Contemporary Forest Landscapes in Britain: Ownership, Environmentalism and Leisure

CONTEMPORARY FOREST LANDSCAPES IN BRITAIN: OWNERSHIP, ENVIRONMENTALISM AND LEISURE

Andrew Garner

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University College London. 2002 ProQuest Number: U643286

INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted.

In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest.

ProQuest U643286

Published by ProQuest LLC(2015). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author.

ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract

This study falls within the ambit of recent work exploring the social and cultural arrangements of space. It examines how embodied landscapes connect with, make and contest political inequalities. Two ancient Forest landscapes, Hatfield Forest in Essex owned by the National Trust and the New Forest in Hampshire managed by the Forestry Commission, are examined as sites that are subject to increasingly diverse aspirations and values about who or what the countryside is for. The variable construction of nature and the differential experience of those constituting it is examined at two levels. Firstly, a theoretical exploration of how landscapes, discourses of place and identity, and material culture emerge in practices and embodiment. Secondly, an investigation of Forests through the perceptions and actions of different groups of people who live, work, volunteer or in a variety of ways manage, the Forest landscape. Substantive chapters consider arguments between ecologists, foresters and locals over a restoration programme; the construction of place and personal identities by managers, staff and volunteers; the politically and morally contested landscape of fox hunting; the connection between skilful tool use, place and gender among members of a work gang; and the making of different senses of the environment by managers and ecologists. It is argued that to understand the differential construction of Forest landscapes, we should concentrate on the points at which discourses emerge in the world and when the material world, in turn, constitutes discursive practice. Consideration is given to the practices and application of skilful knowledge, such as using chainsaws or maps, and to the ways in which the material world, for example soundscapes, contribute to the making of social meanings. The material and symbolic uses of trees are discussed. Finally, the implications are considered in the light of the fault lines exposed by recent events in the countryside between working and leisured landscapes. In memory of Alan Piddington (1943-1999) Contents

List of Figures ...... 8 List of Maps ...... 9 List of Tables ...... 9 INTRODUCTION...... 10 The Study areas ...... 12 Research Methodology ...... 17 Ways of being - the development of landscape perspectives ...... 22 The social uses of trees ...... 30 Thesis organisation ...... 36 A brief note on style ...... 39

Chapter 1 ...... 41 WHOSE NEW FOREST? MAKING PLACE ON THE URBAN/RURAL FRINGE...... 41 Historical roots of contemporary discord ...... 42 Selling it to the tourists - learning the lay of the land ...... 44 Contesting the Forest: "bunny-huggers", Commoners and the Forest with no trees...... 50 Conclusion and Coda: the interstices of pow er...... 56

Chapter 2 ...... 59 LIVING HISTORY: TREES AND METAPHORS OF IDENTITY IN AN ENGLISH FOREST... 59 Identity and Trees in cross-cultural perspective ...... 61 Power and identity ...... 64 A question of materiality - identity and things ...... 68 MaJcing self at Portingbury Rings: Skill and knowledge in tree felling ...... 69 A ramble through time...... 77 Conclusion: metaphors of living history ...... 81

Chapter 3 ...... 84 PASSION AND PREJUDICE: FOXHUNTING AND THE MORALITY OF LAND. PEOPLE AND ANIMALS IN THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE...... 84 Researching hunting ...... 86 A Hunt with the New Forest Foxhounds ...... 92 How to ‘be’ in the countryside ...... 97 The morality of animals in the English countryside ...... 104 The limits of morality: intrusions into rural places ...... I l l The ‘Immorality’ of Technology - a brief material culture of walkie-talkies, bicycles and clothes ...... 113 Conclusion ...... 117 Chapter 4 ...... 119 (RE)-PRESENTING IDENTITY: CONVERSATIONS IN THE FOREST...... 119 Conversation 1 : Captain Barclay; Retired Master of the Hunt ...... 120 Identity in the intersection between local constructions and larger cultural movements ...... 125 Conversation 2: Olwyn Mowatt - an ‘incomer’ ...... 129 Order, Resistance and Ambivalence ...... 133 Conversation 3: Richard Stride - Commoner and FC Forester ...... 135 Being ‘local’ ...... 139 Conclusion ...... 140

Chapter 5 ...... 142 THE RITUAL OF TOOLS AND MAGIC OF PLACE: WORK, CLASS AND GENDER IN THE FOREST...... 142 Tools in culture and tools of culture ...... 145 Working in the Forest ...... 151 Tools of class and status ...... 165 Rural masculinity and “hard men” of the Forest ...... 171 Managing masculinities: Female Foresters ...... 182 Conclusion ...... 185

Chapter 6...... 188 THE MAKING OF NATURE AT RISK: TOPOLOGIES OF MANAGEMENT IN AN “ETHNICALLY CLEANSED” FOREST...... 188 From Ecological Determinism to Hybrid Natures ...... 191 Topologies of Management in the Forest ...... 207 Nature-near and nature-far topologies ...... 221 Nature-far topologies ...... 223 Nature-near topologies ...... 233 Conclusion ...... 246 CONCLUSION...... 251 Economic and social changes ...... 253 The context of Management Policies...... 255 The centrality of identity ...... 258 The engagement of material culture ...... 262 The construction of relationships with ‘nature’ and animals ...... 263 BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 266 Acknowledgements

A great many people contributed to this study, often in ways they perhaps were not aware of. I would like to thank Barbara Bender and Chris Tilley, who, with very different styles, contributed significantly to the evolution of my thinking. Barbara has the unique skill of combining intellectual rigour with personal warmth, and her detailed critique always generated enthusiasm and suggested new possibilities. Chris was able to see straight to the difficult areas in a piece of writing and to succinctly frame the issue. He also hosted evening sessions at his flat in London for a group of postgraduate students at which we tackled some extremely dense papers. Obligatory bottles of wine helped proceedings along. Jane Gamer, my mother, has read and edited every word along the way and provided a reliable test as to whether what I thought I had written actually made sense. At times, she was ably assisted by my brother David who ruthlessly lost thousands of words in the quest for succinctness. My father Carl helped me to let go of a chapter that was not working well. The many hours of careful reading, followed by highly constmctive conversations on the telephone deserve more thanks than is possible here.

I am also indebted to Vikki, Ian and Adrian at Hatfield Forest, for being so helpful in allowing me to probe their working lives so regularly. David Russell at the National Trust, who was very generous with his time and helped to focus my early questions. At the New Forest Mike Seddon, Bridget Hall and Martin Fletcher were all influential in enabling my access to the Forestry Commission. Many more people have been generous with their time and friendship, but Paul, Vicky, Simon and Melissa have become a valued part of my life in the process of disagreeing with my ideas. Garry Marvin provided enthusiastic early morning coffees and lively discussions about all things foxy.

Richard Reeves, another enthusiast, put me on the right path with historical material for Bolderwood. Ben Law, a forestry consultant who lives the sort of sustainable lifestyle in Prickly-nut Wood to which many aspire but fail to achieve, gave me a critical perspective on the more official forest landscapes. But most of all I am indebted because so many people, named and unnamed, introduced me to their Forest, and opened my eyes to a complex and vibrant world and the things they value in it.

Finally, my wife Emma has provided constant intellectual, emotional and economic support. Over the last four years we have had much to be thankful for - and painful loss. Throughout she listened patiently to me developing my ideas, however scatterbrained, and reminded me of what really matters when the work became all- consuming. List of Figures

Figure 1 : Characterising staff at the FC, in Log Roll, Christmas 2000...... 16 Figure 2: Mr and Mrs Andrews, Gainsborough (1727-1788) ...... 24 Figure 3: Kite Flying, Vadim Gorbatov, 2000 ...... 31 Figure 4: Content analysis of Drawn to the Forest: images by category ...... 32 Figure 5: 'New Forest Pony', cover of OS map. Outdoor Leisure 22, 1996 ...... 45 Figure 6: 'Bucklers Hard', cover of OS map. Outdoor leisure 22, 1992 ...... 47 Figure 7: Using a chainsaw to fell a Birch tree ...... 73 Figure 8: Method of felling a tree ...... 75 Figure 9: The problems of preserving cultural heritage (Log Roll, 3^^ Ed. Christmas 2000)...... 89 Figure 10: The Bam, Hatfield Forest ...... 153 Figure 11 : Burley Yard, New Forest ...... 155 Figure 12: Idealised landscape relations ...... 164 Figure 13: Dimensions of Action ...... 186 Figure 14: The primacy of a 'Western' ontology (after Ingold 2000:42) ...... 197 Figure 15: Being in the environment (after Ingold 2000:46) ...... 198 Figure 16: The production of nature for visitors ...... 220 Figure 17: ‘New Forest: New Future’ parodied in the December 1999, Log Roll.... 222 Figure 18: Post glacial changes in the New Forest (Tubbs 1986: 54) ...... 225 Figure 19: The Great Exhibition of 1851 - Elms and conifers inside the Crystal Palace ...... 241 Figure 20: Species list, Bolderwood arboretum ...... 243 Figure 21 : “Important work” (from Log Roll, 'Millennium edition') ...... 249 List of Maps

Map 1 : A fox hunt in the New Forest ...... 94 Map 2: Olfactory, auditory and visible landscapes of foxhunting ...... 103 Map 3: Bolderwood, 1799 ...... 237 Map 4: Bolderwood, Driver’s map 1814 ...... 238

List of Tables

Table 1 : Trees at Hatfield Forest ...... 66 Table 2: Trees and social identities ...... 82 Table 3: Visibility index and senses in time and space ...... 101 Table 4: A framework of countryside relations ...... 116 Introduction

Forests and woodland, perhaps more than any other landscape in England, bear the imprint of generations of landownership. As a valuable resource, for building materials, fuel and the animals that shelter in it. Forests have long been the symbol of established landowning wealth. Agriculture and mineral assets may drive economies, but Forests, the original hunting grounds of Kings, make statements about time- honoured status, wealth and longevity. Today they are also valued by millions of people for their role in leisure and recreation, as metaphors of the state of the environment and a measure of ecological health. Behind these dignified images lies a far more turbulent past and an equally contested present. It is this contested present, and the ways in which identity, discourse and everyday practices are implicated in these contests, that is the subject of this research.

A report commissioned by the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) posed the question: “Given the intense pressures on the countryside, how can people's increasingly varied aspirations and values be accommodated?” (Clark et al 1994:5). In its conclusion, the report maintained that:

a) public agencies have glossed over difficulties and conflicts under the mistaken belief that

these can be resolved by good management;

b) in reality, management methods are 'ill-equipped to handle the deeper, cultural tensions that

arise as the result of widely varying expectations about the use of the countryside'; and

c) therefore, these tensions need to be much more carefully analysed before appropriate policy

responses can be devised.

(Clark et al 1994:5).

Within this framework of increasing pressure on the countryside and the privatisation of public spaces, woodland and forests are moving up the political agenda. Just as, globally, the destruction of rain forests has become one of the most powerfully charged metaphors of threats posed to the environment (O'Riorden 1995) and the price of development, so, in Britain, Burgess has argued.

10 [w]oods and trees ... [have become] the new symbols of the environmental crisis and potent

sites for increasingly bitter struggles between the authorities, existing communities and the

newly-emerging, loose coalitions of environmental activists and so-called 'new age' groups.

(Burgess 1996:9). Similarly, Macnaghten and Urry (1998) argue that as environmental organisations like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Earth First find themselves increasingly involved in developing solutions in consultation with government agencies, even they have misread the degree to which public sentiment mobilises behind certain environmental issues. Moreover in the wake of the BSE and Foot and Mouth crises, the future of farming and the rural communities that rely on it are being questioned as never before. At the crux of these debates is the question ‘what (or who) is our countryside for’?

Consequently, a key question tackled in this work is how do people make different places? How do they create a sense of value in the countryside? Although they move through the same world, they experience and value quite different things (Strang 1997:4). Indeed, these landscapes, as Cosgrove puts it, are “irreducibly social in production and conception” (1990:3). They are about the way in which people understand their relationship with the material world. Landscapes combine the material with the symbolic. The material world (articulated through flora, water, topography, buildings) is represented, framed, interpreted and understood through different discourses. People engage with landscapes, investing labour, constructing, contesting, and appropriating them. Landscapes both create and are created by, social relations and cultural perceptions. In the words of Inglis (1977) landscape is “a concept of high tension”. For some it is distant, mythic, for others it is a “close- grained, worked-upon, lived-in place” (Bender 1993).

Essentially then, focusing on wooded and forested landscapes is one way of engaging with peoples' environmental values, with how human environmental relationships are constructed and with ways in which different groups value the landscaped “What

' It is difficult to think of 'environmental' values without recalling the last two decades of growing environmental politics. However, here I am taking 'environmental values' to refer, in the broadest sense, to human relationships with the physical world. Consequently, how different groups 'value the landscape' refers to a more detailed and nuanced level where an 'environmental' discourse is but one

11 makes people care, what makes them value one thing above another, is essentially a cultural question” (Strang 1997:5). In Britain in recent years trees have been co-opted in such diverse discourses as road development, sites of Special Scientific Interest, claims about the significance and historical importance of certain sites to different groups, debates about nature, farming, hunting, private and common usage, rights to access, and ideas of peace and community. Trees, it seems, are good to think with (Davies 1988:34, Bloch 1998). They are highly visible in the landscape. They are long-lived, able, in some cases, to span many human generations. They represent nature but are also good as metaphors of human intervention. They provide tools, building materials, food, medicine, transport and shelter. At the same time they serve as a rich symbolic, ritual and metaphorical resource base. Consequently, in engaging with trees, in examining how people describe, experience, represent and ultimately value woodland landscapes, this research crosses into historical contexts, economic modes and land use; into how values are inculcated and knowledge organised into categories; socio-spatial organisation, notions of identity and community; and the myths, symbols and metaphors through which these are all expressed.

This introductory chapter outlines the main themes of the thesis. First, the Forests that provide the field sites for the research are sketched before introducing the people who live, work, volunteer and spend time in them - and who provide the principle focus for the study. Secondly, the organisation of the research and methods of investigation are reviewed. Then, thirdly, I consider the theoretical context, drawing - in broad strokes - the evolution in thinking about landscapes and a summary of how trees and woodland have been approached in cross-cultural perspectives. The final section identifies two key lines of investigation that supply the organising principle in each chapter before briefly outlining the content of each chapter.

The Study areas

My initial aim was to undertake research in three sites; Ruislip Woods, a small peri urban woodland in north London, Hatfield Forest in Essex, and the New Forest in Hampshire. These sites escalate dramatically in scale and complexity of management

among many culturally expressive ways of 'making' the physical world, ushering it into the realm of the social. A more detailed discussion can be found in chapter 6.

12 organisation. However, having done initial research in Ruislip, I decided to concentrate on Hatfield Forest and the New Forest to make best use of available time, and because many of the issues emerging in interviews in Ruislip were similar to those arising in Hatfield. One striking difference, though, in the interviews conducted in Ruislip, was the degree to which the woods were marked both as a place of recreation and danger {cf. Burgess 1995). The metaphoric potential for woodlands to be forbidding places is also examined by Harrison (1992) who argues that the “governing institutions of the West - religion, law, family, city - originally established themselves in opposition to the forests” (1992, ix). It is worth clarifying what is meant by the term ‘Forest’ in this thesis. The contemporary understanding of a forest generally involves "a dense growth of tree and underbrush covering a large tract of land" (Longman Concise Dictionary 1985). However, the original meaning of ‘Forest’ denoted a place where a sovereign or other lord had a right to keep beasts of the chase. Hence, Forests^ were places for deer rather than trees (Rackham 1989:38): they might contain large areas of moorland, pasture and other open land. The first royal hunting Forest, protected by a specific set of Forest laws and imposed over existing ownership, uses and rights of common, was King William’s (1066- 1087) New Forest {Nova Foresta) established sometime between the Norman invasion and 1086 (Tubbs 1986:46).

Hatfield Forest is an area (917.5 acres, about 3.71km^) of mixed coppiced woodland and woodland pasture lying to the east of Bishops Stortford and south of Stansted Airport in Essex. According to Rackham in his evocatively named book The Last Forest, Hatfield is a “unique survival, in full working order”, of the “English compartmented wood-pasture” system (1989:19). Under this system the Forest was managed to balance provision of a number of important resources for the people that variously owned, or lived in or near to Hatfield. Resources included deer for hunting, grazing for cattle, rabbits for food and fur, as well as firewood, fencing and charcoal

^ Rackham (1989) uses a capitalised 'Forest' to distinguish between the common usage - an area o f trees

- and the historically specific hunting landscapes that may well include trees but also have considerable open areas and plains. This seems a sensible course to follow and has the further advantage in drawing attention to the sedimented nature of Forests in Britain, which bear the layered imprint of the activities

13 from the coppiced underwood, timber for building materials and seasonal fruit and nuts. Apart from charcoal production and harvesting rabbits, many of the same activities still take place in the Forest, albeit in an atrophied format.

