Shifting baselines #6 Peggy's Weald

Author's note: Shifting baselines uses twelve imagined voices, from twelve corners of Britain, and the nature they knew that their grandchildren never will.

These twelve are not real people, but nothing they describe is invented. Each speaks for a place and a habitat where the living world has thinned so far within one lifetime that the loss has slipped below memory, and where the young now inherit the quiet and call it normal. That is the whole cruelty of a shifting baseline. No-one misses what has gone. So here are the ones who still remember as much as is possible in living memory, passing on the memories of their parents and grandparents, saying it out loud before it is gone forever. Local language and dialect, also being lost generation by generation is included.

Come and stand at the gate here with me, midear, and look out over that. Go on, take your time over it. What do you see? A gurt green field, clean as a billiard table, running right away up over the shoulder of the down to the sky. Handsome, in its way. Not a weed in it, not a thistle, not a stone hardly. My grandson farms it now and he farms it well, better than ever we did, cleaner, straighter, more off it every year. And I will tell you what I see when I look at it, for it is not what you see, and I am about the last one standing who can see it, so you had best have it off me while I am still here to tell it.

I see what is gone. That is the trouble with being old, midear. You do not see the field. You see all the fields it used to be.

When I were a maid, that down were not one green field, it were a whole world. It were sheep-and-corn, the old way, the way it had been done up here since before anyone could reckon, the flock folded on the down by night to dung the ground and out on the grass by day, and the corn grew up out of that. And the corn, now. You would not credit the corn. It were never just wheat, midear, it were wheat and a thousand other things all growing up in it together, for we had not the sprays then to make it clean. There were poppies in it so thick that come July a field of corn were half red, red as a soldier's coat, blowing. There were the blue cornflower, and the corn marigold like gold, and a tall pink flower we called corncockle that came up with the wheat and no one thought a thing of it, it were just there, it were always there. You cannot see corncockle now for love nor money. It is gone. Clean gone out of the whole of England, that flower, and there is hardly a soul under seventy that ever set eyes on it, and I grew up with it to my waist.

And where there is that, midear, there is everything else. The corn full of flowers is corn full of seed and full of insects, and so the down were loud. It were loud. Come the spring the peewits, the green plover, the lapwing, whatever name you give them, they were up over the tilth in their hundreds, tumbling and crying, that mad wild bubbling cry they have and that wibbling wing-sound as they threw theirselves about the sky over their nests. You could not walk the spring field without they were up and mobbing you. And on the wires the corn bunting sat and jangled like a bunch of keys, all day, and the coveys of grey partridge went whirring up out of the stubble, whole families of them, a dozen, fifteen birds, and the hares boxed in the young corn, and over the whole lot the larks went up singing till you could not pick them out against the sun, a dozen larks over the one field, singing. And my grandfather, he could mind the landrail, the corncrake, that rasping crake-crake all through the hay of a June night so a man could scarce sleep for it. I never heard that one myself. It were going even then. But he heard it, and he told of it, and so I am telling you.

And it were not only the wild things, mind, for the down were full of people too, and that is half gone with the rest of it. There were a shepherd to the flock, a proper shepherd, out on the down in all weathers with his dog and his crook and his hurdles, and he knew every ewe by her face and slept out at lambing. There were the dew ponds up on the high ground, little round dished ponds the old men made by hand and lined with clay and straw, that held water up on the dry chalk where by rights there should be none, and the sheep drank at them and the swallows dipped in them of an evening. There were women out gleaning the stubble after harvest, gathering the fallen ears by hand for their own hens, and no farmer grudged them it. And come the harvest itself the whole parish were out in the field together, the corn cut and stooked and carried by hand and by horse, hot work and hard, but there were a kind of singing to it, everyone at it side by side, the last load brought home with a shout. It were a place with folk in it, do you see, and animals, and water, and weather, all tangled up together, and now it is one man in a cab the size of a cottage doing in a day what took the whole parish a fortnight, and I will not pretend that were not a mercy on a body's back, but there is nobody out on that down now from one week to the next, not a soul, only the machine, and the quiet.

Now. Here is the hard part, and I will not slide round it, for I have never been one for sliding round a thing. What happened to all that? I will tell you what happened to it, midear. I did.

