history of the countryside as a model for the future?

61 OLIVER RACKHAM HISTORY OF THE COUNTRYSIDE

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 48 (2012)

HISTORY OF THE COUNTRYSIDE AS A MODEL FOR THE FUTURE? OLIVER RACKHAM

The past few centuries tell a melancholy story of loss of distinctiveness in the English countryside. Not only is there less countryside, owing to development and the growth of cities, towns, and large villages, what remains has been homogenized and simplified: ordinary farmland has expanded at the expense of heaths, fens, meadows, ancient field-systems, and whatever else gives complexity and meaning to the landscape (Rackham, 1986). This has not been uniform. Comparing Faden’s map of Norfolk in 1790—1793 with the Ordnance Survey of 1836—1837 reveals how nearly all the heaths outside the Breckland were victims of a land grab in the Napoleonic Wars.

Each of these changes involved losses of beauty, losses of public access, losses of historical wildness, and losses of the meanings that landscapes accumulate over centuries of piecemeal change. This was mourned by appreciative writers like the poet John Clare (1793—1864), but not necessarily noticed by the public: each successive human generation, growing up in a depleted landscape, thinks depletion is normal. It is important to identify and make the most of places that escaped this trend, such as the Lower Kingcombe Estate (now property of Dorset Wildlife Trust) or parts of the Waveney Valley, or of Assington in Suffolk.

But, the reader will ask, have there not been positive changes too? Yes, there are a few. A remarkable change in the twentieth century is the increase of water birds, partly due to people digging up gravel deposits in river valleys and turning them into lakes. Maybe this is a compensation for the loss of meadow-land — which would, in any case, have become ordinary farmland if it had not been dug up. Can a positive change compensate for the loss of something quite different?

‘I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten’ The last great round of losses was a generation ago, and troubled the writer in his middle years: the destruction of Breckland heaths and of Suffolk woods (Fig. 1) by agriculture and modern forestry. This was during the third quarter of the twentieth century: ‘the years that the locusts have eaten’. Had it been sustained there would by now be almost no natural vegetation left outside nature reserves and abandoned industrial land.

Why was it not continued? Mainly because of the success of plant breeding. If two and a half tons of wheat can now be grown on land that 50 years ago grew one ton, what is to be done with the land on which the extra one and a half tons used to grow? There have been many pressures in other directions, for example from low-density development on the American model, but the need for land has diminished. Whether it will diminish for ever is doubtful: plant breeders have over-reached themselves by ill-advised enthusiasm for transgenic crops, which has brought their science under a cloud.

The conservation movement has enjoyed decades of success. Most of what conservationists struggled for in the dark years of the 1960s was achieved. Not everything: woodland is not longer crudely destroyed, but a new enemy has appeared, namely multitudes of deer. The sudden change from centuries of little or no grazing to rather intensive grazing, subtracts


Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 48 62

Figure 1. Grubbing a wood for agriculture: a familiar sight in the 1960s. Barnard’s Wood, Great Chishill, Cambridgeshire. June 1970.

Figure 2. Ashwood, severely browsed by three species of deer. Note absence of herbaceous plants (except distasteful Dog’s Mercury Mercurialis perennis) and absence of low cover. Hempstead Wood, NW Essex, April 2002.



Great Caledonian Wood was (maybe still is) dear to the hearts of Scottish Nationalists. But Scottish historical ecologists, like James Dickson (1993), insist that the Caledonian Wood is imaginary: Scotland was already much as it is now when the Romans came. Can you restore something that wasn’t there?

The wilderness fallacy In other countries conservation has been based on a belief in ‘wilderness’: that there still exist areas not affected, or not ‘significantly’ affected, by human activity. In many countries, ‘wilderness’ has a legal definition.

Wilderness is an American idea that has never been persuasive in Europe, where everywhere has been influenced by people at least since the Bronze Age. The notion that ‘virgin forests’ exist anywhere in the world recedes in the face of new archaeological discoveries of the extent and pervasiveness of early human activities.

It is said to be the the duty of conservationists to drop whatever else they are doing and turn all their energies to preserving wildwood — the original

1I use the word in its English sense. In America it is often called ‘preservation’ —

‘conservation’ being equivalent to ‘exploitation’.

Figure 3. Forest on a landscape scale: one of the biggest of the Caledonian Pinewoods. Did all the Scottish Highlands once look like this? Should they be made to look like it again? Glen Tanar, Aberdeenshire.

sensitive plants and low-nesting birds and ultimately threatens the existence of the wood itself (Fig.2). Nobody has an effective means of dealing with deer that can be applied to thousands of woods large and small.