Hatfield was made a royal hunting forest around 1100 but ownership of the Forest passed through the hands of several different landowning families. Indeed, the survival - largely intact - of Hatfield Forest through successive decades where enclosure and the clearance of woodland destroyed many of the remaining ancient Forests in Britain, is due primarily, according to Rackham (1989), to the fact that the two families who owned different parts of the Forest were unable to agree on its eventual disposition. Since 1924 it has been owned and managed by the National Trust and is open to the public all year round. Hatfield has become an important recreation site with about 90,000 day visits per year^ and on Bank Holiday weekends it can have up to 10,000 visitors. A property manager and six permanent staff (called wardens) run the Forest. They are helped by three part-time and seasonal staff, a variable number of volunteers and the occasional contractor (see discussion in Chapter 6).

The New Forest is an area of approximately 375km^ of mixed woodland and heathland in south-west Hampshire flanked by Southampton and Bournemouth. It occupies a roughly rectangular piece of land between Southampton Water on the east and the River Avon on the West. The New Forest has an estimated 25 million day visits per year, of which 20 million are for walking or dog walking"^. Much of the New Forest is crown land, managed by the Forestry Commission on behalf of the

of generations of people, animals and plants. As most of the time I refer to ancient hunting Forests that

include significant proportions of open areas, capitalisation indicates this property.

^ Figure is an average 1995 - 2000 and is worked out by multiplying the recorded number of cars by a

figure of 2.6 (the same standard the Forestry Commission use) and does not include people who walk

or ride into the Forest. Wet summers and an air crash in the Forest in 2000 have substantially reduced

visitor numbers over the last three years. (Figures kindly provided by Hatfield Forest National Trust).

There are also 138 car parks, 10 campsites, 33 picnic sites, 200km o f way marked routes (mostly

cycle-paths), 2 arboreta, 3 golf courses, 12 cricket pitches, 3 sports pitches (rugby and football), and 1

Reptile Centre. Information from the ‘Executive summary’ of the ‘Access and recreation Plan for the

N ew Forest’ a part o f theManagers Plan for the Crown Lands of the New Forest 2000/2001.

14 Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA)^. Other areas within the original perambulation are managed by local councils, or owned by private estates, the National Trust and wildlife trusts. A number of villages inside and around the edges of the Forest perambulation house a substantial local population^, of whom between 300 and 500^ work directly in farming or forestry.

The Forestry Commission in the New Forest District have their main office in The Queen’s House in Lyndhurst. As an organisation they took over management of the crown lands from the Office of Woods in 1926. Many of the peculiarities of the New Forest are a result of its unique history. For instance, for some of their decisions the FC need to get permission from the Verderers’ Court. The Verderers^, originally presided over cases of infraction against the Forest laws, and still have a right of veto, which they actively use in defence of Commoners interests (see chapter 1). The Commoners are people who occupy land or property to which attaches one or more rights over the Forest such as the right to graze animals^. The Forestry Commission themselves employ about eighty permanent staff under the direction of the Deputy Surveyor (see chapter 6). One of the oldest roles in the FC is that of Keeper. The Keepers live in the Forest and have a responsibility for a particular area, a “walk” or “beat”, and for the plants and animals in them. They are also the people who manage the deer population by culling. Other major roles within the FC are given to Foresters,

^ The name of the relevant government department changed during the research period from Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries (MAFF) to DEFRA.

^ The New Forest District has a population of 165,000. The total population for the three counties,

Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire, which appear to form the main catchments for the Forest, is about

2.8 million. Totton and the Waterside parishes that border the Forest on the Southampton side, have nearly doubled their population between 1961 and 1991. (Tubbs 2001:360-1).

^ See discussion of these figures in Tubbs (2001: 121-129).

* The name is in reference to their role in protecting thevert, literally the ‘green’ or the forest plants on which the deer broused.

^ These include common of pasture (rights to depasture ponies, cattle, donkeys, and mules on the

Forest); common of mast (rights to turn out pigs during the pannage season to feed on the acorns and beech mast); common of estovers (rights to take fuelwood); common of turbary (rights to cut turf fuel and peat); and common of marl (rights to take limey clay - marl - for improvement of agricultural land). The last two are no longer practiced and the Forestry Commission has attempted to limit and regulate rights of estover (cfTubs 2001: 114-15).

15 and more recently, Rangers, who focus on communicating with the public. A joke doing the rounds at the FC during my field work put it like this: “Keepers kill things. Foresters cut down trees and Rangers apologise for the above”. Another summary of these roles (Figure 1) is found in an extract from the Log Roll, a magazine internally produced to raise money for charity.

One of the chief differences between Hatfield and the New Forest is that staff at Hatfield are firstly and primarily employees of the National Trust, with duties and responsibilities to the Trust. Working at Hatfield for all of them is primarily a matter of moving their careers forward and none thought they would remain there in the long term despite enjoying living in and near the Forest. In the New Forest, however, a significant minority of the staff lived and worked in the New Forest before they joined the Forestry Commission. While some certainly considered the New Forest as a posting on the promotion ladder, for many others their loyalty (and identity) lay in the first instance to the Forest itself (chapter 1 and 4).

k S And you think you're ovenvorked...

On seeing the above the following comments were received:

Rangers: ’Aww poor donkey wonkey’

Foresters: 'More light on its feet than our harvester - have we ever tried donkey extraction?

Keepers: ’Where’s my rifle - I’ve never shot a flying one before’

Management: ’Just put another sack on its back and it will balance’

Figure 1: Characterising staff at the FC, in Log Roll, Christmas 2000

16 Research Methodology

In common with a recent trend in anthropology, a principle problem set by this project was the need to work in disparate locations and contexts to uncover the connections that impact on forest perceptions. Marcus (1995) argues that “multi-sited” ethnography has developed in response to the increasing complexities of the world system. The most common approach to these changes has been the continuation of traditional single-site ethnography, whilst using other methods to provide the data on global processes that play an increasingly important role in local socio-cultural forms. Marcus argues that multi-sited ethnography attempts to track these changes not just in a single locale but as they themselves are constituted in new connections and relationships with disparate places - “a differently configured spatial canvas” (Marcus 1995:98, cf. Burroway et al 2001). In weaving a path which keeps sight of the local within global processes, Marcus proposes research designed around;

chains, paths, threads, conjectures, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer

establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit posited logic of

association or connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnography.

(Marcus 1995:105)

The “argument” of my ethnography is to examine how two specific Forest landscapes emerge in a range of situations and across a number of perspectives. Thus 1 trace ideas of what ‘Hatfield’ and the ‘New Forest’ are in different locations, of what they mean to different people, and how they talk about living in, working in, and spending time in them. This means following ideas, concepts and debates, in meetings, documents and publications in places that may be far removed from the physical landscape of the Forest. Hatfield, for instance, was discussed in a meeting of National Trust property managers in central Wales. A conversation about a walking holiday in the Lake District with one of the Wardens at Hatfield included a discussion of what it was like to look at trees that other people managed. Rangers visiting London comment on how ethnically “white” the New Forest seems in comparison to the capital.

At the same time, as is argued below, 1 wanted to take a specifically grounded, phenomenological approach to the research. 1 wanted to know what it was like to fell a tree, take a guided walk, make decisions about the future of the Forest; to smell it, taste it, hear it and sweat in it as millions of people do every year; to pay attention to

17 the aspects we normally do not think about, we just ‘experience’. As precedence for this, three texts were particularly influential; The Taste of Ethnographic Things by Paul Stoller (1989), and papers on ‘The language of the Forest’ by Alfred Gell (1995) and ‘Waterfalls and Song’ by Steven Feld (1996). All three challenge the reader to give serious consideration to the importance of embodied, experiential aspects of being in places. Stoller relates how the literal tastes of good and bad cooking were a way of communicating social rules and their stresses. Both Gell and Feld bring to attention the importance of sound in the making and understanding of landscape.

The research methodology needed to be flexible enough to follow the ‘Forests’ into other physical and metaphorical arenas at the same time as ensuring adequate observation and participation of embodied experience in each Forest. Getting a fuller impression of the annual and seasonal variations meant that ‘doing’ one Forest first before moving on to the other was not possible. Consequently I divided my week between the two Forests, spending at the very least one day a week in each Forest for most of the ‘official’ 12-month research period*®. At Hatfield Forest, following a meeting with the property manager, I worked as a volunteer, driving to and from the Bam once a week, leaving at 6 am to get to the Forest in time and late at the end of the day. This set a rhythm of activity, and slowly developing skills and trust. Inevitably the stmctured, regular involvement led on to other tasks: research at the Public Record Office to obtain copies of historical maps for the office, getting background information together for a winter solstice walk and a special anniversary event (see Chapter 2) at which I also worked as a guide. I accompanied friends visiting the Forest for the first time specifically to listen to their reactions and comments. I asked many of the people I met while working in the Forest if I could interview them later, preferably away from the Forest. Understandably, some people** were more amenable than others and the resultant visits were among the most memorable and successful in terms of information gathered.

Discovering new aspects, of course, is not defined by the end of the ‘research period’.

“ These included people doing leisure activities - dog-walkers, riders, cyclists, ramblers, fishermen,

birdwatchers, photographers for example - and people who described themselves as working or doing tasks - among them contractors, stockmen, teachers, painters, surveyors, and archaeologists. Obviously

18 It was initially more difficult to arrange access at the New Forest. While staff at the Forestry Commission were happy to discuss research access to the Forest (they deal with a steady stream of requests anyway), they were less happy about being the subjects o f research. After several meetings with increasingly senior staff, we came to an agreement whereby 1 produced a report on “internal communication” in return for a high degree of access to the FC organisation. The drawback for me was that for many people 1 ‘arrived’ already embedded in the internal political structures of power. Often this meant being seen to do a ‘proper’ interview - notebook to the fore - before shutting it and being able to talk in a more relaxed way about the Forest. Not surprisingly the latter conversations were often the more revealing. While senior staff had little qualms in telling me “what 1 needed to know” my relatively empowered position was far more of a hindrance when talking to members of the work gangs. To overcome this, and to get some equivalence with research at Hatfield, 1 worked (and was paid) as a member of the “Rec squad” (see chapter 5). While they were fully aware of my role as researcher, this role gradually faded into the background and 1 was pleased to be asked back by them to help with the setting up of the New Forest Show.

Once a similar pattern of weekly visits became established 1 began to spend more time down in the New Forest, as some members of staff became firm friends and 1 was able to stay over. At the same time 1 was arranging meetings and interviews with visitors and walkers, volunteers, and a variety of local interest groups. Given the large number of these in the New Forest 1 only touched the surface here. Much of my research effort was ringed by a substantial amount of time spent managing diaries, telephoning to arrange meetings and hours of driving both in and between the Forests and home^^. There was a constant frustration at having to divide my time between the Forests (and the other places they appeared in) especially as it was becoming clear to

these categories were not always strongly maintained as visits to the Forest might have an element of both work and leisure for some.

Sitting in the car became an important time for mulling over what had happened during the day, letting the significant things filter down and making mental notes to write up the next morning.

19 me just how important it was to simply “hang around” chatting and joking. Just as soon as it felt one site was going well, I had to go off to the other Forest

A tape-recorder was used to conduct 30 interviews and another 80 were recorded in note-books. I noted relevant facts and striking phrases as best I could without interrupting the flow of interviews. Conversations with, and comments from, another 40 people were also noted. There were many more chance encounters, brief exchanges and snippets overheard that I noted but which could not be dignified by the term ‘interview’. These numbers are also indicative as, increasingly, ‘interviews’ became on-going conversations. Indeed, I now find that friends in the Forest telephone to tell me about things they think will be useful (c/Pink 2000, Norman 2000). In an important sense the ‘fieldwork’ section has not come to the kind of clear and decisive end that anthropologists leaving distant villages might have experienced^"^. Rather there has been a slow change from mainly data generation (a dry description for such a juicy activity) to mainly analysis through transcribing tapes, organising notebooks, and writing. Construction of field sites, both spatially and textually, is an ongoing process rather than a clear-cut snapshot

Neither are the methods of recording without problems. Tape recordings miss gestures and vital bits of conversation as the tapes are changed over. Note-taking during a

But this in fact is similar to people’s experience of the Forest: moving from one job to another jobs, picking up tasks, carrying them on a bit before giving them to someone else; moving out of unsatisfactory jobs to better ones in same organisation; retiring, being fired or made redundant.

Admittedly my experience is partial, but then so, to a degree, is everyone’s. This connects to ideas o f landscapes on the move, see below.

The contributors in Amit (2000) challenge the perceived necessity for the total immersion of the anthropologist in the field; the separation of professional and personal areas of activity; and the existence of "the field" as an entity separate from everyday life. Several comment on the ongoing relationships with people ‘in’ the field. When the ‘field site’ is only about two hours drive away this blurring is perhaps inevitable in a way not possible for ethnographers working overseas.

In her discussion of “constructing the field”, Hastrup (1995) notes that the “kind of participation needed to identify events and write real cultures carmot be glossed as mere ‘being’ in the field. It implies a process of ‘becoming’. Becoming as a metaphor for a kind of participation that can never be complete and which is no immediate consequence of physical presence. It does not imply the anthropologist becomes identical with the others.” (19).

20 conversation is sometimes difficult and always partial. Like many anthropologists {c.f. Berglund 1998) I built up an impression of tone and style and used these to fill in parts of conversations I didn’t manage to fully record. As a ‘reality’ check, some written up interview material was given to respondents and their comments requested (chapter 1, 6 and one of the interviews in chapter 4). Apart from minor changes in phrasing and some correction of facts, those who read ‘their’ sections agreed that they were a fair representation of what they said (even if they disagreed with the argument).

Given the importance placed in this research on “being-in place” and the deliberate attention being paid to phenomenological aspects - “senses of place” - I have attempted to develop ways of recording and expressing these within the boundaries set by the specific requirements of academic writing. How successful these are I leave to the judgement of the reader. In terms of note taking I attempted to ‘listen beyond’ what was being said, recording the sights, sounds (and occasionally the smells), the gestures and the emotional tenor as best I judged them. A great many of these observations did not make their way into this text, but I feel strongly that they added to my understanding. Some, however, did — forcing me to think about ways of presenting this material, an ongoing writing experiment so to speak. Thus, I have attempted to map movements across the landscape together with soundscapes of a fox hunt; to convey some of the emotional tone of people’s sense of identity and the values they bring to the landscape through reproducing selected longer interviews; and, throughout, I use extracts from my field notes in an attempt to convey a ‘grounded’ sense of place for the discussions that follow.

Of course, sometimes things go wrong. Fieldwork is by no means a smooth experience, however polished the final ethnographies might be. At Hatfield I was taken aside by the Property Manager after several months of work to be told that I had overstepped the boundaries the evening before by tagging along with one of the members of staff at the end of the day as she prepared for a school party the next. She had felt unable to refuse my company and regarded it an imposition. I was forcibly told that any research I was doing should in no way distract staff from their duties. Clearly what I had felt was a relaxed conversation was experienced quite differently by the member of staff - a sobering experience that led me to review several other

21 events and relationships. This boundary was reinforced when I was specifically asked not to come to a “small ceremony” lopping the head off a new pollard, one of the events commemorating 75 years of National Trust ownership (see chapter 2).

Over the first few months at the New Forest, several members of staff, part jokingly, would tell each other to shut up because the “spy was back”. The occasional curt dismissal by senior staff and warnings to be aware of asking certain questions or talking to particular people, were powerful reminders, if any were needed, of the highly politicised nature of Forest landscapes in England. One of the most sensitive areas, given the current political climate in Britain, is the issue of hunting and I have documented the difficulties I encountered in chapter 3. While not all managers were sympathetic to researchers, most were highly aware of the potentially political nature of research intervention. Sharpe, Burnham and Graziani (1998) have noted the need for anthropologists to “study up” and not to ignore the implications of powerful organisations involved in woodland exploitation, but doing this can be a highly political activity in and of itself. In late 2000 I was briefly shown a memo specifically vetoing Forest Districts arranging research about the organisation itself without clearance from FC headquarters.

Ways of being - the development of landscape perspectives

This study falls within the ambit of recent efforts exploring the social and cultural arrangements of space and the spatial organisation of the social. Over the last fifteen years authors across a number of disciplinary backgrounds have been exploring the new avenues opened up by investigations of landscape and place (Bender 1993, 1998, Lovell 1998, Strang 1997, Thrift 1996, Tilley 1994, Massey 1995, to name but a few). Below 1 trace a brief intellectual history of landscape arriving at an outline for the theoretical scope of this study. 1 have made much use of a particularly lucid summary in chapter one of Bender’s (1998) book on Stonehenge.

For many people, a ‘landscape’ refers in the first instance to a particular form of representational painting, and connected aesthetics of place, that gives priority to vision. Under this more common usage, landscapes are primarily about viewing.

