In 1845 the English poet, Robert Browning, was living in Italy and obviously feeling rather homesick. His 'Home Thoughts From Abroad' included his famous first verse:

Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England - now!

One online version I saw whilst finding this verse has the comment: "Whilst the Victorians were industrializing everything in sight, their poets were harking back to a gentler (and more idealistic) England of days gone by." - I can only assume that was written by a city dweller who ought to get out more... those days are certainly not 'gone by' where I am.

I live in a corner of the English countryside which is still easily recognisable from Browning's description. I have a copy of a 200 year old map showing our village much the same then as it is now, a few more houses, and tarmac on the roads today, but otherwise unchanged.

We were described in detail in the Domesday Book too, compiled by King William I in 1086. It has changed a bit in almost 1,000 years, but by the standard method of dating hedgerows we do have plenty of those that are 1,000 years old, so the field boundaries go back a very long way.

The photo below was taken by a friend, in June 2007, from a very environmentally friendly air balloon. It shows the canal, built in 1795, running through the village. Our house is top right, behind the trees:

Of course the real tragedy is that more of the English countryside has been destroyed in the last fifty years than the previous thousand, and it seems to be unstoppable. Not just from building developments, industrial scale agriculture causes far more widespread damage than housing estates.

I saw a report on TV only yesterday about people in Rwanda, Africa, being moved out of their homes because of the 'need' for industrialized agriculture to feed them. I suspect that was a euphemism for ever more grazing lands to sell meat to the rich countries.

The whole planet is under the same stress, so maybe it is just a matter of time before the natural world is just 'days gone by', with all of us living in concrete ghettoes and eating processed food. Unless of course veg*ns and environmentalists can work together to do something about it...

Meanwhile I'm continuing with my photo-log of the view from my office window. If anyone wants to see what my little corner of England looked like in April 2010, go to:
http://www.oswild.org/hobnob/photos/april.html

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