Icons of England

There are particular places in England that come as close to perfection as you’re ever likely to find on this planet.

Bill Bryson incited over ninety of our best-loved writers, broadcasters and commentators to pick their ‘icons of England’. The resulting celebration of the English countryside is an idiosyncratic and personal collection that ranges across landscape, history, cherished memories and that most English of subjects, the weather.

• Antony Beevor • Alan Titchmarsh • Sebastian Faulks • Michael Palin • Andrew Marr • Rick Stein • Jo Brand • Sister Wendy Beckett • Jonathan Dimbleby • Wendy Cope • Joan Bakewell • Dick Francis • Robert Macfarlane • Melvyn Bragg • Eric Clapton • John Sergeant • Kevin Spacey • Kate Adie • Simon Jenkins • Simon Barnes • Zac Goldsmith • Ronald Blythe • Libby Purves

CONTENTS

Cover

About the Book

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword – HRH The Prince of Wales

Introduction – Bill Bryson

In Search of England’s Gnomes – Kate Adie

A Place in the Country – George Alagiah

From Pillar to Post – Peter Ashley

From Little Acorns – Clive Aslet

Rural Rides – Paul Atterbury

Where the River Meets the Sea – Joan Bakewell

Time to Stand and Stare – Muhammad Abdul Bari

Sighting the Stubble-Stag – Simon Barnes

‘Sumer Is Icumen In’ – Laura Barton

Through the Lychgate – Sister Wendy Beckett

Ghost Orchids – Antony Beevor

The Call of the Grouse – David Bellamy

Let’s Talk About the Weather – Floella Benjamin

Senses and Sensibility – Richard Benson

Sticking the Wicket – Scyld Berry

A Personal View – Harold ‘Dickie’ Bird

An Ordinary Beauty – Terence Blacker

Love’s Labours Won – Raymond Blanc

Those Special Places – Ronald Blythe

My Little Piece of History – Rosie Boycott

The Final Frontier – Derry Brabbs

Rutland How I Love Thee – Julia Bradbury

In High Places – Melvyn Bragg

Rural Development – Jo Brand

The Urban Village – Vincent Cable

The View from the Urals – Adrian Chiles

What a Waste – Eric Clapton

Back on Dry Land – Sue Clifford

Rhyme and Reason – Wendy Cope

All A Broad – Nicholas Crane

Rebuilding the Past – Dan Cruickshank

From the Trenches – General Sir Richard Dannatt

Beside the Seaside – Jonathan Dimbleby

A Passion for Meat – Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones

Reading the Signs – Sebastian Faulks

Another Time, Another Place – Bryan Ferry

Riding High – Dick Francis

A Conversation with Self – Trisha Goddard

Defenders of Our Back Yards – Zac Goldsmith

An Artist’s Impression – Andy Goldsworthy

Cherry Time – Henrietta Green

Pastures New – Graham Harvey

Bonfire Night – Tom Heap

Following the Furrow – Paul Heiney

Crossing Over – Leo Hickman

The Tree Museum – Simon Hoggart

How the Other Half Lives – Charlotte Hollins

My Island – Elizabeth Jane Howard

Against the Elements – Margaret Howell

A Real Cliffhanger – Tristram Hunt

Cathedrals of Sewage – Maxwell Hutchinson

The Way Ahead – Kurt Jackson

To the Manor Born – Simon Jenkins

View over London – Terry Jones

Older than England – Paul Kingsnorth

Down Memory Lane – Miles Kington

Earth Pilgrim – Satish Kumar

Writing Stiles – David Lodge

Bluebell Picnics – Gabby Logan

Hidden Depths – Richard Mabey

A Guardian of Beauty – Fiona MacCarthy

The Road Taken – Robert Macfarlane

Drawing the Line – Andrew Marr

Scouring the Countryside – Peter Marren

The Secret Kingdom of Marrowland – Simon Sebag Montefiore

Fair Play – Brian Moore

An Enduring Affair – Richard Muir

My Corner Shop – Daljit Nagra

Ancient Jewels – John Julius Norwich

The Point of No Return – Sean O’Brien

Living on the Edge – Michael Palin

Taking Root – Jonathon Porritt

Whatever the Weather – Gavin Pretor-Pinney

Holding Back the Sea – Libby Purves

Dig for Victory – Tony Robinson

Smiling at the Neighbours – Alexei Sayle

Paradise Found – John Sergeant

The Bard’s Own River – Antony Sher

In Defence of Totnes – Lucy Siegle

Forever Tranquil – Mary Smith

Brave New World – Jon Snow

A Slow Boat to Bristol – Kevin Spacey

The Wild Dip – Rick Stein

The Light of Day – Roy Strong

Forbidden Fruits – Alice Temperley

Poetry in Motion – Nigel Thompson

This Land of Dreaming Spires – Simon Thurley

Heaven in a Wild Flower – Alan Titchmarsh

Alone on the Moors – Mark Tully

Taking Flight – Charlie Waite

The Dawn Chorus – Chris Watson

Beautiful Evenings – Francis Wheen

