The A303

by Tom Fort

  Towards the end of April the grazing of the water-meadows generally ceased, as the grass began to grow on the uplands. The meadows were flooded again, and the grass left for the July hay crop. This could amount to two tons an acre, and in a good summer there was often time for a second crop to be grown and cut. After that cattle were allowed to graze for a time, before the whole network was cleaned and refurbished in time for the winter flooding.

  The method may well have originated in northern France in the medieval period, possibly at the great Cistercian abbey at Clairvaux. Having migrated across the Channel, it seems to have been first adopted on a commercial scale in Dorset, on the rivers Piddle and Frome. It worked best on chalkstreams, where water levels did not vary much and serious floods were very unusual, where gradients were gentle, and where drainage into the soil and chalk was swift. Adapting the meadows was laborious and expensive. It could take two or three years to dig the main carrier and the host of little channels feeding off it, to construct the levees between them, and to install the weirs and hatches needed to control water levels. Usually the main carrier fed more than one meadow, and over time the network spread downstream. One scheme on the Avon south of Salisbury involved excavating a carrier two-and-a-half miles long, and building a new weir as well as several bridges and hatches – all of which cost the vast sum of more than £2000.

  Upkeep did not come cheap, either. The accounts kept by Richard Osgood – who farmed between Normanton and Wilsford in the 1680s – record payments to repair weirs, hatches and channels on the Avon, and the proposed replacement of a wooden hatch with a stone one costing eight pounds and six shillings – an investment discussed at length in an alehouse called the Chopping Knife in Amesbury. But the dividends could be heart-warmingly large. It was reckoned that converting to water meadow increased yield per acre at least threefold, and doubled the sale value of the land. By the end of the eighteenth century 20,000 acres in Wiltshire were regularly watered, with about the same in Hampshire, and around 6000 acres in Dorset.

  The lynchpin of the operation was a figure of intimidating toughness and independence of spirit, known as the Drowner. It was his task to maintain the system and organise the movement of water to produce a uniform growth of grass across the whole meadow or series of meadows. It required fine judgement to get the timing and volumes right. As the water spread down from the main carrier, the drowner would be on hand, ready to make a series of swift decisions and adjustments – raising or lowering a sluice here, opening a channel there, switching the flow by placing sods of earth at critical points.

  The drowner’s busiest time was after Michaelmas, when the whole grid had to be cleaned and restored in time for the flooding to begin in November, so that the grass would be showing by Christmas. Throughout the winter months he was out in all weathers, wading through freezing water for hours at a time in nothing more waterproof than leather breeches and boots. He exercised absolute power over his meadows. His status was equal to that of the miller, with whom he would have long-standing agreements regulating the ‘stems’, the times when water could be impounded to fill the mill leat, and when it was available for irrigation. The drowner decided when the sheep were allowed on, and while they were grazing he took control of them from the shepherd. It was by his order that grazing ceased, and he also supervised the hay crop.

  Co-operative farming fostered tightly knit, distinctive communities. Typically an average farmer would have a house with yard, paddock, barn and garden, eight to ten strips scattered around the open arable fields, rights to graze a prescribed number of cattle, pigs and geese on common land, a proportion of the sheep flock and an entitlement to cut turf and wood. The shepherds and drowners might proclaim their independence but the truth was that everyone depended on everyone else. Neighbour helped neighbour, and the mutual dependence extended beyond the collective. All the other trades and services – carpenters, blacksmiths, weavers, cordwainers, bootmakers, tanners, butchers, shopkeepers, builders and the rest – relied on the success of farming. Everyone knew everyone and did everything together, with the church acting as binding agent.

  England’s agrarian revolution arrived late on the chalk downland, held at bay by the powerful interests vested in the collective model. But by the 1750s the old shared field system was steadily on its way out. New crops – clover, oil-seed rape, turnips, cabbages – were introduced, with new patterns of rotation and new breeds of livestock. All this required a new system of tenure. The common land was divided up according to the ancient tithes, but previously scattered holdings were consolidated together. This was obviously far more efficient for those with reasonably extensive entitlements. But for the wretched peasant at the bottom of the scale it represented disaster. Previously he could scrape by with as little as two acres because of his common rights. Now he had forfeited those, and most were forced in time to sell to better-off neighbours and join the swelling ranks of labourers for hire.

