Reading the land
In the app trail, George describes the Punch Bowl from this bench: the combination of bracken, heath, gorse, and birch, and, to the west, ancient beech and oak woodland. However, the broom squires were just one link in the very long chain of people who have used and managed this land.
Substantial woodland clearance began around 6,000 years ago during the Neolithic period to make space for farming. By the Bronze Age large chunks of woodland were clear and farming was already beginning to exhaust the soil, resulting in heathland. The poor-quality soil prevented the return of dense woodland, though nature would still reclaim it with scrub and silver birch. At the same time these spaces proved valuable for grazing animals and providing essential resources such as fuel, timber for construction or charcoal, and food.
During the early medieval or Saxon period land coalesced under manorial management where a large landowner would have their manor house, but everyone had the right to use poorer quality areas for grazing and resources. This was a folk-right, something everyone knows and, to a greater or lesser degree, respects, but it’s not enshrined in law. Following the Norman invasion and the desire to create new vast hunting grounds for the nobility, steps were taken to recognise and protect the rights of commoners to access the land and to continue using it to graze animals and take resources. Significant penalties were created to prevent commoners from building fences or helping themselves to the Kings Deer, while the system could be abused by local lords to raise money, through fines or by selling access rights. But common rights were on the whole preserved. George and the broom squires were in effect the inheritors of these common rights, some of which still remain in place today.
Though they may not be much to look at, walking around a site like Hindhead can show historic banks and ditches, pits or mounds, all revealing a story of landscape exploitation that gives us clues to changing use and ownership. One example is some of the large banks, pictured below, at Highcombe Bottom, where slightly more fertile land was removed from common land for a fee paid to the lord of the manor – a process called enclosure – to create small fields.