Alfred’s Cakes – Michael Wood

My Adventure Playground – Benjamin Zephaniah

Support our Campaign – Shaun Spiers, Chief Executive, CPRE

Contributors

Illustration credits

THE CAMPAIGN TO PROTECT RURAL ENGLAND

warmly thanks all those who have contributed to this

book. We dedicate it to the many thousands of volunteers

who have worked so hard and given so freely of their

time since we were founded in 1926.

Registered charity no: 1089685

www.cpre.org.uk

FOREWORD

His Royal Highness

The Prince of Wales

CLARENCE HOUSE

There is perhaps a rich irony in the fact that it takes an American, albeit one who has lived in these islands for many years, to recognize, celebrate and fight to preserve so much of what is precious about our country. There can be no-one who more deserves the title of “honorary Englishman” than Bill Bryson. Through his books, films and his campaigning as President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England he has done so much to help us appreciate the wonders and charms which surround us and to which, too often, we seem utterly blind. We all owe him the greatest possible debt, and so I could not be more pleased to write a foreword to this remarkable book, Icons of England.

And what greater icon could we have than our countryside, which I have always believed helps to define our identity as a nation? England is blessed with some of the most beautiful scenery in the worid. The patchwork quilt of fields, moors, forests, villages, and market towns which spreads across this land is the product of a golden combination of Nature’s gift to us and the toil and care of generations of farmers and their families who have managed the land. To me, it embodies England’s very soul and is as precious as any Cathedral. The dry stone walls, the hedges, the thatched cottages, the village Churches, pubs, post offices and shops are at the heart of what it means to be English, as are the people whose skills and craftsmanship and commitment keep them alive.

For more than eighty years, the Campaign to Protect Rural England has been leading the fight to preserve the remaining delicate fabric of our countryside. The foresight of the founding fathers was extraordinary – in 1926 Clough Williams-Ellis, whom I remember well and admire greatly, published England and the Octopus, an anti-sprawl polemic, and in the same year Sir Patrick Abercrombie wrote his paper, The Preservation of Rural England. The fight has continued since then and great successes have been won. Indeed, the recent creation of the South Downs National Park, sixty years after it was first proposed, shows the importance of perseverance and is a huge cause for optimism. When we do all come together to work towards a goal, so much can be achieved. It gives me hope that we will not allow our traditions and heritage to be swept away, and that we will look once more to the land for nourishment, healing, wisdom and inspiration.

When asked what, for them, encapsulates the English countryside, the contributors to this book came up with a wide variety of personal icons, from a favourite landscape to a treasured monument, from a particular species of wildlife to a familiar rustic emblem or rural tradition. Together they have created an eclectic and richly varied celebration of England’s countryside. I pray that this book will inspire us all to work tirelessly to preserve everything that is best in our magnificent countryside and to ensure that it remains at the very heart of our great island story.

INTRODUCTION

Bill Bryson
President, CPRE

YEARS AGO, WHEN I was brand new to Britain and everything was still a mystery to me, I went with an English friend to Brighton for the day, and there I saw my first seaside pier. The idea of constructing a runway to nowhere was one that would never have occurred to me. I asked her what it was for.

‘Well, they let you walk out and see the sea,’ she explained as if I were a little simple.

‘But we can see the sea from here,’ I pointed out.

‘No, you don’t understand. You walk out to the end and you are over the sea. It’s lovely.’

‘Can you see coral reefs and shipwrecks and things?’ I asked hopefully.

‘No, it’s just murky water.’

‘Can you see France?’

‘Of course not. You just see the sea.’ Her tone betrayed perhaps just a hint of exasperation. ‘You take the air. It’s very bracing.’