  The outward and visible sign of the enclosure movement were the hedges. These were generally planted as hawthorn, known as ‘quickset’. In our sentimental fashion, we tend to think of hedges as ancient and comforting symbols of the old rustic ways. It’s worth remembering that their function was entirely hard-headed: to show who owned what, and to keep out those who owned nothing.

  One of the casualties of the revolution was the Wiltshire Horn. The ‘walking dung-cart’, as it was characterised by the agricultural historian Eric Kerridge, suited the old ways. Farmers forgave it its meagre fleece and indifferent mutton for its strength and digestive properties. The new generation of landowners was less indulgent. With demand for corn on the up because of the growing population, they were intent, where possible, on converting pasture to arable. Where they retained sheep, they wanted something fleecier and meatier than the Wiltshire Horn. These virtues achieved ideal sheep form in the cross-bred Hampshire Down, which so thoroughly displaced the Wiltshire Horn that by 1840 there was but one flock of the old dung-spreaders left on Salisbury Plain.

  For a time the new order flourished. Farmers on the small and medium scale held their own; the big landowners got rich; the dispossessed ended up hoeing someone else’s earth or else on poor relief or in the workhouse. But during the 1870s imports of cheaper corn from the United States and of refrigerated meat from Australia and Argentina began to undermine the domestic market. Arable farmers struggled, while sheep farmers went out of business. The slump lasted until the 1914–18 war and beyond; although in Wiltshire and Hampshire the worst of the economic effects were offset by the establishment of large military camps on Salisbury Plain and elsewhere. During the 1920s and 1930s much of the chalk downland was simply abandoned. Without the sheep it was colonised by scrub, coarse grass and thistles, and left to the rabbits.

  * * *

  In 1946 Rob Turner’s grandfather came to farm at Winterbourne Stoke. He bought Manor Farm and with it the manor house, which looks like a rather grand mansion but is actually pretty homely inside.

  Grandfather Turner had considerable ambitions. The lend-lease project introduced by President Roosevelt in 1941 enabled British farmers to lay their hands on new tractors and other advanced agricultural machinery. The development of chemical fertilisers made it worthwhile to plough up the long-neglected downland and either turn it to arable or to grazing rich enough for cattle. The use of mobile milking parlours made it possible to keep the cows out all year, and for a while good profits were made from milk.

  Eventually, however, arable farming – assisted by bountiful grants for fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides – came to hold sway. Grandfather Turner was a restless soul, and soon went elsewhere, handing over Manor Farm to his son. By the mid-1970s wheat and barley ruled the landscape. The Turners held most of the triangle formed by the A303 between Stonehenge and Winterbourne Stoke, the B3083 from Winterbourne Stoke to Shrewton, and the A344/A360 between Shrewton and the stones. Right up to the boundaries of the monument, the fields were ploughed for corn.

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p; Then the climate of opinion changed and the pendulum began to swing back again, as we became aware of the impact of modern agribusiness. Thanks to chemicals and subsidies, arable farming more than paid its way for the farmers. But the land had fallen silent. The birds and mammals and insects had been banished. The cereal monoculture had drained the diversity and richness from what was increasingly being seen as part of the nation’s heritage rather than an economic asset. In 2003 the National Trust decided that its land around Stonehenge should revert to grassland. Chemicals were banned and the fields were sown with a brush-harvested mixture of wild fescue and bent grasses and wildflowers such as devil’s bit scabious, wild thyme, bird’s foot trefoil, harebells and bellflowers. Rob Turner, who had succeeded his father at Manor Farm, reached agreement with the Trust to rent their land for light grazing of beef cattle.

