(^146) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
benefited from the rougher conditions and the spread of scrub, such as the
woodlark, but only within limits: once dereliction and regeneration reached
a certain stage their numbers too will have been adversely affected.
The decline in traditional forms of management, which had everywhere
struggled on, by a kind of rural inertia, through the middle and later decades
of the nineteenth century, is apparent in many contexts. Often such practices
came to an abrupt and final end with the advent of World War I, due to
the labour shortages which arose as men went off in their thousands to
die in the trenches. The coppicing of woodland often ceased at this point,
never to be resumed, with major impacts on floristic diversity, as rare plants
and butterflies were lost to the deepening shade. In surviving wetlands the
management of fens for reed, sedge, and marsh hay was likewise abandoned.
Turner in 1922 described how the impact of the War, and the decline in
the market for chaff in London, was dramatically changing the appearance
of the Norfolk Broads. Areas of fen and meadow, once mown for hay or
litter or grazed by cattle, had ‘reverted and their rough herbage is stronger
and coarser than ever’.^43 Decline continued over the following decades, and
T. Boardman described in 1939 how:
Now, since acres upon acres of this material remain uncut and the
vegetation gets into such a terrible tangle, the marshes have to be burned.
Alders, birch and sallows are taking possession... When the marshes
were mown regularly all the young trees were kept under...^44
By the 1930s, many commercial reed beds, both here and in other wetland
areas, were also being abandoned, as the local demand for thatching
materials declined, and they too regenerated to scrub, and then woodland.
All this caused problems for a wide range of wetland plants, and for a
number of wetland birds, such as the reed warbler, lapwing and yellow
wagtail, although overall the numbers of teal and mallard held up well in
this period, probably because of the more stringent imposition of a close
season on shooting.^45
Other forms of traditional land management declined as a more direct
consequence of the depressed state of particular sections of the farming
economy. By 1940 the management of water meadows had ‘largely broken
down’, even in their Wessex heartlands, Stamp in 1950 describing how, as
a result, ‘some parts of the valleys of the Test or the Wiltshire Avon present
... a scene of desolation which is tragic’.^46 The system was closely tied to
the practice of sheep-corn husbandry, and especially to the production of
lambs, and although it could be adopted to serve the needs of dairy farmers
up to a point, its main raison d’etre had now disappeared. In addition,
however, irrigation clashed with the interests of recreational fishing, and
with those of game shooting. The owners of fishing rights ‘may not approve
the interference caused by the weirs... a sportsman out for shooting may
prefer to see a reed swamp than a tract of well tended meadow’.^47