An Environmental History of Wildlife in England 1650-1950

The revoluTion in agriCulTure^97

or even nationally rare. The nineteenth-century botanist George Claridge
Druce was told how the soldier and monkey orchids (Orchis militaris and
Orchis simia) had been ‘tolerably plentiful about Whitchurch [Oxfordshire]
till 1837’: the chalk slopes were then pared and burnt, his correspondent
describing how he ‘actually witnessed the roasting alive of both Soldier and
Monkey orchids’.^21 At Burford in the Cotswolds the pasque flower could no
longer be found: ‘The... locality is now brought under cultivation, and the
plant is certainly extinct there’.^22 Charles Babbington similarly described in
the 1860s how, until the start of the nineteenth century, the chalk hills of
south Cambridgeshire had been

Open and covered with a beautiful coating of turf, profusely decorated

with Anemone Pulsatilla [pasqueflower], Astragolus hypoglottis [purple

milk-vetch], and other interesting plants. It is now converted into arable

land, and its peculiar plants mostly confined to small waste plots by

road-sides, pits, and the very few banks which are too steep for the

plough. Thus many species that were formerly abundant have become

rare... Even the tumuli, entrenchments, and other interesting works of

the ancient inhabitants have seldom escaped the rapacity of the modern

agriculturalist, who too frequently looks upon the native plants of the

country as weeds, and its antiquities as deformities.^23

Some of the land broken up as prices hit record levels during the Napoleonic
Wars was abandoned again after a few years: but once the ancient, herb-rich
pastures had been destroyed, it was hard to recreate them. In the 1880s,
as a more serious downturn in agricultural fortunes set in, James Caird
commented that ‘there is no doubt that vast areas of poor down and heath
land, in the south of England, were converted to arable at the beginning of
this century – land that cannot be tilled profitably now, and that cannot
be restored to its former condition within any reasonable limit of time, if
ever’.^24
Destruction of downs and heaths on such a scale was also detrimental
to the country’s fauna. There was, in particular, a significant reduction in
the distribution and numbers of open-country, ground-nesting birds. By
1825 the hen harrier had disappeared from Kent, Essex, Wiltshire and
the Forest of Dean, all areas in which it had been common before c.1800;
and by 1850 it had also been driven from Oxfordshire, East Anglia and
Yorkshire.^25 The stone curlew, once a common bird throughout southern
and eastern England, declined dramatically in the course of the nineteenth
century, although it finally died out in many counties only at the very
end of the century (and hung on in Kent until 1909 and Yorkshire until
1937).^26 Such an extended chronology of decline, shared by some other
species, suggests that factors other than the ploughing of heaths and downs
played their part: the destruction of other habitats favoured by some of the
species in question (wetlands in the case of the hen harrier, for example); the