survey of the Centre for Ecological Hydrology estimates the proportion of moorland, heath and associated acid grassland in Britain as follows: Table 2: Proportion of moorland and heath As % of Land Area England Bracken 0.7 Dwarf scrub heath 2.5 Bog 1.1 Fen, marsh and swamp 0.9 Inland Rock and montane Negligible Sub 5.2 Acid grassland 3.0 8.2

Scotland 1.6 11.1 25.6 3.0 Negligible 41.3 12.3 53.6

Wales 1.8 5.5 2.3 1.7 Negligible 11.3 9.9 21.2

Image 41: Moorland, Edale looking towards Stanage Edge, Derbyshire, 2016

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession British moorland and heath can be categorized as four types according to wetness: Table 3: Moorland and heathland according to wetness UPLAND LOWLAND DRY Moor Heath Thin soils due to altitude & slope. Forms on sand and gravel. Acid conditions caused by underlying Acid conditions formed by rocks or by excessive drainage even on excessive drainage & limestone. podzolization. Human fire and grazing. Human fire and grazing. Maintained by grazing, fire & wind. Maintained by grazing & fire, and by coastal winds. WET Bog or moss Peat formation resulting from impermeable and wet conditions in valleys, depressions on a plain or plateau conducive to the growth of Sphagnum moss resulting in:Raised bogs; and Blanket bogs which are generally confined to the wet western side of Britain. WET Fens In conditions where water is impeded permanently or intermittently causing flooding and where peat is being formed.

I have described the moorland and heathland soils of Britain because they make a good example of the power of humanity, using simple tools, fire and grazing to significantly transform, within a very short historic time, that component of the landscape, soil, which is the interface between lifeless geology and life itself. Such soils happen to make up a large proportion of British soils. Economically, however, these soils are not as significant as the brown woodland soils that evolved under the deciduous woodland where waterlogging did not naturally occur. The clearing of the woodland and the establishment of agriculture no less transformed these soils where the maintenance of fertility depended on their physical composition – critical proportions of clay, sand and silt – and increasingly sophisticated management using crop and grazing rotations, additions of manure and of minerals as required (clay, sand and calcium, for instance, depending on the inherent composition of the soil), a variety of cultivation techniques and, in recent times, chemical fertilizers.55 Image 42: Molinia grasslands, Edale, Derbyshire, 2014

Marl pits are a common archaeological feature of the boulder clay landscape, incidental concentrations of calcium and clay having been dug out to spread on the surrounding fields, thereby creating pits that often filled with water to become ponds. 55

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3.5

THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE56

Early Saxon settlements were made up of small isolated aggregations of fields that were the exception in a landscape still predominantly pastoral. Dykes, banks and ditches were dug, hedges planted, stone walls built and wooden palisades erected to exclude free-roaming domestic animals from other less extensive but essential land uses including woodlots and game parks. Temporary arable land was defined by hurdles made of willow and hazel switches. Other permanent boundaries were required to define territory where there were insufficient existing boundaries such as rivers, ridge tops, thorn trees, ancient ditches and Roman roads. The progression towards a more settled, less pastoral, way of life that came with the sustainable establishment of Anglo-Saxon culture across lowland Britain – from the Lothians to the Cornish border and hard up against the Welsh massif – was stimulated by Danish settlement on the eastern side of Britain during the 10th and 11th centuries, often enclosing what had been British open pasture for millennia. Image 43: Edale, Derbyshire, 2014

Showing curvaceous and wooded field boundaries that may be enclosures taken out of a premodern open landscape before the later wholesale enclosures of more modern times, suggested by the straighter stone walls: three enclosures just above the railway line running through the centre of the picture, and a yellow oilseed rape field, below, left.

If economics describes the necessary organization of the efficient exploitation of resources for human survival, then politics is a process arising from the vileness of human nature by which the elite ensures that society develops along lines that direct economic benefits to itself (leaving productive labour, domestic and retail servants, and military fodder with just a sufficiency for survival). The elite uses the resources it has captured for military purposes, and for maintaining and expanding its power. 56

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession The settled and increasingly arable nature of lowland Britain was reinforced by the Norman invasion that ruthlessly imposed a more rigid form of feudalism. Resistance to Norman rule in the north resulted in a deliberate wasting policy that created desolate, depopulated uplands fit only, thereafter, for rough grazing, made in the fine tradition of immemorial warfare over lands less able to recover from the depredations of human viciousness than was the case further south. Where the Anglo-Saxon and later medieval clearance of primary woodland was delayed because of heavy soil, a pattern of connected fields emerged from the beginning, as belts of trees were left in order to define property boundaries. Such belts were subsequently managed as hedges. In the same areas, similar boundaries emerged where a lighter soil was cleared first, leaving woodland on an adjacent heavier soil cleared a few generations later with trees left on the boundaries for incorporation into a contemporary or belated hedge. These sorts of boundaries often stand out today because of their irregular and curving nature, taking more account of the topography than do later enclosures. Similar boundaries are formed when managed woodland or deer parks are converted to arable agriculture, but in these cases, there may be a narrow belt of woodland rather than a narrow hedge. These in turn can be confused – at any rate from the air – where hedges have been deliberately thickened by trees in the formation of 18th or early 19th century landscaped parks, or else where hedges have been allowed to run wild when fields are abandoned or less intensively farmed. Image 44: Ancient boundary, Kedleston Hall, Derby, 2016

