Rewilding Cringleford

Cringleford is a Norfolk village lying about two and a half miles distant from the city centre of Norwich. It is an affluent suburb close to the university and hospital, and lies sandwiched between the Yare valley and the city’s southern bypass. Its remaining arable fields are ripe for development. 

About a decade ago the slow process of converting farmland into premium housing estates began. Access roads were inserted and three-bed houses built in streets with names like Dragonfly Lane, Chervil Close and Nightingale Drive. Everyone wants a bigger house with a double garage, and everyone also wants green space and access to nature.

Round House Way serves these estates and either side of it lies an area of green space. An aerial photograph on Google Maps shows a mosaic of bushes and grassland grown on land tumbled down from arable.

Round House Way, courtesy Google Earth Image @ 2025 Airbus

This ‘self-willed’ habitat has taken twenty years to develop its intricacy on what is essentially a housing company land-bank. But time has been called on this natural growth. This year the western side was swiped and shredded to ground level, in preparation for redevelopment [photo 1]. 

1. Round House Way West, looking south (October 2025)

The eastern half remains. People might say “it’s derelict, it looks a mess - it’s a wasteland”. 

But what we find east of Round House Way is scrub land with a richly biodiverse fauna and flora – fruit of two decades of chance, natural elaboration. [photos 2 & 3]  An architecture of hawthorn, blackthorn, oak, rose, willow and bramble frames a herb-rich sward bumpy with anthills and the myriad craters of ground-nesting bees. A solitary cat ranges out from nearby houses, captivated by vole and shrew. Goldfinches flit among seed heads of teasel. Foxgloves and St John’s Wort star the grass. Toadstools shoulder up through the remnants of last-year’s matted vegetation. Processes of seed-time and decay are running their natural programmes at ground level; the loamy soil is bouncing back from the decades of agricultural treatment received from insecticides, herbicides and fungicides. Autumn is displaying a complex of yellows, browns, reds, russets and greens – falling leaf debris making the foundations for a future nutrient hoard. This land is owned by a housing company. 

2. Round House Way East, looking east (October 2025)

3. Round House Way East, looking south-west (October 2025)

The planet is in a Biodiversity Crisis. How can we turn local development into an engine for restoring biodiversity? It requires political will at national and local level, and buy-in from the building companies. If an environmental impact assessment has been carried out at Round House Way it will have assessed impact on a set of prescribed species, but ignored the cumulative value of allowing a self-willed ecological community to develop true biodiversity over a twenty-year span.  A real natural asset has grown up and could be incorporated into local Green Infrastructure if the political will – and awareness – were there.

But soon the flail mowers will move in soon and all this biological richness will be obliterated. A new ground-zero will be set – but a greatly impoverished one.

I am not really asking for protection of the site – arguably any patch of land on this soil type in Cringleford could develop such biodiversity over a twenty-year time-span. I am asking for the biodiversity of such scrub lands routinely to be recorded and then evaluated in terms of their actual - and potential – assemblage value as ecological hotspots and corridors, and for this information to be translated into the planning process. I want all of this site’s biodiversity to receive greater consideration than the usual ecological consultants’ reports. This would require evaluation of the diversity of plants and invertebrates and not just vertebrates (Morris & Welch, 2023). The very early stages of abandonment of arable land can be highly productive for invertebrates (Fuller & Freeman, 2025). 

We know that scrub habitat is ecologically valuable. See, for example, a recent JNCC report which was written to inform government decision making (Mortimer et al, 2000). Scrub does pose challenges for practical management due to its successional nature, but its biodiversity value is absolutely clear. If there is a will to manage it properly it can revitalise the natural assets of urban and peri-urban areas such as Cringleford. It could be part of the invaluable reservoir of biodiversity which ensures the resilience of our nature networks in the face of climate change as well as the increasing pressure of human settlement. Scrub should be understood as contributing vital Green Infrastructure to development projects – provided it can be recognised and properly valued in terms other than financial ones. Round House Way East is a parish asset.

For example, a play area for children; a foraging terrain for birds; a place to go blackberrying and collecting sloes; a cherished wilderness; airspace for bats to hunt moths; a resource for dog-walkers and bird-watchers; a secure place to dig a nest burrow. [photo 4] Round House Way East is a former arable field which is busy rewilding. Can we support that process for future generations of humans, plants and animals? 