‘And then what?’

‘Then you walk back and have some whelks and stroll along the promenade and maybe ride a donkey on the beach – no, I don’t know why; it’s just something else we do – and then you have an ice cream and get on the train and go home.’

‘And this is a fabulous day out?’

‘Oh yes, it’s lovely. Especially if it doesn’t rain.’

I have since come to realize that she was right about everything but the whelks. (If you are reading this in another country and aren’t familiar with that marine delicacy, you may get the same experience by finding an old golf ball, removing the cover and eating what remains. The only difference is that the golf ball has a little more flavour.) Indeed, after some thirty years of devoted observation, I have come to appreciate that the things that make England what it is – which is to say, like nowhere else on Earth – and however peculiar they may seem at first blush, are actually quite endearing and often deeply admirable. This is a book about those things.

Four qualities in particular, I think, set English icons apart and make them more memorable, more individual, vastly more noteworthy than icons elsewhere. Foremost among these is the ability – so gloriously evinced in the seaside pier – to be magnificent while having no evident purpose at all.

Consider one of my own favourite national glories, the wondrously artificial, profoundly inexplicable Silbury Hill in Wiltshire – the largest man-made mound in Europe. Built at about the same time as Stonehenge, it covers five acres and rises 130 feet above the surrounding landscape. It is positively immense, and involved an almost unimaginable commitment of labour. Yet Silbury Hill has no known purpose. It is not a burial chamber and holds no treasures. It consists of nothing but soil and rock carefully formed into a large pudding-shaped hill. All that can be said for certain is that some people at some time in the very distant past decided, for purposes we cannot guess, to make a large hill where previously there had been none.

There really is a kind of national instinct for putting up interesting things whether there is a need for them or not. You see it in chalk horses carved in hillsides and Scottish brochs and drystone walls climbing up and over preposterously steep and craggy slopes. (Who cares where the sheep go when they get up there?) I have always been convinced that the starting point for Stonehenge was some guy standing on Salisbury Plain and saying: ‘You know, what this place needs is some really big rocks.’

Which brings us to the second distinctive quality of English icons – their ubiquity. Let us rush to London, to modern times, so I can show you what I mean. We are at Hyde Park Corner roundabout, surrounded by a ceaseless flow of vehicles, gazing up at the enormous arched monument that stands on the parklike green island in its centre. Atop the monument is a large statue of a winged goddess on a chariot. The island is a surprisingly tranquil place, and in fact rather a lonely one, for few visitors find their way through the pedestrian tunnels that lead to it. Fewer still are aware that the arch contains a charming museum and a lift that takes you to a lookout terrace where you get one of the most splendid views in London. It is only way up here that you realize just what a large structure this is – and how startlingly outsized the statue on the roof is. It is the largest bronze sculpture in Europe. Only when you are up there does the scale of all this come into sudden focus. This is a monumental edifice indeed.

Now here is the really interesting thing about it. Ask anyone in London – any cab driver, any policeman, any citizen you care to collar – what the name of this arch is and hardly any of them can tell you. Although it is one of the most visible and driven-past monuments in London, on as prime a site as the city offers, it is utterly and enchantingly lost to consideration because it is just of one of hundreds and hundreds of historic, appreciable, glorious, iconic structures that exist in London. Almost anywhere else in the world this would be a celebrated monument. Here it is backdrop.

Part of the reason its name is not better known is that it has had several in the 180 years since it was built by the great Decimus Burton. At various times it has been known as Constitution Arch, Wellington Arch, Green Park Arch and now Wellington Arch again. You won’t be surprised to hear that it is also quite useless and always has been. It was designed originally as an outer entryway to Buckingham Palace, but was such an impediment to traffic, and so completely out of scale, that it was moved to the traffic island in 1882 just to get it out of the way.

It is your good fortune in this country to have so many iconic treasures, but it is a danger too. Having so many means that they are easily forgotten and even lost – which is the third and most tragic of the qualities that set English icons apart. In the thirty years I have known England, you have lost, or all but lost, an appreciable number of iconic features – milk bottles, corner shops, village post offices, red phone boxes, seaside holidays and even some seaside piers, including the one at Brighton that so bemused and transfixed me thirty years ago.