Curving ancient boundary reinforced with additional trees in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries to define Kedleston Park. The fields to the right are a result of 18th century enclosures, subsequently amalgamated. The ridgetop boundary probably defined Bronze Age or Iron Age estates, Romanized about the time that the Roman road, running along the valley to the right, was constructed linking Derventio (Derby) to Rocester. Subsequently the boundary marked the Anglo-Saxon estates of Kedleston and Mackworth (surviving the Danish occupation), having passed into Norman hands by 1086 and surviving as modern parishes.

Natural hedges also establish themselves if temporary boundaries are maintained long enough for hedgerow plants such as hawthorn and blackthorn to establish under their protection. This may well have been the case along the temporary hurdles and palisades already mentioned, as along barbed wire fences today. Such opportunistic

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession hedges are also able to establish along the top of dykes and embankments when not grazed out by sheep. Kindly-looking the early British landscape might look to our 21st century eyes but to its inhabitants it was an environment full of political danger. Travelling across land that was not the land of the people to whom you were related in some way – even as a slave – risked challenge. Knowing your local boundaries – that ridge, that river, that rock, that tree, that old Roman road, that dyke, that ditch – was a matter of selfpreservation. The best way to get around safely was by travelling the well-trodden paths along which everyone moved, as settlers, as refugees, as gangs and, in times of safety, as drovers and traders. Characteristically, these were not narrow, confined roads but broad swathes of country through which rights of way had been established by immemorial use. Such was the Icknield Way, which runs from southwest England to the Wash, where the various parallel routes are sometimes a mile or more apart. Humankind struggled upon the land it occupied, sometimes necessarily cooperating, but as often competing to survive. Man against man, clan against clan, and, ultimately, kingdom against kingdom, all for the want of the control of the land and the security that such control gave. It took a strong man (or woman) to manipulate such a volatile condition; one able to lead people; to resist or to dominate those, other, people on the other side of the river or the hill. In this way, feudalism evolved out of the earliest pastoral societies: the need for every man to have a lord within a hierarchical power structure of service and protection. A dynamic environment: settlements were established, flourished and disappeared; a new local landscape was superimposed upon another within a few agricultural generations; and entire groups of people together with their languages migrated or were subsumed by others, some disappearing without trace. Dramatic changes, for instance, took place on the Cornish peninsular and over the fertile lowlands of southeast Britain during Roman times.57 Places far apart but irresistibly subject to the same influential shift in contemporary trading patterns. In BC 500, the most important trade route between Britain and the Mediterranean was the western European seaboard: Iberia, Brittany and the southwestern British Isles. This was because of the difficult travelling conditions across the Alps and along the Rhine Valley: the Bay of Biscay was preferable. However, in the Roman period, even before Britain was incorporated into the empire, trade and prosperity shifted away from the western seaboard as the empire spread north to the Channel. Roman roads, Roman towns and Roman peace made the journey through Gaul more convenient, more safe and, as Gaul itself prospered, more profitable. The Belgae, who moved across the Channel into southeast Britain during the early growth of the Roman Empire, had lucrative trading links with the Romans and were absorbing Roman culture a hundred years before the Claudian invasion of 43AD.58 This shift of wealth was traumatic, so Cornwall maintained some sort of independence until the 9th century when the Wessex kings claimed Cornwall as an English shire. The name Cornwall may come from a British tribe called the Cornovii, who, at the time of the Roman invasions, occupied territory in what is now the English Midlands. 58 The various tribes of the area were collectively known by the Romans as the Belgae. Julius Caesar’s invasion of BC 55 – 98 years before the total conquest by Claudius – was aimed in 57

