A Prickly Affair
The Beauty in the Beast
Hedgehog
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Copyright © Hugh Warwick 2017
Cover design by Stephen Parker
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First published by Square Peg in 2017
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780224100892
To Zoe, Mati and Pip – who keep me connected
Sitting by the window in a cramped and crowded train as it bundled through undulating Lancashire fields on a July afternoon, I paused from trying to read, to gaze outside. Sunshine was vying with clouds to set up an ominous contrast, but in places it broke through to shine spotlights onto the landscape.
When I had last paid attention we had been lurching towards Wolverhampton between parallel lines. On one side of us, the Birmingham Canal, uninviting and unloved, dark water sitting in a stream of concrete. On the other, the M5, dystopian brutalism at its finest, stagnant too, the stream of vehicles static.
Now, out in the countryside, very different lines were visible. Beyond the blurred verge, parallax slowed the middle distance to a sedentary stroll, giving me time to see more: hedges, some rich and vibrant, wandering through fields worn thin by livestock. Walls, inanimate minerals come to life and hinting of hidden depths.
There was a connection between these two different views. I was struck, yet again, by how linear most man-made features in the landscape were. When we set about the land for ownership and control, we tend to do so with lines.
Let us shift perspective. When my son was six he was given the opportunity by his grandfather to fly a light aircraft. Pip sat in a car seat so he could see out of the cockpit; I was in the back, utterly terrified, as my father-in-law took his hands off the controls and told my son to have a go. Looking out of the window to distract myself I was presented with a view of the Cambridgeshire countryside from 1,000 feet up. The threads that cut it up and tied it together were stark: road, rail and canal links – but also hedgerows, tree lines, woodlands. You could also see how much communities – the clusters of brown buildings that represented villages, towns, estates – had been carved up, divided by all these lines. As our lives were being threaded together by the lines we made, so at the same time the landscape was being sliced into ever-smaller fragments. I struggled to find a straight line made by nature.
It is rare to discover a view of the landscape untouched by our lines. So dominant a feature have they become that they have transformed our landscape into something new. As urban living has created the cityscape, so our lines have created what I call a linescape; one where the lines we have drawn have far-reaching consequences.
We use these lines for connection, and we use them for separation. It is a paradox that the very first lines we etched into the land were specifically for fragmentation: walls, hedges, ditches and dykes, all there to assert ownership or restrain livestock – yet inadvertently they have become the agents of connection for wildlife. It is along their edges that our flora and fauna thrive and flourish.
The very lines we carved into the landscape for connection, on the other hand – canals, railways and roads – have become agents of fragmentation for wildlife, cutting habitats into ever smaller, and increasingly unviable, pockets.
The dichotomy is not quite so simple, though, as this book will explore. There are hedges that fulfil none of their promise, and roads along which wildlife runs riot. And while I have a prejudice in favour of hedges – for Wordsworth ‘little lines of sportive wood run wild’ – I want to be challenged. I want to find the good, even in the most unlikely places.
My fascination with the world of lines comes from the animal I started to study over thirty years ago. Perhaps more than any other animal, the hedgehog is defined by lines. It is named after the linear feature it ‘hogs’, and it is famously rendered two-dimensional by the road. Over time I have broadened my vision to encompass other species, and while there are many differences between bees, bats, otters, moths, robins, toads and water voles, I have come to recognise one constant: the impact that the fragmentation of their habitats is having on their ability to flourish.
Fragmentation is an under-reported and poorly understood threat. Most attention is paid to the loss of habitat, and there is no denying how serious a problem this is. In the last seventy years we have lost 97 per cent of wildflower meadows, and 75 per cent of ponds and heaths. Fifty per cent of our ancient woodland has gone in the last one hundred years. But beneath these alarming figures is a further tragedy that should be at the top of the conservation agenda. The remaining pockets of habitat are becoming increasingly isolated.
