Creating the countryside

Dawn today is a line of apricot beyond the trees. It starts as a smudge behind Credenhill, the silhouettes of pines sketching themselves in. The valley seems sunk in half-light, without birdsong. But if I peer into the dimness below the brightening sky, I can see the valley being revealed, like a diagram of itself.

Pay attention to any slice of the British landscape and you begin to understand how it works, and why and when it took shape. In 1954, W. G. Hoskins’s popularising study The Making of the English Landscape helped a post-war generation realise that the British countryside is as manmade as any townscape. More than 70 years on, as the experience of the majority in Britain becomes ever more urban and digital, those lessons are increasingly forgotten. The rural environment is often disdained as boring, irrelevant or – worse – a kind of reactionary force in society.

Yet the countryside feeds us and provides our clean water and air. To state what should be obvious, these are the building blocks of life. They sustain everything, including the complexities of urban and indeed digital experience. The countryside is also at the cutting edge of climate change, and what’s being done here to minimise it should be at the forefront of our minds. We need to be able to read the countryside in order to understand both global markets and the sweep of history, as well as the effects of locality and individual action.

Right now, for example, the road at the end of this valley is still silent. But I know that in farm kitchens up and down these hills the lights are on, kettles are boiling and toast is being vigorously buttered. The agricultural working day starts early. For some, there’s milking to be done, usually around 5.30am or 6am before the cattle start to feed.

Herefordshire is the home of the Hereford breed, muscular champions with distinctive cream faces and red and cream coats. Herefords are beef cattle, grown for meat and not milked, but there are plenty of dairy herds in the county too. The early spring is when these herds are most likely to be dry – that is, not milked for a couple of months – in preparation for calving. It’s a time of year when cowmen may be freed up for other work. On farms that bring their cattle in there are still barns to be mucked out, and slurry pits to be tackled. Still, every half hour extra in bed of a frosty morning is a bonus.

Yet the kitchen lights are on; and many have been burning all night. Round here, this is high season for lambing. To our east, in the Cotswolds, lambing can be as late as Easter (that moveable feast). Go for a walk in March and you’ll often come across flocks of ewes corralled into small home fields or turned onto almost bare fields where winter kale has already been cropped, so they lose a bit of weight to help with the births. These practices are inflected by the modern Agricultural College, but they’re also traditional to those areas of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire: literally built into the landscape of dry-stone walls and stone-walled sheep folds.

Lambing season

Sheep have shaped the environment of those limestone wolds since medieval times, when wealthy landowners elbowed other forms of farming aside to capitalise on an international wool trade. Their wealth is celebrated by the pinnacled “wool churches” they built to dominate Cotswold towns and villages. Some traditional breeds, like the shaggy-fleeced Cotswold Lion, have always been kept for meat as well as their yellowish “golden fleece”. But this landscape – today again a wealthy enclave – is one of the first in which profit replaced husbandry of that human necessity, food.

Sheep farming is equally traditional to our west, in the mountains of Powys and Ceredigion, where lambing can start in January or even December. The received wisdom is that this gives lambs time to grow hardy enough to survive winter on the open fields. But lamb for the table is slaughtered at less than a year old: after a year, it becomes hogget and, after two, mutton. New season lamb is four to six months old and, traditionally, the biggest demand was at Easter: you do the maths, as the saying goes.

In a post-Christian Britain, where Easter tends to be celebrated with chocolate rather than a meat freighted with religious symbolism, the seasonal premium may be less marked and imported New Zealand lamb – product of the mirror annual cycle – irons out consumer demand. Still, any bonus helps hill farmers, labouring to make often less than a living. The Welsh government calls these holdings Severely Disadvantaged Areas, SDAs, and records that the average income of an SDA sheep farm fell by 45 per cent in 2022-3 to £28,700, the result of these shifts in global trade.

