256
THE ESSEX NATURALIST
the lowlands—more of a wilderness than anything else, and the
Roman military engineers took the shortest route they could
through these inhospitable stretches.
Even the Saxons and Normans made precious little inroads on
the wilderness. True, they surrounded their villages with culti-
vated fields, but the rest was still primitive and dangerous, and
no place at all for a picnic.
It was very, very much later that the countryside as we know
it came into being. Only after the forest was really cleared and
the marshes drained and the strip system of land tenure had
given way to the enclosed field system did the land look anything
like it does to-day. Fields and hedges, the very building blocks
of our landscape are not much more than two to three hundred
years old, and the rest of the landscape can be placed nearer
to us than that, even.
Character was given to the countryside in the days of the
great estates, when there was money and time to create parks,
lakes, follies, avenues, impressive vistas and what have you.
Much of this splendour has been nibbled away—many is the
estate that has been carved up and turned to more profitable
uses.
But this is my point—the countryside that so many of us
want to conserve, to keep in a "natural state", we say, is not
natural anyway. A niche, or set of niches, was created in the
18th and 19th centuries, and certain forms of wild life filled
these niches. They were allowed to do so by my lord's pleasure,
and some were just for his pleasure. Should we now, in this
20th century preserve this status quo, or should we allow Nature
to really take over? No-one can doubt that the answer must be
to preserve this idyllic picture of the countryside if only because
it is far more convenient than the impenetrable thickets that
Nature would soon give us—to say nothing of the need for
arable land to feed the enormous population of these islands.
I will return to this subject when I consider conservation of
individual species.
Granted, then, that our first priority (if I may use this most
ungrammatical term), our first priority is to preserve the
countryside as it has been moulded by our forebears, what do
we have to do? We have to look to those factors in our present-
day way of living that are at variance with our ideal. There are
many such factors; I can touch only the most obvious or pressing.
It is a well-known ecological fact that each community,
whether it be plant or animal, changes the habitat so as to make
it less wholesome to its own species, and more to a different
set. Man is no exception. Since the day he found the use of
fire, man has been making the world a worse place to live in, if
only because of the enormous amounts of oxygen he has taken
from the atmosphere, and the enormous amounts of carbon
dioxide he has released. While settlements were small, the