The Old Ways completes Robert Macfarlane’s trilogy about the British landscape, the earlier (and excellent) books being The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind. As in those books, nature is a major player in The Old Ways, along with the people that Macfarlane meets in the places he visits. The ‘old ways’ are not only footpaths; sea roads too find a place, as he sails in an open boat, the old way, with knowledgeable guides. The footpaths, too, are not only in Britain: there is a marvellous pair of chapters on the poet Edward Thomas, ‘Flint’ and ‘Ghost’, as Macfarlane tracks him across the South Downs, and then to Thomas’s death as an artillery officer on the first day of the Battle of Arras, poignantly described with “The morning is a triumph for the British batteries”. Yes, we think; but was it worth the loss of one poet’s life, thousands of other lives. This is fine writing, not escapism, nor yet history, but a walking meditation that encompasses human life past and present, situated in the natural and human world with all its elements—social, political, emotional, spiritual.
Well, what a terrifically interesting book. I’ll say at once that while I’m right up there with Monbiot’s dream of a well-rewilded landscape (with a bit of wildwood near you for peace and refreshment from the electronic world), Monbiot is so bold in his arguments that it’s impossible to agree with everything he writes.
The starting point for this book is that we all feel the need to be free of our society’s stifling artificiality. We quietly hate being stuck on commuter trains, boxed into offices, jammed onto pavements, trapped in front of screens, permanently at the beck and call of electronic devices and social media. Monbiot is very funny on this sad topic. He uses as evidence not all this stuff from today’s world – you know it already – but the results when people from our world have gone into tribal societies: they uniformly want to stay. Conversely, when tribespeople have visited our world, they always want to go back home. Wild, 1. Civilised, 0.
Remnant Bluebells on Ramsey Island, Pembrokeshire: once this bare moorland was forest. Photo: Ian Alexander
Monbiot moves to Wales, near the bare open heathery uplands of the Cambrian Mountains, that everybody tells him are beautiful. He finds what every hillwalker (myself included) must have noticed without thinking too much of it, that there are very few species up there: few flowers (save Tormentil, a marker of overgrazing as sheep won’t eat it), few insects, few birds.
“I hate sheep”, writes Monbiot, startlingly: no echoes of Wainwright here, no grudging admiration of those toughest of hillwalkers, the mountain sheep like the Herdwicks of Lakeland. He hates the bare sward, devoid of trees. Trees? On the mountains? Yes, he shows us the record from pollen cores: from the end of the last ice age, the Welsh uplands were covered in forest – hazel, oak, alder, willow, pine and birch. “By 4,500 years ago, trees produced over 70 per cent of the pollen in the sample.” Then, Neolithic farmers cleared the wildwood, and by 1,300 years ago the trees had gone, replaced by heather. And domestic animals, sheep and cattle, replaced the great beasts of the forest: the elk, bear, wolf, wild boar, lynx, wolverine. Even the mild beaver was driven to extinction.
Just proposing to rewild the British Uplands would be controversial enough, though the process has begun with many small schemes and a few large ones – Trees For Life’s vast Caledonian Forest project notable among them, with (at its core) the 40 square kilometres of the Dundreggan estate becoming bushier by the year. Proposing the reintroduction – the release into the wild, not yet legal in Britain – of beaver and boar and elk and lynx is more dramatic still. But Monbiot would like the large predators, too. Gulp.
And he goes further. We are all guilty of “Shifting Baseline Syndrome” (let’s call it SBS for short, it sounds a horrible disease). We imagine the world should be as we recall it from our own childhood. But it was already depauperate then!
Monbiot would like to allow nature to rebuild itself, with a little help to get started where necessary. He observes a remarkable fact that again we hadn’t thought much of: if you cut a tree, or lay a hedge of hawthorn, hazel, oak, willow – it sprouts vigorously up from the broken trunk, the cut stumps, the splintered branches. Why did our native trees evolve those responses? Because, argues Monbiot, they are adapted to large herbivores. Really large herbivores: elephants, rhinoceroses. Oh my. He wants to bring those back too. Actually it was the straight-tusked elephant we used to have: and the woolly rhino, both extinct: but Monbiot suggests that the living species are good and close replacements. Clearly, getting the relevant permissions might take a little time.