22 about seeing from a particular perspective in a way that opens up distant vistas for a number of reasons, but chiefly for the pleasure and education of the viewer. Whether the view is a painting or a prominent position overlooking gardens, fields or forests, a ‘landscape’ requires an unfolding of nature, a laying out into the distance. It is a powerful conjunction of vision and ideas of nature made material in paint. A painting is one material manifestation of a particular series of ideas about nature. Only latterly has landscape been utilised by academics to analyse the relationship between society and the natural world. ‘Landscape’ has become a critical term in the investigation of humanised space and of the critique of the powerful ‘views’ societies produce.

So it seems appropriate to use a landscape painting as a starting point. John Berger (1972) in his book fVays o f Seeing discusses the well-known painting by Thomas Gainsborough Mr and Mrs Andrews (Figure 2). Berger is concerned with the social meanings that are expressed in, and the inequalities hidden by, particular modes of representation. The connection established between a highly valorised art form and the elite who commissioned the artist’s work played an important role in the development of landscape painting. For instance, among the pleasures the painting gave to Mr and Mrs Andrews, says Berger, is the pleasure of seeing their landowning status made substantial in oils*^. The point, he argues is that while Mr and Mrs Andrews might be engaged in the philosophic enjoyment of “unperverted nature”, this nature did not include the labour of the people that gathered the com or kept the sheep. “There were very strict property limits to what was considered natural” (Berger 1972:108 italics in original).

Talking about the same painting, Prince (1988) makes a similar point: “The picture extols the present and prospective satisfactions of landownership and the attendant possessions, offering a life of contented ease, a comely wife, fine clothes, broad acres, a bounteous harvest, an obedient hound at heel and the promise of good shooting ahead” (1988:103).

23 s

'■‘..-•C:^, -iv^^^:<^^-.wS.$âSSSss5î

Figure 2: Mr and Mrs Andrews, Gainsborough (1727-1788)

A similar point is made, in more detail, by Williams (1985) in his analysis of “structures of feeling” in The Country and the City^^. It is no surprise, Williams claims, that changes in the symbolic and iconographie decoration of the landscape coincided with an increasing ability for people to produce their own nature*^. Through improved earthmoving, draining and irrigation, through new capital, equipment and skills for hire, what was being done was a new disposition of nature even while the idea of arranging nature was far from new (1985: 120, 122-3). While landscape paintings might represent, in an 18^‘’ century phrase ‘pleasing prospects’, they were hardly ever a working countryside.

Both Berger and Williams react against a notion of landscape emerging through stable layers of history, the kind of landscape that Hoskins (1985 [1955]) writes about in his Making of the English Landscape. Hoskins gives us a picture of the landscape as

The 1985 Hogarth Press edition o f Williams’The Country and the City, reproduces Mr and Mrs Andrews on the front cover floating over a bleak engraving of 19* century London. According to Prince (1988) Mr Andrews was a proponent of the new methods of farming being made popular by at the time. Wheat has been drilled, the hawthorn hedges in the distance neatly cut and laid and a new style five-bar gate leads into the field with the sheep (Prince 1988: 103).

24 palimpsest where each succeeding generation leaves their own traces in the landscape etched over the previous patterns. In this view each place becomes freighted with the past, each feature testament to previous lives and living. The trouble with this way of thinking about landscape, as Bender (1998:26) points out, is that the past is presented as over and done with, as essentially apolitical. As we tiptoe through the ruins left by previous generations, we are always in danger of selecting only one version to celebrate. Williams’s (1985) connections between people’s perceptions of their worlds to the social, economic and political conditions in which they find themselves, enables us to think of landscape as part of a “structure of feeling”. He is particularly good on drawing out the class aspects of landscape, a fact that nicely echoes the split in his own life between a working class upbringing in rural Wales, and the abstract Cambridge academic he became later. He is able to show how perceptions mesh with historically constituted structures and institutions, and how these are constantly reinvented and reappropriated (Bender 1998:34). Landscapes become multiple, partial and contradictory. However, in his ‘literary’ focus Williams tends to ignore “the physicality... of the landscape... how space (and time) are involved in the processes of socialisation and empowerment” (Bender 1998:35).

In response to this kind of critique, a number of writers have been influenced by the phenomenologieal philosophy of Heidegger (1962) and Merleau-Ponty (1962) who stress the act of dwelling and being-in the world - the embodied experience of the world. Three influential writers in this tradition are: Bourdieu, Giddens and Ingold. Bourdieu (1977, 1990) coined the term habitus to describe the often inarticulate but routinised ways in which people understand and experience the world. Habitus is knowing “‘how to go on’ in the world” (Tilley 1994:16) and is learned in the encounter with the world - by attentive involvement. Habitus is good at explaining both historicity and reproduction of social relations (Bender 1998:36). But it seems less flexible in allowing for new ways of thinking to enter the world of experience.

[WJhilst there is full acknowledgement of the way in which people negotiate their worlds, the

emphasis is on the way such negotiations, resistances and subversions occur within the

confines of whathabitus makes possible and thinkable.

(Bender 1998:36)

25 Giddens’ (1985) development of “structuration theory” and Ingold’s (1993, 2000) “taskscapes” both share an emphasis on action and agency that offer the potential for landscape to be thought anew. For Giddens, while people are active agents caught up in a world of predetermined social rules, they are also able to affect change in that world by their actions and thoughts. Agency is both subject to, and creator of, structure - there is no one-way causal arrow. However, Giddens is criticised by Pred (1990), Rose (1993) and Bender (1998) for failing to take into account the gendering of landscape, and the differentials of power that separate women and men in time and space. Ingold’s (1993, 2000) taskscapes, again introduced through a discussion of a painting, this time Brueghel’s The Harvesters (1565), is one of sweat and labour, of pleasures and patterns, of fields, trees and buildings that mark the day's movements. Landscape, for Ingold, is the material record of these tasks, a sort of solidified sweat. Heidegger recognised the importance of bringing a sense of dwelling into the equation, but in doing so he presented a somewhat idealised and ahistorical vision of an Aryan German peasantry at home in the forest which is open to criticism — not least because of his flirtation with Nazism. Ingold’s peasants too, are problematic, being “wr-peasants rather than precisely located sixteenth century peasants” (Bender 1998:37).

The trouble with a focus on embodied experience. Bender argues, is that it tends to ignore precisely the sort of ideas that animate Williams’s ‘structures of feeling’. In the rush to create landscape out of embodied activities, political inequalities and representations of difference are left out. It is the need to mesh embodied landscapes with political landscapes of unequal power relations that drive Bender’s exploration of Stonehenge (1998:38). Indeed Bender’s concern with the political is not so much a new perspective as a judicious re-balancing - keeping the political blade sharp while retaining the insights of embodied experiences. From earlier writers, we have the notion that landscapes serve political purposes and obscure people and practices considered less important. They are political, but the politics tends to be kept in the past. Bender’s (1998) book on Stonehenge takes political pasts and makes them contested in the present. She shows how history itself is contingent and made, and explores how embodied landscapes connect with, and contest, political inequalities.

26 Another recent development in the body of work about landscape concerns the idea of landscapes of movement. In particular, what role does migration, exile, forced removal or, at the other end of the scale, travel and tourism, have in our understanding of landscape? What happens when a landscape is defined by movement rather than place? One effect of these questions is to underline the extent to which commentators of landscape tend to assume the primacy of locality; landscape it seems is almost inevitably about attaching people, however unequally, to specific places. Clifford (1997) proposes the opposite view, expressed as “dwelling-in-travel”. His argument is based on “a view of human location as constituted by displacement as much as by stasis” (pg. 2). In his preface to Routes, Clifford recalls Amitav Ghosh's description of an Egyptian village where everyone had travelled from somewhere.

When I first came to that quiet comer of the Nile Delta I had expected to find on that most

ancient and most settled of soils a settled and restful people. I couldn't have been more wrong.

The men of the village had all the busy restlessness of airline passengers in a transit lounge.

Many of them had worked and travelled in the Sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf, others had been

in Libya and Jordan and Syria, some had been to the Yemen as soldiers, others to Saudi

Arabia as pilgrims a few had visited Europe: some of them had passports so thick they opened out like ink-blackened concertinas. And none of this was new: their grandparents and

ancestors and relatives had travelled and migrated too, in much the same way as mine had, in

the Indian subcontinent - because of wars, or for money and jobs, or perhaps simply because

they got tired of living always in one place.

(Ghosh 1986:135 quoted in Clifford 1997:1)

Here, common assumptions about landscape - that it is rooted in localities, that it is about dwelling in circumscribed places - are challenged. The result, Clifford contends, is that:

Practices of displacement might emerge as constitutive of cultural meanings rather than as

their simple transfer or extension.

(1997:3)

Locality then, becomes part of the processes of constituting culture in respect to ‘elsewhere’: a tool that puts ‘where you are now’ as contingent on further travel; a movement that is continually using locality in political terms; in projections forward and back to previous locations and future places; and that can be as much about

27 exclusion and inequality as sharing. One of the implications of this line of thinking is to ask, as do the contributors to Bender and Winer’s (2000) book on contested landscapes, what happens to those that cannot ‘dwell’ or who are forcibly excluded? While Forests seem (and are presented as) quintessentially English, genteel landscapes of deeply held attachments, and are a long way from the wrenches of dispossession, and the threat of death or torture or extreme poverty stalking some people’s experience of landscape, they are still strongly fought over and riven by exclusionary practices. During my field work a dead sheep stuffed down a toilet in one of the car parks, was interpreted by many in the Forestry Commission as part of a long simmering protest against the perception that the FC wants to destroy traditional farming practices and activities by a constant promotion of tourism. The deep anger of several people I spoke to over their feelings of being increasingly ignored and excluded from ‘their’ Forest, were quite chilling.

We would bum the forest down rather than let the FC destroy it and us if that’s the only way

to get their attention. And believe me we know the best places to start a few fires that’ll take

the [whole] Forest.

(Interview, New Forest, July 1999)

The passion of the people protesting against fox hunting, is such that they consider followers of the hunt to have forfeited any rights to have their point of view heard by their immoral and cruel treatment of wild animals. The attitudes of many “countrymen”, for whom the behaviour of “sabs” (hunt saboteurs) and “lycra-clad” townies were indicators of ignorance and, moreover, disqualified them from having any say in the future of the countryside, were equally hard-nosed.

All these new gun laws are because of the gang violence in the cities. Why should that affect

us in the country? Well it doesn’t. I’ll shoot what I want, when I want. We know how it works

here.

(Mr Sutcliffe, Essex, February 1999)

What also of the opportunities and exclusions of women in male dominated arenas, and the experiences of women who choose not to challenge traditional arrangements? And finally, what of the often vicious undertow of racism in the countryside?^^ How

When taking a landrover for repairs in August 2001 in a small garage in the New Forest, we were told about the “jungle monkeys, if you don’t mind me using that term, who don’t know how to look

28 much more are landscapes that some experience as exclusionary made the worse for their image of accessibility?

So this research works within an understanding of landscape that takes cognisance of the intellectual heritage discussed above, and focuses on the relationship between embodied landscapes and the structures and political inequalities that attempt to control them. Bender talks about a sedimented landscape, worked on in thought and action (1998:24). Tilley, commenting on Ingold’s stress on action over cognition, thinks it is unhelpful to polarize “practical activity and the cultural world of explication and discourse” as landscape is “both ‘prelude’ and ‘epilogue’”(l994:23). It seems eminently sensible to be able to discuss the multiple bodily rhythms in which people constitute the landscape and the specific social and cultural conditions in which these exist. This, in effect, is how each chapter is written. I differ in one small, but important, way. The trouble with cultural discourse — or, to be blunt, thoughts — is that they can only enter the world through action. Thoughts and ideas should only be treated as purely cerebral until such time as these ideas become expressed in acts of writing or talking, through ways of being which as a consequence take part in and constitute a politically and historically contingent place. Imagination and thinking, the world of ideas, cannot be easily split from doing and being. We learn and think new thoughts, but learning is fundamentally embodied - sounds, sights and smells become the basis on which, and through which, we imagine the world. Perhaps we should rather be talking about embodied thinking. Why separate and maintain a split between action and discourse if it is only to reassert their connection?

Let me put it another way. A recurring technique of landscape criticism is to ask whose interests are being served and who is being excluded? Bender (1998) does this to great effect in her analysis of the politics of Stonehenge. Thus, too, the absent labourers in Mr and Mrs Andrews are used to critique a landowning landscape. But, to my mind, few have been successful in thinking about that precise point when idealisations become concrete in action. Williams’s (1985) labourers, for instance, are filtered through literature and poetry, or broader social facts: either high culture or the

after a machine... You can keep them in the city - or even better send them back home”. ‘They’ are not wanted here was the very clear message.

29 facts of mass exploitation. Ingold seems to do better in approaching the importance of action. But, as we have seen, his peasants can be criticised for being overly romantic and ahistorical. Ingold, in my opinion, has not followed the implications of a task- orientated perspective to its conclusion. The wealthy landowner or respected churchman is just as much a maker of the landscape through everyday action as the peasant. It is in these unconscious bodily habits, and at the points of more conscious action, where the ideas of inequality, status and power (those political and structural ideas), enter the world. It is in and through these actions that the realm of meanings becomes manifest. The chapters in this thesis offer a tentative investigation of the implications of this small revision. For example, I analyse how landscape is constituted both in the use of tools by members of a Forest work gang and in the use of maps by Forest managers.

The social uses of trees

It might be appropriate to turn to a contemporary painting of the landscape to suggest some of themes of this research^^. Kite Flying, by Vadim Gorbatov (2000) (Figure 3) is reprinted in Drawn to the Forest, a glossy coffee-table book, published as a record of a particular artistic event in the New Forest. In May 1999 staff in the New Forest started taking individual artists out into the forest, explaining how it worked and showing them the plants, insects, animals and birds that make the New Forest distinctive. Thirty artists from the Society of Wildlife Artists (SWLA) took part in a collaborative project celebrating the uniqueness of the New Forest. During the twelve months of the project pupils at several New Forest schools also took part, producing their own artwork which was displayed alongside those of professionals at a ‘Wild

Given the preceding discussion on landscapes of movement, I am aware that returning to an essentially static image may well be a retrograde step. With this caveat in mind, however, returning to a contemporary landscape painting as a frame on which to hang the themes of this thesis, seems appropriate.

30 Art’ exhibition in 2000. The works were then sold in support of New Forest conservation work, with the Forestry Commission retaining copyright over the images. One of the hopes for the book, expressed by Bruce Pearson, the President of the SWLA, is that “it might help the casual visitor, and those with more than a passing interest, to see beyond the ponies and picnic tables” (SWLA 2000:11).

My initial premise is that of all the possible ways in which the Forest could be represented artistically, it is this particular form, this set of significant practices and materiality, that attracted significant sponsorship and had the support of the Forestry Commission. In the same way as Mr and Mrs Andrews can be read for the social and cultural values of the period, the artwork reproduced in Drawn to the Forest provides a starting point for a discussion of contemporary cultural values.

Figure 3: Kite Flying, Vadim Gorbatov, 2000

The book reproduces 162 images which include 3 prints by school children and 6 carvings. Scattered among the paintings are 25 preliminary sketches taken from the artists’ workbooks. The images, including water colours, oil paintings and prints are

31 largely representational or illustrative, a far cry from the contemporary metropolitan art world. The installation art and experimentation with the landscape of Andy Goldsworthy {Elm leaves stitched together 1994) or Richard Long {Red Slate Circle 1983), for example, are conceptually distant. Many of the paintings in Drawn to the Forest owe considerably more to the high point of English watercolour painting as exemplified by John Cell Cotman (1782-1842). Nevertheless, these are contemporary images that express current interests and concerns. A count of the images produced (Figure 4) shows the high number depicting birds, animals and insects in the landscape.

Image analysis

30 -28 —

5 —

Image categories

Figure 4: Content analysis of Drawn to the Forest: images by category

Most of the images of birds, the largest single category, show them as a small centre of focus in a large landscape often with ponies or deer in the background^ \ But the most striking feature is the relative absence of people in the landscape, this despite the New Forest absorbing 25 million day-visits per year and being home to thousands more. In Gorbatov’s painting it seems that we are invited to take the deer’s view, looking out from under the trees to the plain and the space of humans. However, what

The somewhat bald and unqualified categories used here, anticipate the complexities explored in later chapters.

32 is being represented is a cultural view, and it is a view that reinvents nature as foreground, removing people almost altogether^^. Nature is still produced for the pleasure of the viewer, but the form of that nature is different. It reflects, I suggest, the increasing importance given to environmentalist constructions where people are interlopers in nature (however much that nature is the result of generations of human management). These are not beasts of the chase, but animals representing another sort of romanticism. The variable construction of nature and the differential experience of those constituting it is one key theme in this study.

