Agricultural History Review, Volume 65 Part 1 (2017), p. 146

The introduction to Middle Ridgeway and its environment asks how the interaction between changing patterns of land use and ecology has shaped southern England. The authors elect to answer this question by using one small area – just a ‘short stretch of the Middle Ridgeway’ (p. 125) as an ‘open-air laboratory’ (p. 10) – to highlight important factors in the environmental evolution of the whole region. That they chose to minutely focus on a locality with which both authors – and the illustrator – have strong connections is an asset rather than a liability. That the Middle Ridgeway area is well-documented archaeologically and historically is also in its favour, although as well as using it as a microcosm of the wider region, the authors use sources from other parts of the whole, such as Gilbert White in Selborne, to shed light on some of the darker corners of their chosen locale. Sources closer to home include the various members of the Cornish family, Richard Jeffries, John Orr and J. B. Spearing, as well as antiquarians, farm accounts, trade directories, local newspapers, and oral testimony collected over the past 50 or 60 years, which can take us back to the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Readers of the Review have varied interests, and the eight chapters of this short book contain something for everyone. First the authors set the scene. It is not about the Ridgeway as a route, nor is it a ‘walking’ book, although it has already made one of this reviewer’s walks a great deal more interesting. It is, rather, a ‘descriptive study’ (p. 10) of the still somewhat remote ‘ecological island’ (p. 15) through which the Ridgeway passes, between Avebury and Streatley; even within this, the environs of Ashbury are more often than not in the foreground.

Chapter Two on ‘Prehistory and early history’ describes the rich archaeological landscape of this area with its many Neolithic long barrows along the chalk escarpment followed by the Ridgeway, the ‘path of “least cost” travelling east-west along the downs’ (p. 30), although not necessarily a long-distance highway in this period. The authors also evoke the bio-landscape – ‘teeming and resonating with wildlife’ (p. 32) and the development of a mixed pastoral and agrarian economy through this period.

In Chapter Three, ‘The London market’, we embark upon the first of the ‘themed’ chapters. The pull of the capital (‘like tugging a great bag into a new shape’, p. 47) consolidated the Ridgeway as a trans-regional routeway, requiring energy to be spent on climbing up to it but remaining dry underfoot. Grain wagons appeared in the seventeenth century, only to be eclipsed by the Kennet and Avon Canal in the eighteenth, but sheep – thousands of them, followed, in a dry year, by a pall of dust – continued to be driven along it into the twentieth century, until the introduction of lorries. Strangely, there is only one pub on the Ridgeway itself: the Shepherd’s Rest near Wanborough, though apparently Welsh drovers who returned by sea left their dogs to return overland, where they were ‘fed at the pubs their owners had visited on the inward journey’ (p. 40).

The chapter on ‘Ploughland and grassland’ forms a beautiful case study of the interplay between geography (soil type and slope), price fluctuations, and technological developments. Rather than the traditional phases of agriculture (open-field, enclosure, intensive), Jones and Dillon identify an alternative chronology: eighteenth-century sheep ranching; buoyant mixed farming during periods such as the Napoleonic Wars and the ‘Golden Age of High Farming’, alternating with periods of ‘tumbledown’ during which the ploughed turf never properly recovered; and a long agricultural depression lasting until the ploughing campaigns of the Second World War signalled the beginning of a long period of predominantly arable farming. The fortunes of agriculture are mirrored in the fortunes of the rabbit population (medieval warrens, with pillow mounds still to be seen; population stability when rabbits were in competition with sheep: near the end of the eighteenth century, 24,000 rabbits a year could still be killed at Aldborough; decline and then, due to the availability of crops, a population explosion; myxomatosis and with it the complete collapse of a whole ecosystem).

The succeeding chapter looks at the area through the prism of land ownership rather than land use, though the two are inextricably linked. From the time of the Roman villa onwards, land holdings have included both vale and downland, giving each farm a share of clay and chalk. Here the authors argue that the received chronology (individually owned strips farmed in common, followed by enclosed fields restricting ownership to the few) is still ‘revealing’ (p. 81). They speculate that enclosure had ‘profound’ impact on wildlife habitats, using as a baseline Roque’s map – which this reviewer knows, from looking at South Berkshire, is one of the better-quality eighteenth-century maps. The social consequences of enclosure are also explored. In contrast to the enclosed landscape there are also the country estates, particularly those of the Earl of Craven, Ashdown Park – ‘for long a sea of grass only intermittently assailed by the plough’ (p. 90); and Lord Wantage at Ardington.

This leads us into the fourth ‘theme’, that of Chapter Six, ‘Countryside sports’. This catalogues the human-on-animal blood sports that have been pursued down the ages, and also human-on-human contests such as ‘single stick or back-swording combat’ and shin kicking. The authors also describe the Scouring of the White Horse, a festival reported in the Reading Mercury as attended by 30,000 in 1780. Preservation of game for sport often has the side effect of conserving habitats for wildlife, and ‘The wildlife legacy’, as Chapter Seven is titled, looks at the effect the changing patterns of land use have had on the flora and fauna, mostly of the avian variety. Again, the authors have chosen to explore a wider issue through a ‘microcosm’, on the grounds of ‘personal familiarity and quality of historical record’ (p. 107). From the 1840s onwards there are a surprising number of ornithological sources for the area, from which they draw the conclusion that though every change in land use and ownership has resulted in species losing their habitats, other species have been able to move in: ‘nothing is static’ (p. 123). Sadly though, increasing diversity in land use has not been reflected in wildlife species and, as the concluding chapter emphasizes, this remote little corner of southern England is still under pressure from recreational as well as farming activity.

An idiosyncratic aspect of this book is its illustrations. Paintings by the daughter of one of the authors have been used to illustrate the landscape. They are bold, modernist and colourful, showing perhaps the influence of Fauvism and definitely of Spencer Gore (both having painted ‘The Icknield Way’). The stylization almost literally throws the landscape into sharp relief, but – apart from the fields of oil-seed rape, the colours are too vibrant to evoke the subtlety of this landscape. One hankers for some contemporary photographs to illustrate the countryside of the past two centuries – apparently there are some very early photographs of the Ashbury estate from about 1850 (p. 45) – or perhaps one or two works by William Affleck or James Seymour, both of whom are mentioned in the text. Anna Dillon’s paintings are attractive but do little to support the text and perhaps make the book look less serious than it is. Despite a useful list of further reading there are neither footnotes nor index and, irritatingly, the running headings do not indicate which chapter you are in – so the book is not as well-signposted as the Ridgeway itself. Nevertheless Middle Ridgeway makes a thought-provoking and engaging book for anyone interested in the history of landscape and particularly those – like this reviewer – who like to understand the countryside through which they go walking.