The problems presented by fragmentation are both immediate and genetic. When there has been a glut of young, for example, an absence of suitable mates or a shortage of food, animals need to move to new habitat. When they are restricted from moving, the risk of localised extinctions increases. Living within restricted habitats has a further impact on the genetic diversity of individual animals and is the subject of current research.
Hedgehogs are a species whose length of leg tends to argue against extensive perambulation, but they have recently been revealed to require far greater areas than previously thought for viable populations. Computer modelling now projects the minimum habitat required for a sustainable population as the size of three 18-hole golf courses. That means just under a square kilometre – and not chopped up by fences, roads or canals. Where are we going to find that?
For the successful conservation of species, size really does matter. SLoSS – Single Large or Several Small – is how the question is scientifically phrased: what is going to be the most effective way to assist a species or an ecosystem? One large reserve, or lots of smaller ones? It might seem self-evident that we should always choose ‘Single Large’ – but ecology, especially when it has to be considered alongside such tedious realities as budgetary constraints, can be a complicated soul. Moreover, for many species – such as the brown hairstreak butterfly or the bank vole – edges are a crucial component of their habitat, and when the areas are smaller the relative amount of edge is greater. So smaller areas have advantages too – but they need to be connected. The answer to the question, then, is not a simple yes/no: yes, we need single large areas, but we need several small ones too. Single large areas can become fragmented as effectively as the small ones can become connected.
This book, therefore, is going to look at how the bad can be made good, and the good, better. Connection is not just important for wildlife: it is a central tenet of what it means to be human – that we crave (or at least most of us do) connection with others of the same species. In fact, a large body of evidence indicates that we long for a connection with other species too.
This ‘biophilia’, a term popularised by the Harvard University biologist E. O. Wilson, who has done so much to bring an awareness of the need for biodiversity to a wider audience, has serious implications. We need nature, and nature needs us to treat it with greater care. There is an obvious logic to this – if we turn the planet into a barren wasteland, we too will die – but Wilson’s thesis is subtler. The need, he argues, is both physiological and psychological. We are happier in nature. We feel better, convalesce faster and learn more deeply, when we have contact with nature.
‘We will not fight to save what we do not love.’ So said another American biologist and writer, Stephen Jay Gould, in discussing the need to conserve species. Though this principle should, I would argue, be at the heart of the conservation movement, we should not be fooled by the easy lure of the charismatic megafauna – the lions, dolphins, whales and pandas. We are most likely to fall in love with the girl or the boy next door – we need to look for love where we have a chance of finding it, which, for nature, is going to be in the species that are already around us, that we are already, did we but look, connected to, and could be more so. When training people in hedgehog ecology I ask them to ‘think hedgehog’ – which leads to them lying on the grass to gain a different perspective.
So many measures of biodiversity value are made on the basis of organisms that travel through the air. Insects, birds and bats, obviously, but also plants that have seed that can fly or be flown. We need to measure the wildlife value for the things that creep, crawl and snuffle as much as for the flamboyant and flighty. Connection is at the heart of what we need, and what nature needs, if we are to begin to tackle the global collapse of species and change in climate we have engineered.
The Anthropocene period is upon us: a new epoch identified by the planet-wide impact of human activities. The results for future generations are far from determined. But if we can make and maintain connections, both for and with wildlife, it is just possible we might be able to avert the worst.
‘I believe that empathy,’ wrote Philosopher Roman Krznaric, ‘– the imaginative act of stepping into another person’s shoes and viewing the world from their perspective – is a radical tool for social change and should be a guiding light for the art of living.’1 Clearly he is right: without the capacity to imagine the world through other people’s lives we lose one of the key elements of humanity. But I believe we should take the idea of empathy further.
The point at which we begin to see our world from the perspective of the living things and communities that inhabit it is the point at which we can truly embark on a revolutionary shift in the way we interact with the world. This does not require great leaps of anthropomorphism. We are not going to need to personalise the world around us: we just need to start looking at it a little differently.
