(^140) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
laid land to pasture, for livestock prices did not fall as far as those for wheat
and barley, and – with improved access to distant urban markets – those for
dairy produce remained buoyant. In 1880 there were round 14 million acres
(5.7 million hectares) of arable land in England and Wales: by 1939 this
had fallen to under nine million, almost entirely concentrated in the eastern
counties (Figure 25).^14 Better transport and increasing levels of urbanization
also encouraged other forms of diversification, such as the production of
poultry, fruit and vegetables, and in some districts there was an expansion in
the number of smallholdings, in part the consequence of direct government
legislation. In some counties the county councils were, by the 1920s, the
largest landowners, with the largest numbers of agricultural tenants.^15
There was some abandonment of marginal land, as we shall see, but most of
England continued to be farmed, often at high levels of intensity.
It is true that the amount of money spent on artificial fertilizers, land
drainage, and the other ‘improvements’ of the ‘high farming’ period declined,
and this may have had a positive effect on wildlife. As field drains gradually
became blocked, areas of damp grassland developed in places, to the benefit
of a range of wild plants, and of breeding waders, snipe and redshank.^16 But as
in earlier periods, a decline in the cultivation of cereal crops in areas formerly
characterized by mixed farming may have caused reductions in the numbers
of granivorous birds.^17 Moreover, the suggestion that hedges were allowed
to grow tall and uncontrolled, or that fields filled with weeds, needs to be
treated with particular caution. Photographs taken in the early twentieth
century usually suggest a rather manicured and tidy countryside (Figure 26).
Hedges were no longer exploited as a source of fuel and were less likely to be
managed by regular coppicing or laying, not least because, in livestock areas,
they were increasingly supplemented by fences of barbed wire, first used in
England in the 1870s. In arable areas, especially, hedges appear to have been
trimmed back more rigorously than ever, because they shaded crops and
provided shelter for vermin, particularly rabbits. But even in livestock districts
they were often kept in strict order: it was said in 1900 that in Cheshire ‘old
and tangled hedgerows, which afforded secure nesting places for warblers and
other birds, [have] been grubbed up and replaced by mathematically straight
thorn hedges or wire fences’.^18 Tennyson described in the 1930s how:
In west Suffolk there are many long stretches with literally no hedges at
all, or at the best hedges that are kept to, and often below, their proper
size. And as the fields are large – they are very large in some places – and
the country is flat, there is often nothing to break the view.^19
The amalgamation of fields seems in many areas to have continued at a
steady pace: in parts of eastern England the kind of prairie-like landscape
which we usually associate with post-War agricultural intensification was
already beginning to emerge. Butcher in the 1930s commented that on the
Suffolk claylands:
elle
(Elle)
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