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession that whilst in Cornwall Celtic field patterns were fossilized and the amount of enclosed land probably declined, on the other, southeastern side of Britain there was an agricultural revolution during the first and second centuries as prosperity increased: villa remains are thick under the ground in Surrey, Sussex and Kent, along the Thames Valley, on the Chiltern scarp and throughout East Anglia. A new agricultural landscape was also created around the Wash as the Romans claimed agricultural land by drainage. Travelling safe Roman roads through Roman Britain from, say, the port of London to Verulamium (St. Albans) and then northwards to Leicester, Manchester, York and Carlisle, the traveller sees an open landscape, enclosures noticeable only as islands in a sea of grazing land. Seven hundred years later in 1066, the view of the lowlands and even of the lower altitudes of the uplands is different. Gone is the great grazing openness, and in its stead, a patchwork of predominantly arable fields, some a hundred acres or more in extent, boundaries defined by a change in land use or crop rather than by hedge or wall, and by narrow ways for ox-drawn ploughs. A transformation indeed but one that has incorporated some of the old features: a woodland enclosure of the year 566 has the same shape five hundred years later, but rather than being isolated in undivided grazing land it is part of a pattern of neighbouring enclosures including clusters of huts and the occasional forbidding stone church beside the barn-like manor hall at one end of which lives the lord of the manor or his agent. A crude palisade surrounds the lord’s compound into which all will huddle, together with the domestic animals, in times of danger. A landscape suggesting domestic restriction and onerous duty rather than the apparent freedom of earlier times. Another landscape change between 566AD and 1066 is the introduction of a clear landscape division between uplands and lowlands. On the uplands, open grazing remains ubiquitous but it is now obviously separated by hedges and walls from the lowland enclosures below. Here, although grazing occupies about a quarter of the total, it is isolated in a sea of arable farming rather than, as five hundred years earlier, arable islands in a sea of open pastureland. On the lowlands, grazing is now more intimately managed than in earlier times: as fallow arable land; as meadows won from freshwater and saltwater wetlands; as lowland common upon which a variety of complicated grazing and other established rights are jealously guarded; as woodland managed for limited grazing; as small village and wayside greens; and as the various connecting green lanes and drove roads that create a network of grazing land linking uplands and lowlands. Livestock grazing on the lowlands is incorporated into an intricate system of managing natural resources to provide a range of products necessary for human survival, comfort and progress. Thus, a landscape of property boundaries and roadways defining land uses in turn describing the exploitation of

the first place to enforce the Roman presence across the Channel in Gaul as an act of regional pacification, and in the second to establish Julius’ political credentials as a successful war leader.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession natural resources sustainably supplied by an ecosystem both generous and ruthless: if human or other animal populations overstep the sustainable mark, they crash.59 The landscape transformation that occurred within the latter half of the 1st millennium in lowland Britain was the result of a shift away from the freer pastoral nomadic or semi-nomadic society to one of settled arable and livestock farmers. This universal rule of social development continues today in parts of savannah Africa where conflict between nomadic grazers and settled farmers is intense. Early medieval Britain was no exception to the rule, the landscape beginning to change irrecoverably in the 6 th century when the wave of Germanic immigration came to an end and Anglo-Saxon hegemony spread over most of lowland Britain. By this time, Anglo-Saxon power structures dominated the most economically productive part of Britain, having the best land and the best climate; having also the easiest access to the more prosperous parts of Europe when Europe was the wider world and the north and the far west of the British Isles on the edge of it. Anglo-Saxon Britain was a productive human environment characterized by a society built on efficient resource exploitation proved by its ability to pay taxes (initially as Danegeld) to a paramount authority (ultimately the first King, Athelstan, of ‘England’, claiming the overlordship of Britain). Thus, inevitably did Anglo-Saxon England attract less-settled and poorer peoples: first Norse and Danish invaders, and finally Franco-Norsemen, the Normans. The Norman reorganization and definition of England stimulated, as a reaction against invasion, the political self-awareness of Wales and Scotland. But, more significantly for the future of all Britain, the Norman invasion resulted in the imposition of a rigid and ultimately unworkable version of feudalism. Resistance to the flawed Norman socio-economic model set the course for the capitalist revolution that forced a second great transformation of the British landscape from one that was rural and based on the sustainable exploitation of natural resources to one that was industrial and based upon the unsustainable and environmentally polluting exploitation of mineral resources. In this way, the British landscape, like all landscapes, is the result of five powerful forces: humanity being the first, because without human activity, the others would not come into play. The others are feudalism, capitalism, industrialization and individualism, and it is within the context of these concepts that the continuing parts of Landscape, Wealth and Dispossession will be written.

Higher human population densities forced a settled agricultural existence, in turn encouraging population explosions followed by population collapses as rising numbers ensured malnutrition and an associated decline in health and immunity that caused fatal diseases to spread rapidly in overcrowded conditions, the Black Death of the later 14th century being the last and most notorious example. Human populations also crashed because of intercommunal warfare initiated by competition for increasingly scarce farmland, a scarcity exacerbated by declining soil fertility. 59

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4 THE FIVE P OWERF UL FORCES OF LA NDSCA P E FORM A TION – EP ILOGUE TO P A RT ONE Having described the significance of the landscape with the presence of humanity, the rest of Landscape, Wealth and Dispossession describes the evolution of the British landscape – at home and abroad – within the context of the other four forces, which arise out of human political activity: • • • •

Feudalism; Capitalism; Industrialism; and Individualism.

