18.12.24 – theirs and ours

Until the late 1980s, Bedfordshire farmer Hugh White was a proud champion of conventional farming. His 377 acre farm produced wheat at an intensive scale, using methods developed in the post-war period that are still overwhelmingly used today: an overabundance of nitrogen-rich fertiliser (which leaches into rivers, suffocating aquatic life en masse), followed by too much weedkiller (which kills the insects, starving the birds), followed by deep tilling (which destroys soil structure and leads to disastrous erosion). But when the government introduced subsidy schemes to encourage farmers to “set aside” arable fields to reduce EU-wide overproduction, White was quick to accept. Overnight, he stopped managing the entirety of Strawberry Hill farm.

For the next 25 years, White proudly oversaw his farmland’s hands-off transformation into a mosaic of wildflower glades, hawthorn and blackthorn scrubland, and young woodland, which swiftly became a haven for nightingales, barn owls, turtle doves, orchids, butterflies, and countless other species. After White and his wife died, their children sought to sell the farm to someone who would sensitively preserve its invaluable biodiversity. Last month, the Wildlife Trust for Beds, Cambs, and Northants successfully crowdfunded £1.5 million to secure purchase of a second half of Strawberry Hill, ensuring all 377 acres of it can continue as they have the last 30+ years.

On their website, one can view a 360 degree late-autumn drone shot of the whole estate. The bristly patchwork of shrubs, trees, and grassland is surrounded by flat arable fields with hedgerows cut low and mature trees set far apart at the edges. Despite the grey weather and lack of foliage, Strawberry Hill viewed from a height is luminous: crowns of silver, rusty orange, and soft yellow-green leaves glimmer composedly like lichen on stone. The breadth and density of such life-giving texture is not just unique in Bedfordshire, but in the whole of the UK, one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. It is almost unheard of here to leave arable land entirely alone for such a long time.

It didn’t used to be. When I saw the article about Strawberry Hill last month, its transformation reminded me of the goodman’s croft. Once a fairly common practice across Scotland and parts of England, the goodman’s croft (or Devil’s acre, or guidman’s fauld, or clootie craft, or given ground) was a plot of land set aside to go untilled, uncultivated, and ungrazed in an offering to the Christian Devil (and, in all likelihood, earlier pagan deities) in exchange for not interfering with the health of the other crops or cattle. In this plot, the Devil could grow all the plants he liked best. I wrote about the goodman’s croft in Radicle earlier this year, after this Tiktok by Irish comedian Killian Sundermann made me think about how few places in our landscape now are left alone out of fearful respect for its wildness. The practice of the goodman’s croft was widely targeted by Protestant authorities during the 16^th century Reformation, as it was considered sacrilegious to leave land for the Devil rather than make it “productive” for the glory of the Christian God. Despite religious pressure and the sudden enclosing of the Scottish landscape during the 18^th century agricultural Improvements, the practice didn’t die out completely until the 19^th century.

Ecologically, these goodman’s crofts would have looked very much like Strawberry Hill: rough grassland for the first five or so years, before proceeding into scrubland dominated by gorse, brambles, hawthorn, and blackthorn, and then, after 20 or so years, young trees shading out some neighbours as it developed into young woodland. This kind of mixed scrubland is an incredibly rich transitional landscape that supports a huge variety of birds, small mammals, and insects. In a pre-Improvements mosaic of managed woods, arable infield, common grazing lands, and domestic kailyards surrounding stone barns and cottages (which were sometimes one in the same building), the goodman’s croft would have provided myriad benefits: birdlife might have prevented certain insect pests from exploding; plant diversity might have prevented certain diseases from spreading; the dense root systems of grasses, thistles, and shrubs might have prevented flooding and erosion in neighbouring fields, which was a common problem before field drains were widely installed. Putting it simply, I believe that in an early Scottish landscape unbroken by hedgerows and dykes, regular intervals of goodman’s crofts would have played a similar ecological role as the hedge. But unlike the hedgerow, they also carried an important cultural function in centring respect for the unseen, more-than-human beings also living in the landscape.