For instance, a discussion in chapter 5 raises the possibility of characterising the landscape of labourers as emerging through a series of social relationships, while those of visitors are a series of romantic views. Despite the attractiveness of this framework, I find the evidence does not support it. Workmen stop to admire the view too — one spends his free time taking photographs of the Forest. Equally how does this framework deal with other categories, such as Forestry managers on holiday, or visitors who becoming volunteers and incomers who become locals? Thus the recognition of multivalency in landscapes, the emphasis on how one particular set of meanings might well change in a slightly different context or at a later time, is important. People’s experience of landscape is as often made of confusion, of just muddling along, as it is of clear boundaries and delineated spatial categories.

How identities are constructed in, and through investment in the landscape, is the second theme at issue. Forests in England are increasingly constructed in terms of who they are for. What seems to be set up is a structure in which the status of dwelling, articulated as the degree of Tocalness’, becomes a key node in the construction of identity and the subsequent claims to special status. While tourists are simply visitors, say the people asserting a ‘local’ identity, it is locals who literally make the Forest through generations of repeated activities - the deep patterns that make place. Any claim to original status is effectively a political claim to rights over

If we divided the images into landscapes with people, landscapes with fauna (71%), and ‘simple’ landscapes (those where animals do not appear), it is clear that pictures with people in them account for less than 10%. Indeed, on further examination it seems that only two types o f people inhabit these landscapes - distant visitors, or people who work in the Forest or own New Forest ponies.

33 resources and their disposition. History, already always contingent, becomes the battlefield of claims over place.

Uniting these two themes is a concern with the symbolic and material culture of the trees themselves. Mr and Mrs Andrews are beneath an oak tree, the deer are in front of an ancient beech. Each carry particular messages, a metaphoric range, such that, among other things, the oak conveys ideas of stability and family tradition, while the beech speaks of continuity with an ancient English landscape. At the same time these are living organisms around which and through which people live, work and relax. Trees are intrinsic to the making of the landscape. It is just as difficult to speak of Forests without engaging with the metaphorical uses to which trees are put, as it is to ignore their material importance. They provide a potent source of symbolism of social processes and identity. However, they also pose a number of fundamental questions that result in a suite of common concerns in the literature.

Firstly, and reflecting anthropology's reflexive engagement with western scientific development, trees provoke questions that centre on the nature/culture dichotomy. They stand at the intersection, marking the degree to which trees, even in cross- cultural analysis, tend to materialize western cultural concerns. Studies of the social significance of trees need in the first instance to deal with this inherited baggage. In a similar vein, in Landscape and Memory Schama (1995) argues against the assumption that Western culture has evolved by sloughing off its nature myths, but, rather, suggests the strength of links that have bound them together. He claims that inherited landscape myths and memories have two common characteristics: "their surprising endurance through the centuries and their power to shape institutions that we still live with"^^(1995: 15). Harrison (1992), too, explores how the governing institutions of the West - religion, law, family, city - originally established themselves in opposition to the forests: civilisation as basic forest clearing. In both of their works two stories unfold together: the empirical story of economic exploitation, and the role forests have played in the cultural imagination of the West. It is the contemporary uses of trees as metaphors that this study explores.

^^"So many of our modern concerns - empire, nation, freedom, enterprise, and dictatorship - have invoked topography to give their ruling ideas a natural form"(Scharma 1995:17).

34 Secondly, trees are not a stable set of objects. They are ambiguous because of their status as living organisms, and consequently they raise questions about categories and perceptions (Rival 1998, Rackham 1996, Ellen 1998). Despite this, a number of writers such as Rival (1998), Bloch (1998), and Berlin (1992) comment on the degree of cross-cultural similarities in the symbolic uses to which trees are put. Trees are clearly important cultural vehicles for the communication of significant ideas and values (Mauzé 1998:238). To explain this Mauzé (1998) traces the symbolism of trees in the Northwest Coast of America as reconstructed through a number of anthropological texts. These have moved, she argues, from metaphors in culture to metaphors o f culture. Thus while trees were connected to birth rituals and strongly associated with adult roles and responsibilities, today they have come to stand for native culture as a whole: the idea of a cohesive, (and original) society. These new discourses have a clear aim: to persuade the Federal Government of the forests' 'sacred' importance, and, hence, that they should fall under the protection of the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act. Mauzé succeeds in showing how 'traditional' cultures are differentially engaged with forests, but in doing so suggests that contemporary engagement is somehow more political than that of the past. This is based on a disaggregation of the mundane and the ritual, the symbolic and the political, a process that hides their fundamental interweaving and interpenetrating nature.

It is in their authoritative but open-ended nature, Mauzé (1998) suggests, that trees are emerging as metaphors for culture in contemporary environmental and political debate. She notes that in the joining of a New Native discourse with ideals of deep ecology and an environmentalist discourse it is no longer important that trees can potentially be human beings, but that they become moral beings (1998:243) and epitomise the loss of nature and purity {ibid. 245). At the same time the link between trees and humans, or at least trees as a way of thinking about being human, is stressed in the literature (Bonnemère 1998 De Boeck 1998)^"^. It is the contention of this study

It could be argued that, following Douglas (1970), trees are 'natural symbols' deriving their form from human physiology and substances. These symbols reflect the dual nature of humans as both animal-like and god-like. Trees might then symbolically oppose residual animality (the body) with

35 that politics, identity and morality are strongly linked; that we need to be able to move from the scale of the personal through to that of the political while acknowledging that these are not simply a matter of abstract ideas but are deeply felt as constituents of a moral landscape.

Thesis organisation and scope

Two key lines of investigation run in tandem through this thesis. Firstly, each chapter explores a different theoretical facet of how landscapes, discourses of place and identity, and material culture emerge in practices and embodiment. There is a linear development of this endeavour from an attempt to ground contestation in chapter 1, to an exploration of ways of approaching topologies of management discourses in chapter 6. The second line is an investigation of the Forests through the perceptions and actions of different groups of people. Each group acts as a prism, a way of looking in and discovering anew the lineaments and character of the Forest landscape. Within each prism is revealed a different political landscape, a highly positional, and contingent set of values and meanings that move in scale from the closely personal through to the national and international. Given the range of communities/prisms that can, in one way or another, be identified as engaging with the Forests, the scope of the study needed to be limited. In the pursuit of depth there are some obvious sacrifices to breadth - I have not dealt in any substantial way with the landscapes associated with other statutory bodies such as English Nature, English Heritage, the Countryside Agency, or local and regional government. Nor, for that matter, do the huge range of organised interest groups, such as the Ramblers, RSPB, Wildlife Trusts and a range of other local organisations, get more than a cursory acknowledgement. But perhaps the most important group not dealt with directly in this thesis are the visitors themselves. While they appear in several chapters, they play a minor part compared to the principal focus on those people working or volunteering for the National Trust and

evolving humanity (the mind). They materialize and communicate important ideas about what it is to be human. But, this dualistic framework devalues the symbolic contribution o f plants that, rather than drawing an absolute distinction between nature and culture, reaffirm the continuity o f biological species within the world. (Rival 1998:2, Descola 1996, Descola and Palson 1996).

36 Forestry Commission or living in and around the Forests^^. With this caveat in mind the chapters themselves are organised as follows:

In Chapter 1 the parameters of contests over meaning and value of New Forest landscapes are explored. Certain historical roots of contemporary conflict are acknowledged and then traced as they are reconstituted in expressions of identity (both of ‘localness’ in terms of people and place), in images of the New Forest pedalled to visitors, and in certain material markers of rural identity. A highly charged meeting, at which a Forestry Commission ecologist attempted to explain aspects of mire restoration work to a small group of ‘stakeholders’ is described. Some of the complex and often contradictory allegiances and perceptions of landscape are unpicked. Rather than assume a single imposed and authoritative structure on the landscape, place is shown to be highly contingent and political, a constant battle ground for assertions of identity.

Chapter 2 turns to Hatfield Forest and asks the question ‘what social purposes do trees serve’ {cf. Rival 1998)? Reviewing the body of work on the uses of trees in cross-cultural perspective, four key ways in which trees are actively engaged in constituting senses of social identity are recognised. A case is made for treating trees as ambivalent quasi-‘actants’ in social life rather than simply metaphoric resources to be exploited. A second strand disinters the concept of identity itself arguing that we can no longer impute a single cohesive subject. Instead we should look to how identities are created in the intersection and mutual construction of difference, the power inequalities that animate such differences, and the spatial arrangements that give them structure. These ideas are pursued through a consideration of the visual modes and aesthetics of tree planting in Hatfield since the 17^^ century, the relationship between felling trees and embodied expressions of skill and knowledge, and the role that trees play in constituting senses of identity and notions of public and private place.

One of the problems of this category of visitors is that it assumes a straightforward difference between those who live or work in the Forest and those that ‘merely’ visit. By far the largest number of visits made to both Forests are by people walking their dogs who live locally.

37 In Chapter 3 attention is paid to one of the most politically contested activities in the countryside, one that has a powerful and longstanding connection to Forests and which is often taken as the leitmotif of rural/urban conflicts - fox hunting. In this highly tensioned landscape what is the ‘correct’ way of being in the countryside becomes crucial. A description of a foxhunt introduces a discussion of how the political and ethical become written in the landscape and expressed through minutia of action. It is argued through an analysis of soundscapes that the performance of fox and hounds, for the members of the Hunt, is key in imagining and making the sensuous experience of nature more visible, and which axe embed the claims to a strongly felt countryside identity. Along the fault lines of these rural/urban identities certain items of material culture become freighted with significance, moments themselves of contested culture. Thus it is possible to discuss mobile telephones, lycra clothes and deer as morally freighted and expressive of cultural values. The chapter concludes locating hunting in questions about the purpose of the countryside.

How we think of identity as central to the individual as well as emerging within larger social processes is the subject of Chapter 4. Three conversations with people who are involved in the Forest are interwoven with a fourth that questions how identity itself is understood. Captain Barclay, talks about his sense of being rooted in a landowning landscape, of having “saved” a part of old rural England through his ability to influence events. In contrast, Olwyn Mowatt, an ‘incomer’, constructs her identity in the tension between her current life and places far removed in time and distance. Richard Stride, works for the Forestry Commission but also is a Commoner. The ambivalences cutting through his working roles and in his sense of past are striking, particularly within his strongly stated connection to the New Forest. It is argued that we need to see identity as made in both order and resistance to order, but in both directions - against powerful incorporating histories and also against local knowledge.

Chapter 5, on ‘working worlds’ examines how tools are constructed by, and in relationship to, knowledge, people and places in the Forest. Implicit in the analysis was the notion that techniques and artefacts are embodied - that chainsaws become part of the social world through their expressive use and through their ability to change the physical context. The role tools and machines play in constructing

38 different senses of gendered self, group knowledge and local place, are discussed using a method of coding and highlighting that help to explain patterned bodily, spatial and aesthetic relationships to the landscape. The analysis extends to how tools become implicated, in ways that matter to the workers, in expressions of class, status and gender.

Chapter 6 picks up the theme of nature myths and examines how these emerge in and through the constructions of managers. It is argued that the impact of recent theoretical developments in the fields of ecology, environmentalism and anthropology, leads to a reconsideration of how we approach the analysis of the relationship between people and their environments. Using the notion of topologies (Brosius 1999) I explore how managers create, and are created by, the forests they work in. Two different management topologies, ‘nature-far’ and ‘nature-near’ are identified and their contours explored. Specific examples are examined such as a programme for the removal of Turkey oak, the valuations of Sika deer, beech woodland and grey squirrels, as well as decisions about managing a Victorian landscape at Bolderwood in the New Forest. The conclusion argues for greater openness about why decisions are taken and raises questions for further exploration of management topologies of the environment.

The Conclusion draws the themes together and assesses the impact of exploring landscape through paying attention to moments of action that embody ideas, discourses and patterns of thinking. Discussions in the previous chapters are put in the context of the steady increase of visitors, the rising importance given to Forests as national recreation resources rather than as productive rural landscapes, and the challenges of managing highly contested Forest landscapes in England.

A brief note on style

Both single and double quotation marks are used in the text. Double marks identify words or phrases that are direct quotes either during conversation or from published sources. Single marks are used to emphasise words that I am aware are weighted in a particular way even though they are often the best ones to use. Thus ‘nature’ is used to indicate an awareness of the contingent and constructed ways in which people refer to the mix of biology and history that make a particular place. On the other hand, in

39 the sentence where managers “monitor contractors”, “check” volunteers or work gangs, “meet” representatives of various interest groups, and “communicate” information, double quotation marks indicate the actual words managers used.

Finally I have changed the names of the people who ‘speak’ in the text, but usually not the role or date. Those working for the Forestry Commission in the New Forest and the National Trust at Hatfield would probably be able to make a good guess at people’s identities (and could also disagree with my conclusions from positions of relative power). The only names I did not change are those in chapter 4 who all gave their permission for me to use the material from their interviews.

40 Chapter 1

Whose New Forest? Making place on the urban/rural fringe

The central question explored in this chapter is how people 'make' different places within a small, but highly contested, comer of southern England. The New Forest, like almost everywhere else in England, is a landscape of artifice (Cloke 1994), and in this particular area the artifice of 'natural countryside' is being deployed in increasingly urgent debates over the future of mral landscapes. The arguments, and the array of interest groups, work at many different levels - local, national and European. Part of the engagement and debate occurs in arenas that are far removed from the forest, but much of it occurs 'on the ground'. But 'on the ground' covers a multitude of places. A great deal of landscape 'making' in the New Forest is formed in the techniques and technologies deployed by those responsible for managing the landscape. Management discourse not only takes 'place' in the physical landscape but also in processes of a professionalised technological imagination - at some remove from the teams who do the work. This same metaphor of removal from the landscape - into an office - can be extended to the application of national and international laws, agreements and guidelines, with which managers are compelled to comply.

Whether dealing with the privileged landscapes of the managers or the less privileged ones of the work teams, place is always an embodied experience (Tilley 1999:177). We tend to over-emphasise the visual, forgetting how powerful soundscapes, smellscapes, and touchscapes can be (Gell 1995, Feld 1996, Porteous 1990, Corbin 1986). Thus, as well as a recognition of discourses that ‘image’ landscapes through various technical tools, we need to return to the immediately physical, phenomenological landscape made up of experienced places. What follows threads a tentative path between discourse and engagement, between a remote and mythical, and an intimate, lived-in and worked-over New Forest. Firstly, the Forest is introduced as not 'out there' but rather something subjectively understood and engaged with; an amalgam of historical contestation and recent tourism pressures. The way in which the Forest is presented to the ‘outsider'/visitor is discussed before examining

41 contemporary ‘insider’ politics emerging in one moment of confrontation. That confrontation is described, teasing apart some perceptions of place and situating these within larger social and political contexts.

Historical roots of contemporary discord

Tubbs (1986) characterises many conflicts in the New Forest as a response to the slowly growing importance of silviculture. Crown interest in the New Forest turned increasingly away from deer to its timber and underwood resources (Tubbs 1986:73) and by 1810 professional silviculturalists operating out of a new Office of Woods were in place. Alongside greater professionalism went a drive for more profit from forestry, leading to the abolition of some common rights. However, the Crown overplayed its hand by provoking the gentry who benefited from higher rents from land with common rights attached. By a series of Acts of the 1870's the battle lines were drawn between the Verderers^^ and the Office of Woods. The Verderers tended to support Commoners'^^ rights while the Office of Woods wanted more timber plantations (Pasmore 1977). A turning point came when a bill for 'disafforestation', effectively privatisation, was defeated in 1875 on the strength of a new public concern for diminishing natural heritage. The contours of contemporary landscape contests are set by the Forestry Commission (FC), Verderers Court and Commoners whom together mark the poles of a confrontational legal and management landscape. The FC is most closely connected with the everyday management of Crown land within the perambulation.

A second focus for conflict lies in the enormous growth in visitors since the early 1950s and the concomitant changes in the significance of the Forest landscape. Essentially, the New Forest has moved from land that supported a rural agricultural

The Verderers, a name from the original courts that heard cases under Norman Forest law, today have responsibility for management of Commoning and conservation, with powers of veto over

Forestry Commission operations in the Open Forest.

Commoners are those who occupy land or property to which attaches one or more rights over the

Forest. There were originally 6 rights of common of which pasture and mast are the most important extant rights.

42 economy, to a major recreational and natural-heritage target for the jaded urbanite. In the process, there have been significant changes in the priorities of the FC, driven increasingly by the heritage and environmental values of a vocal urban population^^. At the same time there have been considerable social changes in the communities living in and around the forest - gradual erosion of older class certainties (a theme returned to in chapter 5), greater mobility and changing economic arrangements as urban incomers move to the rural fringes to commute or retire. This has had a profound effect on the importance and expression of 'local' identity.

