This is a secret kingdom, little visited by tourist buses and with a feeling of remoteness in its quieter backwaters. If you take the minor road from Uppingham to Oakham  for instance, you will find an unhurried and beautiful corner of Rutland. Ash trees lace the hedgerows, as the road meanders into Ayston on its hill top site. Dark marmalade coloured farmhouses and cottages look beyond  the gigantic oak tree, whose  branches stretch right across the village green, to the beautiful triple aisled church. The last squarson of the regency Ayston Hall ,Sir Henry Fludyer, was a keen sportsman and together with the  Rev Shields of the neighbouring village of Preston  they set their fighting cocks against those of  the parishes of Oakham, Langham and Cottesmore. They lost disastrously. It was reported in the Stamford Mercury in June 1831 and shocked parishioners all over Rutland.  Sir Henry and the Reverend Shields denied all knowledge of the event.

A large herd of  Guernseys  graze the  hill side as  the  road swings down over a little brook and climbs  the high hill to  the dead end village of Ridlington  whose long street leads away along a steep  ridge above the River Chater.  There is a raggle taggle yard strewn with dead cars and fridges, seventeenth century thatched cottages around the church, a little mock tudor school house and breathtaking glimpses between the houses  to the wide valley view below. It’s a beautiful and unselfconscious place; but it’s the tiny village of Brooke in the next shallow valley which makes me want to come back to it again and again. Even though some of the houses and cottages on their gently sloping site above the Gwash are being over renovated, the church on its little islanded mound is worth travelling miles to see. (There was no better location in the land than this, for Keira Knightly’s marriage scene in Pride and Prejudice.)  Ruinous in 1577, (its  curate “marvellously overcome with drink “), St Peters was virtually rebuilt and furnished two years later. It is all on an intimate scale – cosily cluttered with Elizabethan box pews, benches and screens; green and white bell pulls looped up under the tower;  a stiff alabaster Knight lying on his tomb with some of his original colouring;  seventeenth century graffiti carved into the desks in the chancel and amazing fishbone hinges on the north door.

Just out of the village is the romantic and melancholy site of Brooke Priory, all may trees scattered over grass covered mounds and dips  - vestiges of  former fishponds, extensive dwellings and elaborate terraced gardens. Razed in the dissolution the priory site was bought by the Noel family who built an enormous  Elizabethan pile of which little remains.

By the time I reached Oakham on this the road less travelled, I had met  three lots of girls exercising conker-shiny hunters and one speeding farmer on his phone, hurtling round the bend in an ancient, rattling Range rover.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Terry Butcher

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Since 1913 when the first show was held on its present site, Chelsea Flower Show has grown to become the established and familiar landmark in our calendar that it is today. It’s my favourite date – not only because it heralds summer with such a gaudy, colourful bang or that its setting, on the level lawns among Sir Christopher Wren’s magnificent Chelsea Hospital buildings, is as beautiful and noble as London can afford but also because it defines our national character so eloquently by celebrating Britain’s unquestioned brilliance at gardening.

After all, we are the best gardeners in the world. It’s not just that we have the greenest fingers or that our climate produces beautiful roses and hollyhocks but that we are born with a need to garden in our veins. It’s a deep rooted thing and though it may not always burgeon, it’s there in most of us! The French may like to pack their plots with vegetables; the Italians with tomatoes and grapes but more than any other nation, we need to show off our garden artistry and our horticultural expertise to friends, neighbours and anyone else who is ready to admire it. Many of our front gardens are a public display of that art and our myriad flower shows across the land, from village to county size, bring out our innate competitiveness. We want to win prizes for our roses or apples. Chelsea  is the show of shows – the  gardening Olympics where the top nurserymen and growers display their prize exhibits in a glorious story of green fingered Britain – irises form Somerset, bulbs from Lincolnshire, roses from Shropshire, ferns from Worcestershire, grasses from Norfolk. Being presented with a gold medal at Chelsea is as high as you can climb up the gardening ladder and it’s here that us amateurs can feel truly inspired.