Happily, there is a fourth and more encouraging quality to icons, as this book so engagingly attests: people love them. They don’t just appreciate them, the way you might appreciate a good book or an expensive dinner. They love them like a child. National icons really are the things that set countries apart and yet they are almost always taken completely for granted, which means they often aren’t missed until they are gone for good. So it is wonderful to see them given the warmth and reverence they deserve in the pages that follow.

This book is also a timely reminder of how lucky we are to have a heroic outfit like the Campaign to Protect Rural England, to make sure that other iconic features – like Green Belts and hedgerows, long views over dreamy landscapes and a thousand things more – aren’t lost as well.

Our job is to make sure that a book like this is always a celebration and not a memorial. These are thought-provoking and refreshing contributions. Many are anecdotes and memories that celebrate being in and enjoying the countryside as much as they praise historic monuments and locations. We are immensely grateful to all the writers who have contributed, including all those who wrote pieces for this new edition. We were especially pleased to receive a thoughtful and touching contribution from the great and kindly Miles Kington shortly before his tragically early death. And I enjoyed reading Mary Smith’s ‘Forever Tranquil’, winner of the Daily Telegraph competition to write an entry for inclusion in this book. As for the rest of you, we can’t thank you enough for your support.

THIS COLLECTION OF PIECES celebrating rural England does not only focus on the rolling hillsides and spectacular landscapes that set England apart from the rest of the world. Many of the contributors bring their own special touch, with personal anecdotes and refreshingly original choices of icons representing what the English countryside really means to them.

First published as a lavishly illustrated hardback, this new edition has double the number of new contributions from many well-known figures. The sale of every copy will support the campaigning work of CPRE, the organization which is dedicated to a beautiful and living countryside.

IN SEARCH OF ENGLAND’S GNOMES

Kate Adie
on deer parks

I USED TO wonder if deer were posh people’s ornaments; the aristocratic equivalent of the garden gnome. For these animals do not seem real. They are never out of place in fairy tales, myths and legends – the stories of Herne the Hunter and Robin Hood. And although our history books seem full of them – the royals grew forests to hunt them in, Georgian landowners created parks to show them off, and the poor used to enjoy feasting on them – many people have never seen one. But if you are lucky enough – as I was in my childhood – to catch these enigmatic beings on show, you’ll soon realize the countryside isn’t quite the same without them.

As a child, it was a treat to take a run in the car into Swaledale or Teesdale, away from the industrial cranes and pitheads of the County Durham coast. On the way back, full of egg and tomato sandwiches and home-made shortbread, we would always stop on the edge of the village of Staindrop. Once there, I’d peer over the drystone wall towards the outline of Raby Castle and stare at its vast park of rather lumpy northern grassland, with a small copse here and there.

With luck came the moment when I could squeak, ‘There they are!’ as a clutch of brown thin-legged creatures would move tentatively into view – as if they’d been wondering whether it was worth putting themselves on show. Some would browse, others would stare snootily, and the antlered boss would stand at a distance, as king of the park. They would always adopt a rather grand pose, which I found amusing when accompanied by their silly twitching tails.

Up close, deer are delightful, if a bit dim. They’re not interested in being pets; they have no desire to please; they won’t come when they’re called and go bananas when a sheepdog appears. They seem made to decorate the countryside – when they feel like it – and they’re rather good at it. Not only are they elegant, but they always come as something of a surprise. Unlike cattle and sheep, which can be relied upon to be more or less where you expect to find them, deer play hide and seek. On rural roads, there are signs saying ‘Caution: Deer’. You proceed cautiously, expecting a stag to leap up to your bonnet, or plant itself foursquare and elk-like in the middle of the tarmac. But they somehow never appear. They remain concealed in the greenery, and wait until you have passed, before strolling out, probably congratulating each other on maintaining the view in the village pub that ‘they may or may not exist’.

For many people, a deer will never be anything more than an image of Bambi in a picture book. But it is worth making an effort to catch sight of the real thing. While elusive, they come into their own on country estates, when they eventually deign to graze in the sunshine. They stroll delicately, eyeing the landscape as they go – ready to bound into cover at the slightest hint of danger. Just watching them lets you imagine what it would be like to have been a poacher in the Middle Ages, longing for a portion of tender meat to supplement a dull diet, or a newly fortunate landowner dreaming of a landscaped park filled with handsome fallow and roe. For me as a child, the surprise of seeing deer was the icing on the cake, the unexpected bonus of a trip to the countryside. And waiting for them to appear was all part of the fun.