These are just some of the big, meaty ideas in Feral. There are sacred cows in there: the conservation authorities value the bare uplands, and certainly they have a beauty, manmade or not. The story is powerfully told, enlivened and illustrated by tales of wild (and dangerous) personal adventures. Monbiot knows his ecology and his landscapes: he just interprets them differently from the establishment. Quite often, as with his descriptions of the disgraceful overfishing practised by Britain and the European Union, he is certainly right. At other times he is controversial, even combative, but always fascinating. Whether you agree or disagree, if you’re interested in nature – as I assume you are, given that you’re here – you need to read Feral.
Responsibly-caught scallops on a fishmonger’s slab. Supermarkets are often not so careful
With the possible exception of dynamite fishing, it would be hard to devise a more effective means of destroying both living creatures and their habitats. Scallop dredges operate by raking through the seabed with long metal teeth, dislodging the shellfish from the sediments and trapping them in a net whose underside is made of chain mail. The teeth rip through any sedentary creatures in their path, as well as the fish, crabs and lobsters unable to escape in time. The steel mesh smashes animals missed by the teeth. Where they are used, divers publish heartbreaking photographs of the seabed before and after they have passed. It looks, where the dredges have worked, like a ploughed field, lifeless, covered in fragments of shell.
— George Monbiot. Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life. Penguin, 2014. Page 252.
Eating Swordfish, Halibut, King Prawns is Hypocrisy
King Prawns
We rightly deplore the apparent unconcern with which [Bluefin Tuna] is being driven to extinction. But it is not a world apart from the habits of liberal, well-educated people I know in Britain – friends and relatives among them – who, despite widespread coverage of the impacts of unsustainable fishing on television and in the newspapers they read, continue to buy species such as swordfish, halibut and king prawns, which are either in dire trouble or whose exploitation causes great ecological damage.
— George Monbiot. Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life. Penguin, 2014. Page 246.
Today, down at the nature reserve, it was a day for work and weather rather than natural history. A vigorous Low was working its way across the top of Britain, with a brisk, freshening southwesterly wind bringing little showers across town. The water table had risen appreciably in two days, and I was glad of my gumboots, as I had decided it was time to do something about the overgrown ‘Mangrove Swamp’ in the middle of the reserve.
I should explain at once that we don’t have any coral reefs or fringing banks of Rhizophora mangroves here in Chiswick: that would be a fine thing. What we do have is a wet hollow – probably once a tributary of the long-gone Bollo Brook, one of London’s lost rivers – with attractive carr vegetation. Carr means wet woodland: we have willow of various species (probably mainly crack willow), birch and an assortment of other trees in the drier places – sycamore, hazel, holly, rowan, cherry, oak. But down in the Mangrove Swamp the willows predominate, their feet in the water for half the year. They grow rapidly, and then fall over; or branches get shaded out and die. The result, quite soon, is a tangle of lodged trunks and dead wood that cuts off the view and fills up the hollow, part of the natural succession, but tending to make the reserve less diverse (I think) and less interesting to look at. (I’m reflecting on whether one should be “managing” a “nature reserve” at all, given what George Monbiot says in Feral – he’s all for leaving nature to itself – but in a small reserve in town, management does seem necessary. Perhaps it’s a nature garden or something, not really a reserve at all.)
I cleared a mass of broken or cut dead wood from the wet floor, putting it to one side – it will still be available for fungi and beetles to consume. I then cut several long, heavy willow branches, mostly dead or dying, that had fallen most of the way to the ground across the mangrove swamp. A couple of hours hard work (I completely forgot about the brisk wind) had the main area cleared. We then set to and cleared what seemed to be a dark shrubbery near the boardwalk, but which was actually a large fallen tree shrouded in a six-foot thick mass of ivy. It was satisfying to get it clear; the tree trunk will need chainsawing, however.