Looking more closely at these man-made lines from the perspective of the wildlife they affect reveals key differences, for example, between the multidimensional space inside a dry-stone wall compared to the flat tarmac of a motorway; the irony of railway tracks threatened by leaves, compared to the leaves that make up a hedge; the metal-banked canals compared to the moist depths of a ditch. Their natural history, meanwhile, gives unique insight into the wildscape of Great Britain. The earliest lines created by humans were, inevitably, directly related to the underlying geology and ecology of the region in which they emerged. The lichens and mosses that have colonised walls – their splashes of colour and pads of green – speak of the microclimate the walls have created, and also of the rocks from which their stones were originally hewn.
It is a deep history, summarised most accessibly nowadays in Francis Pryor’s The Making of the British Landscape. The bedrock of Britain is probably around 1 billion years old. That ancient foundation has been subjected to the thrusts and ructions of time, and its recent geology is a result of the last 2.5 million years of ice and weathering, which is in turn reflected in the ecology we see on the surface. So while the north and west of the country leans towards a harder sedimentary and volcanic rock, the south and east tends towards softer and more recent rocks of chalk and limestone. An appreciation of a linescape is deepened, therefore, by being able to see more than the limited vision granted to us by the cartographers. I want us all to look at the linescapes of Britain with new eyes. Because while nature does not tend to straight lines and discrete borders, naturally preferring a meandering indiscretion, our lines can and do contain a real potential for wildness.
By now on my train journey to Stirling we were higher up, and somewhere in Cumbria. The train had stopped. Where there had been hedges, now walls asserted their dominance. Brisker life beyond the window, wind whipping up horsetail clouds; but in the shelter of the wall and a small hollow, a cup of yellow in a sea of green; a butter-rich glaze relishing the still damp air.
I returned to my iPad and tried to concentrate again. I was trying to cram as much of one important document before journey’s end. A government White Paper may not be the sort of thing to get most people’s pulses racing, and I had started with low expectations and high sense of duty. But as I swiped the pages of Making Space for Nature delight began to grow, and the conjunction of reading and seeing inspired in me a feeling of excitement and connection. Subtitled ‘A Review of England’s Wildlife Sites and Ecological Network’, it was commissioned by the then Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Hilary Benn, and published in September 2010, and its author, Professor Sir John Lawton, was addressing those in power with authority and passion. He was basing his work on science rather than rhetoric, and pushing for something tangible: a real, nationwide shift in attitudes and relationship to the natural world.
He talked with such optimism, even if in retrospect it seems rather naïve, quoting with approval Hilary Benn’s own words: ‘Now is the time to see how we can enhance ecological England further. Linking together areas to make ecological corridors and a connected network, could have real benefits in allowing nature to thrive.’ That was fighting talk. Sir John called for the formation of what became Nature Improvement Areas, and stated fearlessly that a budget of £1.1 billion a year should be set aside for the conservation of life on planet Britain.
Those big numbers were for someone else to worry about. I was excited by the focus on fragmentation, and more importantly the ways in which connectivity can be woven back into the fabric of our landscape by working with the lines we already have. ‘The commitment of the new coalition Government to nature conservation in general,’ Sir John himself went on with such enthusiasm, ‘and to the promotion of “green corridors” in particular, is heartening.’
If a week is a long time in politics, what are several years? When former Prime Minister David Cameron talked of the ‘greenest government ever’, some might have raised their hopes for a serious change in the way the country is run. Though when the same person was reported as saying, ‘We have got to get rid of all this green crap’ it is hard to know what to believe. And now, there is little evidence that the environment is being taken seriously at all.
Not all lines are man-made – there are natural lines that can look a little too perfect not to be made by man. Beavers, for example, build dams to create lakes that act as both a food store and a defence against predators, and in flat lands these dams can be hundreds of metres long, and strong enough to carry people (I have walked along the top of beaver-dams). These dams then formed early pathways through boggier landscapes, and were used to link communities in places like the Somerset Levels.
Then there can be those lines of trees just too perfectly aligned not to be man-made. Looking to the uplands, hills and mountains are often tonsured. A perfect ring of trees beneath the bald scalp. Though on closer inspection these lines are far more organic with the trees shrinking and twisting as the elevation increases. The treeline is a rare natural line.