The Royal Horticultural Society, the stalwart backbone of gardening excellence, started the ball rolling with their first “Great Spring Show” in 1862. As soon as the Royal Hospital site became a reality the success of the show was guaranteed. It was in the heart of what became fashionable London, it was  patronised by royalty and over the decades it became the spot-lighted platform for the new  and avant garde  in gardening . In garden fashion terms the show presents an annual and definitive Spring and Summer collection to the world: it’s the Vogue magazine of the very latest plants and the most cutting-edge designs. Fashions among the horticultural elite have changed dramatically from formal to informal  and from maximal to minimal, since time immemorial but it is usually Chelsea which has first set the scene. In1929 Mrs Sherman Hoyt caused a sensation by creating a cacti garden for instance, with  a backdrop of the Mojave desert; In the 1930s J Mcdonald made a whispering glade of ornamental grasses while  Hilliers  created a “Dinlgey Dell.”

In 2005 I was asked to help behind the scenes by my friends Julian and Isabel Bannerman who had been commissioned to design a garden for the Daily Telegraph. Having found the vestiges of a huge fourteenth century gothic window in the building yard of Salisbury Cathedral, a mature mulberry tree in a Somerset field and bits of ornamental  Bath stone  from all over Wiltshire they proceeded to create a “ruined” abbey garden in three days. I planted valerian in crevices in the walls as though it had self seeded while they set Rambling Rector roses to clamber over the ruins. The industry, inventiveness and camaraderie behind the scenes at Chelsea was extraordinary. At the midnight hour the Bannermans realized they didn’t have enough plants and  the Leyhill Prison Gardeners, who were busy beautifying their own plot, gave them six dozen tobacco plants. It saved the day and the Bannermans won a gold medal for what to me was the most romantic garden Chelsea had ever seen. That was my best Chelsea of all. Not so enjoyable was the year it poured with rain and I spent a day under inadequate canvas trying to sell extremely expensive garden benches (for another friend!), which nobody wanted to buy.  I loved the luxury of arriving on site at 6.30 in the morning and having the chance to race round  the best flower tents and display gardens before they became inundated by the public. But the tented street of lawnmowers, tools and furniture where I sat was relegated to the less important outskirts of the show and I didn’t really feel part of it.

These days I am usually the ordinary punter, struggling through the crowds to catch a glimpse and marvel at the spectacular show gardens which set the style of today’s garden design and will hopefully continue to do so into the future. In the end though it’s the delphinium stand I always return to, my original and most powerful inspiration. In all the gardens of my life, my efforts to grow delphiniums may have failed, but coming to Chelsea somehow manages to instil me with hope for the next gardening year.

Photo: Flickr CC / simon***

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But the village of Parham is still redolent of Suffolk’s vanished glory days. We came on it by chance through gently sweeping landscape on a road which looped like a river past deeply ditch-ed fields, reed- edged ponds and quiet hamlets of modest colour washed cottages scattered sparsely around the edges of wide greens – Mill Green, North Green and Silverlace Green. In the shallow valley of the Upper Alde, Parham lay sheltered below.

The village is thick with ancient timber framed houses, some much grander than others. Church Farm on the cross roads is particularly sumptuous and has a sweet carving of a dog and stag on the sill of one of its casement windows. At the end of a cul de sac of coloured cottages the chequered flint church looks as crisp and clean cut as it must have done when it was built in the 14^th century. Its handsome new lytch gate is thatched in the local style with a deep scallop edged ridge.

Past the table top tombs of local grandees in the grave yard, a foot path leads out  beside  water meadows and winds for half a mile up the hill ahead.  Then, over the crest and beyond  undulating mounds of  old pasture land streaked with cattle tracks , we caught our first glimpse of the Moat Hall. It rose from its still, wide stretches of encompassing water – the most romantic manor house we had ever seen. We had come to it on the old way from the village, the way its builders, the Willoughbys must have come and gone. We were overwhelmed.

On reading about it later, I discovered we were not alone in feeling moved by its beauty. Antiquity was all the rage with aesthetically inclined Victorians and the half ruined Moat Hall became a well-known sight. Exactly a hundred years ago Joseph Pennell made a special detour to see it. In his Highways and Byeways of East Anglia  he wrote,“It ought to be a haunted house. The dark waters which lie close under the windows and the dark copse are suggestive of secret tragedies. Although dusk is approaching, not a light gleams from the windows, the birds are silent, save for a restless fluttering in the ivy; not a ripple stirs the surface of the moat, not a sound of life issues from the grim old hall. “

Primroses were growing on the banks of the moat the day we went and east of the house an age-old wood  secreted several large stew ponds  in its  undergrowth.  There was probably a fortified house here in the 13^th century and the Willoughby’s proceeded to build theirs on its foundations at the very end of the 15th. It was embellished by later family members including Francis , the  fifth baron of Parham , a famous Parliamentarian under Cromwell, who ended a Royalist. Alot of the Willoughby’s  manor  has gone  and what remains has been a farmhouse for over two centuries. The vestiges of a formal garden are hidden within the ivy hung brick walls and a grand arch heralds the entrance across the moat with figures of Wild Men in its two niches. It’s the most wonderful place: what is remarkable about it is the way it has been suspended for so long in the same  half –dishevelled and dream-like state.