Geophysically, and so economically, Herefordshire is neither Cotswold tableland nor the slate mountains of Wales. It finds itself somewhere in between. Our characteristic Old Red Sandstone, which colours the county’s fields every shade from orange to plum purple, produces a rich clay loam. We’re a region of fertile river valleys, several of which map the county’s boundaries: Wye, Lugg, Teme and Monnow. This is a watery region, from the Golden Valley to Ross-on-Wye, which saw the birth of the world tourist trade in the shape of the Romantic era’s commercial Wye Tour. That also makes it prone to flooding. Thinly populated and therefore impoverished, the rural county’s infrastructure has been battered by this winter’s succession of storms.

But lambing must go on, come hell or literal high water. In neighbouring valleys, and up lanes so narrow that to drive them is like threading a needle, sheep farmers are “keeping watch over their flocks by night”. Lambs, like human babies, most often get born in the small hours. Farmers on well-appointed holdings may try to drowse indoors, helped by infra-red cameras in birthing pens. But the traditional way to do it is to wait up with the expectant ewes, in byres or even open pens. It’s a time of sleep-deprivation piled on sleep-deprivation, and the sharp chills of below-freezing nights do nothing to help.

The MP for Cider

Then all at once the sky lights up, and here we are. With little haze in the atmosphere, the landscape brightens into blocks of colour. The orchard lawn where young trees, not yet with bushy crowns, stand awkwardly cocked. A silver-and-shadow lake, where the ice has thawed and refrozen in fracturing patterns that look like fish scales. A hedge line. A wide slope of arable, this year planted with winter wheat. Smaller grazing paddocks on the hillside; and, above them, woodland. Coots are beginning to pick through lakeside grass, a buzzard lifts from his hilltop perch and glides overhead. Wherever I look, wildlife is beginning to stir.

Yet, layer on layer, this is a manmade landscape. The new orchard is part-replacement for the orchards that grew here until the middle of the 20th century. This is traditional orchard country; at the end of the 19th century, Hereford was even represented in parliament by a gentleman cider farmer. The Rt Hon Charles Cooke was known as the “MP for Cider”. Many of the orchards which remain within a radius of 10 or so miles of the county town are planted with sour cider apple or even perry pear trees. Their fruit can’t be used for anything else – it purses the mouth like a sloe.

In the UK, commercial large-batch cider increasingly uses apple concentrate – sourced from large-scale, cheaper growers in countries like China, Turkey, the US and Poland. Those countries are now the apple behemoths, and they’ve driven if not a coach and horses then certainly a fleet of articulated lorries through the countryside recorded in the Herefordshire Pomona. This seven-volume catalogue of the county’s apple, perry and pear species, much treasured by 21st-century biodiversity specialists, was compiled in the late 19th century. But today it reads as a lost environmental idiolect: Bastard Foxwhelp, Cock-a-gee, Golden Moyel, Hagloe Crab, Jolly Beggar, Peasgood’s Nonesuch, Gipsy King, South Queening.

Hundreds of acres of orchard have disappeared; more are grubbed up every year. But the mistletoe that floats its goldish balls among the orchard branches is visible at a distance, even in the subdued light of this early morning. This “golden bough”, which gave its name to the hugely influential “study of magic and religion” published by J.G. Frazer in 1907, catches my eye here and there this morning.

Family farms

Nearer the house than the glowing mistletoe, but further than the orchard field, the lake lies cockled with ice. About an acre in extent, this medieval carp lake is a record of over 500 years of settlement on this site. What’s more, it’s still full of carp. In summer these large, lazy fish reveal themselves idling in the shallows, or as they leap for flies. Mirror carp in silver and primrose; bronzed leather carp; common carp. Today it looks like habitat. It’s enough of one for a local wildlife trust to release otters here, but the pond was dug as a fish farm. And the fish resting under this morning’s lid of ice have unimaginably distant ancestors who were introduced to this water in the 15th century.

A. E. Housman’s “valleys of springs and rivers, /By Ony and Teme and Clun” lie north of here, in the country where Herefordshire meets Shropshire. But in this valley, too, there’s an abundance of springs, whose sites keep shifting. Though this pond is spring-fed, there’s a whole system of stream-fed carp lakes of similar size on the other side of the valley, in the lea of the hill. The waterway that feeds them used to be a major tributary of the River Wye. It appears on even the most sparsely detailed of county maps between the 16th and 19th centuries. Today it’s shrunk to a modest brook – not quite a winterbourne – which only comes to life when there’s flooding.