Not me alone, mind. But me among them, with these two hands, on this ground. For after the war the word came down from the ministry, and the word was plough. Plough it up, all of it, every acre, feed the country, for the country were hungry and had near been starved out by the U-boats and never would be again, and by God we heard that and we meant it. And there was money in it now, real money, guaranteed money, a price promised for every ton whatever, and grants on top. They paid us, midear. They paid us to grub out the hedges to make the fields bigger for the big machines, and we did it, I stood and watched my own husband and his brother tear out hedges that had been there since before the Armada, hedges full of nesting birds, and we had a cheque from the government for the doing of it and thought ourselves good farmers and good Englishmen. We ploughed up the old down turf that had never once been broke, grass that were older than the church, and under the plough it went. We drained the wet corners where the snipe drummed. And when the sprays came in, the weedkillers, oh, we were glad of them, midear, you cannot know how glad. All that back-breaking hoeing and singling gone in one pass of a machine, the field left clean and green and not a poppy, not a cornflower, not a corncockle, not a weed of any kind. Clean. We were that proud of clean.

And the flowers went first, in a year or two, sprayed out. And then, slower, so slow we never rightly joined it up at the time, everything else went after them. For the flowers were the bottom of it all, do you see, the flowers and the weeds fed the insects and the insects and the seeds fed the birds, and when we took the flowers away we had pulled the bottom brick out of the whole thing, and it all came down, only quiet, over thirty year, so quiet you could farm right through it and never mark the day it happened. The peewits thinned off the spring fields till now you might see one pair where there were fifty. The partridge coveys, near nine in every ten of them gone, whirring up out of a stubble we do not even leave any more. The corn bunting off the wires. The larks down by half. The hares scarce. And the down that roared when I were a maid went quiet, field by field, under my own boots, in my own working life, and I were paid a good wage the whole time to make it so, and praised for it, and called the backbone of the nation. That is the thing I have to carry, midear. Not that it was done. That I did it, and was glad, and thought it right.

But now I will say the other side, for there is another side and I will not let you make me the only villain of it, that would be too easy and it would be a lie. We were not wicked. We were told, and paid, and thanked, and we were feeding people, real people, a whole country that had known hunger and never wanted to know it again, and the food we grew off these clean green fields went out cheap to every table in the land, and there is many a body alive and fed today off what we did up here. I will not stand at this gate and tell you that were a sin, that the people should have gone hungry so I could keep my poppies. It is not so simple and anyone that tells you it is simple has never had to farm a living off a hard hill nor feed a nation. We did a needful thing. And it cost a terrible price, and both of those are true at the once, and the trick of it, the thing that near breaks an old woman's heart, is holding the both of them in your two hands and not letting go of either. We fed the people. And we broke the down. Both. Both.

And here is the part that keeps me awake, same as it keeps them all awake I daresay, all us old ones with our tales. My grandson. Good boy, works harder than ever I did, loves this land in his way. And to him this one gurt clean green field IS the farm. IS the down. It is what a field is meant to look like, quiet and clean and empty, because it is the only kind he has ever seen. He never walked into a wall of peewits going up off the spring tilth. He never saw corn gone half red with poppy. He would think it dirty farming if he did, and he would not be wrong by his lights, for that is what we taught him, clean is good. When I tell him the down were once so loud you could not hear yourself think for larks, he smiles at me kind, the way you smile at an old body, and he thinks I am mixing up the truth with a dream. And I cannot make him hear it. That is the whole cruelty of it, midear. I cannot give him my ears nor my eyes. The loudness is gone even out of the memory of the land, and soon it will be gone out of the last of us that carry it, and then it will be as if it never were at all.

So. You will want to know does the old fool do anything but stand at her gate and grieve, and the answer is yes, I do, and this is the bit I will send you home with, for it is the only bit that is worth a light. If these hands could help break it, midear, then these hands can help mend a corner of it, and that is exactly what I have set about doing with what little say I have left. We leave the field margins wide now, and never spray them, a good broad strip all round where the flowers and the weeds can come back and the insects with them. We have put in what they call beetle banks, a raised grassy bank right through the middle of the big fields for the insects and the partridge to nest in. We leave the stubble stand through the winter now instead of ploughing it straight in, so there is seed on the ground for the birds through the hungry months. We dug out a wet scrape down the bottom for the peewits and blow me if they did not come back to it, two pair, then four. And over on the Plain, not far from here, they have fetched the stone curlew back from near nothing, that queer old downland bird, by folk taking the trouble. So it answers, midear. That is the thing I want you to carry away from this gate. It broke slow and quiet, but it will mend if you ask it to, the ground is that forgiving, more forgiving than we deserve. It only wants us to stop being so proud of clean, and leave it a bit of mess to live in.

