(^112) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
uses up oxygen in the water, causing problems for fish. Many pondweeds
and other plants which float on the surface flourish in these conditions, as
does much of the emergent vegetation – that is, plants which are rooted in
the bed of the stream or lake but which rise above the surface of the water.
But slower-growing waterweeds, which live largely or entirely beneath the
surface, fare badly. By the 1850s the Norfolk Broads – the network of East
Anglian lakes, largely formed by medieval peat digging, which were already
acknowledged as one of the most important areas for wildlife in England –
were beginning to suffer. They were largely surrounded by prime arable land
which was now receiving ever higher doses of both fertiliser and dung from
cake-fed cattle. The waters, once crystal-clear, grew cloudy, and plants such
as horned pondweed (Zanichellia palustris), water soldier (Stratiotes aloides),
hornwort (Ceratophyllum demersum) and water-lilies were suppressed by
the growth of pondweeds such as the stoneworts and bladderworts.^103 Such
changes, well documented here, may have been widespread in arable areas.
Rapid eutrophication also perhaps provided conditions for certain invasive
species to flourish, and the rapid spread of Canadian pondweed through the
English waterways in the middle of the nineteenth century (above, p. 85),
while certainly facilitated by the new canal network, may have also been a
consequence of increased levels of phosphates and nitrates in the water.
Amalgamation of fields and the replanting of hedges in old-enclosed country
continued and probably intensified in the ‘high farming’ period, encouraged in
particular by the use of steam engines for ploughing, for the engines and their
complicated tackle could only work efficiently in large, and preferably rectangular,
fields. Agricultural writers continued to rail against the wastefulness of hedges,
the way they harboured vermin and increased the costs of cultivation; Grant
in 1845 reported their continued removal in Devon.^104 Hoskyns, writing about
his experience of clayland farming in 1865, described them as ‘unproductive in
themselves of anything that is good’ and ‘equally an obstacle to the plough that
toils for bread, and the eye that wanders for beauty’.
The waving and extensive Corn-field, the deep rich winter verdure of the
turnip-crop, the dark and mellow surface of the fallow, owe little of beauty
to the net-work of intersecting barriers that arrest at once the plough and
the prospect, and carry a running nest of robbers, like earthworks of the
enemy, through the fair fields of human skill’.^105
But not everyone thought the same. In the 1880s, at the very end of this
phase of agricultural expansion and intensification, the vicar of Scarning in
Norfolk, Augustus Jessop, bemoaned how:
The small fields that used to be so picturesque and wasteful are gone or
are going; the tall hedges, the high banks, the scrub or the bottoms where
a fox or weasel might hope to find a night’s lodging... all these things
have vanished.^106
elle
(Elle)
#1