Strawberry Hill and the goodman’s croft are so compelling to me for the way they invert 20^th century boundaries between theirs and ours. In the goodman’s croft, theirs was not pushed out of sight in everyday life, but kept mindfully within the boundaries of the farm, of the village. At Strawberry Hill, the same has been done but at a monumental scale, acting as a kind of goodman’s croft not just for the farm it used to be but for the farms surrounding it as well. Over time, the domain of ours has grown exponentially wider, and theirs has shrunk to unliveable margins. A mere 300 years ago, theirs was still found in the area immediately around one’s home, where vegetables were grown in the kailyard that weren’t produced at scale, and the livestock lived quite literally at the other end of the house, penned in by a divider but warmed by the same fire. Now, suburban front gardens are gravelled, astroturfed, paved for parking, or generally decorated in a way that gestures to the occupiers’ values but are otherwise unused and largely inhospitable to more-than-human life. Places that have reverted back to being theirs, like back lanes and roadside verges, are often mown and sprayed down to nothingness again, taken back as ours in an act of principle rather than genuine use. In such a world, the existence of Strawberry Hill feels like an utter miracle.

A few weeks ago, Kate Bradbury wrote a charming account of Houdini the hedgehog, a regular visitor to her garden who, until she intervened, had been barrelling through life with one foot lost and visible bone poking out. I don’t know why that one story triggered this thought when I read so often about hedgehogs and habitat loss, but it suddenly occurred to me that I should rebrand my front garden as a hedgehog haven. If I could rope in a few friendly neighbours to make a short corridor of overtly hedgehog-friendly habitat, it might be easier in passing conversation to convince more traditional neighbours to stop using weedkiller and to plant up their gravel. Maybe if my street shared a common concern and affection for this particular endangered creature – the other side of the coin’s fearful respect of the vindictive land spirit – we might string together a kind of patchwork goodman’s croft.

Every time I walk through the neighbourhood, I quietly assess whose gardens are halfway suitable for small mammal routes and whose are too far gone, paved into unbreakable smoothness. I count the fences and walls that form unwelcoming barriers. I rehearse how we might possibly unpick the solid borders between theirs and ours, how I can most patiently and enticingly convince everyone that they will lose nothing worth having by sacrificing a little land for the health of the whole. Right now, it feels like a daunting prospect. One of my neighbours recently complained to me that there are too many nettles in our back lane. They criticised the businesses who share the lane for not doing more to strim it and keep it “tidy”. I responded that the nettles are good for butterflies and their larvae, but instantly felt my neighbour’s attention wane. I think they had been trying to hint to me that my garden is too untidy as well. I was reminded, again, of the time a resident in my old neighbourhood announced on the community Facebook group that he was going to completely denature the back lane and would anybody like to help? When I protested, citing the lane’s usefulness for habitat and the state of biodiversity loss worldwide, someone else chimed in, “Isn’t the walkway along the river enough? The lanes were built for access, not insects.”

As if theirs and ours can’t be the same place at the same time. I can only surmise that the offering of plots to devils, faeries, or gods might have originated in the aftermath of overproduction, when the land was used too intensively with disastrous consequences for human life. Well here we are again! I take a lot of comfort in how Strawberry Hill’s farmer let his mind be changed by the evidence in front of him. How he campaigned and persisted in protecting this land despite what I can only imagine was great incredulity and dismissal by his peers. I wish, like the keepers of the goodman’s crofts, we were more fearful and respectful of the consequences of taking theirs to enlarge ours. But in both the stubborn refusal to continue with convention and the respectful fear of taking too much, I see a common expression of love for land and life. I see a model for how to love theirs amongst ours that I can take with me into my own small street.

A drone shot of Strawberry Hill

news

I’m thrilled to share that I am now represented by

Caro Clarke

at Portobello Literary! It is a literal dream come true to work with this brilliant literary agent on my book-in-progress Lang, and to be in the company of the phenomenal writers they represent. I couldn’t have asked for safer hands or cooler people. With any luck, by this time next year, Lang will be in process with a publisher.

Speaking of books, my essay The Kailyards can be found in The Nature Chronicles Volume 2, releasing in January and available for pre-order now! Amongst the five other brilliant essays recognised by the Nature Chronicles Prize, you will find Minibeasts by David Higgins, which coincidentally features a beautiful cameo by Strawberry Hill.

Thank you so much for reading pod by pod this year. I hope your winter festivities are restful and merry, and that the new year brings you all the strength, resilience, and joy you need to continue our loving fight for the earth in 2025. See you in January!