No longer a place of work, the English countryside has been tidied up and made picturesque, based on a mythical rural idyll…Read

Reminds me of DH Auden comment in the 1940s on the Lake District.

“Am I to see in the Lake District, then….Another bourgeois invention like the piano?”

The RSPB is gathering extensive information about exactly where swifts are nesting in the UK.  It is suspected that their rapid decline in recent years is linked with a drop in suitable nesting sites, as buildings are modernised.

The first year’s survey reveals that of the houses where swifts are nesting:

• Over half (51%) were built before 1919
• Exactly a quarter were built between 1919-1944
• Over half (52%)had been known swift nesting sites for more than 10 years
• Almost a fifth (16%) were considered threatened
• Almost 5% of swifts were recorded in churches

The data will be used to make sure that exhilarating displays of screaming swifts continue being part of British summers.

A new generation of commoners will receive financial support to ensure animals continue to graze in the New Forest and so conserve its rich biodiversity.

Commoning has shaped the New Forest over hundreds of years. It is because of it that we have this beautiful landscape, a mosaic of pasture, heath and lawn. And it needs to be encouraged - Lyndsey Stride, commoner.

Guardian

Affordable Achleek Cottage (week’s stay £495, sleeps five) is found on the south banks of Loch Sunart.  Views, mountains and remoteness guaranteed.  The nearest village is Strontian, 3 miles away, with the facilities of Fort William 23 miles by the Corran Ferry.  In contrast with the wild landscape all around, the cottage is warm and snug, with central heating and an open fireplace.  It’s also pet-friendly. Information

The clamour for magpie culls is like the baying of a crowd at a witch trial.  There’s no basis in fact for the claim that magpies are threatening British songbirds, only entrenched irrational ideas about corvids.

Organisations like the Songbird Survival Trust have in the past made badly misjudged calls for such culls. The real cause of population declines of species such as the bullfinch and yellowhammer is human activity: unsustainable land management, unecological farming practices and rampant urbanisation.  A new large-scale study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology has confirmed this.

Anyone reaching for their airgun when they see a magpie in the garden is just gratifying a deep-seated superstitious instinct, which equates corvids with death. Or exhibiting a highly selective appreciation of nature, which would like to see the predators of its favourite species wiped off the face of the earth.

for more information, see article by Mark Whittingham Does predator control alter bird populations?

Photo by TallGuy

The famous whalebone arch on Whitby’s West Cliff is a symbol of the whaling industry that thrived there and in other English ports like Hull and Yarmouth in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The 15 ft bones are from a Bowhead whale, killed under license by Alaskan Inuits, and unveiled by Miss Alaska in 2003.  An even larger arch stood on the same spot, made from the 20 ft jaw bones of a Fin whale, presented to the town by Norway in 1963.

During England’s years as a whaling nation, captains returning from Greenland would bring home these huge bones as souvenirs. Ship crews would tie a pair of whale jaw bones to the mast to let anxious families on land know there’d been no casualties.  Some of the bones were used in construction as house ends. Some were set in fields for cattle to rub against.

Whales swim near Britain’s shores and are occasionally stranded, which always causes a great commotion.  The disturbing sight used to be considered a bad omen.  Famously, the whale stranded in the Thames near Dagenham in 1658 foretold the death of Oliver Cromwell, who died on September 3, the following day.

This particular whale lived long in popular memory.  In nearby Chadwell Heath, a tremendous pair of bones forming an arch used to stand near a tollgate and pub named The Whalebone, as recorded by Miller Christy in The trade signs of Essex published in 1888.  Local tradition claimed the bones came from the Dagenham whale, but Christy quotes a Professor W. H. Flower who was convinced the arch proceeded from a Bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus), regularly hunted in Greenland and not straying into British waters.  It has the largest jaws of any animal.

Christy also quotes a resident of the Chadwell Heath area, some time after the toll gate disappeared:

Half the arch (i.e. one bone) stood upright, still deeply rooted in the earth, but alone, forgotten and deserted, by the side of the high road in a fallow field.  No one in the neighbourhood seemed to know anything about it or its history.

So the bone, taken from an Arctic creature that can live up to 200 years, ended up discarded in an English landscape, a mysterious totem pole.  It must have looked something like this Bowhead whale bone standing in a remote corner of Siberia.

Photo from a site on the Chukchi an ethnic group of Siberia

The Co-op is further expanding its Plan Bee campaign by providing aspiring urban bee-keepers with free training and equipment. Life in the city can be better for bees than in the countryside, points out Chris Shearlock, the Co-op’s Environment Manager:

They can find flowers in city parks and gardens, and they are away from some of the pesticides that are threatening them on farmland. It’s a misconception to think that they won’t thrive in cities and towns. I’ve heard of honey being sold from apiaries around King’s Cross station in London.

In the end, what’s going to save the British honeybee, whose population has dropped sharply in the last 25 years, is its value to the economy: as fruit-tree pollinators and annual producers of 5,000 tonnes of honey, they’re worth 165m a year. Independent

There are now some excellent landscape blogs covering Britain. Here are a few:

• Some landscapes Landscapes evoked, depicted or transformed in the arts: painting, literature, music, film, etc. Britain and the rest of the world.
• Walking and writing. by Linda Cracknell. Good stuff in the Robert Macfarlane school.
• British Landscapes Photography with Derek Fogg.
• Write off the map
• Garden history girl

Above painting: J.M.W. Turner, Landscape, c1845

The 87 mile-long Ridgeway National Trail is remarkable in being the oldest road in Britain and because you can still walk it, following the same route used since prehistoric times by travellers and, herdsmen.  The route connects the Dorset and Norfolk coasts, passing over rolling, open downland to the west of the River Thames, and through secluded valleys and woods in The Chilterns to the east. It is littered with historical sites dating back to the iron age. Lots of details from the National Trail website here.

The photojournalist Don McCullin is better known for his work recording war and urban strife around the world, but his more recent work has concentrated more on black and white landscape photography, often taken during the winter in his adopted Somerset . I find them stark, bleak and beautiful.

Don McCullin notes on his love for winter:

I’m probably the only person in England who’s anxious for the winter. As soon as the leaves of autumn start falling from the trees, I become reactivated, the opposite of a hibernating animal. I know that I’ve got four long months of darkness, wind and cold to exercise my masochism. The English landscape’s known for its Constable summers but I’m obsessed with photographing it in the dead of winter, at its hardest … I love the winter – not the climate, but the struggle, its abrasiveness, the nakedness of the landscape.

Some of his British landscapes are altogether darker, like this one of West Hartlepool in 1963, though this too tells a story of cold and nakedness.

First photo and quote: Towards an Iron Age hill fort, Somerset, 1991 From the National Media Musuem exhibition on his work

See also www.hamiltonsgallery.com (The gallery that represents Don McCullin)