Hanchurch

Hanchurch is a word covered in pine needles. To my childhood imagination it was always the place “where you might see deer” – and every so often we did, a band of long bodies on the track ahead. I don’t remember them going back into the trees. I remember the wide forestry tracks seeming to lead on infinitely between two parallel rows of evergreens. Other walks would lead along the borders of firs guarded by waist-high bracken. One freezing, freezing winter day the sun set as we got ourselves lost in webs of tracks lined by grasses hidden by sediments of ice.

Hanchurch itself is a village in north Staffordshire, a few kilometres south of my home town, Newcastle-under-Lyme. But what I talk about when I talk about Hanchurch are the woods. These days they are pine planted for timber after World War II, replacing the old broad-leaved forest.

It’s not continuous woodland. Between the village of Hanchurch and, say, Swynnerton to the south, there are wide expanses of fields. Where the footpaths lead over them the walking is something to be got through, heading for the hedgeline in the distance. Where they go down rarely used lanes, blue tits and robins dart between trees on the edge of outgrowing their old hedgebanks. Mud tends to gloop in the middle of the hollow, so the footprints of walkers spreads out higher into the rank grass and brambles by the sides of the route. These old paths recall the long past landscape, before commercial forestry, vast, fields, deer population explosions and public rights of way.

Rabbits are constant reminders. To me they’ve always been “wildlife”, but they were domesticated animals from the time of their introduction as a food source for the Normans until the 19th century. Their huge artificial mounds where they were kept are recorded in place name elements like “Warren” and “Coney”, and some still exist. In Hanchurch Woods and the surrounding fields rabbits have adapted to hedgebanks. Their movement catches the eye repeatedly against grass, while above them the hedges have thinned to a few maturing trees and irregularly spaced shrubs.

There are also relics from the period when the area was an adjunct to industry. Just off Dog Lane in the northern part of Swynnerton Old Park there’s an old water tower, elaborate in yellow and red brick. Despite its height and elevated position it’s well hidden by the pine trees. Water there had a clear route down into Newcastle and the Potteries. Not far away is the similarly grandiose Long Hatton Pumping Station – now posh flats, although the Engineer’s House on the edge of the site still has some of its original character – and Mill Meece. The huge steam engines there still swing into action on some summer weekends. Like the other buildings, the machines date from the Edwardian period. The Potteries have been urban since the early 19th century. It took a long time for them to be reliably supplied with clean drinking water.

As a child none of this mattered to me. I remember standing amazed watching Mill Meece’s huge pistons working, but it never occurred to me to wonder what they were for. Other days we would buy fish and chips in Eccleshall and park near the pumping station so that we could wave at the express trains heading towards Stafford and Birmingham. It feels like another life.

Although on the edge of industrial urbanism, the revolutions that touched Hanchurch most closely were agricultural. Enclosure, that companion to eighteenth and nineteenth century improvement, has itself been overwritten by later changes. It has left a few “trace fossils”. For example, Common Lane leads between two high lines of hedge, the common itself now gated and marked with tractor tyres. On my most recent walk there, I saw a couple of shire horses – a breed whose ancestry is part Staffordshire.

If the first agricultural revolution, in which animals were bred bigger and seed drills began to outpace the human broadcaster, has left echoes, the second has left deep footprints. In Britain it began during World War II and gathered pace afterwards. The challenge of feeding a growing population, mostly urban, with few hands left in the country to work the soil, demanded radical changes. We all benefit from what happened. Mechanised sowing and cropping, artificial fertiliser, herbicides and insecticides, supplementary animal feed and industrial scale herding enabled the cheap food that characterised the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This revolution was global – India’s “Green Revolution” of the 1960s-1970s still means it can go a long way to feeding most of its immense population – so far.

With such a massive intervention in nature, things of course can go wrong. “Mad cow disease” in the 1990s is one example in the UK. The destruction of farmers’ livelihoods by the drive among supermarkets and their customers for cheaper and cheaper products is another. The huge decline in farm bird populations – some by over 90% since the 1960s – one more. Others – the long-term exhaustion of the soil, the weakening of vital pollinator populations to name just two – are more insidious, and are likely to prove far more damaging, if not fatal, to the present system. I don’t pretend to have answers to the questions these developments raise. I hope there are some.

It’s possible that my extended family was directly affected right at the start of this second revolution. When I was very young we sometimes visited an elderly great aunt who lived on the edge of the woods at Hanchurch. I barely remember her, though she may have been born around 1910 – she was a few years older than my granddad, who just about recalled hearing, aged three, the celebrations at the end of the Great War.

I remember her house, because it was made of wood. For a suburban boy like me a wooden house was most exotic. But I remember it mainly because I fell in the coal hole. I was sitting on the wooden doors at the top when they suddenly gave way. It’s such a distant memory that I don’t recollect getting out, only the white square of sky that was all that was left of the world. Faintly I recall a businesslike handling of my distress, as though to make too much fuss would have been silly. The only other memory that stays with me from that house was the closeness of the trees.

There’s no one left alive to confirm or deny what happened to the land held by that aunt’s family during the 1940s. They had a smallholding on the edge of the woods, with a stone house – no running water. Apparently my granddad used to explore among the trees. He called it his “Mirkwood” after the forest in The Hobbit. This was in the days before the conifers, when the woods were deciduous. During World War II, among the powers held by the government was that to decide whether land was being used productively enough. It may be that the smallholding was “reassigned” to a neighbouring farming family, and the wooden house – with running water – built as compensation. If this did happen – and who knows? – it would have been an early example of the pressure to consolidate land to obtain much greater economies of scale. This has been one of the main features of the most recent agricultural revolution. There’s probably documentation somewhere if that’s really what happened. However, what did certainly take place was that the deciduous wood became a commercial forestry plantation.

In the late 20th century the area came close to changing radically again. At one stage much of it looked likely to become a large gravel quarry. There was furious local opposition, and the plan was never implemented. In 2010, when the Coalition government’s half-baked plan to sell off the state-owned forest stock was raised and then defeated, it was Hanchurch that came most to my mind.

Its routes unfurl in my memory. There are few places so deeply written into my mental landscape – and maybe this is why I’ve never managed to get a clear picture of its layout. Pretty much every time I go, I end up lost in the middle of it. Just as for my granddad, it is my Wildwood, my place of first contact with “nature”. Being lost there still has the frisson of having fallen out of touch with civilisation.

No clearer case could be found of the “shifting baseline”. This term was used by Daniel Pauly in his 1995 paper “Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome”. It describes the process by which each generation assumes that the “nature” (countryside, wildlife) around them is what is natural, and should be valued as such, with little knowledge, and less understanding of what went before. When my granddad explored Hanchurch in the 1920s it had many different species of tree. The fields around would generally have been smaller, surrounded by hedges, and between the crops flowers sprouted. That’s a long way from the present monocultures. And the early 20th century landscape was far, very far from the putative “Wildwood” of the pre-Neolithic period (about 6,000 years ago). That world has disappeared so completely that paleoecologists still debate whether it was a wild wood, or “half-open parkland” browsed by large herbivores – or something else.

On my most recent walk through Hanchurch, I saw wrens, blue tits, chaffinches, carrion crows, blackbirds, rooks, jackdaws and pheasants. At times there was a cacophony of birdsong. What else would I have seen in 1910, or further back? To what “future naturalness” does my generation lead?