As this meeting shows, there has been a change in the nature of ecological conservation itself. Since the 1990s, conservationists have become more ambitious, going beyond conservation1 in the strict sense, preventing further destruction , to what is properly called restoration, an attempt to recover habitats that have been lost.

Ecological restoration is a big business in other countries: in North America, there is an influential Society for Ecological Restoration. It raises the question: What is being restored? This is a matter for historical knowledge. It used to be thought that the native pinewoods of the Scottish Highlands (Fig. 3) are the sorry remnants (some say ‘1%’) of a vast wood that persisted into recent historical times. Restoring the



vegetation as it was before civilized people came in the Neolithic and began wrecking it — or to re-creating wildwood in a country like this where for centuries there has been none.

There are two arguments against this. (1) The objective is not properly defined: not enough is known about wildwood to be sure of when it has been re-created. (2) Many changes are irreversible. It is impracticable to put back the lime-trees that were the commonest tree in pre-Neolithic lowland England, let alone the super-elephants of past interglacials. The best that can be done is to stop destroying the remaining lime-woods, like Groton Wood in Suffolk. Grey squirrel, fallow deer, and Canada goose, once introduced, are here for ever. To take a wood and do nothing to it (which is what happens in practice to many woods that are not nature reserves) does not re-create wildwood.

Even in North America the idea of wilderness ignores the huge effect that American Indians had on the landscape. The reality is that all natural sites are semi-natural, the product of interactions between plants, animals, and people going back into prehistory. Arguably the greatest impact of humanity on natural ecosystems was the extermination of super-elephants — that could break down and eat a big tree — in Palæolithic times.

Importance of continuity Ecological restoration on a landscape scale implies that it is possible to replicate at will passable imitations of semi-natural grassland, woodland, heathland etc., mainly on what had been farmland. Is this true?

Staverton Park, at Wantisden in East Suffolk is a famous place for its ancient oaks and giant hollies and birches (Fig. 4). It is one of the biggest concentrations of ancient trees in NW Europe. It would be a gross misunderstanding to treat it as just another oakwood — an example of W10, one of the commonest woodland types in the National Vegetation Classification. It is an exceptional survival of a deer-park, created some 800 years ago to contain fallow deer as semi-domestic animals. Although deer did not last long, it has been maintained for most of its subsequent history as a wood-pasture, by a combination of grazing animals and woodcutting in the form of pollarding. Pollarding creates Veteran Trees: long-lived trees that develop rot-holes, hollow interiors, old dry bark that make them uniquely important as a habitat for specific lichens, invertebrate animals, hole-nesting birds, and bats. The importance of Staverton lies in a particular sequence of historical events that it would be impossible to re-create.

Staverton Park is one of the few surviving English examples of savanna — trees scattered in grassland or heath. Savanna is now thought of as mainly tropical, but it still exists at a landscape scale in southern Europe and was so in historical times as far north as Scotland (Grove & Rackham, 2001; Smout et al., 2005). Temperate savannas are usually thought of as cultural landscapes, but so are many tropical savannas (Fairhead & Leach, 1998): the boundary between cultural and wholly natural is hard to define.

Continuity is certainly important for wood-pasture (like Staverton Park) and woodland: newly-created versions of these will be only partial substitutes for the ‘real’ thing, although they may act as corridors for



relatively mobile mammals and birds. Continuity is also significant for grassland: even after 150 years, some species may be missing from ‘new’ grassland (e.g. Woodcock et al., 2011). Part of the problem is that modern farming relies on applying huge quantities of fertilizer, whereas most natural ecosystems are low-nutrient: their plants and mycorrhizal fungi cannot cope with agricultural levels of nitrate and phosphate.

Continuity seems to be less important for wetlands and heaths. But there seem to be few studies demonstrating in what respects a recently-created wetland or heath is equivalent to a long-established one.

Are nature reserves too small? Would they benefit from being joined up? This is a common assumption. I have even heard it claimed that it is necessary to protect reserves against climate change, which implies that reserves have to be so vast that they have climate gradients within them. Even if the whole of Suffolk were a nature reserve, it would still hardly be big enough.