A PLACE IN THE COUNTRY

George Alagiah
on the English countryside

‘MY PARENTS LIVE in the country. Would you like to come and stay with us?’ I can’t remember if those were the exact words, but I do recall the fact that it was the first time I’d heard of ‘the country’. This was 1967. I was eleven going on twelve, and had just arrived in England. I had moved from one country, Ghana, to this one, so I was confused: to what was my new English friend referring? Just weeks into what would become a lifetime attachment to England, I had already learned the most important lesson for an immigrant – don’t embarrass yourself, just pretend you know what the locals are talking about. I accepted the offer and, some days later, found myself on the train from Portsmouth to Sussex.

I didn’t fully understand it at the time. But on that little weekend retreat from our city school I encountered the country – not as a place, but as an idea. Back in Ghana, or further back still in Sri Lanka, where I was born, the ties with the rural areas were visceral. The countryside was what defined a person, the town or city merely the place where one made a living. Over the decades, with a second or even third generation born in the heat and dust of the towns, the enduring strength of the extended family pulls one back to the source of the bloodline – to the village or hamlet where it all began.

Here it is different. Here the power of the Industrial Revolution tipped the balance in favour of England’s towns and cities. The smokestacks and tenements changed the physical landscape, but they also altered the mental landscape. The ‘country’ had to be reinvented as an escape and a refuge from the demands of urban living. Sometimes the countryside has been reduced to a leisure activity, a package deal shorn of nature’s life-affirming rhythm, and cleansed of the muck and smell that is so much a part of rural life. But the real thing is there all the same – every right of way is an invitation, every stile a step into somewhere gentle and generous.

I write this after a long weekend in the fields and folds of North Cornwall and Devon. In one day we walked along the bank of the river Ottery, courtesy of an obliging farmer, tucked into some of the best pub grub in Lydford village and ended the afternoon underneath Widgery Cross on Brat Tor. From the granite mass that is Dartmoor, we watched a sinking sun’s fading light settle on Cornwall, stretched out to the west like England’s foot. To go from the verdant squelchy-welly track down to the Ottery’s floodplain and then to the bleak and barren heights of Dartmoor is to experience, in the space of just a few hours, the infinite variety of this small island of ours.

The country is not so much another place as another state of mind. There is a trick to it, though. You have to leave the call of the BlackBerry behind. You need to stop when you feel like stopping, look when you feel like looking and talk when you feel like talking. And then you might learn, as we did from a local, that the reason hundreds of starlings in flight will twist and turn in unison is because the ones on the outside are constantly trying to get to the inside where they feel safer.

Some forty years on from that first trip, I finally understand what going to the country is all about. And now it’s my turn to offer an invitation: ‘Fancy a weekend in the country?’

FROM PILLAR TO POST

Peter Ashley
on postboxes

THE FIRST PILLAR box I saw was at the end of our road. It had a cream oval on the top with the words ‘Post Office’ and a red arrow pointing to the shop door two yards away. My mother would lift me up to it in order to send letters skimming into the darkness, and I remember being there when the postman unlocked its door with a key from a huge jangling bunch and started shovelling the mail into a rust-coloured sack.

I knew from comics that burglars used sacks, and had to be dissuaded by my mother from the notion that a theft was being committed. I had imagined that mail was collected in an underground cavern where tiny post elves – such as those in a Rupert Bear story – sorted it all out. The criminal element persisted when my brother told me that when (not if ) I ended up in jail, all I could expect to be doing in my dungeon would be sewing mailbags.

Anthony Trollope is credited with introducing postboxes to the Channel Islands in 1852, before knocking out his ‘Barsetshire’ novels. The boxes arrived on the mainland a year later in Botchergate, Carlisle. It is odd that the experiment didn’t start in the capital – usually the test bed for innovation. The first pillar box in our present monarch’s reign was planted near the Horse Guards in 1952.

The royal connection took on new relevance when I bought the little I-Spy book In the Street, and postboxes became quarries in a hunting game to spot royal ciphers. These cast-iron monograms enabled a rough chronology to be applied: the flowing script for Victoria, the spare initials for George V. Even Edward VIII found his cipher cast on to a few boxes before he decided to throw in the crown. Much later, I took pleasure in discovering the many variants of design. The early vertical-slitted box near Bishop’s Caundle in Dorset; the acanthus leaves topping a Penfold hexagonal box in Chiswick; double boxes on city streets; airmail boxes in sky blue. And pillar boxes are not solely free-standing. Rural areas were served by boxes set into brick or stone walls; hump-backed and round-topped boxes clamped to tarred telegraph poles.