Identity is often most clearly expressed through comparison and contrast (Boon 1982) and, furthermore, is very plastic in application. Locals are not tourists: "I was held up by grockles (tourists) queuing for cakes "(interview, 22/5/99). Local identity is also a way of claiming authority (in terms that the visitors themselves value, for very different reasons, concerning the perceived authenticity of the landscape). Often heard was the statement that, "There are only a few real Commoners left" Degrees of localness of identity and position in relation to 'local people' appeared in and underpinned the discourse of members of other 'user' groups - the Hunt, Ramblers, cyclists, horse-riders, and environmental organisations. While the discourse on who is local and who is an outsider is pervasive, and morally loaded, it is also highly variable, contradictory and contingent in application (c/ Strathem 1982). Rapport's (1997) reconstruction of the moral universe of an English village dramatically illustrates the contradictory forms of identity and moral indignation by writing about different levels of identity formation - the village, two families, and an individual farmer's wife. Using Boon's (1982) notions of the 'Tribal' and the 'Scribal' he characterises the dialectic between outsider relativism and local absolutism around land ownership, as the way of understanding the different uses of identity in the village. The nearer Rapport gets to the notion of an embedded local identity the more absolute were the terms in which that identity was expressed. Incomers or outsiders were still, to a degree, outside the absolutism of the TocaT moral universe. While the sense of contradictory, context specific, uses of identity ring true in the New Forest, the dialectic between relativism and absolutism is perhaps less applicable. Absolutism

The latest Minister's Mandate for the FC (August 1999) has timber production relegated to third place after environmental conservation and heritage preservation.

43 and concomitant moral indignation appear as much in the discourses of, say, environmentalists, who are often identified as ‘outsiders’, as they do in those of ‘locals’.

Selling it to the tourists - learning the lay of the land.

Pictures, maps and brochures are three important ways in which the landscape of the New Forest is constructed for and by many visitors. Images have an important role to play in the social construction of a sense of place, marking a sense of shared meaning and socially agreed significance. They are also an elusive way of telling significance because they are able to encompass the range of different meanings and discourses that people bring to them: they are not a closed narrative. Yet, these images are an important landmark in the dialectic between discourse and engagement in the physical world of the New Forest. Consequently, there is a moving back and forth between discourse and engagement, while recognising this is a conceit to draw apart that which is inextricably entwined.

Images On the cover of the Ordinance Survey map (1996, no.22) is a 'New Forest pony' grazing a closely cropped lawn in a dappled glade beneath beech and ash trees (Figure 5). The trees have all been browsed to a uniform head height allowing glimpses beneath the crown of more distant trees. On the right of the picture bracken encroaches pulling the eye further into the photograph and focusing attention on the pony. Above the pony's back one can catch site of new saplings and other bushy growth. In the foreground a small ditch in the grass runs left to right.

44 a- ,,

Figure 5: 'New Forest Pony', cover of OS map, Outdoor Leisure 22, 1996

The figure of a pony in woodland is one of the most repeated and popular images of the New Forest. It appears in various formats in tourist brochures, in glossy coffee- table books, in magazines, posters and paintings, and in guide-books. A pony even appears etched in metal plates on information posts at some FC car parks. Images of ponies, together with those of deer and certain trees - but most particularly ponies - have achieved almost iconic status as signifiers of the landscape of the New Forest, a short-hand way of reading which enables one to imagine the whole area, or rather, a whole area. The New Forest pony (and it always is coupled with the regional name) is the icon which provides a separate identity from that of other forests.

45 The importance of this icon in expressing identity is highlighted because the current image is a replacement for an earlier one showing ponies at Bucklers Hard (Figure 6). It was changed due to a local campaign^^. The main complaint was that all except one pony were “coloured outsiders”, cross-breeds not as suitable for representing the New Forest as “proper” indigenous New Forest ponies. While the image of ponies was appropriate they also needed to be “authentic”. However, one can read off both images a series of ideas about the New Forest - that it is peaceful, unique, full of animals and plants, park-like, empty of people and their products - and about the English countryside in general - idyllic, timeless, natural. This is a recursive process: representations of the Forest both form and are formed by interactions with the land. In the highly controlled and carefully bounded landscape of the English rural lowlands, the New Forest is one of the few places where large animals still roam relatively freely. The onus is on individual property owners to keep the animals out of their private gardens. Rounding a comer on one of the New Forest lanes and finding a group of ponies in the shade of a large oak tree carries echoes of a rural past where animals were much more visible in society. For many of the visitors, particularly children, these encounters with ponies are thrilling in themselves and represent both a fulfilment of the images and a measurement of embodied significance.

No corroborating evidence of this campaign was found. The Ordinance Survey marketing department thought the story possible but could not confirm it and insisted that they made the decision simply on the basis of needing a new cover. In the end it doesn’t really matter as several ‘locals’ believed this to be the case and told the same story.

46 Figure 6: 'Bucklers Hard', cover of OS map, Outdoor leisure 22, 1992

Maps Perhaps it is no surprise that this evocative image is on the cover of the popular OS tourist map that provides another culturally important way of imagining the physical landscape. Maps are “spatial stories” (De Certeau 1984) that claim to represent reality because they describe the land's surface with its physical and human features. They are "systems of representing and encoding ... cultural knowledge" (Morphy 1989:3) or, as Strang puts it:

[T]hey describe cultural values, implicitly or explicitly prioritizing aspects o f the land.

Specific activities direct reading in a particular way, and different levels o f engagement with the landscape also affect the kind o f representation that is produced

( 1997 :2 17 ).

47 Thus maps are a highly encultured way of representing the landscape and, moreover, one that has considerable power. Here there is a focus on boundaries, areas, heights and distances, giving pictorial elegance to ownership, rights and routes. Here we have another kind of tourist's New Forest.

The current boundary - the forest 'perambulation' - sets the legal boundary of the New Forest and of the area managed by the FC. Within this area, however, are several towns, villages and scattered farms all with private land and further administrated by local and county councils. In addition, large areas of the forest are privately owned, like Lord Montague's estate running from Beaulieu down to the Solent, various National Trust commons and the Hampshire Wildlife Trust. All of these different ovmerships are given form on the map by lines marking the boundaries of specific areas.

While trees have a seminal importance in the landscape, over 53% is open heathland and grassland of various types. In terms of spatial arrangements, it is the difference between 'open forest'^^ - heathland - and the denser, tree-filled space of the forest inclosures that set the tones of landscape engagement. The OS map shows the nodal points of towns and villages (primarily Lyndhurst, Brockenhurst and Beaulieu) with linking routes that provide access to the areas between and the points of entry into these areas. These routes are the constructors of today's landscape views, the visitor equivalent of the landed gentry's stately home with their carefully arranged pastoral views. The roads have not been routed for a contemporary aesthetic in the same way as a Capability Brown estate, but they have been deliberately moulded to encourage a certain way of approaching the Forest interior. Part of this moulding has to do with the animals that wander freely within the Forest boundary. While main routes like the A31 and A3 5 are fenced and are the responsibility of the County Council, smaller lanes are not. Consequently where these intersect each other, cattle grids are in place to stop animals straying out of the Forest and onto the main roads.

'Open Forest' (capitalised) has specific landscape and jural connotations in the NF. Here I simply refer to areas that are treeless plains o f grassland or heathland.

48 Lines on the map translate into experiences of travelling roads and walking paths. Cattle grids were installed in a rolling programme starting in 1962. Today, rumbling over them in a car provides an audible and visible marker of a change in how people are expected to approach the Forest landscape. Speed limits are kept to 40mph or lower, ostensibly to protect animals but which also has the effect of forcing a slower viewing of the landscape. More details impose themselves on the visitor. The lanes are narrower and in places the Forest seems to lap right up to the road edges. In many places the tarred area of the road is only one car width which again forces slower speeds as motorists drop one side onto the narrow gravel verges to pass each other. The FC experimented in a few places with tarring the full width but decided that narrow tarred strips enhanced the 'character' of most of the lanes.

Brochures A leaflet published by the FC, touches on the main parts of another New Forest narrative.

When about 1079 AD, William I created his "New" Forest ...the land consisted of relatively

infertile woodland and furzy waste, sparsely scattered with farms and homesteads. The act of

afforestation in Norman times...transformed a whole neighbourhood into a royal hunting

preserve, placing it under the hated forest law, with all that involved of curtailment of liberty and drastic punishment meted out for any interference with the beasts of the chase or their

haunts. Since the unfortunate peasants who dwelt in the Forest were forbidden to enclose their

land lest any fence should interfere with the free run of the deer, their domestic animals were

allowed by common right to graze and browse throughout the Forest and this grazing,

reinforced by that of the deer themselves, severely diminished the ability of the sparse

woodlands to perpetuate themselves.

The dearth of new trees became a serious problem during the middle ages, which saw an

enormous increase in the consumption of wood, the principle raw material of the time, and

enactments were made to enable large areas in the New Forest to be enclosed for the purpose

of establishing woodlands, later to be thrown open when the trees had outgrown the danger by

cattle. This process became known as the rolling power of enclosure. The first tree-growing

act was passed in 1483 and others followed. The act of 1698 allowed the enclosure of 6000

acres and as the Crown assumed rolling powers, this meant that the area of woodland could

increase beyond that, to the detriment of the Commoner's grazing rights.

(Brief Notes leaflet. New Forest FC, 1988)

49 In the discourse presented in this brochure and other guides, the Norman imposition of Forest law to protect royal recreation was brutally enforced over a landscape where thanes and churls co-existed in pre-feudal reciprocity - the true Greenwood heart of English liberty (Schama 1995: 135 - 148). This has considerable echoes in the contemporary Forest landscape. 'Commoners', the visitors are told, in museums, guided walks and conversations with locals, are the inheritors of peasants who protested royal injustice in the Norman Forest. The subtext is that they are the true inheritors of the Forest and the only people to be trusted to look after it properly {cf. Turner 1999). Their interests in depasturing ponies and cattle are in the Forest's best interest too. They, through their animals, create and maintain the Forest landscape in the way it is now and always was, especially by making sure the FC fulfils its responsibilities in maintaining the Open Forest.

Rackham (1990) is suspicious of both the historical documents used to tell this story and the reading that highlights considerable popular opposition to arbitrary and draconian imposition of the Forest laws. In contrast, he presents a more conservative picture of deep England emerging through stable, relatively uncontested, historical layers^ \ Schama (1995) paints a more complicated political history of muddied and muddled waters, of deeply resented impositions and old-fashioned greed, where the angriest complaints against the royal Forests came not from common people but from the propertied elite. Whatever the reading, the fact that these are often couched in terms of historical reference and authority shows only that the past is a peculiarly valued place in contemporary Britain. As Bender put it, "we continue to try to create, not the past, but our past" (1998:7).

Contesting the Forest: "bunny-huggers", Commoners and the Forest with no trees.

This section moves from a mobile and essentially mythic visitor landscape to that of a face-to-face, lived-in and managed place. While the former is presented as contested, it is largely experienced as highly structured and cohesive. What follows is a

Contest certainly exists, as Rackham makes clear in his history of Hatfield Forest (1989), but the contestation is mostly between the landowning classes and does not disturb the overall sense of layers.

It is perhaps more about the emphasis rather than outright difference.

50 description from field-notes of a meeting that took place in May 1999 between various 'interested parties' to consider the proposals for a new conservation plan. Here the day-to-day landscape is literally experienced as contested, and as a site for fervently felt and powerfully expressed emotions. It also becomes an occasion to voice a series of justifications about identity, power and knowledge.

The meeting took place at Putties Pines a few miles out of Brockenhurst. Putties Pines are a small straggly group of Scots pines (Pinus sylvestrus) huddled around the car park with a long view up a shallow heathland valley. The group, dressed predominately in green Barbours^^, gathered on the small foot-bridge at the upper end of the valley. In the middle, Joe, the FC 'Life' Ecologist helped by Clare (English Nature and the only female present) were explaining what they planned to do to re establish a wet mire in the lower part of the valley. Standing around them were three other FC Keepers and a senior Forester, one Verderer, one Agister^^, two Commoners - one the representative of the Commoners Defence Association, an assistant Ecologist, and two members of a TV crew filming for a documentary being aired at the end of the year. I was introduced as a researcher looking at different perceptions of the Forest. There was laughter as someone commented that I had come to the right place.

The meeting was called by the Life Partnership staff to discuss the future of this particular part of the open forest. The Life Partnership is built around a £5million budget, half of which comes from the European Union and half from ten partner

'Barbours' are a well-known make of green waxed cotton jackets. Differences of clothes in this setting have some significance given the number of less than complimentary comments by 'locals' about the 'bright' clothes of visitors. The brightly coloured fleeces of both ecologists and the TV crew stood out among the green and dun coloured jackets of the rest.

Agisters are officials o f the Verderers' Court whose main responsibility is to ensure that ponies are correctly marked and cared for.

51 organisations^"^. The project aims to "restore and enhance" the New Forest's ancient woodlands, lowland valley mires and heathland, by

removal of exotic species, repair of erosion damage, encouragement of traditional forest

management practices, protection of heathland from encroaching plants and reconstruction of

endangered wetland habitats.

(Life leaflet on Lowland Valley Mires, nd.[1998])

This was an important meeting for them as they needed to persuade the Commoners of the necessity of their work so the Verderers court would not exercise their right of veto over these proposals. Such a blunt statement does little to convey the complexity of politics involved or the degree to which the Life Project cross-cuts other categories of belonging. The Verderers of the New Forest are already members of the Life Partnership. The presence of so many Keepers, indicates both their interest in the project and that most are also Commoners. The Life team needed to persuade the FC Keepers as much as anyone else. The presence of the TV camera crew may also have encouraged a certain amount of statement-of-position-for-the-record rather than debate.

Joe started by getting out a clipboard and a map. Fie referred to this as he described what he planned to do to re-establish the mire system. Essentially, the work consisted of collapsing some of the deeper drainage ditches and filling in the side of the eroded main stream with heather bales. This would slow the through-flow of water and help "wet up" the surrounding valley. "Any questions?" he asked.

"How are our ponies going to cross the stream when it's all backed up?" "Why are you

collapsing the ditches - they help take the water away to the stream?" "What is going to

happen to the grassland on either side - next thing we know there won't be any grazing for our

stock?" "Why don't you fill in lower down where it is wet already?"

As Joe fielded the questions it became increasingly clear among those listening that their ideas of what the landscape was for were fundamentally different. Joe temporised and suggested we move further down the valley to look at the erosion of

These are: English Nature, FC, Hampshire County Council, Hampshire Wildlife Trust, National

Trust, New Forest Committee, Ninth Centenary Trust, RSPB, Verderers of the New Forest and

52 the stream edge. There he explained that the attempts to drain the valley in the past had caused this erosion. "Yes, and gave us grazing", a Commoner interrupted. One of the Keepers, prodding a collapsing bank with his stick to check the depth, wanted to know why they didn't just leave it alone as it looked like it was already well on the way to re-establishing a bog. Joe referred to his map and started to explain slope angles and drainage rates. One of the Keepers interrupted to ask why they didn't just leave it all alone and save them all a wasted morning. Joe abandoned his notes and asked if they really understood how important valley mires were and then launched into a justification of the project.

I don't think you understand. We have to do this because of the EU requirement and because

this sort o f environment is so rare and threatened. There are only 120 valley mire systems in

the whole of Europe and 90 of them are found here. There are plants and animals and insects

that are only found in these systems. Anyway the mire acts like a big sponge and slowly

releases the water over the summer, keeping grass greener and supplying water in a drought.

Surely you can see that what we are doing is right?

(Joe, Life Project Ecologist, 1999)

Somebody snorted loudly during his outburst. The atmosphere was tense. Clare talked about the statutory requirements under Ramsar and SSSI^^ status to protect this sort of environment. They decided to move on further down the valley to discuss putting bales in at the bottom end that was already quite boggy.

As they spread out to wander I found myself next to one of the Commoners.

"Bloody bunny-huggers!" I nodded. "You know we are the true original ecologists. We have

looked after the countryside for hundreds of years and don't need any university-educated

ecologists to tell us what to do. Why not trust us to do what has protected the countryside so

far? If it is not one thing its another with this bloody FC. They are coming on all soft now but

they Just want us to agree to their plans. This Forest has survived for 900 years without

European money and protection for bits of boggy land. They only want to do this because they

have to show that they are spending the money. Why don't they spend it on something that

they are legally meant to do- like draining and clearing the gorse^^? Those heather bales - they

are just going to fill up with mud and make it dangerous for the ponies. Next thing you know

Wiltshire Wildlife Trust.

The Ramsar Convention of 1993 agreed protection for wetland areas of "international importance". A

Site of Special Scientific Interest is a National designation that affords some statutory protection.

The FC is responsible for draining land under the New Forest Act 1946.

53 we'll be pulling a dead animal out of here. Why can't they leave well alone? All those plants

and bugs have survived so long anyway.”

At the final stop, almost directly opposite the pine trees planted to shield the car park, things deteriorated further. Voices got louder and a senior Forester reminded everyone of the “rules of civilised discussion”. Joe was visibly rattled and suggesting that if they were only going to allow him to put bales in down here it was hardly worth it. Where was their give and take? No agreement was forthcoming. The group broke into individual conversations and most meandered back to their vehicles to move on to the next site. The TV crew cornered four people to interview rounding off what for them was a very successful day's filming.