The field beyond the lake is huge and gently convex. It keeps the floods away from here. In the 20th century some ambitious estate manager ripped out hedges to create the “prairie farming” open field that was fashionable at the time. The 1970s were a decade in love with modernity, and big fields suited new super-sized agricultural machinery: combine harvesters in place of tractors, and closed cab tractors several storeys high to replace the old open saddle on a couple of axles, plus trailer.

Today this field is an almost luminous green in the intensifying morning light. But prairie farming, though it may suit the plains of Hungary, or the Ukrainian breadbasket, can be an awkward fit in the variegated, contour-rich terrain of British farmland. The destruction of hedges decimates wildlife. It also leaves topsoil free to shift and slip away – as dust when it’s dry, or mud when it’s wet. Herefordshire is lucky that, unlike the biodiversity deserts in parts of Wiltshire and south Oxfordshire for example, it remains largely worked by family farms. These small businesses, usually run by a single family that’s lived on-site and managed the same few fields, hedges and ditches for generations, aren’t seduced by “economies of scale” and “investment in plant” in the same way as the huge estate farms owned by land banking corporations, or wealthy farming consortia.

You can often guess at a glance whether land is being farmed by actual food producers whose home it is, and who therefore have every personal incentive to sustain their land. The more naked a landscape looks, the more likely it’s managed by a company primarily concerned with extracting profit.

Legible in the landscape

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule of thumb. Chalk downland is just one grassy habitat where hedges are non-traditional. Besides, hedges themselves are a quirk of British history. “Vegetable walls”, as a distinguished Romanian writer I know once described them.

Cheaper and quicker to build than masonry walls, and more durable than fences, hedges seen close up are trees trimmed short. In best practice, they’re knitted together by laying: their stems nicked and forced sideways in a long line of diagonals. It’s traditional, if only loosely accurate, to date a hedge by adding a century per species. The hedges on the hill opposite contain hawthorn, ash, hazel, field maple; but not all in the same stretch. Dog rose and bramble, nettles and dock mesh them together. They elbow up towards the wooded and impractically terraced and ditched terrain of the Iron Age hillfort, lozenges of paler green against stands of mixed forestry.

The hedged fields are a product of the Agricultural Revolution which saw gentry landowners enclose their estate land. Enclosure was a paralegal process that closed off common ground on which ordinary people practised subsistence farming. Common grazing land and strip farming had been part of the post-feudal deal by which an English peasantry with few rights continued to labour for local landowners.

But at the end of the 18th century, landowners embraced agrarian modernisation. Mechanisation meant they needed fewer workers, who instead of being settled were re-hired as day labourers. As William Cobbett records in his state-of-the-nation Rural Rides, written in 1822-26, among the many left without means of support or even a home, starvation was commonplace: “How long; how long, good God! is this state of things to last? How long will these people starve in the midst of plenty?” Like the desperate poor everywhere and at all times, they were delivered up to the Industrial Revolution as infinitely exploitable labour.

Yet perhaps the biggest monument to power within this landscape is the wooded top of Credenhill, which draws the eye constantly up towards a sky of by now almost Mediterranean blue. Here the second largest Iron Age hillfort in Britain encloses nearly 50 acres in a tremendous complex of banks and ditches, which centuries of farmers have dismissed as impractical to farm. The resulting woodland is now conserved by the Woodland Trust and home to fallow deer, muntjacs, foxes and raptors.

This typical valley, on this typical morning in February, is an environment of great beauty. But it’s absolutely without innocence. Britain’s social and political history is as legible in its landscapes as its townscapes. If we were to learn habitually to read it, we might begin to think about the rural environment as that which has undergone continual change – and so can be changed again.

Decision-makers could reinterpret the places from which our human essentials come: biodiversity literally keeps the planet alive. They could learn from what works here, and what doesn’t. Who knows what could be gleaned from a set of interlocking practices and systems such as this valley records. In taking advantage of how things work rather than trying to defeat them, the way sustainable family farming does, we might even survive.

Fiona Sampson’s “Limestone Country” is reissued by Little Toller.

This article is from New Humanist’s Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.