I broke this down. I will say it plain, for I am too old to dress it up. I helped break it, with my hands, for good wages and good reasons. And now with the same hands and what years I have got I am trying to put a little back, and I reckon that is the only honest thing left for a body to do who has done what I have done. Not to weep. To mend. Go on now, midear, mind the mud in the gateway, and if ever you get a bit of ground of your own, however small, you leave a corner of it dirty for me. Will you do that. Leave it dirty, and let it get loud.

Notes and sources

The people in these monologues are invented. The losses they describe are not. Figures and facts behind Peggy's telling:

Content and ecology

• Farmland birds overall have fallen by around 61% since 1970 (Defra, Wild Bird Populations in the UK, 2023 update). The lapwing is down roughly 56% since 1970 (RSPB, State of the UK's Birds 2012), with declines of up to 90% reported regionally by the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust; the grey partridge by around 91 to 92%, corn bunting by around 83%, yellowhammer by around 62% and skylark by around 58% over the same period (BTO Farmland Bird Indicator; RSPB). All are now Red-listed birds of conservation concern.

• The corncrake (the old "landrail") was once common in hay meadows across lowland Britain and is now effectively lost from mainland England, surviving mainly in the Hebrides and Northern Isles, with reintroduction attempts elsewhere. Earlier and mechanised mowing, which destroys nests and chicks, was the principal cause.

• The primary driver across these species is the post-war intensification of arable farming: the shift from spring to autumn sowing (removing winter stubble and spring nesting ground), hedgerow removal, drainage, the loss of mixed sheep-and-corn husbandry, and the use of herbicides and insecticides that stripped out the weed and insect food chain. The Agriculture Act 1947 guaranteed prices, and mid-century grants that paid farmers to remove hedgerows and plough permanent grassland, are the documented policy background to Peggy's account.

• Arable wildflowers collapsed with the same practices (seed cleaning, herbicides, fertiliser, the spring-to-autumn shift). Corncockle (Agrostemma githago) is now extinct as a wild cornfield plant in Britain, and the cornflower (Centaurea cyanus) is reduced to a tiny fraction of its former range (Plantlife; RBGE Botanics Stories).

• Around four-fifths of Britain's lowland chalk grassland has been ploughed or lost since the 1940s; Salisbury Plain, in Peggy's county, is the largest surviving expanse in north-west Europe.

• The hopeful measures are real: unsprayed conservation headlands and field margins, beetle banks (developed by the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust), over-winter stubbles, wet scrapes for lapwing, and agri-environment schemes all show measurable recovery where applied. The stone curlew has been brought back on Salisbury Plain and the Wessex downs through targeted conservation (RSPB).

Place and dialect

• Wiltshire and West Country cadence and vocabulary (peewit, landrail, midear, gurt, reckon, bist, sheep-and-corn husbandry) drawn from the Wiltshire dialect tradition, including Edward Slow's Wiltshire Rhymes and Tales in the Wiltshire Dialect, the Wiltshire glossaries collected in Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary, and general West Country usage. Dialect is kept as a suggestion in the spelling rather than heavy phonetic transcription.

• For the life and landscape of the Wiltshire downs, the writings of Richard Jefferies (born at Coate, near Swindon), especially Wild Life in a Southern County and The Amateur Poacher, and William Cobbett's Rural Rides, stand behind the picture of the old sheep-and-corn down.

About the author

Helena Jevons is an author, playwright, Nature Lover and consultant based in East Sussex. Through her rewilding project The Urban Wildling she writes about nature, regenerative living and the quiet return of wildness to ordinary places, work that sits alongside her books Last Sparks: The Death Monologues and the stage play Hot Flashes: The Menopause Monologues. An accredited executive coach with more than two decades of experience helping purpose-led founders, coaches and small businesses grow with clarity and care, she brings the same grounded, hype-free sensibility to her writing on the living world. She works with clients across the UK and online. Read more at urbanwildling.com and helenajevons.com, or book a discovery call at calendly.com/helena-jevons/30min.