(^26) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
heaths were also regularly cut, for a variety of materials. Bracken and heather
were used for thatch, as animal litter, and sometimes to cover domestic
floors; gorse was employed for fencing and (in the words of John Norden)
‘to stoppe a little gap in a hedge’.^29 All these materials were also used as fuel.
Heather was harvested for this purpose in the form of turves dug to a depth
of at least 2.5 cm, which thus included both the vegetation and a square of
combustible matted roots. Crabbe, writing in the late eighteenth century
about east Suffolk, refers to the local heaths as a source of ‘the light turf that
warms the neighbouring poor’.^30 Gorse was simply cropped above ground
level, and was sometimes cultivated in special enclosures, especially where
there were brick kilns, which were often fired with heathland vegetation.
When Blickling Hall in Norfolk was constructed in 1617–21, for example,
over a million bricks were made in kilns entirely fuelled with gorse and
broom faggots brought from the heaths at nearby Cawston and Saxthorpe
(although Blickling also appears to have had its own ‘Furze Closes’, to judge
from an estate map of 1729).^31 Well into the nineteenth century, most of the
kilns on the Bedfordshire brick fields were similarly fired using heathland
vegetation.^32 The vitrified bricks so common in seventeenth-, eighteenth- and
even some nineteenth-century buildings throughout England, and often used
in a decorative fashion, may be the consequence of using heather or gorse as
fuel, both rich in potash.^33 The significance of heaths as a source of thermal
energy, as well as grazing, was seldom lost on contemporaries. In the early
seventeenth century, Thomas Blenerhasset, writing about Horsford Heath
in Norfolk, described how ‘This heathe is to Norwich and the Countrye
heare as Newcastle coales are to London’.^34 In short, heaths were both cut
and cropped very intensively, ensuring that they were degraded landscapes,
continuously depleted of nutrients, deficient in biomass and organic matter.
Today, heaths are most common in East Anglia, mainly overlying glacial
sands and gravels, and in the south and south-east of England, mainly
on Tertiary sands and gravels although sporadically on the Cretaceous
Greensand and Wealden sands. They can also be found in Staffordshire
and other west Midland and north-western counties, overlying Triassic
sandstone and Carboniferous coal measures, and often shading without clear
demarcation into the moors of the uplands. Extensive areas also occur in
Devon and Cornwall, often close to the coast. But these are mere fragments
of what existed in the seventeenth century for vast areas of heathland, as
we shall see, were reclaimed, afforested, or urbanized in the course of the
eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or else have degenerated to
secondary woodland. Even in the period since 1830, heathland has declined
by around 80 per cent^35 : a great deal more than this, possibly three times
as much, disappeared during the previous century through enclosure and
‘improvement’. What survives is important not only in national but also
in international terms, for while heaths were once a common element of
the landscape in many European countries, including France and Denmark,
they have been eradicated even more systematically there. Yet heaths as
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