ChapTer one
Setting the scene: The nature
of nature
The natural landscape?
This book discusses the history of wildlife in England in the three centuries
between 1650 and 1950. It examines how the number, and distributions, of
different species altered over time, and describes the changing ways in which
various wild plants and animals were regarded, controlled and exploited
by the human inhabitants of this country. Above all, it explains how the
environments in which such creatures made their homes developed over the
centuries. Most people today probably think of the countryside as in some
sense ‘natural’, certainly in comparison with the environment of towns. But
nature, as Raymond Williams once observed, is the ‘most complex word in
the language’, and problems over its definition underlie many current issues
in conservation, and lie at the heart of this book.^1 In truth, rural landscapes as
much as urban ones are largely or entirely artificial in character, the creation
of particular social, economic and technological circumstances. Heaths,
woods and meadows are, in most ways, no more ‘natural’ than suburban
gardens or inner-city waste grounds. Indeed, one indication of how far
removed we are from a truly ‘natural’ landscape in England, uninfluenced
by human activity, is the fact that natural scientists argue over what precise
form this might have taken.
Following the end of the last Ice Age, around 11,000 BC, England was
gradually colonized by plants and animals as the temperature warmed, and
as a continued connection with Continental Europe – the English Channel
and the southern North Sea were only flooded in the seventh millennium
BC – allowed them to move northwards with ease. Until relatively recently it
was assumed that the natural vegetation developed through what ecologists