4. An Ivy Bee (Colletes hederae) bringing back pollen to her nest hole at Round House Way East (October 2025)

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References

Fuller, RJ and Freeman, G (2025). Letting nature take back control: a paradigm shift in UK nature conservation? British Wildlife, 36.8, pp547-554.

Morris, RKA and Welch, MD (2023). Is invertebrate conservation in Great Britain best achieved by policies that increase species protection? Journal of Insect Conservation, 27(4).

Mortimer, SR et al. (2000). The nature conservation value of scrub in Britain. Report #308, Joint Nature Conservation Committee, Peterborough.

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© Tim Holt-Wilson, 2025

No-Mow-May

May returns and “the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land”. Sadly, the voice of the lawnmower is more likely to be heard today, as the grasses, dandelions and daisies surge ahead, and normalising lawn management fires up again. A lawn is a meadow passed under the yoke of culture. For some people even a striped lawn is too wild, and they replace it with plastic green turf. All this ‘normalising’ comes at a cost to the diversity of living things which thrive in grassland. 

Grasses were invented by nature about 120 million years ago, though it is unlikely that dinosaurs ever rolled on a prairie. It would take 70 million years or more before grasses were prolific enough to carpet the ground, so the pleasure of rolling on a greensward belonged to browsing and grazing mammals of the early Tertiary epoch. Later, whole ecosystems such as savannah, steppe and pampas evolved as a joint project of mammals and grasses. Grazers such as aurochs are likely to have maintained forest clearings and floodplain grasslands in prehistoric Britain (Yalden 1999, p.72). Wrested from woodland and valley scrubland for the purpose of livestock farming, hay meadows and grazing pastures are a Neolithic creation (Rackham 1987, p.330). Sheep, cattle and horses need them, and we need these animals.  

The familiar British meadow has become a rarity, particularly in the lowlands where 90% of it has been lost in the past century (Lake et al, 2020, p152). Ploughed up in favour of arable or replaced by monocultural grass leys, too many old meadows and pastures have been deleted from the landscape and, along with them, the vibrant populations of herbs, insects, birds, mammals, fungi, et cetera,  which had thrived on them for many hundreds of years.

One place in Suffolk with long-established grassland was Brome Park. The Hall was built in Tudor times, about 1550, and an engraving dated 1707 shows the house surrounded by extensive parkland and trees. The Park survived until about 1963 after which it was converted to arable land. The only areas not ploughed up were the grounds of the Hall, its tree-lined avenue and a scrap of land attached to a cottage known as The Bungalow, which is where I have lived since 1992.

Brome Hall, illustrated by Jan Kip, 1707.
The site of the Bungalow is just out of the picture, beyond a pond and dovecote (far left).

At first I mowed the lawns assiduously, to keep on top of the vegetation in a drive for order. I was worried what the neighbours might think if I didn’t. Later, led by a mixture of laziness and botanical curiosity, I began to make a first cut much later in the season. I began leaving some areas of grass longer than others – frankly, I hadn’t the heart to mince up the flowers that began showing themselves. As years went by, the lawn began to lose its carpet-like quality and became more like a meadow, with a tussocky grass structure interleaved with a variety of other plants. Some patches were left longer than others, following a three-tier regime. I became aware of the diverse flora within my care. I noticed discrete populations in different parts of the lawn: stands of cocksfoot grass and common sorrel on brown soils contrasting with timothy grass, ground ivy and mosses on sandier soils.

Germander speedwell (Veronica chamaedrys), ground ivy (Glecoma hederacea) and creeping buttercup (Ranunculus repens) in a sward of springy turf moss (Rhytidiadelphus squarrosus), May 2022.

Germander speedwell (Veronica chamaedrys), ground ivy (Glecoma hederacea) and creeping buttercup (Ranunculus repens) in a sward of springy turf moss (Rhytidiadelphus squarrosus), May 2022.

Lady's smock (Cardamine pratensis) starring the lawn, with a large anthill (right), May 2022.

Twayblade orchid (Listera ovata), May 2022.

