(^128) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
the upper levels of society, defining the boundaries of the ‘polite’, marking
off the owners of large estates and the occupants of ‘villas’ on the fringes
of town both from members of local farming communities and from less
wealthy, more decidedly middle-class neighbours, not least because the
creation of a park demanded a commodity which they lacked – land in
reasonable abundance. Above all, the removal of orchards, nut grounds,
fish ponds, dovecotes, and farm yards from the vicinity of the mansion,
something which always accompanied the destruction of walled geometric
gardens, expressed a lack of involvement in the active production of luxury
food: indeed, the sharp decline in interest in displaying forms ‘intermediate
exploitation’ beside a mansion was one of the most striking aspects of the
‘landscape’ style.^79 Even deer were increasingly excluded from parks and
replaced by sheep and cattle. In part this was because they played havoc with
ornamental planting and thus made unsuitable denizens of these manicured
and designed landscapes. But more importantly they, like fish, rabbits and
pigeons, fell somewhere between the new enthusiasms for agricultural
‘improvement’, and for the shooting and hunting of animals which were
more clearly ‘wild’. Fish ponds, rabbit warrens and the like thus came
to occupy an uneasy position in the minds of landowners, and appeared
archaic and unfashionable.^80 At Chatsworth, as we have seen (above, p. 64),
the main view from the mansion, into the eighteenth century, had remained
across the great canal complex, still used as a fish farm, and out to the
rabbit warren on the far side of the river Derwent. As late as 1756–57,
there were 335 breeding couples there.^81 But when Capability Brown was
commissioned to modernize the landscape in 1758, the warren was the first
feature to be targeted. A note in the accounts records that ‘The Warren was
destroyed 1758, sold all the rabbits’.^82
Especially in counties where smaller ‘villas’ were thick on the ground, parks
collectively occupied very large tracts of land. In Hertfordshire, to the north
of London, they already accounted for around 6 per cent of the surface area
by 1766, but this had increased to some 10 per cent by the 1880s.^83 Today,
surviving parklands often form islands of relatively unimproved pasture
within what are otherwise intensively farmed landscapes. This contrast would
have been less marked in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but in the
arable east especially they would have provided some refuge for mammals
and birds displaced from local pastures by the shift to arable husbandry, and
from the neighbouring commons by enclosure. Some of the older parks and
pleasure grounds are now particularly rich floristically. The Great Lawn
at Chatsworth, probably laid out by William Kent in the 1730s but in
an area already partly lawned by 1699, is a good example.^84 No less than
56 species of angiosperm have been recorded here, including many not normally
thought of as inhabiting lawns, such as tormentil (Potentilla erecta), heath
milkwort (Polygala serpyllifolia) and yellow mountain pansy (Viola lutea).^85
Many parks were provided with lakes, an important boon to wildlife,
especially wildfowl. Many today function as County Wildlife Sites or Sites
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