After a well-deserved cup of tea, I pruned the hedge that was overhanging the street, pulling down a mass of strong twining hops that had scrambled all over the hawthorn. Blood-red haws rained down but there were plenty left when I had finished. Around the reserve, the rowans were in fine fruit, with some roses covered in scarlet hips.
I have an unhealthy obsession with sheep. It occupies many of my waking hours and haunts my dreams. I hate them. Perhaps I should clarify that statement. I hate not the animals themselves, which cannot be blamed for what they do, but their impact on both our ecology and our social history. Sheep are the primary reason – closely followed by grouse shooting and deer stalking – for the sad state of the British uplands. Partly as a result of their assaults, Wales now possesses less than one-third of the average forest cover of Europe. Their husbandry is the greatest obstacle to the rewilding I would like to see.
— George Monbiot. Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life. Penguin, 2014. Pages 154-155.
Autumn Reds: Guelder Rose at London Wetland Centre
Today a brisk southwesterly wind blew the ragged clouds away, and it suddenly felt very much like autumn. The willows have lost many of their leaves, while other trees are still fully clad in green. Down at the Wetland Centre, the Guelder Roses were resplendent in scarlet: the photo is exactly as taken.
Down on the grazing marsh, a few migrant birds were giving the resident birdwatchers a treat. The Peacock Tower echoed to excited calls as a Whinchat perched on a faraway reed to the left, a Jack Snipe bobbed obligingly among some dead reeds to the front, and a Stonechat perched momentarily on a reed to the right. To my own surprise I saw all of them, even confirming that the Jack Snipe was bobbing up and down and had a dark stripe down the centre of its head. When it sat still it was marvellously hard to see, even in a telescope zoomed in and centred on the bird, its disruptive patterning doing an excellent job of breaking up its shape and matching the light and shadow of the vegetation around it.
Round on the wildside of the reserve, a few (Migrant) Hawker dragonflies and some Common Darters were still flying; and overhead, five House Martins, presumably on their way down south from somewhere far to the north, were busy refuelling on the many small insects flying over the water.
I didn’t even bother to struggle round the Fungus Foray in the afternoon, as it was obvious from the dry weather of the last month that there wouldn’t be any mushrooms to speak of. So I wandered along to say hello to whoever came along, and perhaps see some other wildlife.
Sure enough I met Alick Henrici, the indefatigable mycologist; he leads fungal forays in every county, even the Grampian Fungus Group, so he gets about a bit away from his home patch in Surrey, especially Kew Gardens. He said there was nothing to see, barring a few certainties like Phoma hedericola (Hedera=Ivy) which forms small dried-out looking patches on “almost every Ivy leaf”.
Around the corner, as he had said, some children and their mothers were thoroughly enjoying pond-dipping. Most of the summer animals were nowhere to be seen – not a newt anywhere, hardly a waterflea – but I saw some Pond Skaters, a Water Boatman, a few tiny damselfly nymphs, a Hoglouse or two, and a couple of plump dragonfly nymphs.
Hoglouse, Dragonfly nymph, Ramshorn snail
A weird, soft screeching noise was coming from a small oak above the pond. It wasn’t quite the harsh screech of a jay, and if it was a crow it had a seriously odd high voice. I climbed up to have a look. A grey squirrel was the source. It was alone so it wasn’t clear why it was calling.
On the steps over the mound are some wooden posts to keep the uprights in place. And peeping through the wire netting on the mossy top of one of these posts was a teeny tiny clump of a yellow Ascomycete fungus, the ‘Golden Spindles’ toadstool, Clavulinopsis fusiformis. The holes in the netting are about a centimetre across.
Clavulinopsis fusiformis
The English seem unemotional … except for their passion for nature