  Turner fulfils most notions of what a farmer should look and sound like. He is ruddy-faced and powerfully built. He moves slowly and deliberately and speaks in the same way, with a hint of country burr. He is friendly and informative, with a deep knowledge of the land and awareness of his duty of care. He works tremendously hard and I would guess that he is a good neighbour. I know he is a good friend to the little River Till.

  As Rob drove me through his meadows and past his ploughed fields he spoke with quiet pride of his stewardship of his land. Altogether he owns and rents 2200 acres, slightly more than half of which is arable – mainly oil-seed rape, wheat and barley – and the rest grazing for his 400 beef cattle. He is, I would say, a man of the soil in the best sense, steeped in traditions of husbandry and in the landscape of which his holding forms part. The past is important to Turner, but it is the present that fills his life and time: the ceaseless round of jobs that comprise a farmer’s day. Plough, fertilise, seed, spray, harvest, buy cattle, sell cattle, move cattle, check cattle, mend fences, replace gates – these and all the other tasks measure out the year and afford little time for looking around, let alone looking back.

  Nostalgia is for writers, naturalists and local historians – those whose love for this austere, often desolate landscape is bound up with an ache of awareness for what is lost. For W. H. Hudson – who roamed far and wide across the Plain – the sense of loss was focused on the disappearance of sheep and the way of life that went with them, and on the arrival of the Army. Hudson harboured a fierce distaste for urban life and a feeling akin to hatred for the military and the potential for violence implicit in their khaki uniforms. In 1910, in The Shepherd’s Life – a minutely observed and loving celebration of the old simplicity – he wrote:

  ‘To the lover of Salisbury Plain as it was, the sight of military camps with white tents or zinc huts, and of bodies of men marching and drilling, and the sound of guns, now informs him that he is in a district which has lost its attraction, where nature has been dispossessed.’

  The paradox that escaped Hudson in his melancholy was that the annexation of so much of the Plain by the military was to be its salvation. By sealing off the remote parts and either preventing farming altogether or permitting no more than restricted grazing, the MoD, quite unwittingly, gave protection from the worst effects of modern agricultural methods. While huge areas of arable land were being rendered lifeless by the application of fertilisers, weedkillers and pesticides, the artillery ranges and exercise grounds provided a sanctuary for birds and beasts, once they got used to the boom of guns and the grinding of tanks.

  Hudson’s spiritual successor was Ralph Whitlock, who was born in a village between Salisbury and Amesbury just before the outbreak of the 1914–18 war and spent his whole life on Salisbury Plain. Whitlock wrote scores of books and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles about the history and geography of the Plain, its flora and fauna and its village society. For Whitlock – the son of a shepherd-turned-Methodist preacher – the tragedy of the chalk downland was precipitated by the arrival of agribusiness. In a lecture to the Amesbury Society in 1979 he quoted John Aubrey’s description of the texture of Salisbury Plain – ‘the turfe is of short, sweete grasse, good for the sheep, delightful to the eye, for its smoothness is like a bowling green.’

  ‘That is how I remember it,’ Whitlock told his audience. He lingered on the little flowers he knew so well: milkwort, eyebright, squinancywort, rock-rose, viper’s bugloss, lady’s finger, tormentil, thyme, sheep’s bit scabious, carline thistle, harebell, rest-harrow, autumn gentian – ‘their names are as fragrant as the flowers,’ he said. Over them flitted the butterflies – ‘now rare but then abundant’ – chalkhill blues, small coppers, Adonis blues, marbled whites, skippers, green hairstreaks, fritillaries, burnet moths. From the butterflies he moved to the birds: wheatears (‘now only a bird of passage’) and the stone curlew. ‘I have seen as many as seventy collecting on the downs for migration,’ Whitlock said, ‘and have heard the haunting carolling across the twilit downs.’ The whole piece is like a hymn or chant to a lost world.

  At length the passing of the Wiltshire Horn sheep was followed by that of the water meadows. They limped on into the twentieth century, but in general the system was too labour-intensive and expensive to remain viable in the agricultural depression that lasted until the outbreak of war in 1939. The drowner was relegated to folk memory, and his armoury of long-handled spades and trenching tools to the display cabinets of various regional museums.