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Walking up river the whole Elysian bowl of the park opens out. A second weir comes into view past a small copse where foxgloves cling to old tree stumps, and just beyond the first view of one of the most majestic houses in England, dun-stoned and gilt-edged in the sun with its window surrounds painted in gold leaf.  It was here that Bess of Harkwick came in 1549 with her old husband Sir William Cavendish. She built the first house, not a trace of which remains, but her descendant the first Duke of Devonshire began  the existing one a hundred years later and after a row with his architect completed the house to his own design in the early 1700s. The fourth Duke built the striking rusticated stables and The Victorian ‘Bachelor’ Duke, the substantial north wing.

On a level with the house the emperor fountain shoots its astounding jet of water 270 feet into the air while on the slope behind the house a spectacular cascade of white water falls down a long, wide, shallow stone staircase built in 1699. Joseph Paxton the great gardener and his boss the  ‘Bachelor’ Duke were not only inspired by the romantic setting of Chatsworth but also by the infinite possibilities the water pressure from the hill behind afforded. Paxton laid out the Stand Wood walks between 1834 and 1845 and the steep hill with its rocks and waterfalls was a perfect place for him to create endless surprises. Precipitous stone steps and leaf moulded paths twist up  past dripping steams and mossy crags among ash, birch chestnut, wild cherry, and rowan, sycamore, holly, yew, cedar, wellingtonia and spruce trees . Suddenly, as though you are in the African jungle an aqueduct springs from the almost vertical hillside above and spills water onto moss covered boulders 80 feet below. Its water flows along a conduit from the Emperor Lake in which water gathers from the moorland all around. Paxton harnessed the fall down the hill to create the pressure for the Emperor Fountain.

Bess of Harkwicke’s Hunting Tower on a level with the lake was built in the 1580s and remains unaltered.  There is one room on each of its three floors and two turret rooms at the top. With its huge bow windows it was designed for ladies to view the hunting taking place in the park below through the lattice panes. Even standing beside it, it seems you overlook all Derbyshire. The estate is rolled out like an 18th century map. In it midst, directly in line with the house, the great spire of the church built by Sir George Gilbert Scott in 1869 soars upwards above the model village  Edensor.

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You certainly can’t be in hurry on our rivers and canals but you can experience a kind of paradise. It’s the enforced slow pace which is so good for the soul and renders you a calmer, and perhaps nicer person. You have time to  notice so much more – patches of king cups  on the banks of the Thames; brilliant  back gardens running down to the Grand Union canal  as it slices through  Coventry or rare waders in the marshy Norfolk landscape. The languorous atmosphere seems to suit the human spirit. I only know this because as soon as I get back into a car and traffic, after a sojourn on the waterways, I begin to feel jagged and my anxiety levels rise.

I’m a canal-aholic. My father first took me to see the Sapperton canal tunnel when I was six and on every subsequent visit the wonder of it never ceased to amaze me. At the end of the eighteenth century, this hand cut tunnel through the Cotswold escarpment linking the Thames and Severn rivers was, for a brief time, the greatest engineering achievement and the longest tunnel in the world (2.2 miles). The journey that the couple from Surrey had been able to make reminded of the sheer bold brilliance of our engineering forbears. They thought nothing of creating astounding viaducts or chains of locks to convey canals across deep valleys or up and down steep hills. By linking rivers they enabled heavy freight to be transported to our docks or from A to B. The commercial use of most canals may have been short lived due to the invention of railways, but the legacy left to us today is extraordinarily valuable in other ways.

A quiet reverence for those engineering heroes of the industrial revolution is inherent in most of us. Danny Boyle knew it when he dreamt up the scenarios for his opening ceremony at the Olympics. Perhaps, in their efforts to offload what they can to the private sector, the government were capitalizing on this resurgence of national pride. Last year they handed over 2000 miles of our inland waterways to the Canal & Rivers Trust, a charity: “If you want to use them, you can look after them,” it was saying. The enthusiasm is indeed colossal. 99% of the lock keepers who volunteered last year, want to do it again this year. The sense of ownership has prompted local communities to take pride in their own stretches of river or canal and to keep the  footpaths  and locks in  good order and the endangered water vole ( “Ratty” in  Wind in the Willows) is staging a bit of a comeback through the improvement of watersides.  Together with the Inland Waterways Association, even more stretches of lost or disintegrating canals are being resurrected by thousands of volunteers. A “canal laureate”, the poet Jo Bell, has even been appointed. Perhaps she will reflect on how vital these peaceful, silent waterways are to our mental health – whether we choose to walk beside them or  to travel by boat on some deliciously slow journey, like the couple from Surrey.