In 1999, I began making a list of as many species of plants and insects as I was able to recognise. I counted seven species of grass and two kinds of speedwell. I was amazed to find a twayblade orchid in one place and a spotted orchid in another; my lawnmower had never given them a chance to grow before. I found an incipient anthill beneath a plant pot, with yellow meadow ants scurrying about. I replaced the pot, and later discovered they had earthed up around it. This gave me the idea of encouraging anthills, of which I now have four – the largest is 30 cm high x 70 cm across. The lawn is now a texturally rich habitat: it may look a bit ragged and untidy in places but it now supports a much richer flora and fauna. In August I notice small moths flying up from the grasses round my feet. Frogs shelter beneath cool, matted tussocks, and voles forge a complicated network of tunnelled pathways. The spotted flycatcher swoops from a vantage point to snatch flying insects.  The green woodpecker bangs away at the ant hills. Rabbits scuff holes and leave scatterings of bare earth which are host for fresh seeds. Plumes of gnats dance overhead, sometimes following my head disconcertingly as I move about. 

Ant activity amid leaves of creeping cinquefoil (Potentilla reptans) and tufted vetch (Vicia cracca), May 2021.  

Having this meadow on my doorstep has transformed my engagement with and understanding of wildlife, particularly plants and insects. It has prompted photography, microscopy and the gathering of a small reference library. 

What I have done here is allow the inherent richness in this small corner of Suffolk to express itself. The diversity - the seven species of grasses, for example – is a legacy of the past, and argues for habitat continuity here. I didn’t plant them. I argue that my lawn is the final, biodiverse remnant of the old Brome Park which goes back to Tudor times, at least. The sward reminds me of old churchyards; it may never have been ploughed. None of the other land round here – not even the grounds of the Hall – is anything like so rich. I admit of having made additions to the garden over the past 30 years, for example alexanders, hyacinth, marjoram, lungwort, mahonia, box, magnolia, and – on the lawn – a clump of greater knapweed. I argued that none of these have modified the baseline plant population, which I think is an ancient one. I fear that when I leave here this little world will be endangered by someone who does not appreciate just what a special place it is.

Common sorrel (Rumex acetosa) and fading leaves of lesser celandine (Ficaria verna), May 2022.

My advice to gardeners is to stop mowing in May and see what comes up on your lawn. See what plant and animal diversity you already have – get to know and identify it, discover it close up; take macro photographs. If you find a monoculture then by all means diversify it, with native species chosen to typify a Suffolk meadow in your corner of the county. Someone in the future will thank you. Vary your mowing regime – I use a hand scythe in July to cut the longest grasses in the centre of the lawn while carving out swathes of different lengths in other parts with a petrol lawnmower. Sit back and note what happens. Give yourself a decadal timescale. Prepare to be surprised and delighted by what you find. Remember: it’s not all about ‘you’: the world is a fabric of other lives, from slugs to hedgehogs, frogs to daisies, and your lawn is part of the tapestry which makes theirs possible. Make space for nature, and remember that there is nowhere on Earth that we can take wildlife for granted any more. You have a scrap of our planet in your care.

A small hay meadow in the making - first growth of grasses Alopecurus pratensis, Arrenatherium elatius, Dactylis glomerata, Lolium perenne, Poa trivialis, Poa pratensis and others, May 2022

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REFERENCES

Lake, S. et al 2020. Britain’s Habitats. Princeton University Press.

Rackham, O. 1987. The History of the Countryside. J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd.

Yalden, D. 1999. The History of British Mammals. T & AD Poyser Ltd.

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Ferment

The garden is - as ever - a wealth of life: a ferment of greenery and flies, birds and song, sunlight patterns on leaves: myriad changes in which each moment is entirely and absolutely different from any other in the world's story. 

Here is my key point: the ceaseless difference at the core of existence: the ever-new.

Were there ever to be a recurrence it would surely signal the end of this world. 

There are repeat elements, for instance the nodding of a branch in the wind, the structure of the song-thrush's call, the form of a daisy flower. But this all happens within the frame of the phenomenal present, which is a process of ceaseless self-differentiation. Every instant is utterly new in detail, unrepeatable.

Clinging On

As the human world reels under the malign influence of Coronavirus, my thoughts turn to Cretaceous barnacles. 

This sudden interest in extinct cirripedia is prompted by a paper published a month ago by Professor Andy Gale: New thoracican cirripedes (Crustacea) from the Cretaceous of Europe and North Africa.[1] It announces the discovery of new extinct genera and species of barnacle. There are two sorts: the acorn/wart-type (sessile) barnacles familiar from rocky shores and the stalk-type (pedunculate) 'goose barnacles' sometimes found attached to drift wood. 