I had, therefore, anticipated four more parts, each one based upon these four forces in addition to that created by humanity. However, as I considered the parts focusing on feudalism and capitalism, I came to understand that the shift from feudalism to capitalism is fundamental to the way in which we live now. Therefore, I needed to include an intervening part looking at the great economic and consequent social issues that ran through the political life of feudal Britain and of the feudal western Europe (or, from another angle, the western Christendom) of which Britain was increasingly becoming a part from the 6th century onwards. These issues are most significantly, the dominance of sheep and wool in the economy, and the political power of the Church, which had become, by the 15th century, the biggest landlord. Other significant issues that define the period are: the evolving relationship between lord and vassal, and, consequently, of landlord and tenant; parks and forest law; land enclosure and engrossment in relation to common and private use of land; and urbanization. Another issue that needs to be grasped before the evolution of the capitalist British landscape can be fully understood is the nature of local government and taxation in the preceding feudal period and how it seems (but by no means universally) to have grown out of post Roman estates, townships (or vills) and parishes, not (necessarily) out of manors, which were the instruments of estate management. The dynamic interrelationship of these issues shaped the largely open upland and the generally enclosed lowland landscapes that, at any rate visually (and to a certain extent therefore superficially), defined the parts of Britain that were not obviously urbanized before the second world war and to some extent up until the 1960s. Epilogue to part one I apologize, as much to myself as to the reader, for the preponderance of bucolic images in part one of Landscape, Wealth and Dispossession. Manifestly the images of the human landscape of the 21st century are of an industrial, urban, warmongering, ravaged world that humanity has created and continues to wilfully create. As an expression of the nagging obsession that has been one of the dominating factors of my life, the purpose of this book is to face the reality of what humanity has done and to answer the big question: Why have we devastated our beautiful planet and, in the process, impoverished our brilliant human spirit, when we could have used our astonishing intellect – our capacity for wisdom, courage and compassion – to have created paradise? Facing up to the reality means seeing life as it is, as the first 86

Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession step in considering how it might be better. Thus, while I love walking the British hills, and while I can think of few pleasures better than walking alongside a British hedgerow that has been around for a few hundred years, if I walk into an exhibition of contemporary art that is full of bucolic scenes, I walk out again. Recently however (August 2017) I visited the Leek ‘Open’ while on a walking holiday in that part of the Pennine world. I was impressed with the quality of the art and decided to pick out the three pictures I would like to take home with me. Each one a compassionate and brave consideration of the contemporary urban landscape. I photographed them and I’d like to reproduce them here but I can’t for copyright reasons. All the same I will end this first part of Landscape, Power and Dispossession with four landscapes that I would try to capture in paint, had I the skill: Image 45: King Street, Derby, 2016 The red brick chapel, centre, was demolished as I reviewed the first draft of Part I, September 2017, to be replaced by a block of ‘Georgian’ flats. The building on the left is St. Helens House, by Joseph Pickford, 1766.

Image 46: Ayrshire Coast, 2018

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Image 47: Bloomsbury, London University quarter, 2017

Image 48: Central Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, 2018

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5 B IB LIOGRA P HY FOR P A R T ONE Agee, James, with Evans, Walker (photographer), Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Houghton Mifflin, 1941. Barr, John, Derelict Britain, Penguin Books, 1969, Chapter 4, The Background. Burns, Robert (Rabbie), 1759 to 1796, Scotland’s national poet, son of an unsuccessful farmer and largely self-educated, he was recognized as a pioneer poet in his lifetime. Brady, Nyle C, The Nature and Properties of Soils, 8th Edition, Macmillan Publishing, New York 1974. The book that helped me most to understand soil science in my university days; still the best reference of which I know. British Geological Survey: 1:1,584,000 Geological Map of the British Islands, Solid Geology. Buurman, P and DL Mokma, Podzols and Podzolisation in Temperate Regions, ISM Monog., No 1,1982) quoted in ‘Russell’. Campell, Thorbjørn, Arran, A History, Birlinn Ltd., 2013. Clare, John, The Lament of Swordy Well (written in the 1820s, referring to enclosures in Northamptonshire). Selected Poetry, The Penguin Poetry Library, with an incisive commentary by Geoffrey Summerfield, also a remembered poet. Darien-Jones, Nick, see Houghton, Dr Colin. Derbyshire Landscape Character Assessment: http://www.southderbys.gov.uk/Images/Trent%20Valley%20Washlands_tcm21-103761.pdf Drakeford, Tom and Una Sutcliff, editors, Wimbledon Common & Putney Heath, A Natural History, edited by Tony Drakeford and Una Sutcliff, Published by Wimbledon and Putney Commons Conservators, about 2000. Engels, Frederick, 1820 to 1895, The Condition of the Working-Class in England, 1844, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1973. Evans, Walker, see Agee. Flyn, Cal, Thicker Than Water, William Collins, 2016. In 2014, the young Scottish writer, outraged by the brutal clearance of the Scottish Highlands in the 1830s, traces her great-great-great uncle to Australia, where, she discovers not only his epithet, the Butcher of Gippsland (in Victoria), but also her own confusing sense of familial guilt for his brutal treatment of the indigenous inhabitants. Forster, Edward Morgan, 1879 to 1970, English writer and thinker, The Machine Stops, 1909. Gelling, Dr Margaret (1924-2009) was a leading authority on the history of English place names and the evolution of the medieval landscape. This quotation comes from her popular book, Signposts to the Past: Place-names and the history of England, and refers to the establishment of medieval estates in Berkshire, about which she was an expert. My copy of the book published in 1978 by Book Club Associates. 89

Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Golding, William, Utopias and Antiutopias, an address he made in Lille, 1977, published in A Moving Target, Faber and Faber, 1982. Goldsmith, Oliver, 1728 to 1874, Irish novelist, playwright and poet. Hammond, Barbara and John Lawrence, husband and wife team of writers on social history and reform. Barbara (1873 to 1961) was particularly committed to recording the condition of the labouring classes during the Industrial Revolution. They were English southerners, spending most of their lives in rural Hertfordshire, although they lived in Manchester during World War II when John worked for the Manchester Guardian, returning to Hertfordshire in 1945 to witness, and no doubt welcome, the expansion of Hemel Hempstead as a New Town that would reach the edges of their village, Piccotts End. Hobbes, Thomas, English political philosopher, 1588 to 1679, Leviathan, Part I, Of Man, Penguin Books – Great Ideas, 2005. Houghton, Dr Colin, Nick Darien-Jones, and Nicholas J Jones, Broadway Pictorial (based on the photographs of Broadway collected by Dr Colin Houghton, doctor in Broadway, 1938 to 1982), Darien-Jones Publishing, 2004. Ikeda, Daisaku, The New Human Revolution, World Tribune Press, 1995, Volume 2, Chapter 4, Banner of the People. Daisaku Ikeda was the third founding president of the SGI, Soka Gakkai (Value Creation) International, a society that promotes priest-less Nichiren Buddhism and international peace. As a movement originating in Japan in the 1930s, 40s and 50s it abhors nuclear weapons. Johnes, Martin, with Ian McLean, Aberfan – Government and Disaster, Iain McLean & Martin Johnes, Dragon Books, Welsh Academic Press, 2000. Jones, Nicholas J, see Houghton, Dr Colin. Keble Martin, Rev William, 1877-1969, Britain’s premier botanist and botanical illustrator. Krakowka, Katheryn, Prehistoric pop culture, Current Archaeology, 338, May 2018. Lamb, HH, Climate, History and the Modern World, Second Edition, Routledge, 1995. MacGarvin, Malcolm The North Sea, for Greenpeace, Collins and Brown, 1990. Maitland, FW, Domesday Book and Beyond, first published 1897 by the Cambridge Press, my copy Fontana Library 1960, 1961, 1969. Marryat, Frederick, 1792 to 1848 (Captain Marryat, author of Children of the New Forest and Mr Midshipman Easy), The Settlers in Canada, Leipzig, 1840. Marx, Karl, 1818 to 1883, political and economic historian, philosopher and theorist, Capital, Unabridged, Volume 1, A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Translated from the Third German Edition (1887) by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, Edited by Frederick Engels, International Publishers, New York 1967, Lawrence & Wishart, Ltd., Edition 2003. NB The first (German) edition was published in 1867. This English translation of the third edition, published by

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Progress Publishers, Moscow in 1965 includes corrections made by Frederick Engels for the fourth 1890 edition. McKissack, Patricia and Frederick, Rebels Against Slavery, a Coretta Scott King Honor Book, Copyright, 1996, First Scholastic trade paperback printing, January 1999. McLean, Iain with Martin Johnes, Aberfan – Government and Disaster, Iain McLean & Martin Johnes, Dragon Books, Welsh Academic Press, 2000. Meteorological Office, UK, www.metoffice.gov.uk/, all weather information, 19712000 data, unless stated otherwise. Mill, John Stuart, 1806 to 1873, On Liberty and Other Essays, Oxford World’s Classics edited with introduction by John Gray, Oxford University Press, 1998. Money, DC, Climate, Soils and Vegetation, University Tutorial Press, 2nd Ed., 1972. Mokma DL and P Buurman, Podzols and Podzolisation in Temperate Regions, ISM Monog., No 1,1982) quoted in ‘Russell’. Mumford, Lewis, 1890 to 1995, American Sociologist, expert in urban civilization, The City in History, Secker & Warburg, 1961, and Pelican, 1966. Pollard, Joshua, Neolithic Britain, Shire Publications Ltd., 2002. Prebble, John, The Highland Clearances, Martin Secker & Warburg 1963 (then Penguin Books in 1969 and reprinted almost every year since). John Prebble, 1915 to 2001 was born in Middlesex but as a child lived in the town of Sutherland, Saskatchewan where he had family ties including to Native Americans. He returned in Middlesex in 1927. He dropped his membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain during World War II. Rackham, Oliver, 1939-2015, was the foremost British Historical Ecologist whose understanding and writing about the history of the English landscape remains unsurpassed. His most famous book – amongst many – is The History of the English Countryside. My copy is the 445 page illustrated reprint published by JM Dent in 1986. Reader, James, Clerk and Ranger to the Wimbledon and Putney Commons Conservatoires at the end of the 20th century, Chapter 5 of Wimbledon Common & Putney Heath, A Natural History, edited by Tony Drakeford and Una Sutcliff. Rhodes, Cecil, 1853-1902, British imperialist and racist founder of the Rhodesia colonies (eventually the independent countries of Zambia and Zimbabwe). Reference taken from http://www.azquotes.com/author/12265-Cecil_Rhodes Russell, Sir Edward John (1874 to 1965) and Edward Walter (1904 to 1994) Russell’s Soil Conditions & Plant Growth, 11th Edition, Edited by Alan Wild, Longmann Scientific & Technical, 1988. The first edition by the father, revised by the son and still the leading reference. 110 editions between 1921 and 2015.