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Further on, the faded village sign of “Chetwode” heralds the vestiges of moats, a small church, an early Victorian “Priory House” and a huge medieval stew pond beyond the roadside hedge. North East of the church a footpath leads down to a small wood secreting a sinuous pond and on up a gentle slope towards the wooded outskirts of Chetwode Manor, stranded and hidden, my oldest home. Tantalizing glimpses of its gables and tall chimneys can be seen above the trees and beside, there are undulations – perhaps remnants of the vanished church of St Martin.

The Chetwodes came there in 1040, true Anglo Saxons, and the manor stayed in the  family until  1966.  At one point, when the land was thickly wooded, a giant wild boar terrorized the parish. People were afraid to venture outside for fear of the “savage monster” until “A true and valiant knight,” in the form of a twelfth century Chetwode, slayed the beast. (The deed appears to have been validated when, in the early 1800s, a tenant farmer was filling in a circular ditch long known as ‘Boars Pond’ and found the bones of an enormous boar, calculated to have weighed well over a thousand pounds.) As reward for his bravery King John granted the Chetwodes the right to claim the lucrative “Rhyne Toll” which they continued to do until the late nineteenth century. The annual ritual involved the blowing of a horn (a conch shell) around the boundaries of the Chetwode land during the first week of November followed by a collection of  taxes from any owners of  stray cattle and the distribution of ginger cake and ale. Disputes were sorted out in the Court Leet, a panelled room on the first floor of the Manor.

In 1244 an Augustinian Priory was founded about half a mile away and a large church built adjoining it. When the priory  closed two hundred years later the church  was granted to Chetwode’s parishioners. (Their own church next to the manor was falling down.) What survives today is just the chancel of the original priory church. It feels overly high and oddly truncated when you first walk in, but it has the most graceful set of lancet windows to the east and south you ever saw. They are Early English perfection. The famous medieval glass in the south window is beautiful. The north chapel, reached through a gothic archway half way down the aisle, contains our roomy, box panelled family pew, complete with fireplace and absolutely no view of the altar whatsoever. Perhaps the Chetwodes were an ungodly lot. I sat there under the handsome stone plaques commemorating my grandparents and tried to conjure more distant forbears. Absentee landlords though the Chetwodes were, preferring the Shropshire pile they had married into in the seventeenth century, I like to feel their brave spirit still hovers among the surrounding woods from which their name derived. I am proud of the boar-slaying Chetwode and for a moment I feel I belong to this still Buckinghamshire backwater.

Photos:
Church: Wikimedia Commons / John Salmon
Bus shelter: Wikimedia Commons / Martin Loader

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Up on the downs the scene is sadder still. The myriad chalk tracks, far older than the hills, which cross the ridgeway every half mile or so and lead up and over to far off villages or lonely farms, are blocked off as well. Sometimes with gargantuan and unsightly lumps of concrete or with tree trunks pushed into place by JCBs.  Because most of the tracks are ancient bridleways,  just enough room has been left for riders and pedestrians to squeeze past, but what has not been left is that feeling of timelessness which was there before. The spirit of the “open road” has been sorely compromised. Even the sparse beech woods beside the Ridgeway have been blocked off with ditches and huge earth ramparts in order to discourage youthful “ravers” from camping. These latest downland defences, built against a tiny and seasonal minority of illegal ravers, are no different to the nearby earth ramparts built by our Neolithic forbears around the hill forts of Uffington Castle to defend themselves against possible marauding tribes. Five and a half thousand years later things have come full circle.  Ironically it was our Neolithic forbears who invented the art of raving. By about 3500 BC, once farming had become firmly established, huge festivals were held every summer in hilltop earthworks like Uffington Castle. Recent archaeological evidence has shown that these bacchanalian revelries often lasted for several days, just like Glastonbury Festival does today.

