There is a venerable tradition of literature about the lines humans have created in the British landscape. Alfred Watkins’s The Old Straight Track, Francis Hitching’s Earth Magic, Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways and a plethora of natural histories and hedgerow-seeking illuminations – recently John Wright’s The Natural History of the Hedgerow. All are fascinated with fragmentation and connection, and infused with the joys and conundrums we layer on our land with our human footfall. In Linescapes, Hugh Warwick provides a good-humoured, even visionary, perspective on the fragile ecology of our hedges, roads, power lines and railways. Often opting for the hedgehog’s-eye view (his first book, A Prickly Affair, declared his passion for this important indicator species), he reveals how the man-made lines in our landscape present a paradox. They were originally put there to fragment, assert ownership or to restrain livestock, yet over time their edges and intricacies have provided opportunities for adaptable wildlife to flourish. Walls sympathetic to wildlife can contribute to its recovery, sometimes “very slowly, as lichens inch to the corners of the compass. Sometimes with the sneaky speed of a stoat on a mission.”
While we have lost 98% of our wildflower meadows and 50% of our ancient woodland in the last 100 years, Warwick asks us to shift our sightline away from ugliness and ruination towards the potential of new habitats. “Connection is what we need, and what nature needs if we are to tackle the global collapse of species,” he argues.
Wending his way along archeological lines such as the reaves – bronze age boundary walls – of Dartmoor, among hedges, ditches and dykes, Warwick considers how these man-made habitats came to be. In Woodwalton and Holme Fen in Cambridgeshire he sees a rejoining of wild with wild in the Great Fen project; between Peterborough and Huntingdon, where the destruction of rare and fragile wetlands was nearly complete, new lifeblood is returning. Little owls are attracting hordes of birdwatchers; right behind them hares frolic among a managed patchwork of newly scrutinised, rejuvenating land.
Warwick presents the complexities of the task we have created for ourselves. Among the walls of North Ronaldsay, Orkney’s most isolated island – where lichen was scraped from the rock to dye sheep’s wool – black guillemots nest in the interstices of the stones and fulmars roost beside them. But although this architecture is a sanctuary, it can also be a death trap. Fulmars are gregarious and groups can become caught with no runway to take off, so they accumulate and perish.
The author is at his lyrical best when discussing “ancient paths and green lanes”: he sidles alongside highway historian Valerie Belsey to describe “the green lane effect” of the warm, sheltered, microclimatic tunnels of Devon, where 2,000 species can be found within an 85-mile stretch. He focuses his inquisitive eye on beauty and complexity – roots like “a wattle-wall … like dancing figures writhing around one another” – and praises the luxuriant foxgloves, their “lewd openness and their promiscuous seduction of bumblebees”. Later he is seduced by the wobbly line of a badger track in deepest Dorset, “a faint line in the grass which seemed to swallow me then spill me down as I slipped on unexpected slickness”. Sheltering from a rainstorm he shows us “among twisted trees, hearts open to the world, knots rotted into perfect holes for wildlife to shelter”.
None of our engineering escapes Warwick’s ecological fossicking. Canals, for instance, not only made the world work more speedily for humans but were are also useful for invasive and recolonising organisms of all sorts. Railways, an even faster connection, were “animated and deliberate earthquakes, destructive of all wise social habit, or possible natural beauty, carriages of damned souls on the ridges of their own graves’, he writes, quoting John Ruskin. But the verges that are planted with hazel, and so noisy with the trains that predators are deterred, are dormouse heaven.
Warwick is a generous companion and never a prickly know-it-all, even as he presents his manifesto for reconnection. “Wherever we leave our lines we are creating change,” he suggests. All such lines have the potential to help wildlife, he writes, but environmentalists need to sit at the same table as accountants, and all need to keep nature’s wish-list in mind.
• Miriam Darlington’s Otter Country is published by Granta.
• Linescapes: Remapping and Reconnecting Britain’s Fragmented Wildlife is published by Square Peg. To order a copy for £15.29 (RRP £17.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