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Smith, Adam, 1723 to 1790, The Wealth of Nations, 1776, 1994 Modern Library Edition, Edited with an introduction and notes by Edwin Cannan, Random House, 1994. Stamp, Sir L Dudley (1898 to 1965), Britain’s Structure and Scenery, Collins, 1946. (and 6th ed., 1967). Stamp, the son of a grocer, was associated with the London School of Economics as a Geographer. He is considered to be the founding father of modern geography, changing the cultural view of landscapes, which he defined as shaped by humanity in dynamic response to the environment. Sutcliff, Una and Tom Drakeford, editors, Wimbledon Common & Putney Heath, A Natural History, edited by Tony Drakeford and Una Sutcliff, Published by Wimbledon and Putney Commons Conservators, about 2000. Trueman, AE, Geology and Scenery of England and Wales, New edition completely revised by JB Whittow and JR Hardy, Pelican Books, 1971. Tansley, AG, 1871 to 1955, Britain’s Green Mantle, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1968, 2nd Ed., Revised by MCF Proctor. Sir George Arthur Tansley was a botanist and pioneer ecologist introducing the concept of the ecosystem. Trueman, AE, Geology and Scenery in Scotland (1938), Revised by John Whittow and JR Hardy Pelican Books, 1971. Trueman, AE, Geology and Scenery of England and Wales, New edition completely revised by JB Whittow and JR Hardy, Pelican Books, 1971. United Nations Environment Programme Press Release, 2011, www.unep.org/nigeria Whittow, John (or JB). John Whittow is a geographer and writer who, in 1965, mapped the coastlines of England and Wales and therewith encouraged the National Trust and the UK Government to protect the national coastline from urban development. See Whittow, John. Winbolt, SE, Britain B.C., Pelican Books, 1943. Yates, David Thomas, Land, Power and Prestige, Bronze Age Field Systems in Southern England, Oxbow Books 2007.

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6 INDEX FOR P A RT ONE Aberfan .............................. 10, 89, 90 Agee, James .............................. 7, 88 Anaerobic def ................................. 40 Aquatic animals.............................. 34 Argyll and Bute............................... 46 Arnott, Susi .............................. 22, 43 Arran ....... 3, 15, 18, 32, 33, 38, 60, 88 Arthur’s Seat .................................. 13 Australia, Aboriginal Genocide ......... 4 Autotrophs, def ............................... 34 Ayrshire.................................... 10, 86 Bagshot Sands sub-region ............. 76 Balance, ecological, def ................. 36 Barr, John .................................. 7, 88 Bassey, Nnimmo .............................. 8 Bath, Somerset ........................ 20, 22 Beaker people ................................ 63 Beaker, phenomenon, the .............. 60 Berkshire, Anglo-Saxon estates ..... 73 Bioactivity, def ................................ 36 Biodiversity, def ........................ 32, 33 Biogeographical Regions, def ........ 32 Biomass, def .................................. 36 Biomes, def .................................... 32 Biosphere, def ................................ 32 Bogs ........................................ 75, 79 Bogs, blanket ..................... 47, 74, 76 Bogs, peat ................................ 33, 45 Bogs, raised ............................. 47, 74 Bogs, sphagnum .....46, 47, 74, 76, 79 Boulder clay ....................... 17, 19, 27 Bradgate Park ................................ 30 Brady, Nyle C ........................... 47, 88 British Geological Survey .. 25, 56, 77, 88 British regions, the four .................. 20 Bronze Age, def ............................. 63 Bronze Age, Early .......................... 66 Bronze Age, field systems .............. 68 Bronze Age, Middle .................. 65, 66 Burns, Robert ............................. 4, 88 Caithness ....................................... 12 Calluneta ........................................ 75 Campbell, Thorbjørn .................. 3, 88 Carnivores, def ............................... 35 Carvers Woods .............................. 33 Cheviot Hills ................. 12, 16, 32, 33 Chilterns..................22, 24, 25, 28, 43 Clachan, a ........................................ 3 Clare, John ................................ 5, 88 Cleveland Hills ............................... 22