The implication is that surviving woods, heaths, fens etc. are fragments of what were once much larger extents. This is certainly true for heathland. On Faden’s map of Norfolk, surveyed 1790—1793, the interior of north Norfolk is a spider’s-web of heaths and corridors of heathland, ramifying among farmland. On the Ordnance Survey of 1835—1836, nearly all the heaths have

Figure 4. Staverton Park, Wantisden and Eyke, Suffolk: one of the biggest concentrations of ancient and veteran trees (and thus of the creatures that live on such trees) in England. Its unique character — its powerful genius loci – depends on a sequence of events beginning with a short period as a deer-park of the Earls of Norfolk 800 years ago. The ancient trees have all been treated as pollards, to produce successive crops of wood, last cut about 200 years ago.



gone, victims of a land grab (via Enclosure Acts) at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. A similar network of grassland commons used to pervade inland Dorset, disappearing somewhat earlier than the Norfolk heaths; the heaths in SE Dorset, made famous in the nineteenth-century novels of Thomas Hardy, were mostly lost to agriculture and forestry in the twentieth century.

This is the basis for heathland restoration (Fig. 5), joining up existing heaths can re-establish links known to have existed in the not too distant past. Another advantage is that heaths suffer from edge effects: bigger heaths are easier to maintain. Heaths, however, are low-nutrient ecosystems and may be difficult to re-establish after a period as farmland.

In the Fens there are two restoration projects, each of tens of square miles. The Wicken Fen Vision seeks to extend Wicken Fen Nature Reserve. The Great Fen Project seeks to link Holme Fen and Woodwalton Fen in Huntingdonshire. Drainage of peat fenland, as carried out in this country, turns out to be a mistake and unsustainable. The land has been excessively drained in order to grow arable crops, and in consequence the peat has

Figure 5. Heathland restoration: Brandon Park, Suffolk. Coming after forestry, this was straightforward: the trees (pines) were killed by felling, and there was not the problem of agricultural levels of fertility. Heather sprang up from buried seed shed before the pines were planted, and the Cladonia lichens characteristic of heaths have reappeared. In only nine years a passable imitation of a Breckland heath has been restored. Whether it will contain the more exacting Breckland plants remains to be seen, although by 2011 there was a good population of Mossy Stonecrop Crassula tillæa.



shrunk and blows away as dust. (The Dutch, more prudently, have drained their fens only enough to produce pasture.) Every year another centimetre or so of peat oxidizes and adds to the burden of atmospheric carbon dioxide, getting to the point that farmers are only too willing to sell land to a conservation body while they still can. The restorations are in the last parts of the Fens to be drained: Holme Fen famously subsided by some 3m in the decades after drainage, until it was abandoned. Drainage has produced irreversible changes in the structure of the landscape. It will never be possible to recover Whittlesey Mere, one of the largest lakes in England destroyed in that calamitous year 1851, because the disappearance of the surrounding peat has left the lake bed high and dry.

To what else does this apply? Churchyards are valuable habitats for lichens, reptiles, and other wildlife. Yet nobody would claim that churchyards are remnants of what was once a continuum of Churchyard; nor is there any project for linking them.

Are woods like heaths or like churchyards? Should they be linked? Are ancient woods merely sample fragments of what was once a continuum of woodland? If so, why is each ancient wood different?

As one goes backwards into the past, woods get more numerous but not in general more joined-up. North Norfolk lost some of its woods to the nineteenth-century land-grab, but much less than heathland, and the woods were already disjunct before. In the middle ages woods were more numerous and some of them were bigger, but they were already islands of woodland among farmland. Woods have often been connected by hedges, but even ancient hedges are not the same as narrow woods, and not all species have the dormouse’s ability (Aylward, this volume) to use them as corridors between woods.

It may well be that fragmentation is one of the necessary stages in the process of turning wildwood into ancient woodland. On Frans Vera’s interpretation, wildwood itself was not a continuum of forest from coast to coast, but was already fragmented into a mosaic of woodland and grassland, slowly shifting under the influence of deer and wild oxen.

Many of the features that now make woods valued and distinctive are the result of historical processes that it would be impracticable to replicate (Rackham, 2003; 2006):

• Wood edges and the woodbanks that define them; lanes around the edges of woods (where they survive), which are important as a habitat for wood-edge plants and animals.

• Ridge-&-furrow and other earthworks within woods, especially as creating small wetlands.

• Ancient coppice stools: these are the woodland equivalent of the Veteran Trees of wood-pastures and hedgerows, and are a significant habitat for bryophytes (Fig. 6).

• Plants of ancient woodland: the many species that do not readily colonize new woodland, especially because they are clonal (renewing themselves without growing from seed), like wood anemone, or dispersed by ants, like cow-wheat.



• Coppicing plants: the large proportion of the flora of a wood that flourishes each time the wood is cut down: either perennials that are there all the time, like violets and primrose, or plants that come up from seed shed at the last coppicing, like wild raspberry or foxglove (Fig. 7). Each ancient wood tends to have its own distinctive suite of coppicing plants, which may result from evolutionary divergence over the many cycles of felling and regrowth since the woods were separated.

