May
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IN CELEBRATION OF FOUR REMARKABLE WOMEN
An engaging history of the powerful female campaigners who changed the face of England
BOOK
THE WOMEN WHO SAVED THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE
BY MATTHEW KELLY
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, £20 (HB)
This wonderful book tells the stories of Octavia Hill, Beatrix Potter, Pauline Dower and Sylvia Sayer, and the substantial part they played in defining what we today think of as ‘the English countryside’. With an engaging, accessible, page turning style, Matthew Kelly reveals an innate awareness of his reader as he illuminates the achievements of these four extraordinary women.
Hill was “a public moralist and reformer of quite astonishing range and commitment” who facilitated the purchase of countless pockets of land in urban and rural locations to be held in perpetuity for the enjoyment of all by the National Trust. Beatrix Potter, famous for her tales of Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny and their kith, used her wealth to purchase a number of Cumbrian hill farms which she bequeathed to the
National Trust. Dower and Sayer, “committed to national park principles, represented the social democratic, statist ethos that gathered strength after 1945”, continued the work.
For anyone who has ever wondered how England came to look the way it does, who is curious about the history of environmental campaigning, the “slow rise of the now near-universal environmental consciousness” and the history of both the National Trust and our national parks, this book is an essential and delightful read.
BOOK
THE TRESPASSER’S COMPANION
Nick Hayes wrote one of my books of the year for 2020, and he is at it again. The Trespasser’s Companion is the coconspirator of The Book of Trespass – it is the one that takes the ideas of the first book and presents them as a very hard-to-disagree-with manifesto for change, complete with a how-to guide to reclaiming what is already ours.
The data is stark – we are excluded from 92% of England and 97% of our rivers. We have been trained over the generations to revere the exclusive partitioning of the vast majority of our land and water into a playground of the tiny minority. Nick Hayes gives us permission to rise above that nonsense. More than that, he equips us with the facts – facts of law, and facts of history.
We know that access to nature is crucial to our physical and mental wellbeing. And it is increasingly obvious that our exclusion from nature leads to a lack of care for what little we have left. We can solve both of these problems at the same time if we gain access to the wide expanses beyond the thread of the permitted footpath.
If we do not manage to persuade the rich and powerful of the value of our case, we will simply have to take action into our own hands. Calmly, peacefully and respectfully putting up no more with the hoarders of our land.
BOOK
BIRDS AND US: A 12,000 YEAR HISTORY FROM CAVE ART TO CONSERVATION
Tim Birkhead is never happier than when roped up to observe his favourite birds, guillemots, nesting on Skomer’s cliffs. The ornithologist has visited this magical island o Pembrokeshire’s coast for the past 50 summers, transforming our understanding of these fascinating seabirds.
Guillemots are among several hundred species mentioned in Birds and Us, a hefty book crammed with a lifetime’s knowledge. But Professor Birkhead wears his learning lightly, as he tells the complex story of our evolving relationship with birds over 12,000 years. Sadly, things have often ended badly – for the birds, that is. We learn about sea fowling, falconry and the war on wildlife that accompanied the Tudor Vermin Acts and Act for the Preservation of Grain, when even kingfishers and green woodpeckers had a price on their head. Trapping sparrows for sale to shooting clubs remained popular until the 1900s. Those who studied birds killed them too, hoarding skins and eggs.
Birds and Us shows that no other creatures have had as powerful a hold on our imagination. The avian obsessives we meet in its pages include Francis Willughby and John Ray, who in the mid-1600s produced a staggeringly detailed list of all the world’s birds then known. Later, Charles Darwin’s studies of birds contributed to his “nerveshattering” announcement that God had not shaped the natural world.
Eye-opening, thought-provoking and often witty, this is popular science writing at its best.
MUSIC
HALLIVAL
IONA LANE
For Iona Lane, writing about the magic of Scottish folklore was an escape from lockdown in her home city of Leeds. Her debut album reflects this research, with the title track taking its name from Hallival mountain on Rum.
Lane, a recent Leeds Conservatoire graduate, has an ethereal voice and is supported by several other musicians, most notably a harp and fiddle player. Several tracks feature the South Asian shruti box, an instrument that acts as a hat tip to the bagpipes with its haunting drone, but has a soft, melancholy edge.
