The Always Greener Grass

October, a few days after Michaelmas and the narrow lane shows signs of autumn’s progress. Golden-green crab apples lie strewn along the crown of the road glowing, almost lambent, in the half-light of the holloway. A grey murk penetrates the trees, a twilight wrung from the fabric of a squall. It’s a suitable gloom for the trek up Blagdon Hill in Dorset, a place already seeded by burial mounds and the field furniture of Bronze Age death cults.

The lane forms a field boundary on the lower slopes of a Wessex down; its double line of trees part of a familiar British landscape often described – with chocolate-box charm – as a kind of patchwork quilt. It is an irresistible cliché, a poetic, familiar reflection of the truth anyone landing at an English airport or gazing at a hillside would recognise. From any kind of plan view, the fields of different colours, shapes and sizes – L-shaped golden, full with bowed heads of wheat, a crooked square of freshly tilled, brown earth, rectangles of green dairy meadows – jostle, into an order distilled from untidiness. The land appears to be stitched together along their boundaries.

We weigh one kind of land against another. The idea of borders hinge on a contrast. The boundary is the fulcrum of distinction. Against cultivation, wilderness; fertility, barren waste; you, me; us, them. The discourse of difference takes over and the definition of ourselves depends on dissent with the other. The grass is greener, we say. The grass is always greener.

When it is studied at close hand, however, this picturesque notion doesn’t cover the whole truth; Britain is, indeed, formed from boundaries, but rather than the outline of fields, it is the organisation of communities, the exercise of power and a hierarchy of relationships between people and places that are important. While the lines that divide and unite us in the age of the ‘global village’ are those of our constituent nations, with duchies, principalities and provinces adding a regional gloss – be that northerner, Cornishman or Brummie – it is easy to forget that local boundaries were the first to define us. They organised, ruled, taxed and protected us but also gave us a deep connection with, and sense of belonging to, a specific place.

Stand on Blagdon Hill and the lines are visible – a legacy not only of a landscape history in which 840 acres of downland have miraculously remained undisturbed for centuries, but also a consequence of the down’s extraordinary geographical importance; this quiet Wessex hillside is teeming with ancient and modern boundaries, it is the epitome of border country.

From the top of Blagdon Hill, the wide apron of Martin Down unfolds for over two miles to the north until it comes up against the agger of Ackling Dyke, the Roman road to Salisbury. The landscape here is so distinctive it questions the assumption that the scenery of southern England, like its weather, runs the gamut from interestingly mild to mildly interesting. The hill, like many others among the chalk downs, is a complex form; a coalesced jumble of shallow dips and steep escarpments that demonstrates the sculptural power of wind, rain, the advance of time and their joint capability of rendering a landscape every bit as rugged as the hard rocks of the uplands. Worn away and as rounded as its tumuli, furrowed and wrinkled and imbued with gravitas, the downland’s character has been shaped not only by natural forces but also by human interaction, and its form is not just the culmination of, but also a monument to, everything that has happened to it. History is rendered and tangible. It wears its heart on its sleeve.

The down has remained unploughed for so long that it has survived modern agriculture’s tendency to produce monocultures for grazing and silage. Its poor soils are perfect for sustaining rich chalk meadows of wild flowers and it is one of only a few such habitats in southern England. On St John’s Eve at the tail end of June, I walked through lung-high nettles that guarded a secret meadow, arms aloft like a marionette, to a field of white flax, punctuated by the conical flowers of common spotted orchid. In high summer, the butterflies become the down’s garniture – Chalkhill and Adonis Blues, Silver-Spotted Skipper and Dark Green Fritillary flitting their way in the warm, sweet air among Burnt-Tip Orchids, Dropwort, Salad Burnet and Horseshoe Vetch – but even in autumn it puts the vanilla farmland that surrounds it to shame. As the last of the swallows flit over the meadows, skylarks erupt from the long grass on short, glorious song flights, and thickets of oak saplings, bracken and brambles make tangles of delight around migrating willow warblers, roaming flocks of finches and long-tailed tits rollicking about the branches like trapeze artists.