How might a sense of place emerge through this interaction? How are competing landscapes justified? Are the lines of power and influence transparent? Blunt and Rose (1994) writing on the relationship between women and space assert that "spaces are constituted through struggles of power/knowledge" and that "different epistemological claims about ... identity produce different interpretations of space itself (p.5). Furthermore, rather than assuming a single imposed structure (patriarchal, in their analysis) on space, they prefer to emphasise a social process. That process, of symbolic encoding and decoding, produces "a series of homologies between the spatial, symbolic and social orders" (Moore 1988, quoted in Blunt and Rose 1994:3).

Naming something states what it 'is' and claims ownership of it. In the New Forest, at one level calling a place a "valley mire system" is obviously different from calling it "grazing". At a second level there are the namings that enforce national and worldwide landscape encoding. Here are the reminders of the FC's legal requirement to drain the valley, the subsequent (and not-so-subtle) reminder of the English Nature representative of statutory requirements of environmental protection. These designations themselves immediately include those in the know and exclude others. Here also, the Life project through its capital investment, its staff, and the new coalitions it has spawned represents a new spatial arena. In this arena contemporary

54 environmental notions of nature as threatened by humans on a global scale are written afresh in the valorisation of “endangered habitats” and “rare species”. Finally, there is the reflexive naming - “bloody FC”, “pig-headed Commoners” - where rehearsal of roles in the landscape is paramount. Embedded in this is a degree of ambivalence as the Life project has opened up the concept of landscape value for an imagined human totality, and a subsequent trying-on-for-size of this new expanded field within the terms of the old power structures.

Secondly, who is making these power/knowledge statements? Using the metaphors of colonial geography of Blunt and Rose (1994), we might imagine the FC as representing a powerful 'colonial' discourse. They have the ability to significantly change the landscape, to 'make' it theirs through direct intervention. But 'the FC on examination disintegrates. Keepers, Foresters, Ecologists - each have distinctive landscapes, part inherited pattern, part training, part individual interests. Joe was as much talking to the Keepers present as anyone else. On another occasion a manager asked how they should keep the Keepers "on message"? The FC attempts to present a cohesive discourse but is itself riven, complex and dynamic - Keepers are often also Commoners. The Commoners themselves claim an identity part historical, part mythical. But they, too, fragment into partial representatives, occasional visitors to the role of Commoner among their other social lives. In other contexts they distinguish between 'real' Commoners and those who are just visitors who have bought land. Some who are vocal, active in consultation panels and at the Verderers Court, are also incomers with time and motivation to spare for debate. Others with commoning rights do not exercise them and maintain a very low profile in debates about the Forest. They also have families with children who either cannot afford to take over farms or do not want to.

Thirdly, there are the technical and professional modes of claiming power/knowledge. In the introduction it was suggested that a great deal of 'making' the landscape by managers takes 'place' in office environments. A crucial part of this process is the production and use of maps and the measurements on which these are based. The FC has a planning department whose sole aim is producing maps for management interventions (see also chapter 6). With constant reference to his maps and plans Joe was making claims to an authority and a sense of control not evident in the 'real' world

55 of bitter confrontation. The Commoners and Keepers present were repeatedly drawing his attention away from the maps to their landscape. For Joe, power to imagine the morally right universe of a re-established mire was most effectively expressed through the maps and the technical surety of his measurements. The power claimed in this discourse is what Lefebvre (1991) glosses as the "illusion of transparency", the claim of mimetic representation in maps. As Blunt and Rose explain;

Transparent space assumes that the world can be seen as it really is and that there can be

unmediated access to the truth of objects it sees; it is a space of mimetic representation

(1994:5). Furthermore, transparent space tends toward homogeneity, toward a denial of difference and an assumption of authority by removing the possibility of alternative landscapes. Creating what the valley might have been (a boggy piece of land that evolved into a particular environment over hundreds of years of human/animal/vegetable interaction) measuring what it is, and mapping what it should be elides an imagined future with a 'transparent' present and past. Technical tools obscure the highly specific valuation, the careful selection of significance and the overriding import of proposing a dramatic change in the landscape by reference to the past.

Conclusion and Coda: the interstices of power

People's ability to talk and act is very context dependent and contingent. In the context of Putties Pines and armed with his maps and officially sanctioned management role, Joe has some power. In other contexts he may feel more lost. Moreover, Joe's language of landscape transformation masks another, more direct, 'making' of the landscape - that which involves a physical engagement, the moving of things, be it heather bales into streams, earth out of watercourses, trees planted or cut down - all of which is done by the FC work gangs. In the organisational charts of the FC these men are always graphically at the bottom, people without individual identity "the recreation work-gang" under a hierarchy of individually named Foresters eventually traced to the Deputy Surveyor. The 'gang' with whom I have spent most time have very different ways of perceiving the landscape (chapter 5). These centre on a close relational description of people they know and places they have worked in. Each 'place' in the Forest is both sedimented memory and taskscape (Ingold 1993).

56 But most specifically, in this case, they have a very ambivalent relationship with the instructions that come from managers.

We are not paid to think are we? We just do what the Ganger says. It doesn't matter whatwe

think about the Forest, We've just got to get on with it.

(Dan, Forest worker, 1999). Yet, in other contexts their knowledge and savvy, of tasks and of the environment, is sought after.

Burgess (1995) has shown how Forests and woodland are experienced as landscapes of fear by many women. This may be true of the peri-urban woodlands that Burgess has researched (and was definitely the case at Ruislip Woods), but it did not seem an issue among the women that work for the FC. However, almost all the people I spoke to working in, planning or managing the Forest were men. Women stand out precisely because they are in some respects 'unusual' in the physical, outdoor working world of the men. It is only within the last two years that the FC has changed from an organisation where Foresters (all men) sent their writing to a typing pool (all women). While women have made in-roads in the FC, with the exception of one senior post and one active Forester, they are all in high communication roles such as Rangers, administrative staff and receptionists. In traditional forestry roles, such as timber felling and Keepering, the male bias remains unchanged. This is despite the fact that a great deal of the physical work is now done with the aid of machines. Clare, in the Putties Pines context did not appear to be reacting in a particularly gendered way but what about in other contexts? Furthermore, judging by the virulence of the comments directed at her behind her back some of the men found her power/role more challenging than Joe’s.

At Putties Pines the landscape becomes a mobile set of signifiers for protagonists to mould, but it also interrupts their flow, is prodded, dissected and discussed. While it may be "managed" in one way or another, the physical landscape continually escapes and makes mockery of intervention because it is part of a living ecology that is itself changing. Here place has been presented as "a space that is fragmented, multi dimensional, contradictory, and provisional" (Blunt and Rose 1994:7), that is tensioned by power and identity. I have attempted to show homologies and contradictions between discourse and engagement, symbols and practice. But in the

57 end has this been successful? It is all too easy to talk about mapping as simply straightforward power/knowledge. Here is a dialectic story of power and the margins, but one that still is patterned by the oppositional discourses of the powerful: the FC, Commoners and Verderers, English Nature and legal definitions, scientific knowledge and heritage. But within these structured relations of hierarchy, is slippage, negotiation and resistance. Understanding the perceptions and politics behind people's experiences of landscape requires attention both to the details of where and how power is exercised, and to the silences and asides that suggest other landscapes, other ways of telling and counting significance yet to be addressed.

58 Chapter 2

Living history: trees and metaphors of identity in an English Forest.

Here is the mighty oak upon which a nation built its power and prosperity; the ash tree which

burned brightly on many a hearth, or bore the blade of tool and weapon alike; the elm, whose demise was mourned, yet which lived to fight its round again; the hawthorn, the hedgerow

stalwart and essence of May delights; the rowan, talisman against the darkest forces; yew, that

enigmatic presence, the witness of death an the celebration of immortality.

(Miles, 1999:17)

This chapter is concerned with an analysis of a range of cultural forms and expressions of identity that emerge in, around and through trees in England. Trees, their fruit, nuts and berries, bark, wood, sap and leaves are intimately woven in the material and social fabric of most societies. In some societies this weaving is tightly meshed, central to the daily realities of existence and fundamental in structuring language, identity, beliefs and rituals (Turner 1967, Gell 1995). In others the interweaving is looser, less marked, and further from the concerns of everyday life. Very few people in contemporary Britain, for instance, are able to identify the species of tree from which their roofs, furniture, shelves, or utensils are made. On the other hand, trees and forests provide fundamental metaphors around which people are actively creating identities and discourses, some of which are violently opposed. Television pictures of road protestors being 'cherry-picked' from trees are one set of images that comes to mind. The pictures forcefully show how trees have entered public debate as contested symbols of resistance. Trees also appear in disputes about, farming, hunting, private and common usage, rights to access and the environment. They are a recurring motif in ideas of peace and community. Trees are seen as icons of the countryside, of idealised rural existence. They are valued as the mark of ‘leafy suburbs’ and soften architectural set pieces in the city. Moreover, trees are highly visible in the landscape. They are long-lived, able, in some cases, to span many

59 human generations. They represent nature but are also good as metaphors of human intervention - serving as a rich symbolic, ritual and metaphorical resource base. Trees, in short, make good thinking tools.

In this chapter some of the different ways in which trees actively constitute senses of social identity in Hatfield Forest, Essex, are examined. In particular I focus on how trees constitute senses of identity among the wardens and volunteers who work at Hatfield Forest. Concentrating on the material culture of trees and their landscape also allows consideration of how they actively create senses of place and identity for other visitors and users of the Forest and, eventually, emerge in statements about the global ecological significance of trees. However, a central feature is the emotional attachment that working in and among the trees of Hatfield Forest, evokes. For those close to them, the trees of Hatfield Forest are endowed with strong personal signification and are a primary metaphor through which the value and importance of daily work is materially expressed. Trees become a way of imagining roles in the wider world. They are employed in creating not only a sense of place, but also a sense of place in time.

Firstly, the re-emergence of trees and forests as a focus of anthropological investigation is reviewed and critically assessed. While trees are found to be metaphors of life and human identity (both thing-like and person-like), how identity emerges in these contexts is under-analysed. Secondly, the role of power in tensioning identity is illustrated through the aesthetics of tree planting at Hatfield. This raises questions, explored in section three, about the nature of forests as material culture. Again the ambivalence of trees, both as exemplars of human creativity and technical production (and as plants with their own lives and life-cycles), makes for no easy assessment of their role in identity creation. A case is made for treating trees as quasi- 'actants', as if in dialogue with the construction of identities, active in their creation - not simply as a passive metaphoric resource to be randomly plundered. Trees thus become part of an embodied relationship which, in section four, is examined through the process of clearing a section of coppice woodland to get it back “in cycle”. Trees are shown to have characteristics that demand competitive display of knowledge and technical skills, which are subsequently discussed both in terms of personal satisfaction and larger sets of meaning and identity. Working up from this scale of

60 intimate identities, section five describes a “ramble through time” that was part of the 75th celebration of National Trust management at Hatfield. The forest is presented as 'unchanging' to visitors - a paradoxical assertion, given the notion of a ‘ramble through time’, and one that conceals a great deal of potential conflict between competing interest groups.

Identity and Trees in cross-cultural perspective

Trees and forests have recently re-emerged as a focus of anthropological study (Rival 1998, Schama 1995, Harrison 1992). A variety of theoretical perspectives and approaches are represented, from those owing a debt to structuralism (De Boeck 1998), those exploring cognitive questions (Atran 1990, Boyer 1996, Bloch 1995, 1998), to those concerned with the historical (Rackham 1996, Schama 1995), symbolic (Harrison 1992, Rival 1998, Mauzé 1998) and phenomenological (Gell 1995, Burgess 1995) forest landscape. A parallel interest, primarily focused on questions of management and policy, has emerged in ecology, geography and environmental studies (Dudley et al 1995, Font and Tribe 2000, Westoby 1989). These writers are concerned, in broad terms, with interactions between human societies and their natural environments. In short trees provide a potent source of symbolism of social processes and identity and are clearly important cultural vehicles for the communication of significant ideas and values (Mauzé 1998:238).

In what follows there are two interwoven strands of analysis. One strand examines how trees are used as metaphors of identity, while the second disinters the concept of 'identity' itself. An examination of recent literature reveals a certain incoherence in the uses to which the term 'identity' is put. Which areas become important and culturally highlighted, or ignored and devalued, depends both on the ethnographic situation and on the author's purpose. We need to pay attention to the implicit theories of identity that permeate recent 'tree' ethnographies before moving on to discuss the roles that trees play in identities at Hatfield Forest. An important caveat is that what follows is a disaggregation of the ways that writers produce identity. Most authors do not distinguish between the modes they use in discussions about identity, nor, for that

61 matter, are these modes experienced as separate parts of identity in social interaction. Yet, they each carry a set of implicit ideas about identity that is worth unravelling.

Four main ways in which identity is discussed in relationship to trees can be recognized: 1. As representative of the individual (e.g. Giambelli 1998, Howell 1996). Trees are assumed to have a direct link with certain individuals. They are important metaphors of self-hood and a way of thinking about personal identity in relation to other places and people. They represent certain aspects of the individual - social and political importance, stage of life - to themselves and to others. Hence, 'identity' is a quality that pertains to an individual and that needs expression beyond the mere fact of bodily presence. In this metaphoric mode, identity needs to be represented, externalised and objectified to achieve meaning in the world.

2. As descriptions of social roles (e.g. Knight 1996, 1998, De Boek 1998). Trees provide metaphors of social roles and valorised behaviour such as being a 'good' father. Trees become a symbolic resource of social roles from birth to death. Implicit to 'identity' in this mode is that it is morally freighted. Being a 'good' parent is both a role and a culturally specific statement of intention. It includes the ability to be better or worse in that role, and implies 'intention' to the notion of identity.

3. As spatially arranged markers of social groups (e.g. Uchiyamada 1998). In this instance trees mark both spatial and moral boundaries for the groups involved. 'Identity' is part of a making of a 'we' - but one in which the boundaries deemed important are not necessarily those which other groups consider important. They may also be contested inside the group. Identity exists outside the individual - they have limited influence on some identity categories they can use (clan, age-set, caste, ethnic group, nation) as they are bom into a pre-existing social system.

4. As metaphors of culturally significant conceptual boundaries (e.g. Gell 1995). This fourth mode (a meta-mode that underpins all three previous categories) emphasises underlying conceptual boundaries in human cognition. Indicative of this mode is Bloch's (1998) contention that the remarkable regularity in aspects of cross-cultural tree and plant symbolism revolves around learned conceptualisations of “life” and

62 “not-life”. For him, apprehension of trees involves a set of basic cognitive processes - “cognitive anchoring”. Bloch stresses this anchoring cannot fully account for the phenomena themselves - the anchoring itself, “a theory of life”, applies “differentially and contextually to different types of beings” (1998:53). Trees make abstract notions of life concrete and they work because their status as living organisms is ambiguous. However, life and death are problematic concepts, not essential properties, which are communicated through semantic and embodied construction. Hence identity becomes part of a complex of ways of thinking and being that underpins human cognition. Implied in the notion that identity is made up of basic cognitive structures and learned cultural categories is a degree of unconsciousness in use. Identity is latent in language and ways of doing things.

In Britain, tree metaphors cluster around key symbolic expressions not unlike those found among non-Westem peoples (Rival 1998). Trees are identified with humans, and admired for their great proportions, old age, potency and self-regenerating energy. Rival comments that arboreal imagery in Western green politics is based on “strikingly similar uses of trees and forests to signify environmental health and social vitality” (1998:16). For Rival, phrases like “Without trees there would be no life” or “trees are the lungs of the world” (ibid.) indicate that trees symbolise the regeneration of life. No one at Hatfield actually described trees using slogans like this. However, they did draw connections between life in the forests and senses of being human, and the ‘death' of being at work, often expressed in terms of personal regeneration.

I come here to take stock. (Volunteer, March 1999)

It gets me out of the office and into the fresh air. (Walking the dog, May 1999)

I re-fill my batteries before going back to work. (Visitor, May 1999)

The walk [in the forest] gets me started in the mornings (Warden, February 1999).

It is important for me to see things growing. (Visitor, August 1999)

Hatfield Forest becomes a resource: something people can identify with and which has characteristics that can symbolise their values. In Bloch's terms, trees are able to make abstract notions concrete by transforming and collapsing together metaphors of environmental health, regeneration generally, and regeneration personally. Significant ideas are given form as intimate expressions of personal identity.

