Go West Young Man

Sorry for the silence, Ive been away in Herefordshire for a family wedding.

Heaven for swallows and martins; plenty of food
and nest sites.

As we all know, the rapid decline in insect numbers in the UK and across the rest of Europe has had a serious effect on our insect-eating birds, but the effect is worst in lowland agricultural areas like ours. I witnessed this myself when I found house martins and swallows still raising young in in farms and villages along the Welsh border, long after the very few here in Brampton had given up and gone. More directly, I was struck by the sunlit swarms of insects at dusk under the trees, the moths that flew in and out of the house and spiders webs that festooned the branches on a dewy morning.

Clear air, rolling green hills with a
patchwork of woodland and ancient hedgerows.

Herefordshire always reminds me of Tolkein's Shire; small farms, small fields, livestock, orchards, hop-bines, mistletoe, endless dense hedges and lovely woods dot the rolling landscape. It hasn't changed much in my lifetime. Then there are the houses that dot the landscape or cluster into hamlets, mostly with plenty of nest sites for birds.

A West Country "motorway".

It's easy to imagine that the England that we have in our mind's eye might have been destroyed long ago while we were distracted by "progress" and shiny new tech, but it is still out there across big swathes of our country. Look for the older landscape West of the Great North Road in Northamptonshire, Leicestershire and all the way to Wales.

Of course we still have some treasures over here in the East but they are mostly isolated little gems, like islands in a sea of sugar beet, motorways and housing estates. How did this east-versus-west split come about?

Swarms of insects beneath the oaks.

The answers lie in geography, climate and human history.

I was thinking about these things as we drove home through Worcester, Stratford, Warwick to join the M6 and the A14. In Herefordshire the trees had been green, that grass was still growing and the air was fresh, but near Stratford the earth looked bit more brown and a bit less green. Some of the hedgerow trees were turning yellow and red. By the time we reached Coventry farms and roadside verges looked parched and dusty and autumn was creeping towards us from the East.

Rainfall is a big factor in the difference between East Anglia and the West Country. Most of our rain comes in from the Atlantic and Wales takes the dragon's share of it while the English lion gets what's left. It is simply that the lush landscape of Wales is hilly and lies upstream of us in terms of air currents.The parade of eastbound clouds often fizzles out before it reaches the flat-lands of Cambridgeshire. In fact, we get about the same amount of rain as falls in Jordan. That has a huge impact on agriculture, on vegetation and on insects and birds. Thats why the countryside here is so parched in comparison to the west.

We watched the traffic build up and the lanes multiply until I could stand it no more. I turned off the A14 at Naseby to find some country roads and immediately found a slice of proper landscape with stone houses, old walls and hedges, and a monument to the English Civil War battle that occurred there in 1645, which brings me to history.

The countryside landscape in the east is a modern one, created by enclosures and the draining of fenland. Fields are large and regular, like the whole landscape was drawn up on squared paper, which some of it was. Livestock farming is rare here and arable is king, and for that you need big fields t handle big harvesting equipment. You also need tonnes of chemicals to keep taking big yields off the same fields year after year. When the fields were enclosed, over two hundred years ago, mist of the blackthorn to hedge the east midlands was grown here in Brampton and Buckden. They didn't bother with hedges much in the Fens.

Straight fields, straight ditches and straight roads are a feature of our flat landscape so there are no surprises round the corner. In the old landscape the field patterns were based on Norman practices, with three large fields surrounding the village with its manor, church and tythe barn. Sometimes the road wound its way round the fields and through the village following old desire lines or even he whim of a badger who walked there first. The pattern would be disrupted by groves of trees and meandering rivers. And that's how most of England still looks if we get off the dual carriageway and head for the hills.

Swallows nesting in a porch on September 16th.
Young one on the left.

Looking for the vanished wildlife of Olde England? "Go West Young Man", I say.