I have never really thought about these crustacea before. They are easily overlooked - that is until you gash your hands or feet on them at the seaside, or eat them in a Portuguese restaurant. What crystallises my interest in them now is that one of the Zeugmatolepadid family now bears my name: Subsecolepas holtwilsoni. It is a lepadid barnacle - one of the stalked type. My thanks go to Andy for the honour. I think its taxonomic status is:

Phylum - Arthropoda

Clade - Mandibulata

Clade - Pancrustacea

Subphylum - Crustacea

Class - Maxillopoda

Infraclass - Cirripedia

Superorder - Thoracica

Order - Pedunculata

Suborder - Scalpelliformes

Clade - Thoracicalcarea

Family - Zeugmatolepadidae

Subfamily - Martillepadinae

Genus - Subsecolepas

Species - holtwilsoni 

Andy Gale is one of a very small band of palaeontological researchers active in the field of fossil cirripedes. Their most illustrious forebear is Charles Darwin. Thomas Withers was active from 1910 to the 1960s, and catalogued the fossils specimens at the Natural History Museum, London. " There can be no doubt the Wither's 'Catalogues' are to fossil lepadomorph and verrucomorph barnacles what Darwin's 'Monographs' are to Recent barnacles."[2] Andy has been one of the most prolific cirripede researchers in recent decades, focusing on the Cretaceous Chalk and publishing many papers. He says that S.holtwilsoni is common in chalk of the Upper Campanian stage in the UK, and that 400 fossil specimens have been found at various old pits in the Norwich area. He named it after me for helping him dig in these pits and for having been involved in their conservation, including Keswick, Catton, Cringleford and Whitlingham.

Collecting samples at Keswick, 2015

I have not visited any chalk pits lately. Britain today is in emergency 'lock-down', and I feel sorry for city-dwellers cooped up in flats and terraced houses. At least I have an extensive wildlife garden to ramble in, and I also enjoy exploring the meaning of our geological heritage.

Crustaceans of the Campanian seas are a great imaginative diversion - a dépaysement, as the French say. Geology and palaeontology call us out of our own time and down into the profound depths of planetary and biological evolution. I try to imagine the lifeworld of the extinct species that now bears my name.  

Here are photos of the type specimens of S.holtwilsoni, variously sourced from chalk pits at Keswick and Cringleford, and all are now archived in the Natural History Museum. They show elements of the set of hard, calcareous plates which enclose the head of the barnacle. 

Type specimens of Subsecolepas holtwilsoni. Image courtesy Andy Gale [1]

Stalked barnacles from JG Wood: 'The Illustrated Natural History'; Routledge, London, 1863

Darwin's drawing of a Middle Jurassic stalked barnacle Pollicipes concinnus,
as found attached to the shell of an ammonite.[3]

Contemporary stalked barnacles attach themselves to floating objects, particularly driftwood, turtles and ships. According to Andy Gale, S.holtwilsoni and other Zeugmatolepadids probably had a similar lifestyle, attaching to the shells of free-swimming ammonites and seabed-dwelling inoceramid bivalves as well as floating wood.[1, p.245] There must have been a steady rain of their plates falling into the carbonate-rich mud of the sea floor, perhaps 100 to 500 metres down.[4] 

The Campanian stage spans from 83.6 to 72.2 million years ago.[5], and chalk of this age is well-represented in Norfolk and Suffolk. I have visited many quarries of this period in the Gipping valley and Norwich areas. At Keswick and Cringleford I helped clear the chalk exposures so that Andy Gale could record the geological succession and take samples. The samples are treated with glauber's salt and freezing in a repeat process until the miniscule fossil fragments - echinoid spines, bits of coral, fish scale, shell, etc - are freed from their chalky matrix and can be examined under a microscope.  

Fossil residues from the Chalk (40x magnification)

  

The contrast between the physical reality of an old chalk pit, with its crumbly, scrub-infested chaos, and the clarified world of knowledge compiled by over 150 years of scientific research into the Chalk is remarkable. We now know much about the Earth's geography during the Campanian, for example that Europe was an archipelago of islands.[6] We know much about biodiversity and details of climate and chemistry.[7; 8]  

 

The world as it was in the late Cretaceous. Image courtesy Andy Gale [1]

All this is wonderful, radical stuff to explore during COVID-19 lock-down. Like astronomy, geology has the power to frame human life against an almost infinite scale of time and space. Like pedunculate cirripedes, we cling for a few seasons to our floating attachment points and then - like them - our debris will inevitably find its way to the metaphorical sea floor. Perhaps only our names, inscriptions and genetic coding will survive us, for a century or two at most. The history of taxonomic revision makes clear that not even species names backed up with diligent taxonomic description may be proof against time. 