63 Identity becomes a polymorphous collection of ideas about individual selfhood (that need externalising), social roles, and understandings of conceptual boundaries (that need practical and ritual reinforcement). In a summary of the current understanding of identity, Cohen (2000) comments that Coffman's contribution to identity studies - that identity is a mutable tactical resource - has misled researchers by highlighting the game elements in identity creation. This tends to ignore how people invest in identity as self-knowledge and consider these identities to be non-negotiable. Mouffe makes a similar point when she opposes the extreme of postmodern fragmentation which refuses “any kind of relational identity” (1995:262). This, too, ignores the degree to which identities (however contested, ambiguous and ill-defined) are taken as fundamental characteristics of self and group. On the other hand, Mouffe maintains, a critical advance has been the break with the subject as rational, transparent entity which conveys a homogenous set of meanings. No longer can we impute a single, rational, essential 'individual' as the source of action (1995:260). The unconscious and irrational, expressed in the symbolic, real and imaginary planes (Lacan 1994) subvert any sense of a cohesive subject.

Power and identity

A key idea in Mouffe's work is identity only exists through and in relations of subordination. Identity is constituted in power. Power is part and parcel of identities rather than being an external imposition taking place between two pre-constituted identities (1995: 261). Any creation of identity implies the establishment of difference which is itself constructed in a hierarchical manner. The consequence of this relationship is that no identity is 'original' or 'natural' but must always be seen as contingent, made in "permanent hybridization and nomadization" (Mouffe 1995:264). Perforce, says Mouffe, this must implicate the power structures through which these identities are constituted.

Instead of seeing the different forms of identity as allegiances to a place or as a property, we

ought to realise that they are what is at stake in any power struggle.

(1995:264).

Massey (1995) reflects on the resonance of Mouffe's conceptualisation of identity for two key geographical terms: space and place. Social space, Massey remarks, is also

64 constituted out of social relations and interactions, and for that reason are always expressions and a medium of power (1995:284). Consequently to Mouffe’s intersection - mutual construction - of power and identity Massey adds a third realm of spatiality. Social relations are spatially written: the construction of identity is also the construction of spatial difference. “We make our spaces/spacialities in the process of constructing our various identities” (Massey 1995:285). Conflicting identities are held together through “powerful delineations of time-space” (ibid.).

It is possible to suggest some contours of time-space delineation and conflicting identities in Hatfield Forest by briefly examining visual modes and aesthetics of tree planting since the 1700s. In Britain we have inherited a sensory world in which the visual, the vista, the view are valued. Trees occupy an ambiguous place in this visual landscape. In carefully landscaped and open glades, viewed from outside and at a distance, trees achieve a series of positive values. Discussing woodland in Georgian England, Daniels (1988) shows how the “politics of the picturesque” influenced planting and landscape patterns. Trees and woodlands provided a way of representing and so ’naturalising’ conflicting views on social order. Table 1 shows how certain species of trees were planted at Hatfield in response to 18th and 19th century notions of landscape, and again in the 1960's as a response to 'good' forestry practice of the time.

Initially the aesthetic was for more formal styles, with avenues and rides, and trees planted to mark the vista providing a “military sense of command” (Daniels 1988:45). Later, more informal styles, still encouraged visitors (of the right kind) to cast a domineering eye possessively over the landscape. Rackham (1989) describes how the forest came to be treated as an extension of Hallingbury Park belonging to the Houblon family. It is perhaps no coincidence that this visual domination of the landscape coincided with a period that saw the final ending of common rights in the forest and concluding with John Houblon's promotion of an Enclosure Act in 1857. This assertion of identity by landed families was often at the expense of others. Rackham recounts John Houblon's description of large numbers of people,

chiefly of the idle and disorderly Men and Women of bad character from [Bishop's]

Stortford...under pretence of gathering nuts loiter about in crowds disturbing the Deer and

65 Game, and in the evening take Beer and Spirits and drink in the forest which affords them an

opportunity for all sorts of Debauchery. Other persons of better description come to the Forest

in small parties... and although this is not so great an arrogance it is done without permission...

and sets a bad example to the lower class of Trespasser.

(Rackham 1989:136) Houblon then proceeded to take legal advice about trespassing.

Table 1: Trees at Hatfield Forest

Management Semi-natural Visual aesthetic ’Economic' Forestry intervention 1750-1850 1960's style Not planted - natural Planted regeneration Coppiced. Species Ash Horse chestnut Scots pine Maple London plane Larch Hazel Swamp cypress Oak Hornbeam Stone pine Alder Black pine Sallow Spindle Crab Elder Beech Oak Birch (2 varieties) Hawthorn (2 varieties) Spatial order Throughout forest but Around lake and at In small plantations at mainly in enclosures. significant southern end of Forest. Underwood with junctions of rides. Designed to hide the edge standards. Meant to be seen of the forest. Many trees of one species. Not mentioned in any publicity material. Not meant to be seen.

Whether the aesthetic was formal or informal, it was bound by notions of power expressed in the ability to visually subdue the landscape. But people are differently placed in respect of their ability to access this metaphor. Even today, where the Forest is preserved ‘for the nation’ and visitors can also 'see' the landscape as a valorised

37 One of Hatfield’s official designations is as a National Nature Reserve (NNR) as well as a Site of

Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).

66 view, there are differences. Visitors in cars are limited to one specific circular route. Staff can 'view' significantly more from their vehicles restricted mainly by their perceptions on limiting environmental damage. The Chairman of the Management Committee (a non-executive role), who is also a descendent of the last private owner of the Forest, was able to show me all of 'his' Forest sitting comfortably in his Landrover. As Massey has commented,

there is always a history which, in one guise or another, is brought to each situation of political

practice...new identities are formed on the basis of, in the context of, even on the ruins of, a

legacy of past and coexisting present identities.

(1995:286)

Boundaries are not necessarily shared, nor are people equally placed in terms of access to trees as metaphorical resources. Consequently, skill and knowledge about trees are part of a process of identity differentiation. Indeed, few ethnographies clearly differentiate between degrees of knowledge about trees. Trees, it is often assumed - more by default than by deliberate omission - are understood in similar terms by most members of the group, culture or society. This is patently not the case, as in most societies some people claim greater knowledge, skill or connection with trees than others. While they may be honoured and valued as guardians of cultural knowledge, their claims to power/knowledge may also be challenged in subtle and overt ways by others. De Boek (1998), for instance, carefully explains the metaphorical importance of different kinds of tree in constructing sexual asymmetry among the uLuunda in southwest Congo. While he builds a satisfyingly ‘complete’ picture of uLuunda society, there is little sense in his writing of how people are differentially positioned vis a vis these symbols of power. One wonders how much his ethnography relies on the view of the men for whom these trees are symbolic of their status. In Britain, forestry has become highly professionalised, with access to most jobs through further and higher education. At Hatfield Forest part of the claim of authority by staff to be trusted to make decisions over the future of its trees lies in their knowledge and professionalism. As managers, theirs is a powerful discourse, but one that is reinforced in relationship and with reference to their knowledge of trees. This knowledge, however, is variable and subject to fashion. Inside the forest, trees upset the primacy of the visual field, forcing other sensual modalities into the fore. It is argued below that there is a connection between the stress on sensual modalities, other

67 than the visual, that trees evoke and the ambiguous place that forests increasingly hold in terms of identity and politics. In interviews, respondents have stressed the immediacy of experience in the forest: touch, smell, sight, sound. For the staff, this immediacy of experience extends into arenas of skilful knowledge and hence into claims of identity.

A question of materiality - identity and things

Another resurgent strand in the social disciplines is a focus on materiality in the making of society. This concerns not only material culture but also space and spatial practices. In other words, the role of places and the role that things in places have in constructing social worlds is crucial. Hatfield Forest poses a number of problems for a theoretical understanding of the relationship between identity and material culture. Firstly, in trying to understand the multifaceted identities present in Hatfield one has to explain both difference and pattern. A tool fine enough to pick up on the textures of individuals (where identity is practised) is needed but which is still able to account for the remarkable durability of certain identity patterns. Secondly, spatial ordering can be read as the engagement of powerful and less powerful identities but this ordering is neither clear, nor clear-cut. Thirdly, as material culture, Hatfield Forest is both a highly produced landscape, and one that constantly escapes its 'created' definition, growing and changing in its own way in out-of-the-way places. Rather than being imagined (Anderson 1991) identity is 'made' in process of making 'things', in this case making trees into the material of culture.

While the way a 'history' is used and emerges depends on the social context of time and place, how exactly 'pastness' is carried forward into the present, what modes of connection or mechanisms are powerful enough to do this is worthy of attention. Appadurai (1986:4) notes that contemporary Western common sense characteristically opposes the material/technical world to the social - things to words. Things are regarded as silent and inert, only animated by persons and their words. Yet, as Tilley points out (1999:95), in the majority of small-scale societies, past or present, this is simply not the case. Things create people as much as people make them. This requires a considerably different perception of objects, one in which things are able to play the role of 'actants' - objects which have actor-like roles effectively

68 shaping performances of sociality (Haraway 1992, Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Haraway calls this the “barely admissible recognition of the odd sorts of agents and actors which/whom we must now admit to the narrative of collective life” (1992: 297). They work to reproduce and transform the social contexts in which they are encountered. Kopytoff (1986) suggests things can he considered to have a biography and life-phases similar to humans. This approach is concerned with how all sorts of bits and pieces - bodies, machines, buildings, trees, as well as texts - are associated together in attempts to build order.

But, perhaps more importantly, techniques and artefacts are embodied - processes that remedy and compensate for the body's deficiencies, and, at the same time, extend, magnify, and make more durable its power. If order is to extend in space and time it must be made of things that resist disassociation and create patterns by lasting longer than the interaction that formed them. Thus, in Serres felicitous phrase, “the object for us makes our history slow” (1995:87) - material culture carries 'pastness' into the present.

Making self at Portingbury Rings: Skill and knowledge in tree felling.

Hatfield Forest is described by the National Trust staff as a unique example in “working order” of a wood pasture and coppice system that was common for much of pre-industrial history. The Forest is made up of open “plains” dotted with pollards and enclosures with dense coppiced woodland. A pollard is a tree that has been cut at a height (approximately 10ft) that puts new growth out of reach of browsing cattle. This results in a uniquely shaped tree with a thick straight boiling, or trunk, topped by a small rounded crown of young growth. Trees that have been coppiced are cut down to the rootstock at ground level (leaving a “stool”) on a regular cycle. At any one point in time some enclosures will be relatively open having just been coppiced, while others, nearing the full cycle, will be tall, shaded and densely wooded. Within the enclosures certain self-sowing trees are allowed to grow without being cut. These “standards” or “maidens” are felled once they have achieved sufficient girth to produce valuable timber. Coppicing and pollarding produces a reliable crop of “poles” and “wood”. Until the C20th wood was primarily used for fuel, while the poles were used for building and fencing. The ‘wattle’ of wattle and daub walls were from

69 coppiced woodland. A rotating system of cutting, together with timber standards and open plains, ensures a steady supply of mixed woodland resources. Coppicing and pollarding also significantly lengthens the life of an individual tree. Some of the oak {Quercus robur) and hornbeam {Capinus betulus) pollards at Hatfield are estimated to be 300-500 years old, while certain coppice stools are thought to be even older. Often part of the tree rots away leaving a hollow trunk together with new young growth. As this environment has remained roughly similar over a substantial length of time, a number of rare plants, insects and birds have exploited the ecological niches available. Consequently, Hatfield is now recognized both for its heritage and for its environmental importance.

This section describes the tasks wardens and volunteers have undertaken in one of the enclosures in Hatfield Forest. It is argued that trees not only play an intimate role in creating a sense of place but also structure the creation of individual identities, motivations and justifications particularly in relation to notions of expertise and knowledge. It is through this grounded, intimate and embodied engagement that claims of identity in terms of the significance of the Forest as a whole are powerfully made. In turn these identities can be spatially mapped in and further related to types of trees. Trees, as ambivalent products as well as bearers of material culture, can also be seen as metaphors of public and private space.

Portingbury Rings are grass-covered dips and mounds in a clearing in the north west comer of the Forest. They are thought to be Iron Age remains, or, according to recent archaeological speculation, a medieval hunting lodge. The shallow rings are set at the end of a ride between three enclosures of coppiced woodland that had not been cut back for at least 25 years. As part of the management plan for this area the staff decided to get the coppices back “on cycle” - that is to cut back the coppiced trees after every 12-18 years of growth. Initial clearing was done in 1998 cutting back the hawthorn {Crataegus monogyna), hazel {Corylus avellana) and hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) in one comer. More time was spent the following year clearing the rest of the scrub and coppice. This produced a good crop of poles and wood neatly piled in lengths by the access track. The “bmsh wood” or “toppings” were piled over the shom “stools” to provide protection for the new growth - “spring” - from deer, rabbits and cattle. The brushwood not used for this purpose was bumt. By springtime, the site was

70 considerably lighter, cleared of most of the scrub, and lined with the first length of wire fencing to help keep the animals out. Dotted at random intervals in this space were a number of standards: trees that had naturally seeded and had been allowed to “grow on” without being coppiced. These were of varying ages, species and sizes, but destined to provide “timber” rather than “wood”. At this point, a decision had to be made about which trees would be felled now and which would be allowed to grow on. The younger the tree the more ‘value’ it adds each year in girth but this proportion of added value falls as the tree ages. At the other end of the scale trees had to be felled before they were too large to be dealt with by the available equipment, or if their boles had already split into two main branches. A good standard is one with a long, clean bole without major branches. The wardens decided to fell a number of oaks {Quercus robur), birch (Betula pendula) that did not seem to be thriving, and several ash {Fraxinus excelsior) trees.

By this stage, wardens and volunteers had spent about 15 days working in the enclosure. Certain trees began to gain characters as aspects about them were noticed. One oak was identified as an old pollard that was to be retained. A hawthorn was not coppiced because the warden liked the contorted shape of its stems. An ash that constricted the track was used as a spatial marker describing how far to go into the enclosure. The space had become worked - threaded with to-ing and fro-ing, marked with small intimate memories of boggy sections, a particularly painful hawthorn spike, laughter as someone sat down suddenly when their load slipped, or at the antics of the ever-present dogs. The breaks for tea and lunch were opportunities to assess how much work had been done, to tell jokes and, in more reflective moments, to comment on a sense of satisfaction gained by working outdoors in such a beautiful place. Two things seem to be going on in these exchanges. Firstly a rehearsal of identity ‘here’ in this place, of things that ‘we’ like doing, in opposition to ‘stressful’ urban pressures. Volunteers often expressed envy at the lifestyle of the wardens, while acknowledging that it had drawbacks. One volunteer, who had retired as head teacher of a challenging inner-city school, was reorienting her career:

71 I have found that I can think more clearly here. Take my time and really get the priorities

right. These trees allow you that. They remind me that not all life need be as hard as in the

city. [She runs her hand over the bark o f a large oak]. It's like getting in touch with a deeper,

older rhythm. This tree was alive before I started teaching and probably will still be alive

when I'm dead. It gives you perspective, doesn't it?

(Sam, Volunteer August 1999)

Secondly, and largely implicit, was the awareness of renewing a deeply patterned cycle, of echoing in their own way, with their own tools, the movements and practices of past ancestors. This emerged primarily in conversations at other times in which the experience of working at Portingbury Rings was used to justify why the Forest is managed as it is, and how deeply satisfying it is to be part of this ancient cycle.

You can imagine groups of men coming out into the forest to fell trees. They would be here,

like us, out for the day. Only a lot more of them because we use chainsaws and tractors instead

of axes and horses. The place can get to you then.

(Phil, Warden April 1999) Even the early morning repetitive task of cleaning and sharpening tools, albeit chainsaws, achieves a rhythmic bodily pattern that in this context becomes freighted with a sense of the past.

Wardens in particular drew parallels between their skills and knowledge and the bigger picture of the importance of maintaining “our living history”.

Knowing the trees is important to me. Seeing them grow, cutting them back, planting new

ones.... I know I won't be alive to see the new pollards grow old. I will probably leave and

work somewhere else in the next few years anyway. But it is still satisfying. I see what people

have done in the past and I am leaving my own small mark too for others.

(Ben, Warden May 1999)

Production of identity for wardens lies partly in their competence at work and in the practice of skills and knowledge. Training in forestry includes a detailed understanding of tree species, their timber and wood values, their growing characteristics and requirements, their relationship with other plants and animals, and the various fungi that attack them. This knowledge is then built up in the process of working in and managing forests. Consequently, not only is a forester able to rapidly identify species, they can also identity specific strains and cultivars. Each tree then becomes a material starting point and a container for latent knowledge, both general

72 and specialist. Specialist knowledge includes knowing the particular characteristics of, say, an ash tree, while at the same time using that tree to draw out the larger story of a medieval coppice system. A point where this became particularly clear was during a day in April when most of the staff and four volunteers felled the marked trees.

Ben, a warden, took the opportunity to explain to the volunteers the felling process. There is a significant skill in successfully felling a tree with all the elements of a dramatic performance. The forester first needs to assess the “balance” of the tree, which way the bole is leaning, where the heaviest branches lie and which way the tree naturally wants to fall. This sense is gained with experience but is still very difficult to judge properly. Trees often have heavy branches on the opposite side to the lean tending to pull trees over in unexpected directions. Then he (in this case) needs to decide, within the scope of what is judged to be the natural fall, where he wants the tree eventually to lie. Various factors will come into this. At the Portingbury Rings coppice, the wardens were concerned to avoid freshly coppiced hazel stools, fence lines and to avoid breaking off branches of surrounding trees, especially the old oak pollard.