Climate, British ............................... 13 Climate, British modern .................. 12 Coal, formation .............................. 23 Conservation, def ........................... 34 Cornwall ......................................... 82 Cotswolds .......................... 28, 57, 58 Cottrell, Noel .................................. 19 Cyperaceae fen ............................. 47 Darien-Jones, Nick......................... 88 Dartmoor, Grimspound Bronze Age village ......................................... 73 Decomposers, def .......................... 35 Dependency, def ............................ 35 Derby Royal Infirmary, demolition .. 51 Derby, inner ring road .................... 86 Derby, King Street.......................... 86 Derby, Longs Mill ........................... 53 Derbyshire ....................18, 24, 33, 47 Derbyshire Landscape Character Assessment.......................... 40, 88 Derbyshire, Molina grasslands ....... 79 Derbyshire, Stanage Edge ............. 78 Derbyshire, Thor’s Cave ................ 37 Derbyshire, Trent valley soils ......... 40 Detritus, def ................................... 35 Devon ............................................ 12 Dorset ............................................ 22 Drumlanrig Park ............................. 17 Drumlins ........................................ 17 Dumfries and Galloway .................. 17 East Anglia, Bronze Age fields ....... 69 Ecological classification ................. 32 Ecological viability .......................... 34 Ecology .......................................... 30 Ecology, 8 analytical steps ............. 31 Ecology, three laws of .................... 34 Ecosystem, natural, def.................. 33 Ecosystems ....................... 34, 35, 36 Ecosystems and evolution ............. 34 Ecotone, def................................... 33 Ecozone, def .................................. 33 Edinburgh ...................................... 13 EIA, environmental impact assessment .......................... 53, 54 EIA, of humanity ............................ 53 EIA, with and without scenarios ..... 53 Energy ........................................... 35 Energy flow, def ............................. 36 Engels, Frederick ................. 8, 88, 89 Environment, human impact .......... 50 Environment, natural ...................... 50

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Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession Erratic ............................................ 17 Essex ............................................. 71 Essex, Rainham ............................. 19 Estate boundary ............................. 81 Estates, pre-historic ....................... 72 Evans, Walker ................................ 88 Evolution, def ................................. 34 Fens, Bronze Age fields ................. 70 Field systems, Bronze Age............. 68 Field systems, pre-historic.............. 69 Flyn, Cal..................................... 4, 88 Forster, EM .............................. 10, 88 Fulani, West African ....................... 62 Fungi, def ....................................... 31 Gelling, Margaret ..................... 73, 88 Geography ..................................... 29 Geological time .............................. 21 Geology, erosion and deposition .... 16 Geology, igneous ........................... 16 Geology, laws of deposition ..... 23, 26 Geology, mesa formation ............... 24 Geology, metamorphic ................... 16 Geology, scarp ............................... 27 Geology, sedimentary .................... 15 Geology, superficial........................ 16 Geology, the Scarplands ................ 23 Geology, underlying ....................... 15 Geology, water ............................... 19 Glacial till ....................................... 16 Golding, William ....................... 29, 89 Goldsmith, Oliver ....................... 5, 89 Grampian Mountains ...................... 13 Habitat, def .................................... 34 Hammond, JL and Barbara ........ 6, 89 Hardy, JR ....................................... 91 Heath ............................................. 75 Heathland according to wetness .... 79 Heathland in UK ............................. 78 Herbivores, def ............................... 35 Heterotrophs, def ........................... 35 Hiatus, def ...................................... 68 Highland Clearances ........................ 3 Hobbes, Thomas .................. 3, 10, 89 Hominoids ...................................... 49 Houghton, Dr Colin................... 88, 89 Humber, the ................................... 22 Hyde Park ...................................... 27 Ikeda, Daisaku ........................... 8, 89 In-bye land, def .............................. 72 Jersey ............................................ 12 Johnes, Martin ................... 10, 89, 90 Jones, Nicholas J ........................... 89 Jurassic.......................................... 20 Jurassic Scarp ............................... 25 Keble Martin, Rev William ........ 75, 89

Kedleston Hall .................... 19, 30, 81 Keuper marls ................................. 56 Kilbrannan Sound .......................... 46 Kilmarnock ............................... 10, 87 Kinder Scout, Derbyshire ............... 47 Krakowka, Katheryn ................. 60, 89 Lake, def ........................................ 74 Lamb, HH ...................................... 64 Landscape and soil ........................ 73 Landscape mechanics ................... 32 Landscape, early Anglo-Saxon ...... 80 Landscape, early medieval ............ 83 Landscape, five forces of formation 85 Landscape, pastoral................. 61, 65 Landscape, pastoral, pre-historic endurance .................................. 73 Landscape, photographic evidence 57 Landscape, post glacial, stone age 55 Landscape, post ice age ................ 37 Leicestershire ................................ 30 Leicestershire Wolds................ 21, 25 Leicestershire, River Soar .............. 45 Lerwick .......................................... 12 London clay ............................. 27, 56 London, Bloomsbury ...................... 87 Lynchets ........................................ 67 MacGarvin, Malcolm ................ 14, 89 Machrie Moor ........................... 33, 60 Maiden Castle ................................ 70 Maitland, FW .................................. 89 Marl pits ......................................... 79 Marryat, Frederick ...................... 3, 89 Marx, Karl .................................. 9, 89 McKissack, Patricia and Frederick .. 6, 90 McLean, Iain ...................... 10, 89, 90 Meteorological Office UK ............... 12 Midland plain .................................. 22 Mill, John Stuart ......................... 9, 90 Molina ............................................ 79 Molinieta ........................................ 75 Money, DC ............................... 11, 90 Moor ........................................ 75, 77 Moorland according to wetness...... 79 Moorland in UK .............................. 78 Mumford, Lewis ......................... 9, 90 Mutual coexistence and competition, def .............................................. 35 Neanderthals and Homo sapiens ... 50 Niche, def ...................................... 34 Niger Delta, Ogoniland ............... 7, 52 Nithsdale ........................................ 17 Nomads v Settlers.......................... 67 Norfolk Broads ............................... 76 North Downs .................................. 24 94

Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession North Sea.... 12, 14, 19, 25, 44, 57, 71 Norway, Gåla ................................. 41 Nutrient cycle ................................. 35 Nutrients, def.................................. 35 Omnivores, def ............................... 35 Oolitic limestone............................. 20 Outer Hebrides............................... 15 Oxidation, def ................................. 40 Papua New Guinea ........................ 63 Pastoral landscape................... 61, 65 Pastoral landscape, Anglo-Saxon .. 73 Peak District ....................... 24, 44, 47 Pennines ........................................ 22 Photosynthesis, def ........................ 35 Pickford, Joseph, St. Helen's House, Derby.......................................... 86 Pollard, Joshua ........................ 59, 90 Prebble, John ............................. 3, 90 Preseli Hills .................................... 64 Proctor, MCF.................................. 91 Productivity, def ............................. 36 Prokaryotae, def ............................. 31 Protoctista, def ............................... 31 Pugin, Augustus W, St. Mary's Derby ................................................... 86 Putney Heath ................................. 42 Rackham, Oliver ................ 73, 77, 90 Raised Beach................................. 46 Reader, James......................... 57, 90 Red River Colony, Canada............... 3 Reduction, def ................................ 40 Rempstone, Leicestershire............. 21 Resource cycles, def ...................... 36 Rhodes, Cecil............................. 6, 90 Roman influence ............................ 82 Russell, John and Walter ......... 73, 90 Salisbury Plain ............................... 25 Scarp, geological ..................... 22, 26 Scarp, Jurassic .............................. 25 Scarplands, the .................. 22, 23, 24 Scotland ......................................... 13 Sheffield, Norfolk Park, Manor Oaks ................................................... 53 Shetland Islands ...................... 11, 12 Smith, Adam .......................... 6, 8, 91 Soil acidity ...................................... 39 Soil formation ........................... 38, 39 Soil horizons .................................. 38 Soil, humus formation .................... 38 Soils and landscape ....................... 73 Soils lias ......................................... 25

Soils, beechwood, South Downs .... 43 Soils, colluvial ................................ 40 Soils, eluvial ................................... 40 Soils, illuvial ............................. 40, 43 Soils, peat ................................ 43, 74 Soils, podzolic ................................ 77 Soils, Trent Valley, Derbyshire ....... 40 South Downs ........................... 24, 43 Species, def ................................... 33 Sphagnum moss ...................... 46, 74 Staffordshire, landscape near Leek 12 Staffordshire, The Roaches ........... 75 Stamp, Sir L Dudley ......21, 22, 36, 91 Stone Age, Beaker phenomenon ... 61 Stone Age, definition ...................... 54 Stone Age, DNA ............................ 61 Stone Age, landscape .................... 55 Stone Age, megaliths ..................... 60 Stonehenge ...... 49, 58, 59, 61, 64, 65 Surrey, lowland heaths .................. 76 Swansea .......................................... 7 Tansley, AG ............ 11, 43, 46, 75, 91 Terrestrial animals ......................... 34 Thames.......................................... 27 Thames Estuary ............14, 19, 25, 69 Topography of Britain ..................... 15 Trueman AE.............. 3, 26, 27, 55, 91 United Nations Environment Programme .................................. 7 Vale of Pickering ............................ 22 Viability, def ................................... 36 Viable ecosystem ........................... 36 Villa, def ......................................... 63 Wash, the ...................................... 22 Wealden Sub-Region ..................... 24 Wetlands, British ............................ 44 Wetlands, Cyperaceae fen ............. 47 Wetlands, fresh .............................. 45 Wetlands, marine ........................... 45 Wetlands, moor and heath ............. 79 Wetlands, raised bog ..................... 47 Wetlands, sphagnum moss ............ 46 Wetlands, wet peat ........................ 46 Whittow, JB .................................... 91 Whittow, John ................................ 91 Wimbledon Common ...57, 75, 78, 88, 90 Winbolt, SE .............................. 63, 91 Worcestershire, Cotswolds, Broadway ................................................... 57 Yates, David Thomas ......... 67, 69, 91

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