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REFERENCES

[1] - Gale, A.S. New thoracican cirripedes (Crustacea) from the Cretaceous of Europe and North Africa. Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie - Abhandlungen Band 295 Heft 3 (2020), pp.243-282. [Link accessed May 2020]
[2] - Southward, AJ. Barnacle Biology. CRC Press, 1987; chapters 2.1 and 2.2.
[3] - Darwin, CR. A monograph on the fossil Lepadidæ, or pedunculated cirripedes of Great Britain. Palæontographical Society, London, 1851 Plate 3, Fig.1. Downloadable here. [Link accessed May 2020]
[4] - Rawson, PF. Cretaceous: Sea Levels peak as the North Atlantic Opens, in: Brenchley, PJ & Rawson, PF (eds). The Geology of England and Wales. The Geological Society, 2006; 2nd Edition. 
[5] - Lee, JR, et al (eds). British Regional Geology. East Anglia. British Geological Survey, Fifth Edition, 2015.
[6] - Csiki-Sava, Z et al. Island life in the Cretaceous - faunal composition, biogeography, evolution, and extinction of land-living vertebrates on the Late Cretaceous European archipelago. Zookeys, no.469, January 2015, pp.1-161. [Link accessed May 2020]
[7] - Jarvis, I, et al. Late Cretaceous (Campanian) carbon isotope events, sea-level change and correlation of the Tethyan and Boreal realms. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, no.188, 2002, pp.215-248.
[8] - Skelton, PF et al (eds). The Cretaceous World. The Open University / Cambridge University Press, 2003.

THANKS TO

• Andy Gale, for naming the extinct beastie.
• Gilbert Addison, for suggesting the title of this article.

Land gulls

Two 80-acre fields at Cookley, near Halesworth, with winter wheat

(shades of yellowish green, blueish green)

on clayland, undulating, empty - just the crop, the soil, the flint.

Setting for a cold wind.

January the last.

Beyond me in space: white gulls.

Gulls in flight, over the field's face, roving. A few standing, breasting the sun.

White owls over a green sea.

A skylark sings, aloft. 

The gulls think downward. Raised on ocean-space and sprats, they turn to terrestrial matters: beetles and worms. 

All beneath a milky, blue and infinite sky.

They flutter to and fro: staring, stopping, turning to drop and rise - a mere second or two. Focused then refocusing. Steady meditation. Body thinking. Time.

How many are there – forty or fifty? 

But who watches gulls - those dustbins of the bird world!?

One could map their delicate trajectories: a script of white on green. Their nodes and lines, objectified. 

Instead, each bird enters my vision, enters my thoughts. 

In this moment each one enters my heart.

Their wavering flights criss-cross my sight in a ceaseless, white-winged ballet. 

They catch the sun, like dew on wheat and roof-lines in distant villages. 

Land gulls.

Les Rats de Montfaucon

I have been dipping into 'Gleanings in Natural History' by Edward Jesse (John Murray, London, 1834). It is a collection of miscellaneous essays and notes on plants and animals, half bound in green leather with beautifully marbled boards. I have been searching for information about eels. However yesterday I allowed allowed myself to be distracted by stories about other animals. What I read about the rats of Montfaucon made my hair stand on end.

Montfaucon is an area on the north-eastern side of Paris, part of the unexceptional quartier called Les Buttes-Chaumont. As I remember from my days living in the city, its greatest attraction is a public park with interesting rocky terrain, sited in some old sandstone quarries. Two hundred years ago it was a frightful place.

Until 1760 it had been home to the biggest gibbet in France: a square, three-storey building, like a stone-built warehouse with windows, open on three sides with an access ramp to the rear; each window could hold a hanged body, sixty windows all round. A factory of public execution. The smell of the place and the crowd of dogs and carrions birds were atrocious.[1]

Le Gibet De Montfaucon. Image courtesy http://www.parisenbreves.fr/breves/140

At the same time, Montfaucon housed the capital's night soil processing factory, la voirie de matières fécales, at which excrement collected by cart was processed into valuable 'poudrette' fertiliser. It was sited in one of the disused quarries, and consisted in a descending series of linked basins. Liquid matter was gradually drained off, and the solids progressively matured into a nitrogenous earthy material for resale.[2]

Two horse knacker's yards and rendering plants were situated in another quarry. They were able to process 15,000 carcases per year (that means 288 per week; 41 per day). Products included hide, hair, grease and maggots (for fishing and raising poultry). Every night a horde of rats sallied out from drain pipes and holes and stripped the carcases clean of anything edible. Only the bones remained by morning.