Icons of the English scene, pillar boxes stand like red and black guardsmen awaiting their orders. The perfect visual shorthand for communication, our digitalized cyberworld gives us nothing as potently recognizable. Remarkably, most of them are still with us, often all that stands between us and our messages, invitations, greetings and condolences reappearing – as if by magic – just about anywhere in the world. Occasionally they will be struck off the postman’s rota. But they still obstinately cling on to pavements, grass verges and walls. They are difficult to uproot; like icebergs, there’s almost as much below the pavement. One wall box – that once served Waddon Manor and other less grand abodes below Corton Down in Dorset – still revealed its fretwork grille sitting in the bottom when I cautiously opened the now unlocked heavy door. Apparently this is a snail trap, designed to prevent the shell-backed creatures from consuming the mail – how, I’m not quite sure.

I’ve always feared that these essential items in the iconography of England may one day disappear, or that in the spirit of the age I might wake up and find them all painted pale beige and owned by the Dutch. But I think there is now an agreement in place between the Royal Mail and English Heritage that conserves them. In the end, though, it is down to us to care about them as much as we utilize them for their vital purpose.

FROM LITTLE ACORNS

Clive Aslet
on ancient trees

ENGLAND WOULD BE nothing without its ancient trees. We have far more of these arboreal veterans than anywhere else in Northern Europe. Just as Trinity College, Cambridge is supposed – by Fellows of Trinity College – to contain more Nobel Prize winners than the whole of France, so Richmond Park supports more 500-year-old trees than France and Germany combined.

With our national affection for the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest, ancient cedars of Lebanon, not to mention Newton’s apple tree in Lincolnshire (the tree sprouted anew after being cut down in the eighteenth century), we have been better than the Mediterranean countries at recording them. It is thought there are some ancient olive trees in Greece, but they have not achieved the degree of celebrity of, say, Sherwood’s oak. We name our ancient trees. They are the subject of awe and fascination. They almost seem to speak to us, revealing something about our values and the vast span of history they have witnessed.

In Scotland, the Fortingall Yew must be one of Europe’s oldest living organisms – its age calculated in millennia. Dating ancient trees is not easy: they cannot be carbon-dated because they are still growing, and the tree rings cannot be counted because they are hollow. The Fortingall Yew parted company with the original shape of its trunk long ago and now survives as a one-dimensional ligneous wall. The late Duke of Buccleuch, who had a passion for trees, made a pilgrimage to see it, saying, ‘I never cease to marvel at the fact there is something living today that was 3,000 or more years old at the time of the first Christmas.’

Visiting a tree such as the Bowthorpe Oak in Lincolnshire, so hospitably big the hollow trunk was used as a dining room in the eighteenth century, makes me reach for the dictionary. Numinous is the best word I can come up with. Trees have always seemed sacred (think of the tree of Calvary, as the cross of the Crucifixion is sometimes called); their redemptive quality appears all the greater in the age of climate change, symbolizing the power of trees to redress the atmosphere’s imbalance of CO².

Our blessing in this matter of ancient trees has little to do with our forestry. Woods do not necessarily allow trees to survive to a great age. Competition with other trees causes them to grow tall but thin, so eventually they fall. Britain’s ancient trees are a legacy of the top people’s passion for hunting. From the days of William the Conqueror, kings and aristocrats needed open country to ride over. This parkland included free-standing trees. Gouty and misshapen – with limbs lopped off – but with deep roots, these ‘King Lears of the natural world’, as Thomas Pakenham puts it, have stoically endured all that has been flung at them.

The fact they have survived into the twenty-first century has something to do with national sentiment, but more with a fact of history. Marauding armies saw them as convenient fuel, but because Britain was at peace throughout most of the eighteenth century and thereafter, its trees were spared.

Once, these trees would have enjoyed a sappy youth. They have now shrunk, as we all must, into senescence. As they collapse back into the earth, they become host to all sorts of biologically interesting intruders – the decaying timber of a dead tree is home to bats and alive with unseen invertebrates. But the most biodiverse are those still clinging tenaciously to life. Ancient trees have been called Britain’s equivalent of the rainforests. And many of the most spectacular are oaks, our national tree.