And some of the man-made linescapes we now revere were once contentious. As the ‘hedgerow poet’ John Clare suffered the ravages of the enclosures, manifested by thousands of miles of new hedges, so some wildlife took up the opportunity to branch out from the restricted range of the woodland edge and take great strides along these newly laid lines. Time travel would let us see how the fragmentation of the landscape caused by the enclosures assisted in their spread. The arrival of hedges – vastly expanding the amount of woodland edge – was perhaps the greatest thing that happened for the hedgehog.
Of course, our lines go back far earlier than the enclosures. When did we first mark the land with lines? The first would have been temporary; barriers to provide some protection from the wild nights – lines seem such a statement of order in the face of the organic chaos of nature. It is not hard to imagine proto-human Homo erectus (the most successful hominid, surviving for around a million years, while Homo sapiens has only notched up 200,000 years so far) making the first lines as brushwood fences, 1.8 million years ago. Evidence of stick picket, woven and wattle fences has been found dating back more than 600,000 years, while hedged banks and dry-stone walls were first introduced along with arable cultivation more than 10,000 years ago.
It was the Neolithic farmers who etched some of our very first lines into the landscape. Hedges, ditches, dykes, and walls: for most of the last 5,000 years, the lines have been organic; they have allowed nature to wander along our barricades. The gentle expansion of these ways accelerated with the Industrial Revolution into something more aggressive, covering most of the land, cutting ever deeper. Canals, railways, roads and pylons, linking people and spreading power and information; fragmenting habitats.
To understand these lines we need to recognise that they are of us, and that to ignore their social history is to remain blind to their significance today.
Beneficial, benign or malignant, these lines bind us and the natural world into an unnatural state. This state is not static: the good can be neglected, and the bad can be rewoven into the landscape. This is at the heart of this journey. How can we maximise the positive? We need to learn from the lines that have nurtured the landscape, and apply those lessons to help heal the scars. We need to learn to communicate without erecting barriers.
My train journey was coming to an end. The line of the border with Scotland had been unmarked. Hadrian’s Wall was long gone too, but the linescapes were still around us. Even as we entered the wilder land, lanes and walls, hedges and ditches were all in evidence – a tangle of lines waiting to be read.
‘One may liken the English landscape, especially in a wide view, to a symphony,’ writes W. G. Hoskins near the beginning of his classic book The Making of the English Landscape – the more poetic and persuasive precursor to Pryor’s – ‘which it is possible to enjoy as an architectural mass of sound, beautiful or impressive as the case may be, without being able to analyse it in detail or to see the logical development of its structure.’
While I love to experience great symphonies washing over me, learning to read individual lines of music can open up new appreciation of the whole. And we will, I believe, see more deeply into the world around us if we learn to read the lines in our landscape. They are so much more than their function as barriers or carriageways. To change our perspective – towards an empathic look at the landscape – is to become aware of the impact they have, and the only way to really alter how we weave our lines.
Reaves chequer Dartmoor. Relics of Bronze Age field systems, these low walls, often little more than hints of the linear features they once were, map out a story of lines that reaches forward from their origins 3,500 years ago to the present. When you can find them.
They are, though, by no means the earliest lines on our landscape. The ‘Sweet Track’,1 unearthed in 1970, is the remains of a raised path between Westhay and Shapwick in Somerset built by Neolithic farmers in, we know with remarkable precision thanks to dendochronology, the study of tree rings to date timbers, either 3807 or 3806 BC. For a while it was thought to be the oldest track in the country, until in 2009 an even older one was found near Belmarsh Prison in south-east London. The Sweet Track was part of a network laid out to cross the boggy land and reach valuable ‘islands’ when the waters rose each winter. These paths required considerable communal effort to connect communities. The rich peat into which the wooden stakes were driven to carry the planks of the path reveals something of what the world was like 6,000 years ago. Hazelnuts, for example, have been found stored in a pot beside the track, and an indication of the status of the track is suggested by the discovery of a rare jadeite axe head. An axe of this sort was symbolic and valuable, made with stone from the Alps, and was probably placed as an offering.