The knacker's yard at Montfaucon (Parent-Duchatelet, 1827) Image courtesy http://insitu.revues.org/10512

A knacker's shed at Montfaucon, 1831. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes the rats themselves fell victim to campaigns of extermination and commercial exploitation - as many as 2,500 could be killed in one night, tackled with a poisonous mixture of arsenic and flour or by dogs, sticks and flaming torches. Their miserable skins had some value. The tricky thing was not to provoke them into making a panicky exodus into surrounding housing estates.

When the wind was in the north, all Paris suffered from the suffocating stench of Montfaucon. As the population of the city grew, people lost patience with the place. Also, the rats were becoming a mortal danger, and not just to lone drunkards and tramps. Buildings and public infrastructure were being undermined by their burrowing.

The trigger for change was an outbreak of cholera in the city in 1832, leading to a public health campaign and a final decision to close the site. The night soil processing was moved to the Forest of Bondy, some 15 km east of the city. But what of the knacker's yards?

The question had evidently been debated for some time, as Edward Jesse wrote:

The most interesting account of rats I have met with, was made some time ago in an official report to the French government. It was drawn up in consequence of a proposition made for the removal of a horse slaughter-house at Montfaucon, to a greater distance from Paris, when one of the chief obstacles urged against such a removal, was the fear entertained of the dangerous consequences that might result to the neighbourhood, from suddenly depriving these voracious vermin of their accustomed sustenance. (p.311)

The writer Théophile Gautier (1838) likened the potential rat problem to a volcano - 'Naples has its Vesuvius, and Paris has its Montfaucon', he wrote [3]. He dramatically explained the situation for prurient readers:

The rats of Montfaucon are no ordinary rats; the abundance and quality of their food has developed them prodigiously; these are Herculean rats, enormous, huge as elephants, ferocious as tigers, with teeth of steel and claws of iron; rats that make one or at most two mouthfuls of a cat; the fields they cross are trodden down as though an army had passed through with its artillery, baggage train, ammunition wagons and field smithies; the clay they carry on their feet gives this trackway a greenish hue that distinguishes it from other paths: these routeways, toughened as if by tarmacadam, terminate at subterranean ratopoli with immense tunnelworks where innumerable gnawing and devouring populations swarm…

Those who dine like Belshazzar at Montfaucon, suddenly missing their sustenance, will come into Paris to eat human instead of horse meat.

Montfaucon was finally closed in 1849 [4], and re-opened as Buttes-Chaumont Park in 1867. I have not been able to find an account of the closure of the site. I suspect the feared rodent apocalypse never happened. Dogs, poison, sticks and flaming torches can accomplish great work.  

If pure stench and carnal corruption are revelations of Hell then Montfaucon was surely a Hell on Earth. Sad to say, it was not an exceptional one. There were in those days many fragments of living Hell in the world, where living things were tortured or recycled without compassion by their fellow beings or obliviously by the plutonic processes of decay and putrefaction. The slaughterhouses of Regency England are a case in point. Today such facilities are sanitised and closely regulated, as are facilities for sewage processing and capital punishment. Today they are conducted pretty well out of sight and mind. However, we need the story of places such as Montfaucon to remind us of the existential truths our civilisation has masked, and indeed what civilisation has accomplished over the last two centuries. Is there such a thing as progress? I think the story of Montfaucon is clear evidence that there is.

Who can say what further progress may yet be made in the spheres of justice, waste disposal and animal rights?

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References

[1] - Le Gibet de Montfaucon, at: Plateau Hassard: Le Blog - http://plateauhassard.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/le-gibet-de-montfaucon.html 
[2] - La Voirie de Montfaucon, at: Plateau Hassard: Le Blog - http://plateauhassard.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/la-voirie-de-montfaucon.html 
[3] - 'La Ville des Rats', by Théophile Gautier (1838) - http://www.theophilegautier.fr/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/La-Ville-des-rats.pdf 
[4] - La Voirie de Montfaucon, at Wikipedia - https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voirie_de_Montfaucon/

In the South Downs

4-1-2016

I do not know the South Downs, but my visit to Petersfield last week was drawn into their power. They looked grey and brooding in the mizzling weather blowing up from the south.

