These late-winter days bring out the map-worm in me. Partly, of course, this is a practical business. I plot the routes of walks not yet accomplished, dream up fantastical holidays where every Michelin-starred hotel lies on the edge of a wilderness. But maps are texts, and there is huge pleasure in simply reading them, decoding their narratives, hunting for digressions and sub-plots. The Ordnance Survey sheet on which I now live, Landranger 144, is full of tantalising cliffhangers. East of Swaffham is a tuft-shaped hamlet called Ivy Todd. Is it, like the freestanding ivy bushes after which it is named, a place that grew like a shell around some now-vanished ancient foundation? What happened at High Wrong Corner, on the edge of the MoD’s Stanford Battle Area? And why is there a moat in a wood with the indecipherable name of Hazel Hurn?
Visiting these places on the ground can be a terrible blow to your romantic imaginings, and sometimes it seems better just to take a sheer aesthetic delight in charts, in the chiming of the village names strung out like concrete poems along the byroads. The idea that maps show some objective truth, either for the maker or the reader, is nonsense. All have a point of view, and even geographers differentiate between true maps, which have everything to do with interpretation, and what they call “tracings”, or hyper-realistic ground plans.
Yet even the latter can be powerfully evocative. In 1847 Joseph Johns made a scale plan of the standing and fallen trees in a plot of Boubinsky Prales, an aboriginal forest in Czechoslovakia. It is a map with an acute sense of time: the trees are represented (from above) with such precision that you can see how the fallen ones are entangled, how they are split, broken, weathering at the tips, where new trees are growing and what their girth is. It’s a snapshot, a frozen moment, but conveys a sense of the ceaseless decay and regeneration of the wildwood — and of the ceaseless, reverent watcher.
No true map is more redolent of interpretation than the oldest detailed chart of Norfolk, drawn by William Faden in 1797. Faden was geographer to George III, and his inch-to-the-mile map is highly accurate for the late 18th century. But it’s the overwhelming prominence of two features that strikes you: the extent of the commonland, and the respectful detailing of the great houses. The commons are everywhere — on all the poor land between villages, along the river valleys, over the saltmarshes, covering maybe a quarter of the county’s land surface. The big houses have the names of their owners — who subscribed to the map — written alongside them. Put these facts together and you can see the map for what it is — a prospectus, a shopping list of land for the enclosures.
In the milky February sunshine I go up to look for one of the most remarkable features in Faden’s map, a latticework of commons, maybe ten square miles in extent, stretching between half a dozen villages south of Wymondham. But, beyond a few hoary gorse bushes on the verges, there is no evidence that it ever existed. Both Bunwell’s village greens have gone. Wymondham Common’s 50 scattered cottages are vanished. The three miles of commonland alongside the drove road from Forncett to Wattlefield (these strips were called “long meadows” in East Anglia) is now a numbing avenue of rape.
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Nationally the figures are shaming. Between 1761 and 1844, Parliament, acting on behalf of roughly 10,000 landowners, passed 1,893 Acts for the destruction of two million acres of common pasture, heath, fen and wood, and a further 2,911 Acts which took 4½ million acres of common fields into private cultivation. Between two and three million commoners were made into displaced persons as a result and driven into either wage dependence or the poorhouse. England’s successful big-farming future was built on an act of cultural and ecological obliteration that would have done credit to a totalitarian nation.
The enclosure of his native village helped to drive the poet John Clare mad. Standing on the edge of what had been Carleton Rode’s vast common, and thinking of the clinical surveying of its potential by Faden, I’m surprised that, nationwide, they didn’t spark a revolution.
richard.mabey@thetimes.co.uk