These tracks tease us; they remind us how little we really know of what life was like before. And they remind us of how much evidence has been lost. The huts of ice-chasing Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, colonising the newly scoured, post-glacial land, have gone. They were replaced by Neolithic flints, Bronze Age villages, Iron Age hill forts, Roman roads, Anglo-Saxon cultivation, the Norman Conquest, and onwards to the modern era. The erosion of time, wind, water and life has leached the land of our ancestors’ fingerprints.
Yet there are some places that seem to have managed to cling on to the past. And with that they carry a mystery that is enormously attractive. Rich in memories, thanks to a collision of geology and climate, Dartmoor is such a place. Though it looks wild, it has been a man-made landscape since the Neolithic. I find that hard to remember when I wallow in the magic of the place. My usually empirical mind will easily spot the spore of faerie in moss-rich crevices.
Ten thousand years ago the bleak sweep of moor was tree-clad. Early communities started the process of removing trees, initially to create clearings in which game would congregate to eat the succulent new-growth, and become far easier targets. As agriculture developed clearances became more focused, and by the Bronze Age the moor would have been productive farmland, demarcated by the reaves.
But then there was a change, and cultivation ceased. It seems likely a combination of reduced soil fertility and a wave of colder, wetter weather reduced the ability of the land to flourish, causing communities to move to lower ground.
The more benign land was not without field margins of stone. Reaves spread, during a flurry of building activity across the south of Britain that lasted just fifty or so years, marking the point in time in the Bronze Age when we began to use lines to assert ownership over the landscape and authority over nature.
But we have lost sight of most of them, thanks to the combination of integration – many modern field margins might be able to trace their history back to reaves, had we the skills to read the lines – and the scouring of agriculture, industry and housing.
Dartmoor’s reaves survive because the land was never again cultivated with such intensity. Much of the stone has been sequestered for other work like houses and modern stone walls, but the essence of the reaves remains, even if it can sometimes be a challenge to find. I was looking forward so much to an excuse to wander in search of them.
I began my search after an evening with the Dartmoor photographer Simon Blackbourn. He showed me one of his beautiful photographs of the moor. ‘You see there is a wall, but there is so much more to read into this – those lines, they are gorges left behind by tin mining after the seams were dug out; there, medieval terracing running perpendicular – and modern forestry. Not forgetting the buildings, roads, Neolithic monuments, a military training area and a bloody great TV transmitter. It always makes me smile when people call Dartmoor a “wilderness”,’ he said.
It was summer; the next morning the sky was richly blue and decorated by white horses tossing their manes, hinting at wind to come. And the vegetation on the moor was at its peak. Bracken had leapt from cute folk-club violin-head curls to overbearing Glastonbury crowds, obscuring all in its path. Including the reaves. A rudimentary mistake; turns out that they are only visible when the vegetation has died down.
I could not waste the opportunity, though; visits to the moor are all too rare. So I took time to explore some of the other memories held by the land, and set my course to a place called Grimspound. Simon had mentioned that this might be an interesting diversion, and it was near the spot where he had taken the image of a much-worked ‘wilderness’.
I have never been able to just drive across Dartmoor. I am obliged to stop. There is always something to see, hear, scent. The meander I took to my destination wound me down to the River Dart, where I stopped. Walking along the tumbled boulders I was amazed at the water. Never has it looked more like whisky, glittering gold in July light. I could have stayed for hours. But I did have a mission, and managed to pull myself from this beautiful reverie.
I find it hard to understand why we are all so familiar with the charismatic megastars of the archaeological world, yet have managed to remain ignorant of the gems on Dartmoor. There was no fuss, no signpost, no map, no gift shop, no dedicated parking – just a regular narrow Dartmoor lane and fairly bare hills to either side. I pulled into a layby and started to walk uphill across tussocky grass. The heather held its pink-purple bells still as the wind whipped the grass stems into a blur. I came to a path: heavy stones laid into the ground. I was following the natural line, more steeply now, between the hills. Soon the path crossed a stone-clad ditch. This was a leat.
