In January's Clun Chronicle Mike Newman pondered whether people can be hefted to a place in the manner a mountain sheep is born hefted to its hillside. Certainly they can, and I have met farmers who possess an instinctive knowledge of their land inherited through generations. They can be described as hefted because they both identify with their land and understand it. Such farmers lie at one end of the spectrum of understanding of the countryside, at the other are the "concrete kids" of the cities.
According to a recent survey one-in-five children have never seen the countryside. Many have only seen rural animals on television or in zoos. The gross light pollution that pervades our landscape means that many urban kids, and adults too, have never seen the Milky Way. A few years ago, I met a thirty-year old London-based researcher in rural Oxfordshire. As we strolled around the green fields she confided that she had learnt about ridge and furrow at school, but in her twenty or so years she had never before seen it. We truly live in an age that is out of touch with the landscape and that is why it is under such great threat.
Millennia ago people appreciated both the land and the sky. They revered places where the sun or moon created special alignments, especially at the solstices. It is during the winter solstice that the mid-Clun valley is at its most mysterious. The lie of the land around our town creates a gentle amphitheatre with Clun at its centre. On a mid-winter dawn, Sowdley Wood shades the town while the rising sun lights the land from Whitcott and Bicton. In a reversal of expectation the new day's light travels from west to east towards Clun. A little after nine, the sun bursts into view in the low gap between the Rock of Woolbury and the Riddings above Woodside. For many years I have nurtured a theory that on the morning of the winter solistice the sun would rise centre in this gap just as the sunlight creeping from the west reached Clun Castle. If this were the case, it would make the castle grounds a very special site, perhaps one where our ancestors built a stone or wood circle long before de Say erected his fortification. Alas! As in so many previous years, the winter solstice of 2007 saw Clun fog-bound and nothing could be seen. The next morning brought a better day with a clear blue sky and delightful white frost. As the sunlight crept from Whitcott Keysett toward the castle, I waited impatiently for sunrise. As the ground beneath my feet was lit, the sun burst from behind the hills but it was positioned to the west of the gap and not dead centre as I had hoped.
Back to the drawing board for this theory? I think so. But just contemplating the way the light falls on the land increased my understanding of this valley and fashioned a delight out of an ordinary winter's morning. It is a lack of understanding of the landscape and our responsibilities for it that lies behind so many appalling planning decisions and the sprawl of concrete over green fields—from which, thankfully, the Clun Valley is sheltered. But if much of England is to have any decent countryside a century from now, we need urgently to increase public understanding of the countryside. If people don’t know it, they can't love it as so many of us do.
Andy Boddington
Published in the Clun Chronicle, February 2008