The songwriting has flashes of real potential, with poetic phrases such as “brutal beauty wrapped in western tidal swell”. However, these refrains are relied on too heavily, with extensive repetition rendering them less impactful.
What sets this album apart is Lane’s storytelling. ‘Schiehallion’, the second single release of the album, is inspired by the Schiehallion Experiment of 1774, in which scientists calculated the Earth’s density for the first time based on their study of this mountain in the Grampians. Elsewhere on the album are a wealth of influences from Celtic folk traditions.
TV
CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW
BBC TWO, 24 28 MAY
After a two-year break, the RHS Chelsea Flower Show returns to the spring season, this year encouraging designers to highlight native plant species and embrace rewilding.
Show gardens will include wild plants, trees and shrubs rarely seen at Chelsea, such as nettles, cow parsley and poppies, plus hornbeam, hazel and weeping willow. In their garden, ‘A Rewilding Britain Landscape’, Lulu Urquhart and Adam Hunt will use hawthorn and field maples to show how beaver reintroductions transform the land.
Almost 3,000 plants and trees will feature in ‘The Meta Garden’ designed by Joe Perkins, to highlight the connection between plants and fungi in woodland ecosystems, while in the Discovery Zone, the science of horticulture is brought to life.
Q&A
PRESERVING HERITAGE IN BRICKS AND MORTAR
From the oldest farmhouse in Wales to chapels rich in history, presenter Will Millard reveals architectural heritage in peril in the latest programme in BBC Four’s Hidden Wales series. We ask him about the buildings that touched his heart
Your background is in anthropology and leading expeditions in West Papua and West Africa. What attracted you to this story of Wales?
We are all occasionally guilty of not fully appreciating the wonders that hide in plain sight. Growing up in the Fens, my village creeks and rivers were an endless source of childhood inspiration and human stories and, as much as exotic adventures have their obvious thrills and pulls, I never lost sight of how much those local places had influenced me growing up. Four years of making Hidden Wales proves just how many extraordinary places there are around all our homes.
Which building caught your imagination the most? Which would you most like to see restored?
Esgair Llewellyn on both counts. When it comes to the limited funding available to preserve our historic buildings, the castles and mansions of the upper classes get preferential treatment. The dwellings and workplaces of the working classes are too often overlooked. The walls of Esgair Llewellyn, a medieval cruckframed hall-house that is at least 500 years old, can tell the story of Welsh farming through the ages. The place is undeniably romantic, and one of the very few surviving examples of its kind, but if it hadn’t been for the care of just one sheep-farming family, it would have been lost forever.
Why is it important to save these historic buildings?
There is no replacement for being able to experience a building, physically, for yourself. History should be tactile; it isn’t the same looking at history in a book or on the internet. These places have an atmosphere and unique sense of presence that can only be experienced by going there. If kept standing, they have an enormous cultural value; especially in the really rural areas where they could yet provide a source of income, too.
Why is so much of Wales’ coal history being allowed to disappear?
I don’t think any of the industrial sites that provided the wealth of the Industrial Revolution are given anything like the respect they deserve. As someone whose family were coal miners, I think the government were incredibly shortsighted when it came to recycling those coal buildings and back-filling the mines; it feels to me as though they just wanted to erase their memory as quickly as possible. The Navigation Colliery, featured in our film, is among the exceptions in the Welsh Valleys. It was something of a show mine and is absolutely stunning, but, even so, it has had a difficult time since closure and is still very much at risk, despite the monumental efforts of local conservation group, Friends of the Crumlin Navigation Colliery.
Where could the investment come from to save these buildings? Will it mostly rely on private ownership?
In an ideal world it would come from us, charitable donations, or via government grants. Things like the slate landscape of Blaenau Ffestiniog receiving UNESCO World Heritage status obviously helps too, but for a lot of our endangered historic buildings, the onus slips on to the goodwill of volunteers or those private owners who have a real passion for heritage and the resources to invest. Sadly though, there is nowhere near enough of either of those types of people to save much more than a fraction of our most important buildings. However, I really do believe we are passionate enough about our history as a nation to do more, if we can only wake up to what we stand to lose today.
BBC Four’s Hidden Wales: Last Chance to Save with Will Millard is available on iPlayer.