It is not surprising that the area is a National Nature Reserve, but management of the habitat has also saved the landscape’s human character, preserving it as a monument to the preoccupations of our ancestors. In particular, the unploughed bumps and tumps of at least 4,000 years of history, much of it unwritten, amounts to a museum of mounds, a chronicle of man’s obsession with making earthworks from the stone age to the twentieth century. Within a few miles of its summit, there are countless round and long barrows of every conceivable stripe, an earthen henge, two huge, die-straight backstops for a Second World War rifle range and, aligned on the midwinter sunset, a six mile-long Neolithic cursus – sadly, now all-but ploughed out, its structure and form finally as difficult to perceive as its original purpose. Among all these impressive relics one ancient monument stands out, Bokerley Dyke.

The dyke runs for almost four miles in serpentine twists across the landscape of Martin Down. A large, linear earthwork, an elephantine bank and ditch, it trails off to the horizon where distance renders the scar to no more than a stitch in the countryside, tugged and rucked this way and that. It is all the more impressive when you realise that, like similar monumental earthworks of the Bronze Age, it was hewn from the ditch and heaped on the bank with nothing more substantial than picks made from deer antlers. Freshly made, the bank would have been bright white, visible from miles around in the day, a stark slash of reflected moonlight by night; at all times a clear statement of power and purpose.

The dyke reaches the apex of its expression where it cleaves the crest of Blagdon Hill like a split in the crown of a cob loaf. A toupee of Scots pine marks where the scar bisects the hill top where the Dyke is up to 100 feet across at its widest spot, with a 16 foot drop from the top of the bank to the base of the ditch. Scots pines grow from the summit of the bank to crown the hill and frame the patchwork of common land and distant fields below. The position of the trees is interesting; in the south of England, where Scots pines are unusual, they were often planted where tracks crossed or marked where drovers could graze their cattle. As itinerants, drovers often kept themselves away from settlements, on common land that straddled the boundaries between villages.

From the hill, you can make out that on the south and west of the dyke, a landscape of large arable fields – as ecologically dull as a factory floor, but fringed with occasional belts and plantations of mixed woodland – predominates. Immediately north and east of this line lies the open grassland and rough pasture of the old down, punctuated by occasional clumps and thickets of stunted shrubs and saplings. The line of the dyke that divides Blagdon Hill is a clear boundary between modern arable and ancient common, but is also the border of Hampshire and Dorset and was once the boundary that kept Anglo-Saxon Wessex from Celtic Britain. It is more than likely a stop-gap structure, between once-impenetrable, wild woods found at both termini of the dyke, a reflection of the fact that its two ends also mark boundaries in the geology.

Bokerley Dyke may even have its origins much further back than the stand-off between the invading Saxons and the indigenous Celtic tribes of west Britain, as far back as the late Bronze Age. The pattern of burial mounds of the period, which differ in form according to which side of the Dyke they are, tells us that they were constructed by different tribes, a few hundred yards from one another. Ring and tongue barrows, which are a particular kind of round barrow where a causeway bridges the surrounding ditch, are only found on the Dorset side of the Bokerley line. There are differences also in Iron Age settlements on either sides of the line; to the northeast their enclosures are rectilinear while to the southwest they are round.

Bokerley Dyke’s impressive proportions mark it out as an obvious defensive structure which later became a county as well as a parish boundary, but elsewhere, even a minor border virtually unmarked on the ground might have a distinguished provenance. The line, for example, that marks out a civil parish might have its origins 1500 years ago in the perambulation of an Anglo-Saxon estate – a written description of the bounds of the manor, describing the landscape and investing local landmarks with a legal purpose as official boundary markers. The perambulation formed the boundary clause of a charter, the first step in its journey as it was passed down through the generations and was handed from one administrative unit to the next in different guises. Some ancient estate borders have proved durable enough to make it into the 21st century as civil and ecclesiastical parish boundaries. Half a dozen miles to the north of Bokerley Dyke, twenty miles of the boundary granted to Wilton Abbey by Anglo-Saxon King Eadwig can be traced by county and parish borders that are still in use over a millennium later. Part of the durability of Wilton Abbey’s border is because, for at least 500 of those years, the ‘Hundred of Chalke’ – a ‘hundred’ being the medieval precursor to the district council – used the Abbey’s boundary as its own. Before the advent of maps, enormous effort would have to be invested in the description of a wholly new boundary – far better, surely, to copy somebody else’s hard work.

