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John Lewis-Stempel: Heathland, a place of freedom and unconventionality

John Lewis-Stempel John Lewis-Stempel

Grey and bleak in midwinter, yet purple and exotic come high summer, our heathland is an unloved landscape that has become rarer than rainforest.

Ah, ‘leafy Surrey’. Its tree-fringed avenues of mock-Tudor detached make it almost the definition of John Betjeman’s Metro-Land. Suburbia in excelsis: a lovely, domestic place, close to the centre of the English identity. Press the mind-button ‘Esher’ and a Good Life image springs to mind — solid, middle-class and safe.

How the centuries turn and change the landscape. Two hundred years ago, Surrey would have been best described as ‘heathy Surrey’, as at least 20% of the county was heathery, wide-open, almost treeless heathland. Today, perhaps 3% of Surrey’s heath remains.

Southern England used to be resplendent in such purpled, heathery heathland, from Dorset to the Breckland of Norfolk — hence the abundance of Anglo-Saxon ‘heath’ place names, such as Heathfield, Bromley (from the shrub broom) and Farnham (from fern). What happened in Surrey happened across the breadth of lowland England, which, with its dry sands and gravels, was the locus classicus of heathland. Gone went heath, gone went its wide-open vista of knee-high shrubbery, arid and largely tree-less.

Some 80% of the nation’s heaths have been ‘lost’ since 1800. At one point in the 1960s, heathland was extirpated in England at the rate of two acres per day. Few cared, because heathland was regarded as ‘waste’, better built over, put down to trees by the Forestry Commission or brought under the plough. The great landscape historian Oliver Rackham even created a neologism for the fear and loathing of heathland, ‘ericophobia’ — the Erica family, the heathers, being the chief understorey shrubs of heathland. One wonders, uncomfortably, was there a national, xenophobic distaste for heathland? It can seem unconscionably exotic and foreign — un-English, even.

‘It is the abundance of reptiles that make the heath so odd in the English experience’

Oh, certainly, in bleak midwinter, the grey heath has the churchy smell of gorse and the pews of Anglican congregation; under summer skies, the purply scene, spiced by the heather, the gorse, the thyme, the juniper and a handful of Scots pine against a cerulean sky, becomes Mediterranean — even fairyland.

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You can still — just — catch the dream of heathland if you visit Dorset, lucky Dorset, where one-fifth of the county’s heath still exists, but, then, it had so much heath before the onset of ericophobia. (By the measure of the Domesday Book of 1086, about 60,000 acres of Dorset was heathland.) There still exist immersive tracts of swarthy heath there, above all on the Isle of Purbeck, which is the Egdon Heath of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878). Hardy, who grew up on Dorset heath, was and ever will be the habitat’s greatest tribune, understanding precisely its besotting antinomies: its fragility, despite the steadying woody, weedy scrub and the way that, at late evening, the view to the horizon is clear, but around one’s knees the heath swirls as thick as tar, as if darkness ascended, rather than descended. Which, of course, is a type of foreignness.

Then, there are the beguiling, strange creatures of heathland. One can wander onto Purbeck’s Hyde’s Heath — as good a piece of heathland as I have found and an RSPB reserve — in summer and be greeted by extraordinary things that are ordinary there. Nightjars perform aerial convolutions as they hawk the moths against the sunset and the green shard of a heath tiger beetle scuttles across a sandy path.

However, it is the abundance of reptiles that make the heath so odd in the English experience. Hyde’s Heath possesses all six native reptiles: adder, grass snake, smooth snake, slow worm, sand lizard and common lizard. Zoologically, this is no surprise, as parched heath with acid, free-draining soil is sought after by reptiles for their hibernacula, being the ultimate winter ‘des-res’ neighbourhood for the cold-blooded.

To the Englishman such as me, habituated to green pastures, a walk on sunlit heath can seem like a visit to the heated reptile house of the zoo. On spring days on Hyde’s Heath, I have had adders, sleep-eyed and emerging from hibernation, fizz under my feet, which is a little alarming for those of us inclined to ophidiophobia. Once and once only, I witnessed male adders ‘snake dance’, two rivals swaying up, trying to push each other down. Their smooth, muscled bodies enmeshed like spasmodic gears. No biting, no violence, but war as ballet, supremacy by dance-off, submission in eurythmy.

ngland’s six native reptiles, including grass snakes, squirm and bask upon our sunlit heaths. Credit: Lee Crabtree via Alamy

More than once on Hyde’s Heath, I have found adders, warming up, refusing to cede the right of way on a track, an assertion of ancient rights and a reminder of old enmities. There was a snake in the Holy Land’s Garden of Eden, the forked tongue of which caused the expulsion of Adam and Eve. England has its own serpentine version of Genesis. When King Arthur’s army confronted Mordred at the Battle of Camlann, when an ‘An adder glode forth upon the ground’ and bit a knight who, in self-defence, drew his sword, which was mistakenly taken as a signal to commence combat. So ended the life of King Arthur and 100,000 knights in a legendary bloodbath, due to the bite of a single adder. Is this the ultimate source of our ericophobia — that the heath’s quintessential snake caused the fall of Albion? Well, one’s mind can roam in fancy on the unbridled heath.

The heath was always a place of freedom and unconventionality — it was conspicuously the realm of the peasant farmer, who grazed its poor acres with his few sheep, cattle and pigs. For all its apparent ‘wildness’, the heath is farmland, the result of trees being razed by Neolithic and later agriculturalists. Its existence depended on the grazing of livestock and cutting of fuel for the hearth. When the peasant smallholders of England were killed off by the incipient industrialism of the Agricultural Revolution, the maintenance of the heath stopped. One-sixth of Surrey spontaneously turned into woodland in a century due to the abandonment of heath management.

Today, the national total of heathland is a mere 145,000 acres and what remains is fragmented and isolated. The decline is even worse in other countries. Heathland, it is said, is rarer than rainforest.

I go to Hyde’s Heath often and, every time, find myself the sole wanderer over its 170 acres — I worry that heathland continues to be unloved. Yet, always there is the consolation of recognition, even in summer’s unseasonal heat: the heath is a piece of real England… the England of the Diggers, Johnny Rotten, William Cobbett and the ‘gentleman of the night’ who would sell you a hare for a quid at the back door of The Moon pub. That alternative, untidy, awkward England that is actually very, very English.

John Lewis-Stempel has twice been crowed winner of the Wainwright prize for nature writing, and was the 2016 BSME Columnist of the Year. His new book, ‘England: A Natural History’, explores 12 distinctive habitats of England

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