RURAL RIDES

Paul Atterbury
on rural branch lines

THE VICTORIANS DID many good things for us – not least the building of a nationwide and fully integrated railway network. Of course, we have already undone their great work by removing much of the rural branch line experience – there is nothing better than getting off a modern mainline train at a busy station and crossing to a distant platform to board a small, usually one-car, train. I still thank our ancestors every time I find, in a quiet corner of England, that there remains a way to journey into the past, and do just that.

By 1900, about 20,000 miles of railway linked practically every town and many villages all over Britain. This meant the freedom of travel had become accessible to even people living in the most remote corners of the land. Of this dense network of lines – main lines, secondary and rural routes and branch lines – the branch lines were the most important in social terms. And there were hundreds of them all over the country, winding their way through hills and dales, mostly for a few miles but sometimes much further. They carried people to school and to work, on shopping trips, family outings and on holiday. They facilitated courting and greatly improved the national gene pool. They carried agricultural goods, materials for industry and things for the village shops. And in so doing, they – and their employees – were the heart of the communities they served.

The branch line legacy, and the society it looked after so well, lived on into the twentieth century and through two world wars. It wasn’t until the 1950s that things began to change, when people and goods started to travel more by road. Left to their own devices, the railways could have responded to the challenge. But interference crept in and the old Victorian structures, which took into account social needs and benefits, and allowed the profitable main lines to subsidize the branch lines, were casually abandoned. Cost-cutting and modern efficiencies meant the rural routes and branch lines had to go. So throughout the 1960s, the axes swung and thousands of miles of railway disappeared.

For those prepared to use a map, a timetable and throw caution to the wind, the rural branch line experience is still there for the asking. By this I do not mean the preserved tourist railways. These offer a vision of railway life, but it is far better to make use of and enjoy the scattering of branch lines that somehow escaped the ravages of the 1960s and linger on in parts of Britain – still doing what they were built for in the first place.

The survivors include real branch lines, and others created by the truncation of former through routes. Cornwall has classic examples of the former, from Liskeard to Looe and from St Erth to St Ives, while East Anglia boasts an excellent couple of the latter variety, Marks Tey to Sudbury and Norwich to Sheringham. Oxfordshire has two good ones to Henley and Marlow, while elsewhere in the Midlands, the North and Wales there are exciting long branches to Matlock, Whitby and through Snowdonia to Blaenau Ffestiniog. Sadly, classic branch lines do not survive in Scotland. There is no better way to travel and see the spectacular British landscape pass by the window.

WHERE THE RIVER MEETS THE SEA

Joan Bakewell
on estuaries

AN ESTUARY IS an awesome thing, its great bulk of fresh water pressing forward remorselessly into the measureless ocean. It is a striking sight in all weathers – the Severn Estuary below Bristol with its rippling bore; the Mersey’s quiet emergence into Liverpool Bay. But the one I really love is the gentle winding of the river Alde towards the North Sea at Aldeburgh.

Suffolk is a place admired for its vast skyscapes rather than its landscapes. The clouds scud and gather over reedy marshes and heathland – you can see the weather coming from far away and there’s always time to run for cover. And a scattering of ancient spires indicates this was once a thriving centre of the wool trade. For me, however, a Suffolk scene wouldn’t be as compelling without the meandering river, and the wild, unrelenting coastline with its fishermen’s huts and encroaching tides.

Following the river Alde’s twists and turns is like watching a drama unfold. Much of the Aldeburgh Music Festival takes place along its banks in a converted maltings – a complex of red-brick buildings sitting low in the landscape, whose steeped roofs are scarcely visible above the lie of the land. Below it, the river winds its way towards the desolate North Sea, always battling against its swaying reedbeds. On a summer evening, as the birds swoop and call above the water, it is easy to sit back, look out at the ancient Iken church alone on the horizon, and feel part of the action.

As the Alde widens its banks, the drama continues. A scattering of pine trees shed their cones on its sandy shores. At Aldeburgh itself – a one-street town whose coloured houses line the coast – the estuary turns south past a modest yacht club and finds its way to Orford, with its pretty harbour where Britten’s Peter Grimes set his boats out to sea. It is hard for me to stroll along its pebble beach without hearing the opera’s interludes playing in my head.