The lines of the leats are another engineering marvel that goes back to at least medieval times, when they were employed to guide water to power hammers that crushed tin ore. The water also powered the bellows used in smelting. There are hundreds of kilometres of leats across the moors, carrying water that was used by the farms for everything from drinking and washing to keeping food cool. Not the most sanitary of water distribution networks: the odd dead sheep could unsettle even the most iron constitution. Frequently they have been built with such subtlety, hugging contours, that they appear to be allowing water to flow uphill. In fact they were designed so carefully so as to reduce the risk of flooding when water was over-abundant.
So sidetracked was I by this beautifully engineered ditch that I had not lifted my head to see what was coming. At first there was just a line of broken-down wall, but as I carried on up the hill the line curved out into a smile and then the circle of stone that guards the remains of the late-Bronze-Age settlement of Grimspound. There was a small plaque that I assumed had some useful information about this unexpected delight. It told me to keep my horse out of the stone circle.
The wall, now a tumbled ruin, was once nearer 2 metres tall. And while the enclosure of 1.6 hectares is impressive, and the clearly defined main entrance is imposing, I was really struck by what was inside. The remains of twenty-four small huts are scattered throughout, and there were probably far more. One remained so well preserved (or possibly a little rebuilt – some of the early archaeologists were not as fastidious as those of today) that the porch was obvious, a J-shape that would have protected the interior from prevailing winds. I paced out a 3-metre diameter for these circular houses of stone.
The acid soil has done away with most of the organic memories, but the lichen-crusted stones present clues. Investigators, trowel-bearing time travellers, have scraped down and found some answers. Ash from the fireplaces, often in the centre of the homes, showed evidence of willow, oak and, predominantly, peat. This would indicate that the moor had lost much of its tree cover by the time Bronze Age families moved in. Peat takes a long time to accumulate, around 1 millimetre per year, so for there to be enough to provide fuel gives an indication of the changes in the landscape.
The wind whipping the clouds also pulled the temperature down to a point where it belied the beauty of the scene. But it was not ‘grim’, as the name suggested. The Saxon word grimm meant fierce or savage. But this was a relatively recent naming; no reference can be found before the late eighteenth century, and it must say more about the people’s stories than the place itself. The two hills rising either side of Grimspound, one capped by Hookner Tor, give it a feeling of protection, if not from the elements, then from less corporeal threats. There is no mistaking the commanding presence of the tors, erupting from the land.
I walked up and away from Grimspound towards Hookner Tor and, after causing some ponies to lift their grass-nuzzling heads for a moment, with the air of locals in a very local pub being interrupted by the arrival of an outsider, I got to see a very different view. The path I had walked up to the tor carried straight on through the circle and up the other side, while the path which had led up from my car also passed clean through, and they met in the middle of Grimspound.
Tim Sandles, author of the fascinating website Legendary Dartmoor, points out that these are later paths – one specifically running to the nearby Vitifer tin mine and known as the ‘Miners’ Path’ is thought to date from the thirteenth century. It is fascinating to be looking down on the footworn lines that have remained unchanged for the last 800 years at least. And off to my right, there were the thin gorges from tin mining and medieval terracing reminding me that this peopled land is newly empty.
But from this position, what struck so hard was that those circles were homes. Around 3,300 years ago, a little after the reaves I sought were built, people, possibly my ancestors, lived here. These people may have been ‘reavers’.
There was a clattering noise behind me, and I turned to see a cloud of jackdaws raucously taking flight from the silhouetted tor.
In early December I had another opportunity to visit the moor and find the reaves, but the bracken, though dead, had not collapsed enough to be truly revealing. Simon suggested I explore an alternative Dartmoor site, Merrivale. At least these lines you cannot miss, he told me.
