Helen Macdonald in The New Statesman: Most of the lowland heaths I knew in my childhood were military-owned. Useless for agriculture, heathland was cheap, so in the 19th century the War Office bought up great swathes of it for military training – including in East Anglia, where today the roar of USAF aircraft is a regular accompaniment to more usual heathland sounds. Every remaining acre is precious, for lowland heaths are extremely rare. Britain holds about 20 per cent of the world’s total number, though since the 1800s most have been lost or become highly fragmented. They have been variously enclosed, built on, improved for agriculture, neglected and become woodland.
For a long time no one paid much notice to this loss. Heaths had long been seen as waste ground, aesthetically unpleasing, economically unproductive. In the past they were considered the home of those on the margins of society, places of disorder, rebellion and crime. Walking on the reserve, I thought of Daniel Defoe crossing Bagshot Heath in a carriage in the 1720s. He complained that it was a vast tract of land “given up to barrenness, horrid and frightful to look on.”
Well, I thought, looking down at a patch of tiny tormentil flowers, it’s impossible to see the beauty of a place like this, even in summer, from a moving carriage. Like tundra landscapes, lowland heaths look featureless from a distance, failing to conform to the conventions of a beautiful landscape, but up close they are rich with small glories. The sharp angles of grass seedheads, the scramble of tiny veronica plants, masses of parasitic dodder strewn over heather like pink silly string, the tiny, jewel-like beads on the leaves of sundews in the wetter places. To see a heath, you must focus on what is at your feet.
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