Locals must be familiar with these hills and the bulk that forms a backdrop to their lives: southwards towards Burriton, westwards to Ramsdean, northwards to Steep. They frame all views except eastward, into Sussex, where the Weald lies.

The hills are chalk; their summits are mostly bare and their slopes are mostly wooded. In past centuries they would have been given over to sheep, with flocks crossing the downland turf. The Downs remain but sheep and downland are mostly a memory now, as arable or tree plantations have taken over. What would the poet Edward Thomas have made of this? He lived at Steep; he walked these hills, knew their paths and people; he digested what he saw and felt, he distilled it into his ungainly yet ecstatic, wild yet thoughtful writing, in which the character of nature is blended with his own troubled soul. He chronicled the pre-War world just before it crumbled. He wrote a book 'The South Country' and filled it with his response to the Downs.

My friend Jonathan runs a sawmill near Butser Hill. He manages Whitelands Wood, with its modern stands of ash and western red cedar climbing the northern flanks of the hill. He nurtures a few ancient yew trees in clearings. He delights in the wood's biodiversity. Old man's beard scrambles along the fences and up the trees; Roman snails still live in the rough chalky soil. Otherwise there are few traces of the ancient downland visible on old maps and which developed here since the Bronze Age. Constant grazing is just not practical. Times have changed.

Buried path - a former downland trackway, with flints and mosses underfoot

On Tuesday Jonathan and I drove to the Shepherd's Church at Didling, with his son Bede and grey, shaggy lurcher Beaumont for company. The chalk escarpment runs east-west here, fronted by a dark ribbon of woodland; its summits are green and bare. The church stands alone, surrounded by fields and is reached by a farm track, which becomes a footpath that continues towards Didling Hill. We paid our respects to this ancient shrine before walking on, with Beaumont trotting along in a universe of smells. The day was patchy sunlight with passing clouds. I became absorbed by the hill's wooded presence as we climbed towards it. Edward Thomas's words were flickering through my thoughts: old man's beard, 'that  hoar-green feathery herb' and how the scent of its shrivelled seed heads evoked unplaceable memories; the shell of 'a little snail bleached in the grass, chips of flint and mite of chalk'; the badger, 'that most ancient Briton of English beasts', dug from his sett and given to the hounds in a dark combe with 'sliding chalk by beech and yew and perishing juniper'.

We passed a chalk pit; we entered the wood.

The world changed - ash and yew crowding around us. Deprived of grassy cover, the topsoil showed bare flint and chalk in the gloom beneath the trees, which the deer had browsed into a canopy just below head height. Brown and white earth from a badger's sett was mounded up between the roots of a large ash. A pile of yew seeds in various stages of decomposition marked a vole's winter feasting place. Beaumont was in his element, alert, alive and questing. We diverged from the path a bit, exploring tree bark with a forester's eye, reading the past written into its hard, rumpled textures. Jonathan noticed a scatter of prehistoric flint knapping debris underfoot, white shards glowing in tree shade - they would have been hidden by an overgrowth of turf had this been open downland. In places I found my feet struggling to grip on the sloping soil, the sliding chalk.

The old world of the downs finds shelter beneath the trees. Here, we move into a different, set-aside space on a north-facing scarp too steep for farming. Root and tree, teeth and fur, flint and bone; the smell of earth and vegetable decay; animal trails, invisible. The elder world seems closer here, with Thomas's sturdy footsteps close behind us and the whisper of corduroy as he walks past, struggling with his thoughts. He has a weekend's leave from the Army; he is walking to clear his head, clear the turbulence of a homecoming to his wife Helen and their three clamouring children ten miles way in the cottage at Steep. They only remember him as he was before he enlisted. He is walking to find the words he needs, to encounter places where his own nature can do its work of healing; he strides out to forget everything on earth 'except that it is lovelier than any mysteries'. He sees a fallow deer as it watches him under the trees; it stamps then runs. He finds himself alone.

We turned and left the wood.We hadn't even reached its upper margins, where open skies and downland begin - I don't know why: I would have relished a summit view. For some reason the wood had been enough, a saturation. Beaumont trotted on across the reseeded grass ley, indifferent to its green monoculture.

Meaning flourishes in spots of diversity in the landscape, like a 13th century flint church, a pile of yew seeds between the roots of a tree, or the smell of a badger.

Such things are worth walking to find.

  

Edward Thomas