My devotional space, if that doesn’t sound too ridiculously pretentious, is a country lane round the corner from my house. I walk or run there every day, looking out for wildlife as I go, breathing the fresh air. Perfect antidote to desk work.
Some research was reported this week, confirming that people with regular access to nature are most likely to act in eco-friendly ways, by recycling, for example. I’m not surprised. I can’t bear to see ‘my’ lane despoiled by so much as a milk top. I come home with pockets full of litter.
I haven’t added to my blog in a while because I’ve been stuck at home over midwinter and haven’t encountered many survivals from the 1700s. No trips to the City of London, no museums. It strikes me today that the early eighteenth century has been hiding in plain sight, because the lane where I walk every day has hardly altered since that time. An ancient way, which existed as far back as the thirteenth century, leads off from it: nowadays a quiet footpath, once, presumably, full of traffic. Two of the half dozen houses on the lane were standing when my fictional heroine, Coronation Amesbury, was growing up in another southern English country (Wiltshire; I live in Essex). They are mostly thatched, cruck-built and plaster-rendered. A local historian dates one of them to the seventeenth century.
If Coronation had ever visited this remote part of north Essex in 1703 she could have walked out of the hamlet, now a small village, up the lane past houses that would have been old even then. The lane, neatly tarmacked today, was probably a rutted, flinty track - the village still has some of those, leading across the fields. The views have hardly changed: there were more and denser woods around here before the Second World War, but there are some still, and they were probably used for field sports then as now.
In the wake of Storm Brendan last night, the lane runs with water. The ditches are overflowing, and one or two small trees have been blown down. There were plenty of wet winters in early modern times, though 1704, when the sequel to my novel is set, was notable for the dryness of its summer. I think the biggest difference between then and now, and the most poignant, is the decimation of the wild bird population, much of it in the last thirty years. I’m lucky if I see a jay, a few blackbirds, blue tits and wrens on my daily walk. Corrie would have been surrounded by scores of thrushes, finches, game birds and wetland birds that we hardly see nowadays outside nature reserves and wilder stretches of the coast. The hedges would have been clamorous with birdsong. And then there’s the butterflies and insects, once so plentiful the air was dense with them … we have lived through a kind of holocaust and scarcely noticed it. If I could walk in Corrie’s shoes through a pre-industrial countryside for even an hour I think it would change my view of everything forever.
