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I went with a friend today to an area not far from where I live - a small group of fields in west Wiltshire close to Whaddon Bridge (photo below), a beautifully-preserved medieval crossing that was on the original pack horse route between the old market towns of Trowbridge and Melksham. Hardly anyone comes here now, but through these very fields, and along virtually the same path we were walking on, would have plodded horses laden down with wool, traders and agricultural workers, people whose lives and livelihoods depended on the river and the pastures along its edge.
 In the winter the fields flood and sometimes host Mute and (occasionally) Whooper Swans, and they're a regular site for the occasional Jack Snipe, found amongst the small numbers of wintering Common Snipe.
At this time of year though - on the cusp of summer sliding into autumn - there is a lazy, somniferous feel to the day, a sense of rhythm that is ages old.
The river here has probably wound through these pastures, past these same willows, under this same brickwork, and on towards the River Avon for hundreds of years. It will have regularly heard Chiffchaffs calling from the same thickets I could hear one calling from, and hidden generations of fish from the sharp-eyed Grey Herons still found along the banks. Banded Demoiselles and Blue-tailed Damselflies will have danced Over its surface through summer after summer, and it will have taken on the hues and shade of countless skies and flickered with the light of countless stars...
Truly beautiful, and - if I may be excused a little parochialism - so very English...
It's so easy when you come to a place like this to be transported back to a bygone era. A quieter, gentler time. But of course that era is long gone, and just over the hedges in the far distance is a busy road, behind the trees a housing estate, and the river no longer flows directly to the Avon but has to battle through sluices and culverts, and pour through large towns where its waters are polluted and its life poisoned...ah, that bygone era. Personally, I feel very sad to have missed it...
The fact though, of course, is that I almost didn't miss it.
I'm in my forties. When I was a child the towns here - most places actually - were far smaller. The main road hadn't been built: there was no need for it, far fewer people had cars. Had I been a forty-year old naturalist wandering these fields I'd have known that they would have looked pretty much the same way that my father would have seen them; actually they probably looked remarkably like they did a hundred years before that. I'd have seen fields full of wild flowers and I'd probably have known where Red-backed Shrikes nested. Yes, I wouldn't have my state-of-the-art binoculars, and I'd have been struggling to put a name to the dragonflies and wild flowers I was seeing without my modern field-guides - but essentially the fields themselves, the wildlife and the river, would have been right where they'd always been and I'd probably have had little doubt that they always would be.
It's not like that anymore. As a birder - and as someone with a deep interest in the natural world - when I walk here now I'm very aware that within my lifetime these fields may well be "developed" (a word, like "progress", that has lost almost all sense of objectivism and now is used self-justifyingly), that if the river didn't flood annually there's no doubt there'd be housing here already or a road to shave another sixty seconds off a journey that we probably didn't really need to make...
And the frightening thing is that we've almost come to accept that as "the norm": it's "normal" that our wild places are under threat, and it's "normal" - for those of us who care - to be worried about it. Our parents probably didn't worry - our grandparents almost certainly didn't. The river and the bridge, the trees and the fields, had been here for generations and why would or should that change?
Our view of the world has altered radically, and it's happened in an incredibly short timeframe - a generation or two. We're nostalgic for an era that - if middle-aged - we were actually born in!
We've come to believe that - unless they're wrapped-up safe in a Reserve - our most beautiful places will probably be lost and our wildlife will probably disappear. We don't expect anything to either last very much longer - or at the least remain unaltered or unaffected by us humans. Yes, we'll fret about it, complain, probably join a society or two, but an amazing change to the mindset of our whole society is taking place and it makes me want to scream: what until relatively recently was inconcievable is now becoming normality, and we're starting to accept it...
Comment:
Brian Bray. 25 Aug 2005.
"You've just described my childhood!
I was born in 1945 in South Wraxall, not a world away from Whaddon, or from where you live come to that, the world up to the late 1950's in that part of Wiltshire was idyllic, if only we'd have appreciated it much more at the time, rather than in retrospect..."
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