Problems with woods being too small tend to relate to birds and other territorial animals, some of which require territories too large for a small wood to sustain them. It is true that large woods tend to have more plant (including bryophyte) species, though not in proportion. Plants that are confined to big woods tend to be those that require permanent open areas such as seldom occur in small woods: most of them (silverweed, plantains etc.) are not specifically woodland plants at all.

Joining up woods does nothing to relieve the two most immediate threats to woodland ecosystems: excessive deer and excessive shade from lack of felling. (The Alleghany National Forest in the United States is half the size of Suffolk and still has a severe deer problem.) It denies the character of woods as islands, each of which has developed in its individual way since they became separated.

Figure 6. Giant stool of Small-leaved Lime Tilia cordata, Groton Wood, 19 April 2009. This is, in effect, an enormous coppice stool, whose origin may well go back to wildwood times.



Figure 7. Buried-seed plants in coppiced area: Ragged Robin Lychnis flos-cuculi and Lesser Spearwort Ranunculus flammula. Hayley Wood, Cambridgeshire, June 1988.

Figure 8. Victory Wood, Blean, East Kent. The Woodland Trust has made a plantation to restore the link between Blean Wood (to the left) and Ellenden Wood (to the right), which were separated a century ago by grubbing out the woodland between them. Google Earth.



I would not discourage readers from re-creating woodland, but warn them not to expect too much of their attempts. It is not sufficient to stick some trees in the ground, note that they are still alive five years later, and claim success. There is much more to re-creating a wood than that: much of its value depends on a particular sequence of historical events that it would be impossible to re-create.

There is, however, much to be said for rejoining woods that are known to have been joined in the past (Fig. 8); and recovering woods once thought to be lost to modern forestry. The latter may be a simple matter of removing planted trees and letting the native trees recover; at the other extreme, the Woodland Trust has set itself the formidable task of recovering Wentwood Forest in Monmouthshire, once thought to be the biggest wood in England and Wales, of which two replantings have left little but the seed-bank.

Globalization, a new threat of destruction or degradation Probably the most serious threat to natural ecosystems is the effect of Homo sapiens in mixing up all the world’s plants and animals and all the world’s plant and animal diseases.

Invasive species are not new. In the nineteenth century people made at least 30 attempts to introduce the grey squirrel to Britain; not to be outdone, the American Acclimatization Society is said to have set itself the objective of introducing to North America every bird mentioned by Shakespeare, beginning with the starling.

Among plants, there was the gardeners’ tradition of making it a point of honour not to grow native plants. Thus yellow archangel, Galeobdolon luteum, was grown, not as the beautiful and unobjectionable native variety, but as a variegated cultivar that is clonal and vigorous, overwhelming gardens. 2Bluebell had to be grown as the related species Hyacinthoides hispanicus. Both of these get into the wild via garden throw-outs and begin to invade native woodland.

Plant diseases can be part of the normal, settled dynamics of vegetation: every inch of the Bradfield Woods, Suffolk, is infested with one or other of the honey fungi Armillaria, yet these do no noticeable damage. Elm Disease is a marginal case: from time to time it flares up and kills elms on a landscape scale, beginning with the Elm Decline in the Neolithic.

Foreign plant diseases are not new: potato blight, Phytophthora infestans, in 1845 caught up with its exotic host the potato and caused the Irish potato famine. In the twentieth century, with the growth of international trade and the rise of tree-planting as an industry, globalization of disease moved up a gear. So far Britain has been let off lightly compared to other countries [this was written a year before the latest Chalara outbreak. Ed.]. In Ohio (USA), chestnut Castanea dentata has been removed by the east Asian fungus Endothia (Cryphonectria) parasitica, most elms by Elm Disease from Europe, most red oaks by the Elm-Disease-like fungus Ceratocystis fagacearum, Cornus florida (most beautiful of American flowering shrubs) by the fungus Discula destructiva and the fir Abies fraseri by the European insect Adelges piceæ. Ashes, left as the commonest remaining trees, are now being

2It is listed as a Noxious Weed in Washington State.



subtracted by the Asian insect Agrilus planipennis. All this has happened within 100 years; how much will be left if such introductions continue for another 100 years?

Around Kyoto, Japan, in 2010 about one-sixth of the trees in the richly wooded mountains died: pines (a species closely related to Scots Pine) killed by the eelworm Bursaphelenchus xylophilus, said to be of American origin, oaks by the fungus Raffaelea quercivora and its insect vector Platypus quercivorus.

