24 July 2024

The secrets of the heath

To see the beauty of these dwindling acres, you must focus on what is at your feet.

Photo by Shelley Belboda / Millennium Images, UK

Six weeks of travel for work had left me disorientated and anxious. Hollowed out by time zones, airport transits, successive hotel rooms and the press of world news, bed rest couldn’t fix me. What I needed was to feel grounded, I finally realised. I needed to make myself feel at home.

So I drove to a local nature reserve, a tract of lowland heath. This is a habitat familiar to me from my Surrey childhood. Open expanses of heather and gorse, dwarf scrub, grass and scattered trees, the heaths here in East Anglia aren’t the same as the ones I grew up with. They’re drier, for the most part, with fewer areas of bog and standing water, and the fine white sand underfoot is far from the rich gold of Bagshot sands, but heaths they are, and thus magical. No other landscape feels so intensely known yet insistently strange to me. Part of that strangeness comes from heathland soundscapes, which aren’t melodic, but percussive, electrical. Sizzling grasshoppers, taut vibrations of dragonfly wings. Rustle of lizards, the mechanical reeling calls of nightjars, woodlarks singing melancholy phrases straight out of Eighties arcade games where alien ships drifted down black screens.

Leaving the car, I made my way out on to the heath. It’s been a poor year for insects – a cold spring on top of a more general and frightening decline – and the grasshoppers were quiet that afternoon. They sing at higher temperatures. The air, though cool, was rich with the scent of heather, the heath before me glowing with its tiny purple flowers. I looked up to the west, where the sky was dark with stormclouds, then down to the ground, where frail white moths lifted from the grasses around my feet. A roll of thunder came, then, a long, grumbling echo that halted the chattering song of a nearby Dartford warbler. A few seconds of silence, then the warbler began to sing again, a call and response that seemed parts of one, complicated whole.

Lowland heaths grow on poor soils, but they don’t arise on their own. The naturalist Clive Chatters describes them as “cultural landscapes overlain with the language of ecology”, for while heaths were originally created by the foraging patterns of large prehistoric herbivores, their continued existence is due to people, from Neolithic farmers to more modern communities who have used the land to graze livestock and harvest wood and heather for fuel, tools and shelter.

These days, heaths are mostly nature reserves and places for human recreation. Too many visitors can damage a heath – its ground nesting birds, for example, are particularly vulnerable to dogs. But without sufficient management, heaths will disappear. I remember the shock of discovering that a heath I visited with my parents when I was small had vanished, and was now dense pine forest – an early lesson that familiar places turn unfamiliar and known things disappear simply through the passage of time.

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.

I didn’t spend long outside that summer afternoon. The weather intervened. Fat drops of rain sent up puffs of dust like smoke from the path. Then the storm properly broke and the scent of petrichor was overpowering as I walked back to the car. Inside, watching water blur the windscreen, I exhaled. My sense of dislocation had gone. Partly it was simply the relief of being outside in a familiar, natural place, one that reminded me of my childhood. But also because it reminded me that I am no longer a child. Like heathlands, we are dynamic, complex entities, always altering in response to the conditions we find ourselves in. Heaths are a patchwork of different microhabitats, not ever one thing, like a field of wheat. They’re more like embroideries, stitched together of innumerable small and intricate parts. The simple categorisation of “heathland”, like “human”, is always going to obscure the reality of exactly what they are.

Most of all, the heath had made me hopeful. We’re so used to thinking of healthy ecoystems as ones untouched by humans that it’s deeply grounding to remember that it is humans who have, over many thousands of years, kept heaths alive.