This time the weather was traditional drizzle, road-hugging cloud. I parked up in another layby and headed out into the grey. My heavy beard soon sucked so much moisture from the atmosphere that I could wring from it a small stream of water. I was beginning to reconsider my love affair with the moor. But it is important to see your paramour in every light. Another leat ran across my path, and as I climbed up the cloud lifted enough for me to see two stones set upright. As I got closer I could see that from them ran a double line of smaller stones. It looked like a case of bad dentistry: stubs sticking out at odd angles, but definitely in a line. About 25 metres to the south was another double line running in parallel. Up here on a hill, shrouded in water, was another mystery as impressive, imposing and impenetrable as the famous monuments of Wiltshire.
The lines were of different lengths, the northern one shorter at around 180 metres, the southern around 250 metres. And around them was so much more. There was a stone circle, there were ‘cysts’ (stone tombs with broken lids); there was a 3-metre-tall menhir. Halfway along the southern line there was a stone circle. Taking photographs and scribbling notes, I thrilled to be among some of the Bronze Age’s most fascinating creations.
Though clearly important, explanations of Merrivale’s purpose remain largely guesswork. Writers from the nineteenth century suggested it was a venue for chariot races or Druidical ceremonies, but neither existed until at least a thousand years after these stones had been erected. Possibly it formed some kind of ceremonial route, though most appealing is the idea of an astronomical calendar. What its stones are not, however, is reaves. They seem to have no practical function, and are certainly not part of any field boundaries.
The archaeologist Olaf Bayer came to my help. ‘We describe the world in rational terms, aware of geology and geomorphology,’ he explained to me, ‘whereas our ancestors saw a landscape filled with agency, one that was animate. There were real reasons for doing things – appeasing gods was important, and it really is only in the post-war years that we have developed this habit of rationality. So it is a false dichotomy, the sacred and the profane. Theirs was probably a pantheistic world, one in which there was spirit in everything.’
These worlds are met most famously at Stonehenge. This was built around 5,000 years ago in an environment already determined by paths and other lines. For example, the Cursus, running for 3 kilometres beside the more obvious monument, is a pair of lines that was probably a ceremonial pathway. And as our landscape reading skills have improved, so the links between henges and barrows have revealed a complex sacred landscape.
Stonehenge was built on other lines, older still and not of human origin at all: naturally occurring ridges shaped by the melt-water of retreating glaciers, which coincidentally point in one direction towards the mid-winter sunset, and in the other at the mid-summer sunrise.2 We are blessed with this knowledge, but to an earlier people the significance must have been obvious.
It is worth remembering, given the human tendency to view the world in one way, and assume the current model is correct, that those who created these ancient monuments also knew that what they were doing was correct. And maybe future generations will look in wonder at how much we did not understand. Perhaps we should be a little less arrogant in assuming superiority.
The next time I was down on Dartmoor I hadn’t even been thinking about trying to see the reaves. I was staying just outside Totnes in a happy jumble of a farmhouse with the ecologist Amy Grace-Fensome to watch the eagerly anticipated solar eclipse the next day. But as I was thinking of where on the moor it would be good to see the eclipse and we started to look at maps and books, I remembered the reaves. In Oliver Rackham’s The History of the Countryside I found Combestone Tor on the Holne to Hexworthy road, from which, if the vegetation was kind, apparently, reaves were visible. What better place to experience the eclipse than from on top of a tor!
The next day we headed off on our adventure under a duvet of cloud. As we drove up onto the moor I noticed a patch of brighter sky to my right. I glanced and then noticed that when I blinked, I could see a small memory of what I could not see – the sun with a nibble from its top right side.
And now it looked as though we might see the eclipse. In preparation we had made a device out of a box, gaffer tape and my binoculars. The merest glance had left its mark, so I was very happy to have a slightly virtual vision.
I caught a glimpse of the tor, just one valley beyond, looking more like petrified piles of laundry. Not deep into the moor, Combestone is famously accessible, and there was a silhouette of someone, legs wide, on top of its squat jumble of stones. In the car park we joined around a dozen other sightseers.
