Not Purely to Please Us

An actively coppiced wood is full of edges and full of light. The dark interior of an undisturbed wood may seem a dull place by comparison but it may contain just as much diversity, though the species will be different. The creatures that shun the edge are often drab and boring compared to the bright butterflies and song birds of coppice. The stag beetle is top of the range for visual interest. We often wax lyrical about the wildlife of coppices but who are we to say that fritillaries and chiffchaffs have more right to exist than some greyish grub that lives in dead logs and few of us has ever seen? Everything has a right to life and wild creatures are not there purely to please us.

— Patrick Whitefield, How to Read the Landscape

How Old Is the Countryside?

The Old Men of Moccas give me a tangible feeling of how old the countryside is. We gaily toss about words like Medieval and Neolithic, and hundreds of years run off our tongues like grams in a cake recipe. But these old, old trees, fuller of dead wood than live, sitting there, growing by tiny rings each year or perhaps dying a little bit more than growing, give a real visual experience to the word ‘age’. And when I saw the ridge and furrow under their feet I had some tangible idea of just how long ago it was that those men and oxen made those ridges and furrows.

— Patrick Whitefield, How to Read the Landscape

Constant Change

Landscapes are constantly changing. Sometimes people are the cause of change but landscapes also change in spite of us. Mostly we try to keep things more or less as they are, as arable fields, pasture, gardens and so on. But all the while natural succession is waiting in the wings, ready to take the vegetation forward to a more mature stage as soon as we relax our grip. The whole gamut of succession runs from bare soil, or even bare rock, at one end to mature woodland at the other.

— Patrick Whitefield, How to Read the Landscape

Explaining the Landscape

Everything we see in the landscape is the result of a complex of different causes. We don’t like complexity. We would always much rather put something down to a single cause. It’s never true but it’s easier on our brains.

— Patrick Whitefield, How to Read the Landscape