We humans - short-lived, forward-facing, terrestrial animals as we are - have a limited understanding of landscape. A landscape is a multidimensional thing, beginning deep beneath the earth, and millions of years ago, with bedrock. Sometimes, as with granite, this bedrock was forged by violent forces. Sometimes, as in the slo-mo deposition of the chalk on which we sit in Norfolk, it was formed so peaceably as to be imperceptible. Often great events - like earthquakes, floods, ice sheets or even meteorites - stirred sediments or moved them hundreds of miles, adding complexity and nuance to the surface of the earth.
Next comes the collision of the geosphere and biosphere that we call soil. From below, the bedrock is ground down by time and weather into substrate; while, from above, it is enriched by fungi, bacteria, plants and animals, alive and dead, creating the biological powerhouse so easily dismissed as soil.
Climate is critical too. In Norfolk, typically, we experience bitter eastern winds in winter, while much of the Atlantic's spring and summer rain has petered out before the west wind reaches us. We are cold in winter but relatively hot and dry in summer, meaning species of the eastern steppes persist here and nowhere else in Britain.
We humans are also drivers of the landscape, in many cases catastrophically. After the fading of the ice sheets as the Devensian Glaciation ended, twelve thousand years ago, Britain and our land-bridge with the continent were slowly filled with scrub and forest, marsh and river; with aurochs, wolf and lynx. Into this dynamic wilderness came our distant ancestors, eventually bringing crops and livestock, both requiring land. From the Stone Age, our ancestors began to fell the forest, and widespread deforestation happened in the Bronze Age, leaving the British landscape largely - artificially - open.
A pond in the Claylands (credit: M Watson)
What happened then, until the nineteenth century, was a tug of war between these many forces - rock, soil and climate, wild species, humans and our crops and livestock - leading to different land uses and landscapes all across the country: each with its distinct community of plants and animals. Then, from the Industrial Revolution onwards, our own impact intensified. Through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries we tore out hedges, filled in ponds, diverted rivers, eradicated countless thousands of acres of heath, chalk grassland, meadow, grazing marsh and brecks. We killed rabbits in their millions and drove marsh harriers, bitterns and avocets from the country altogether. Landscapes - and assemblages of species - which had persisted for millennia were radically changed.
One Norfolk landscape, however - little known, largely ignored - has escaped the worst of our twentieth century ravages. It is the Claylands, south of Norwich, and stretching southwards into Suffolk, almost to Ipswich. The bedrock of the Claylands, as across East Anglia, is chalk, but whereas most of Norfolk's later glacial soils are sandy, here the earlier Anglian Glaciation left a plateau of crumbled chalk and heavy boulder clay.
Before the introduction of modern drainage, and the rise of powerful tractors and the huge ploughs which have changed the face of farming, Claylands soils were hard to cultivate. As a result, the landscape developed through the Middle Ages as a hotchpotch tapestry of little fields, embraced by ancient hedges, rich in trees and shrubs. Field ponds abound here too, home to water voles, great crested newts and countless other dwindling species. Large grassy commons, likewise with ponds and hedges, bounded by timbered Mediaeval farms and manors, and inhabited by turtle doves and barn owls, are another feature of this timeless landscape. So too are ancient coppice woods; and shallow chalky rivers which cut the landscape into fingers.
Twentieth century modernisation had its impact, as it did in every landscape in the country, but much of the character of the Claylands remains intact. Crucially, much of the value of this ancient landscape for its wildlife has also been preserved.
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Sulphur clover (credit: David Ferre)
Enter Norfolk Wildlife Trust. Though we manage just a handful of priceless wildlife sites in South Norfolk - notably New Buckenham Common and Lower Wood, Ashwellthorpe - for more than a decade our engagement team has delivered projects in the Claylands for communities and landowners. In autumn 2021, funded by the Green Recovery Challenge Fund and with support from Norfolk County Council, the People's Trust for Endangered Species and the RSPB, we have launched our most ambitious project here to date: Claylands Wilder Connections.
As its name implies, this is a project focused on connection. First this means habitat connectivity: pathways and stepping stones for wildlife and its genes to flow through landscape. Thanks to pioneering mapping by our colleagues in the GeoData team at Southampton University, we can identify corridors through the Claylands landscape along which meaningful connections for wildlife - through the restoration of ponds, hedges, scrub or strips of meadow - can most readily be re-established.
Second, it means connection between communities and landscapes. The Claylands is a landscape formed through centuries - indeed millennia - of human land use. We want communities - working with landowners - to be the driving force in restoring and maintaining landscape connectivity for wildlife here. We want to equip community conservation leaders with the experience and skill to make informed decisions on land management for wildlife in the future.
This is a daring vision; but we have never been deterred by challenges. We hope that Claylands Wilder Connections will become the model for habitat restoration right across the county, with projects everywhere in Norfolk delivered by partnerships between landowners, communities and Norfolk Wildlife Trust. For now, we have the Claylands in our sights. Here, with community and landowner support, we will make more space, and better connected habitat, for hedgehogs, for sulphur clover, for great crested newts and for countless other species, across a venerable landscape.
Find out more about the Claylands: Wilder Connections project on our project page.
Header image: Barn owl by Elizabeth Dack