The Blue Peter-style gadget did not work. Maybe the sun was not bright enough, filtered through layers of cloud, to generate the expected beam, but at least the cloud did mean I could look briefly at the sun, possibly unwisely, and begin to see the change.
A skylark, my first of the year, was singing, and as I looked around me I saw, at last, the reaves. The lines of stone, or in some cases hints of lines of stone, were so low that I understood why previous adventures had been unsuccessful. But they were there – as they have been there since the Bronze Age, over 3,500 years ago.
From where I stood the most noticeable lines ran up the far side of the Dart valley, in remarkable parallel. Many hundreds of metres between these shadows of lines, and yet still they ran together. These were boundaries created with intent, not generated as a by-product of field-clearance: enclosures. As Olaf Bayer explained, the thinking nowadays is that these lines probably existed in the minds of the local people before they became physical. The enclosures – asserting ownership, we assume, were imagined all over the south of England until the notion of actually creating this linescape spread in such a short time.
Early commentators thought them relict trackways, possibly guiding Roman legionaries, but it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that people began to formulate the idea of them being boundaries. The word reave comes from the old Saxon for line or row. And far from them being a trackway across the moor, there are over 400 kilometres that can be found over much of this magical landscape.3
As they dropped off the moor the reaves seemed to vanish, but this was just because Dartmoor is an island of preservation, a large lump of granite which has never been managed as it once was many thousands of years ago. And as with Grimspound and Merrivale, the wondering as to what life was like here so long ago threatened to exclude the eclipse. I had to force myself back to the celestial: the reaves would probably last out the next hour, but the eclipse would not be around again for quite a while.
It is hard to tell how much was chance and how much a result of the sliding moon. But the air felt colder as the sun shrank. And the skylark stopped singing, giving the gentle roar of the River Dart to our north greater presence in the aural mix. A coincidence? Around 90 per cent of the sun’s light was blocked from reaching us – the dark side of the moon must have been rather less so. The time lag, about eight minutes for light to reach us from the sun, got me thinking astronomically. It takes about a million years for each of those photons to bounce their way from the centre of that fusion reactor in the sky to its edge, and release and freedom. So by the time we catch them they are already very old. Some, indeed, travel much further. One cold, clear night the previous winter, I found myself stopped at a puddle in the towpath of the Thames in Oxford, staring at Jupiter in the water. Jupiter does not shine; it reflects. A photon of light that has left the surface of the sun after a million-year-flight from the core leaps into space and travels for 43 minutes before hitting the surface of Jupiter and then bouncing back towards the earth for another 35 minutes, whereupon it uses the surface of the puddle for one last journey into my eye, onto my retina and then onwards as an electrical impulse to my slightly overwhelmed brain.
Despite the clouds shifting slowly there were glimpses of the sun in its reduced state. We borrowed a fellow gawper’s special eclipse viewer – she had spent ages searching Totnes and beyond before finding it, all for her four-year-old son who had expressed such excitement and was now ignoring the proceedings with equal concentration. The vision was extraordinary, with our star appearing like a waxing moon, or a slightly lopsided smile.
Without the distraction of artificial light the sky becomes all. The early gods were sky gods, and why not? At night, when fear has real cause, the movement of the stars and planets must provide escape for the mind. So the Bronze Age builders whose reaves, lines and circles remain as testament to their labour must have watched these celestial moments struck with awe.
Gradually the light breeze seemed to soften, or rather warm, and then the skylark was up, welcoming back the fuller light of the day, or the warmer air, or just re-asserting ownership of that patch of land. As I turned to clamber down the tor back towards the car I noticed, just across the narrow lane, two more reaves. From ground level I probably would not have seen them, but now they were obvious. I went and walked along them, and was struck by how gold the short, pony-cropped grass looked – maybe more copper actually, with a smattering of verdigris: hints of spring coaxing a patina of new life from the moor.