  In a few places the drowner and his art clung on a little longer. In his classic book Keeper of the Stream, Frank Sawyer – who for more than fifty years was in charge of the Services Association trout fishing on the Avon upstream from Amesbury – recalled conversations with Seth, the old drowner who had worked the meadows since the 1890s. As old-timers do, Seth harked back to a golden age; he was particularly antagonistic to the proliferation of willows and alders along the stream banks, calling them ‘thirsty varmints . . . idle critters’ and accusing them of sucking the river dry in summer.

  Sawyer mourned the disappearance of the multitude of tiny waterways that made up the grand design. ‘These grass-fringed runnels, ditches and carriers remain vivid in my memory,’ he wrote. ‘Everywhere were masses of crawling caddis and snails, every stone or loose turf sheltered a horde of shrimps and small fly larvae, while thousands of minnows scattered in panic as great trout and eels sped along the carriers to safety in the deep pools at the hatchways. When the meadows were drained, all this wealth of fish and food was washed back to enrich the main river. Moreover the main drains, kept clean of silt by the drowner, provided first-class spawning for trout on the bright, golden gravel and the chalk.’

  All are long gone now, almost all, anyway: ridges flattened and ploughed, drains filled in, the ground trampled by cattle, hatches left to rot, brick arches collapsed, carriers filled with mud and choked with rushes. The imprint of this rather beautiful and intricate technology can be seen everywhere along the south-country chalk-streams – for instance along the back road that connects the village of Wylye with its three sweetly named neighbours, Hanging Langford, Steeple Langford and Little Langford, where the River Wylye winds quietly through rough meadows. Many of the old carriers are maintained to provide fishing for trout anglers, and in the pools beneath the hatch-gates the trout and grayling sway in the current, picking off hatching insects just as their forbears did in the days of the drowners.

  No one fishes the stream at Winterbourne Stoke any more. There were once eighteen mills along the Till, as well as extensive water meadows. Although it always dried up in the summer, it stands to reason that it must have flowed plentifully for much of the year. Now – thanks to the relentless abstraction from the aquifers to supply thirsty Swindon – it is a miserable shadow of its old self. Sometimes it ceases to flow as far down as Berwick St James, a couple of miles south of Winterbourne Stoke, and the trout have to be rescued and taken to safety further downstream.

  Historically the Till was a spawning stream for Avon salmon. They grew big, and right up to the 1970s the Avon was famous for its salmon fishing. No more. But
even now an occasional exceptionally determined fish finds its way up to Winterbourne Stoke. In the past ten years there have been four recorded instances of salmon digging hollows in the gravel to lay and fertilise eggs for spawning there. One pair were seen 300 yards above the bridge, observing the same instincts that had driven their ancestors to make the same journey to the same place for thousands of years.13

  12

  GROSSLY DISORDERED

  An improvised flagpole stands at the eastern end of a lay-by a little way out of Winterbourne Stoke. When I first stopped there it was flying a weather-seasoned Cross of St George, later replaced by a bright new Union Flag which flew bravely for a time before being blown away by a gale. The last time I passed it the old flag was on guard again. The lay-by is one of the few on the A303 big enough to take several trucks at one time, with a substantial island between it and the road. Apart from a bin for rubbish, the authorities provide no amenities. Its only attraction is a modest example of A303 private enterprise in the form of a stumpy little caravan that stands on the verge across from the flag. The name on the caravan is Joseph’s.

  The name of the man inside who wields the spatula and smiles his welcome across the hot-plate is Fatih. But after his arrival in this country from Turkey, an employer said customers would be unsettled by Fatih, and renamed him Joseph; and he has stuck with that. His clientele comprises truck drivers, squaddies from the military camps, and motorists inclined to a bacon sandwich and a mug of hot tea in preference to an Olympic breakfast in the more formal setting of Little Chef. Joseph is there seven days a week, all the year round except when he returns to his home in southern Turkey to see his family. He has a room at the farm-cum-B&B down the road, where he keeps his caravan at night.