I suppose there will always be warring factions in the countryside but I find the present negative aspect depressing and misleading.  It somehow feels that we are all being warned off the land. Last week I walked up the Ridgeway from Streatley towards home. At the top of a long slow climb above the Thames, the track emerges from an ivy hung tunnel of trees and widens to the sky. My spirits soared. Then suddenly they sank again when, seemingly miles from anywhere, I spied a CCTV camera watching me from on high, fixed to the top of a pole. A notice on the locked iron gateway beside read, “No horses, dogs or vehicles.” The owner of a hidden gamekeeper’s cottage in the nearby wood was obviously fearful of siege.  I have to look on the bright side though and hope that our countryside doesn’t turn into one vast Gated Community.  For the moment anyway, and even though it may not be obvious, our  rights of way are still there for the taking and thank God there are still vast tracts of Britain devoid of notices and locked gates.

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Evelyn Simak

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Here, in this strange paradise, deserted paths lead endlessly this way and that under great lime trees and evergreen oaks. All around lie thousands of late Londoners under tombstones tipping this way and that, or under ever grander Victorian stone canopies, obelisks, sarcophagi, draped urns and sphinxes. Some are swamped in over a century’s tangled ivy while others, more recent, are piled high with artificial flowers. A robin perches on an angel fingers and you can often be completely alone here in 70 acres of verdant beauty. Life falls quietly into perspective: humility and awe take over. Here lies the author of The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins, entwined with his mistress. Here too are Trollope, Thackeray and Blondin, the most famous tightrope-walker of all time who, in 1859, crossed the Niagara Falls on a high wire. Here is ‘Boots’ Davidson, who introduced the Trinidad steel band to Britain and whose dancing funeral procession in 1933 was attended by thousands. Wherever you turn the wonders never cease. Here are Dr James Barry, the pioneering woman doctor who became the General of the Army Medical Department in the guise of a man; George Grossmith, joint author with his brother Weedon of The Diary of a Nobody; Thomas Hood, who wrote ‘The Song of the Shirt’, and, being always in debt, mortgaged his brain in exchange for a cash advance. A monument to the illustrator George Cruikshank, a reformed alcoholic, proclaims him a champion of ‘universal abstinence from intoxicating drinks’. Here too lie the young men who never heeded him: Viscount Strangford, a dazzling, handsome rake who died from brandy dissipation and consumption, and Viscount Hastings, the ‘King of Plungers’, who eloped with Sir Henry Chaplin’s fiancée and ruined himself by gambling. The Grand Union Canal cuts silently along the southern boundary of the cemetery. Beyond it, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway begins one of the most brilliant journeys of all time, tunneled and viaducted to Penzance. Within the sound of the clattering track lies the great engineer himself, alongside his father, under a simple block of Portland Stone.

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Nowhere suits England’s wild winter weather better than Dartmoor; nowhere is more relentlessly melancholy. The dark moorland will take you back thousands of years, with its ragged peaks appearing through the mist, its stone circles,  ancient encampments and abandoned villages, but best of all is  Wistman’s Wood — a silent, unadulterated and secret place. If you go to the very middle of the moor, just up from Princetown and its prison, near Two Bridges, where the only two roads which cross the moor meet, there is a path which leads northwards towards Cocks Hill. From here it is a mile and a half’s walk along the side of a wide, long valley of the West Dart, gradually climbing into bleaker more desolate countr.

From a distance the wood looks like a patch of low scrub, grey brown against the moorland, on the eastern slopes of the river. As you approach its magic grows. I think there is a fear of woods embedded in our subconscious from the days when the ‘wildwood’ covered the land. Today only nine per cent of the country is covered in trees and that is mostly in Scotland. Woods are tamer places now but they are still irrevocably laced into our literature and folklore. Wistman’s Wood,  is not the sort of tall dark forest feared by Little Red Riding Hood but more the mystical stunted woodland where Shakespearian heroes lose their way in a tangle of low hanging branches, ‘this desert inaccessible, Under the shade of melancholy boughs’.

Wistman’s dwarf oaks crouch in gnarled and twisted forms clinging to and growing up between huge moss covered blocks of moorland granite. Many of their mossy limbs rest on the leafy woodland floor. There are bilberries and brambles scattered among them and feathery  ferns growing from the branches including the Filmy fern. There are red foxes and adders sunning themselves on the boulders in spring.