At Bokerley, the durability of the border from ancient kingdom to local authority is a clear consequence of the extraordinary mark it makes on the landscape – a mark that represents not only its function as a boundary but also a near-complete chronicle of the entire down, having been constructed, breached, amended and re-erected for different purposes at different times for almost the whole of the period that the hill has been occupied. Its current incarnation as a county boundary is the latest in a 3,000 year-long timeline that reveals interesting details about the history of Martin Down and Blagdon Hill. The boundary even had a part in a plan prepared in case of the ultimate dystopian future, the outbreak of nuclear war; a study of the Home Defence Regions – the administrative hierarchy by which survivors would be ruled if central government was destroyed – shows history up as a kind of repetitive motif extending into the future, with Bokerley Dyke once again part of an arrangement to divide the country into separate states along almost Anglo-Saxon lines.

Elsewhere, the signs might not be so obvious as they are on Martin Down, but with the help of a detailed map, a study of the course of the boundary can reveal interesting details about the use of the landscape itself. Where a parish boundary follows the line of a public footpath, for example, the path is often the modern incarnation of an ancient track. Where several parish boundaries appear to cling to such a byway, it is likely to be an old long-distance route. About five miles to the north of Martin Down, Old Shaston Road - the cattle drove between Salisbury and Shaftesbury - marks the edge of seventeen, poetically-named parishes arranged north and south of its course, from Coombe Bissett to Compton Chamberlayne. The drove, an old turnpike which follows the watershed along the down – and which can be identified as such by the wide verges upon which cattle fed as they were driven to market – is as obvious a byway on the map as it is on the ground, but many more old roads lie hidden along field margins or in once-tramped, long-forgotten holloways.

Sometimes the course of a boundary suddenly veers from its path along a road or watercourse only to re-join it later. Where it leaves the course of a river and loops around on a floodplain, it usually indicates the river has shifted naturally through erosion over the years or else been artificially straightened, leaving a line on a map that charts the evolution from river loop, to oxbow, to dry land. Where the border bows out from a field margin or path, it might follow an all-but ploughed out feature like the bank of a hill fort or a prehistoric enclosure, lost on the ground, yet preserved in an act of medieval administration.

Clues to the history of some boundaries can also be immortalised in local place names. As modern English has edge, border and boundary, so Old English had ecg, Old French had bordeüre and Old Norse had ra. Where there are boundaries, there are sure to have been disputes and these, too, leave their mark in place names. The Old English word threap for an argument or dispute seems particularly apt for the village of Threapwood, southeast of Wrexham and on the English-Welsh border. Threapwood was disputed territory and for centuries existed, Passport to Pimlico style, as 300 acres of no-mans-land outside the control of either the counties of Sir Y Flint or Cheshire. No Justice of the Peace had any power there and no taxes or duties were paid until 1857 when the extra-parochial status of Threapwood was ended.

All of which touches upon what a boundary is and what it is for. A border not only separates you from people on the other side of it, but also gives you a social identity, a sense of belonging and, perhaps even, local pride. Over the centuries, your ancestors’ affiliation with a single parish or town has steadily widened into a social identity that has lost its over-powering local focus. You are a citizen not of a city, but a state and perhaps, even, a super-state. Where once you hailed from Compton Chamberlayne, Invergordon or Tal-y-Bont, now you are English, Scots or Welsh, also British, even European. Meanwhile, you identify with some other tribe that doesn’t necessarily have any geographical limitations – fans of Manchester United are, by and large, not from Manchester and lesbians aren’t necessarily from Lesbos. The world has moved on, but borders remain and, as one of the most enduring features of Britain, they offer a hitherto unexplored facet that can unlock some of the secrets of the landscape.

There was a time when the parish boundary was the limit of our lives. Despite the fact that modern technology and travel conspire to make the world smaller every day, our need for belonging, to have roots, a sense of place and, indeed, boundaries of some kind will never change.