The nursery trade has much to answer for, especially the practice of growing young trees in one country and exporting them to another. Importing millions of ‘native’ trees (which often are not natives but look-alikes (Sell, 2007)) involves importing thousands of tons of foreign soil and all that it contains. For example, nursery practice is known to have helped the spread of alder disease. Perspicacious though the Customs are, they can hardly be expected to search container-loads of plant pots for a microscopic organism, not knowing in advance what to look for. Under present regulations, it would seem that any of the world’s plant diseases are at liberty to enter Britain provided they do so via some other European Union country.

The New Zealand Flatworm (Arthurdendyus triangulatus) appears to have got into Britain in foreign soil and has been exterminating the earthworms of Scotland. (The disastrous consequences of subtracting earthworms from European ecosystems are mirrored by the disastrous consequences of adding European earthworms to North American ecosystems that are adapted to not having them.)

Many foreign plant pathogens are species of the water-mould genus Phytophthora. The common tropical pathogen Ph. cinnamomi, besides being destructive of many crop plants, caused one of the great ecological tragedies of the twentieth century when it was accidentally let loose in SW Australia, whose unique flora, developed over millions of years of isolation, had no resistance (Podger, 1972). Another Phytophthora has appeared in England and has been consuming alders at about 1% of the trees a year (Forestry Commission, 2004). Phytophthora ramorum, of unknown origin, is responsible for ‘Sudden Oak Death’, which in this country is a disease of rhododendron and larch (not to be confused with Acute Oak Decline, a different disease of unknown provenance).

Conclusions This is a critique of ecological restoration at the landscape scale, neither endorsing nor opposing it in general. Each proposal needs to be considered on its merits. Is this scheme feasible? What are its objectives? How will anyone know when the objectives have been achieved? What threats is it intended to meet? Which species will it benefit? Will it stabilize rare species, or will it make a few common species a little commoner?

The plant pathology story is a lesson from the nineteenth century that has still not been learnt. Anyone planning a restoration should ask whether it will benefit future invasive species or pathogens, for instance by helping them to spread from site to site. Anyone planting trees should be cautious and should know exactly what they are and where they came from.



Proposals should begin by recovering a situation that is known to have existed in the recent past. In this way for example, Americans have recovered a few of the hundreds of thousands of square miles of prairie that existed in the Mid-West until the nineteenth century.

Restorations need to be properly recorded to learn lessons from success or failure. As all conservationists know, it is easy to get physical work done, but can be difficult to establish a record of what exactly was done, and very difficult to persuade anyone to come back year after year and record the consequences.

References Dickson, J. 1993. Scottish woodlands: their ancient past and precarious

present. Scottish Forestry 47: 73–78 Forestry Commission 2004. http://www.forestry.gov.uk/pdf/fcin6.pdf/$FILE/

fcin6.pdf Grove, A. T. & Rackham, O. 2001. The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: an

ecological history. Yale University Press. Podger, F. D. 1972. Phytophthora cinnamomi, a cause of lethal disease in

indigenous plant communities in Western Australia. Phytopathology 62: 972–981.

Rackham, O. 1986. The History of the Countryside. Dent, London. Rackham, O. 2003. Ancient Woodland: its history, vegetation and uses in

England. 2nd ed. Castlepoint Press, Dalbeattie. Rackham, O. 2006. Woodlands. Collins New Naturalist, London. Sell, P. D. 2007. Introduced “look-alikes” and other difficult introduced plants

in our Cambridgeshire flora. Nature in Cambridgeshire 48:46–54. Smout, T. C., MacDonald, A. R. & Watson, F. 2005. A History of the Native

Woodlands of Scotland, 1500–1920. Edinburgh University Press. Woodcock, B. A., McDonald, A. W. & Pywell, R. F. 2011. Can long-term

floodplain meadow recreation replicate species composition and functional characteristics of target grasslands? Journal of Applied Ecology 48: 1070–1078

Oliver Rackham Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

Professor Oliver Rackham is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. An acknowledged authority on the British Countryside, especially trees, woodlands and wood pasture, he has written a number of well-known books, including Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape (1976, 2nd ed 1990), The History of the Countryside (1986), The Last Forest: the history of Hatfield Forest (1989) and Woodlands (2006). He has also published extensively on the ecology of Crete. In 1998 he was awarded the OBE for ‘services to Nature Conservation’ and in 2006 he was appointed Honorary Professor of Historical Ecology in the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge.

history of the countryside as a model for the future?

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