The Reverend Swette visited the wood at the end of the eighteenth century with great apprehension. . ‘It is hardly possible to conceive’, he wrote of Wistman’s ‘anything of the sort so grotesque …… Silence seemed to have taken up her abode in this sequestered wood – and to  a superstitious mind some impression would have occurred approaching to dread, or sacred horror.’ . Noel Carrington, a grocers son from Plymouth turned poet, writes concurrently mourning the wood’s slow death ‘dishonour- old-dreary in aspect – silently decays The Lonely Wood of Wistman.’

The Victorian romantic Eliza Bray believed that Wistman’s wood was a  sacred grove of the Druids and proceeds to devote a whole chapter of her book Druids on Dartmoor to prove her point. Others suggest that the wood is the kennels where the diabolical ‘Wish Hounds’ are kept and that on dark misty nights their baying can be heard. Sometimes the ghost of a dog called ‘Jumbo’ is seen chasing after rabbits.

For me it is the ‘dark but gentle ambush’ described by Louis MacNeice in his poem ‘Woods’. We can always walk out again. The patch of  sky near the edge of the wood grows bigger and then the valley opens out towards the long slow walk down to the road and to the roaring fire in the  Two Bridges Hotel. (It was Vivien Leigh’s favourite.)
 Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Rob Purvis

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My next door neighbour stopped me in the street and said, “We’ve got to stop it.” “Got to Stop what?” I asked. “The new house they want to build  across the stream.” I was incensed at her assumption that I was a nimby. We live in a village and villages have evolved since time immemorial.  I don’t believe they should be put in aspic and those that have been, like Laycock in Wiltshire for instance, feel vaguely unreal in their perfect prettiness. As long as the new housing in our village is of the right scale, built in the right materials and, if it is a larger project, provides the necessary proportion of affordable houses, then  I have no reason to object. However, if the character of our village was threatened by, say, a disproportionately huge housing estate with computer generated plots to ensure the maximum amount of bland houses packed into the smallest space, I would doubtless shout from the rooftops. So I’ve already revealed myself as  a potential hypocrite, but then nimbyism is  a complex moral issue.

Over the last decade we have been gradually imbued with a social conscience about green energy, business and housing needs. Nevertheless the number of nimbys has mushroomed since large tracts of our virgin landscape await planning decisions on the building of windfarms, high speed railways, new runways, pylons and massive housing estates. Meanwhile commercial lobbyists are quick to condemn nimbyism as a middle class pastime of the privileged who are keen to look after their own patch rather than caring about the greater good.

Well that’s true to a certain extent but I think that every piece of beautiful, wildlife- haunted and locally well-loved landscape deserves a vociferous  band of nimbys to defend it, as well as a fair and balanced trial when it comes to planning decisions. Some affluent bits of the country appear safer from development than others and I think that’s unfair. A year ago, David Cameron told Countryfile that his constituency in north Oxfordshire constituted “some of England’s finest countryside,” and he  would no more put it at risk “than I would put at risk my own family.” Well it’s safe then, isn’t it? But what about great swathes of the Thames estuary marshes, the Cambrian mountains or the Powys Hills – all currently under threat – which have no such powerful nimbys to clamour for them?

Take our local town of Swindon: never considered a beauty. For the last few decades its anonymous suburbs have sprawled so  far outwards that  you need to be a qualified orienteer to find your way around the  relentless, could-be-anywhere-housing- developments, industrial estates and  clutches of titanic superstores. Vast tracts of farmland as well as  woods and copses I knew as a child are all under concrete now; whole villages such as Shaw, Haydon Wick and Lydiard Tregoze have been swallowed up. But there is one corner left untrammelled – the gentle,  pastoral landscape which was the inspiration of Swindon’s famous son, Richard Jeffries, one of our greatest country writers and visionaries.  “One day the area will be glorified,” Edward Thomas wrote in his biography of Jeffries. “It will be known as Jeffries Landscape and it will be as Selbourne was to Gilbert White.”Despite the vast number of brownfield sites with planning permission in Swindon, the developers Redrow and Persimmon, with limitless funds and lawyers behind them, won their appeal to build 900 houses across this sacrosanct landscape. They will make more money from a greenfield site than they will from a brownfield. Council members are easily seduced by the provision of roundabouts and other planning “gains”. Members of the Richard Jeffries Society, who fought the decision, didn’t stand a chance with their lack of political clout.  It was an unfair battle and is an example of what happens all over the country in areas which have no vociferous defenders.

But the new house we look onto is built now and the young couple who live there have made a bridge across the stream so that our gardens have become communal. A good reason, in this case, not to be a nimby.

Photo: Wikimedia COmmons / J Scott

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