Figure 7: Using a chainsaw to fell a Birch tree

73 Once these decisions have been made the forester fires up his chainsaw and starts “rounding-up”, also called laying-in, facing or setting-up the tree, by removing the buttresses or spurs at the base of the tree to establish the basic shape and size of the trunk (Figure 8). Then, with another quick look up at the tree to estimate its fall, he carefully makes a “gob-cut”, with the horizontal cut at right angles to the proposed direction of fall. The next cuts depend on the size of the tree. With a large oak, he puts the saw in at a T-shape to the gob-cut in order to relieve the pressure in the centre of the tree and to lesson the likelihood of “shake” or “cracking” which could ruin the timber value. He then sets about forming the “hinge” around which the tree will topple and which gives some control over the descent path. This hinge can be formed with a thicker and thinner edge to encourage twisting as the tree falls, again to try to modify its fall path. As he works back the tree sometimes “sits back” and traps the saw. Then metal triangular wedges are driven in to free the saw. As the moment when the tree starts to topple nears, the forester becomes very focused. On large trees they will leave catches - small bits of wood left at the opposite side to the gob cut which are severed at the last minute to release the tree. But at any point these might “let go” and the forester needs to leap out of the way with the chainsaw. Eventually comes the high point. With a crack, the tree starts to fall. There is little the forester can do at this stage except get out of the way in case cracking timber sends splinters or splits off higher up in a run, and the tree crashes to the ground. If all has gone well, if the planning, execution and reading of the tree have been right -particularly with a large tree - this is the moment to savour and briefly rest. The next stage is “snedding”, cutting away the side branches to leave a long straight bole that will be later sawn into timbers and planks.

74 Planned direction of Wedges fall removed for rounding-up Gob-cut

Gob-cut Tree bole

Basic cutting directions of Planned direction chainsaw of fall

Hinge to help control Catches to help control direction of fall when the tree falls

Figure 8: Method of felling a tree

Often it is when things go wrong that the implicit identification with trees is more clearly shown. Phil, another warden, had selected a large ash to fell. The day before he had been explaining that coppiced ash is particularly intolerant to browsing during the first year or two and needed careful protecting with hawthorn topping. He had not felled a large ash for sometime, and explained that he needed to beware of the possibility of splitting. A characteristic of ash is that it splits, pivoting over above head height and sending dangerous splinters into the face of the Forester. As Phil worked, it became clear that the tree was not going to fall the way he wanted it to go. He adjusted the hinge but still the tree sat back. Eventually it snapped, and Phil had to move very fast as the tree fell in the opposite direction to which he had planned. Taking off his helmet and wiping the sweat away he, he swore at the tree and then explained that he must have misread the weight. He commented on the colour of the timber revealed and then, still obviously annoyed, went off to fell a birch. Ben hit even worse problems when the oak he had been felling ended breaking branches and “hung-up” on the old pollard he had been trying to avoid. After trying hand winches

75 and failing to move it, the tractor was called for and eventually dragged the oak onto the ground.

I am really unhappy now. It would happen just when you were all listening to me spout on.

I'm going to fell those three over there just to prove I can still do it properly.

(Ben, April 1999)

How can we understand the role of trees in making identities here? There are certainly elements of competition among the staff to perform skilfully, and to demonstrate their knowledge. But there is also ambivalence in felling trees by those who see their role as primarily conservation. As Ben put it:

I like protecting trees and helping them grow and maybe felling is almost the opposite of that.

But it is part o f a cycle. It needs to be done. To tell the truth I get a real thrill out o f felling a

big tree. Once I'm into the process its very focused...it's the buzz I suppose.

(Ben, June 1999)

In cutting down and nurturing new growth wardens and volunteers feel themselves in direct engagement with an ancient 'natural' tradition. Coppiced woodland embodies metaphors of death and renewal, of cyclical time stretching back to our early ancestors. Some of the older stools might have been cut and coppiced over 500 years ago. There is a conscious awareness of repeating tasks that they imagine to have felt very similar in the past. Coppicing is not done for the same reasons or with the same tools as in earlier times, but there is a strong awareness of similarities of pattern and experience, albeit with a hazy, 'timeless' past. The earth banks surrounding the enclosure, on which a modem wire fence is built, probably had fences periodically built on it right back into the 11th century. A short section of the bank was topped with a traditional woven hawthorn hedge, “Just so we can know what it looked like and I can use it in my guided walks” (Phil, May 1999).

Felling standards has different metaphoric opportunities. Here the tree is killed, renewal only taking place in the sense of other trees growing to take their place. But, unlike coppice wood, destined for burning or a short life in fences, timber has a long and valued 'second' existence. Timber from Hatfield in recent years has been made into flooring, a rebuild of a medieval barn, hand-made furniture, fine art and turned bowls. Another warden. Bill, described how satisfying it was to run timber through the bench saw and reveal the unique grains and pattern in the wood. In successfully

76 felling standards and cutting and drying the timber, he added, “I am an important part in delivering some old trees to those who make it into beautiful things” (Bill, April 1999).

A ramble through time

As part of their celebrations of 75 years of the National Trust at Hatfield Forest, the staff organized a “ritual beheading” of a new oak pollard and a “historical walk” taking visitors through the history of Hatfield with the help of costumed actors. Unlike the ongoing coppice work these were one-off events organized for a very different audience. Trees are used in this instance to structure a distinct set of identities, those between staff and visitors and those between staff and local dignitaries on the management committee. They also link to ideas of national importance by stressing aspects of uniqueness and notions of continuity through time similar to those expressed in the previous section. The pollarding and the walk illustrate an important role of the staff in mediating between older embedded rural identities and those of the rapidly growing urban population advancing into the countryside along the M20 corridor.

One of the problems of managing trees together with cattle is the minimal regeneration on the open plains. Without deliberate planting and subsequent protection from cattle in the form of wooden tree guards, there is little opportunity for new pollards to be established. According to Rackham (1989) pollards did not fit into the landscape park aesthetic of the owners before the National Trust and nor did the National Trust itself see value in these trees until the 1970’s. Many of the old pollards have become large trees with their branches all starting at the pollard mark. Hence, not only was there a break in maintaining the pollards, but this lead to a significant “generation” gap. Consequently, Hatfield has many “veteran” pollards in the 300-500 year bracket nearing the end of their lives, and then a general tapering of numbers until the 150 year bracket^After this, no new pollards were planted until those established 20-30 years ago. With the realisation of the unique microenvironment

In the fashionable romanticism of the 19*’’ century, pollards were cast as unnatural, sad remnants of bygone insensitivities, and referred to in contemporary texts as having “mutilated heads” (Davies 1988)

77 these trees provide, particularly for rare beetles, there have been attempts to pollard established trees in the 50-100 year range with mixed results. Pollards have thus moved up to become valued features in the landscape at Hatfield and, in the narratives of the staff, part of the Forest’s uniqueness.

Some of the oldest pollards line the road visitors follow from the main gate, over the plain and down to the lake. These pollards, with their large, hollowed-out boilings and strange shapes are a highly visible feature of Hatfield Forest. They are mentioned in most of the brochures and information leaflets that visitors can pick up about Hatfield Forest. Following MacCannell’s (1989) theory of a staged development of tourist sites from un-remarked to sacralized, these pollards appear to be in the process of becoming codified icons of Hatfield itself. It perhaps would not be surprising if in the future certain ancient pollards were fenced off (to protect them from 'the public') in the next stage of site sacralization. One interesting feature of this codification is in allying ‘ancient’ pollards with another icon of timeless ‘Englishness’, the oak. It may be all too easy to dismiss historical specificity in metaphors such a “hearts of oak”, and the “oaken bulwarks” of the English Navy (Schama 1995) as meaningless in contemporary society. But, I suggest, the metaphoric ranges of strength, defence and stronghold remain potent. Does the symbol of the National Trust, an oak leaf, tap into the same range of the defence and preservation of valuable heritage? When asking tourists about the pollards the majority identified them as old oak pollards. In fact, most of the pollards visible from the road are hornbeam or maple. Interestingly, this same elision of fact with image is made by members of the management committee who represent a more traditional rural point of view. A maple pollard does not mean the same.

Given these perceptions of pollards, it is perhaps not surprising that lopping the top of a young (oak) tree - the first step in making a new pollard - was the key event in a small celebration of 75 years of National Trust (NT) management. The tree, and the simple action of cutting it, gives material form to a number of ideas about the forest, its past and its future. At the same time these expressions need not be mutually compatible, nor viewed in the same way by the participants. The “ritual beheading”, as it was jokingly referred to, was not a public event nor were the volunteers invited. Those present were limited to the staff and members of the Management Committee.

78 The property manager saw this as an opportunity to celebrate what the NT has done well in the Forest and the currently cordial relationship with the Management Committee. The Committee is an interesting result of the terms of NT ownership of the property. Since 1924 the chairmen have been members of two local families; the Buxtons, descendants of the Buxton who gave the forest to the NT; and the Barclays, long-standing landowners and closely connected to one of the two hunts that have rights of access to the forest. Consequently, the pollard could equally represent connections with the rural land-owning class and a statement of their continuing concern in and ability to influence the future of the forest.

Metaphorically tying trees to people in significant ways like this makes statements about what sort of place Hatfield is (and who it is for). At the same time, the ability of a pollard to represent continuity from the past into the future enables those present to re-establish their claims over and their roles within the Forest. A pollard becomes the material representation of their authority, written into the living landscape. To stretch this metaphor further, they control (literally as well as metaphorically) the pollards which the public have access to mainly in terms of their iconic and environmental value. Focusing the event on a pollard with its ability to span many human generations reinforces the embeddedness of authority, consequently metaphorically glossing over the turbulent history of the competing owners of Hatfield. The tree is able to emphasise stability rather than competition and change.

The bigger event in terms of resources and effort was the “Ramble Through Time". This was a large event where the NT was able to publicise its work at Hatfield, recruit new members, sell plants and timber, advertise its educational programme and guided walks, and rehearse the significance of the Forest. As the day aimed to attract families, the educational content needed to be fun as well. The centrepiece of the day was a circular walk through the woods stopping at re-creations of past human involvement with Hatfield. Starting with the Iron Age, actors in period costume brought scenes to life. Visitors could see a domestic scene outside an Iron Age hut; the capture and throwing in the stocks of a poacher in the Norman period; a ‘medieval’ altercation between a mounted lady of the manor and some peasant commoners with their animals in the forest; ‘Victorians’ arriving in a carriage and taking tea outside the Shell House on the Lake; and finally, a selection of modem

79 machinery and techniques used to manage the Forest today. At each point, wardens provided background information on the scene being played out. Children particularly enjoyed being able to pelt the ‘poacher’ with wet sponges and pet the 'commoners' animals.

In this stroll through a re-created history, a story about the relationship of people and trees was being told. One part of it was about continuity of practice in the woods. As far back as the Iron Age, it was suggested, trees were coppiced and the wood used in many aspects of everyday life. The trees also provided shelter and grazing for wild and domesticated animals. A second part of the story was about human conflict over the forest. The guides and actors were briefed as follows:

The key idea you need to get across is that it was because there was so much conflict over the

forest that nothing got done. Unlike many other forests that were enclosed, felled and sold off

this one stayed much the same because no-one could agree about what to do with it.

(Ben, Warden 1999) Trees, particularly coppiced trees, provide the material link between ‘us’ and our ancestors. It is easier to imagine ‘our’ past when we can imagine that they looked at, touched and used trees in ways that can be physically experienced now. Trees become powerful aids to imagination, short-circuiting the process of mental re-creation with the physical immediacy of their presence, sound, texture and smell. While we know the people dressed up are actors pretending to be someone else in a different time, trees, even if managed, are natural. They grow in the same way as they did in the past thereby giving us access to a past in more ways than we realise.

Visitors remarked on the anticipation engendered by the tunnel-like path through dense woodland that then spilled out onto each scene in turn. One visitor commented on the sense of changing values over the forest. She described the change from a forest in which people made a living, to one where it had become a status symbol (Victorian) and where making a living from the forest was no longer important.

I thought it quite strange when we got to the modern day bit to see all that machinery. I had

the sense o f the forest being rural, and being worked in... sort o f local and rural together ... and

then you get to the National Trust bit, where they are saving it for the nation, saving this

particular way o f doing things in the forest - but with all that machinery. It didn’t seem quite

right.

(Anne, interview 1999)

80 Again, trees represent both the past and ideas of naturalness. Anne opposes the naturalness of the trees specifically to the machines of industrial modernity. For her trees somehow stand against this kind of production.

Conclusion: metaphors of living history

Trees make curious candidates for consideration as material culture. While Hatfield Forest is undoubtedly a creation of human environmental interaction and effective in representing values currently esteemed, it is also made of up individual trees with life paths of their own, constantly growing and changing out of the reach of cultural intervention. This ambivalence allows trees to materialise and to physically represent a whole range of ideas about identity, skill, the past, authority and place. Trees can be viewed both as containers of latent values to be released with the correct interventions (cutting in the right way), as well as active producers of meaning which, by their very existence in one form or another (as coppice or pollard trees), shape human responses in patterned ways. It is persuasive to think of trees as artefacts that are able to ‘slow history down’, to pass meaning on in vastly removed arenas of time. Table 2 summarises some ways in which trees structure identities, and act as a resource for creating identities in Hatfield Forest.

It is suggested that the primary role of pollards is to make the ‘place’ of Hatfield, of coppiced woodland to make the past and of timber standards to make skilful selves. It should also be clear that while this may be the current roles played by trees in Hatfield Forest, this is in no sense set or expressive of the full range of metaphoric meanings trees can carry in these different situations. Rather it indicates partial patterns or identity preferences which contemporary trees carry in Hatfield. Individuals experience these patterns differently and are differentially placed in them. Susan, recently employed by the NT to run their education programme, commented about learning' the forest.

81 I didn't really know anything about forests when I started here. I was pretty much thrown in at

the deep end. I didn't realise what an incredibly diverse teaching resource the place could be. I

mean, I knew about the old pollards and the bugs and beetles in them, and you've seen the

mapping exercises we have at the Lake. But out here [under a dense canopy of hornbeam] its

still all new to me. I still feel very ignorant - 1 don't think you should really be asking me any

questions at all.

(Susan, Teacher 1999)

Table 2: Trees and social identities

'Type' o f tree Pollard Coppiced Standard Spatial Visible, public. Interior, private Ambivalent. arrangement Becomes more visible when an area is coppiced

Social Ritualised; Source of authentic Used to identities Icons of Hatfield knowledge about demonstrate skill place and knowledge.

Products "wood" "timber" Rods, poles, fire-wood, fences Beams, planks, utensils, furniture

Value Preserving heritage; Cyclical time; ancient Economic/ unique ecosystem pattern aesthetic Role Making place Making past Making self

There is something about being 'out there' in contact with the 'natural' world of trees which changes people - affects their identity. For Susan, knowledge about the forest is part of a process of learning valorised perceptions and being trained to be better in her role. Intimate knowledge of trees of the kind that empowers the wardens’ identities was still elusive, hidden in bodily memories of skilful practice yet to be gained, and in parts of the forest not yet 'known'.

In a way reminiscent of Mauzé’s (1998) description of the move from metaphors in culture to metaphors o f culture on the North West American Coast, trees in Hatfield

82 have moved from having meaning in culture because of their products, to having meaning because of their shape or beauty, and then to having meaning due to their ability to materialise the past. They have moved from providing a living, to a status symbol, to a heritage and environmental artefact. But biographies of things, as Tilley (1999) has pointed out,

inevitably work in terms of other categories, ... with the social, economic, technical or

religious use of the thing, and all the interlinkages between relating to an artefact's production,

exchange and consumption, its birth, movement, use and death....

(Tilley 1999:75-6) For the wardens, doing the task is more important than the product from the task. Hence the process of cutting a coppice makes the past. The wood and timber product is incidental to the process, incidental to the presence of coppiced trees and the embodied repetition of a historical cycle. Using chainsaws - modem technology - does not interfere for them in the sense that they are physically echoing past practices. Trees, it seems, can stand for life, for heritage, for natural environment, for fresh air, for commodity, for prestige gained from the exercise of skill, for the past and for the future. At Hatfield, trees achieve meaning through their spatial arrangement, their particular species and characteristics, and the human activities that 'make' them significant. Different trees seem better able to express distinct metaphoric modes of identity. At certain points during their lifetime they achieve greater significance for individual, role or group identities. As metaphors of the fundamental categories that invest identities with their tonal depth, the trees of Hatfield are polysemous, but still able to provide a focus of 'our', however ill-defined, identity. Thus, while trees among forest dwelling hunter-gatherers may be expanded around metaphors of the forest as ‘parent’ and cultivars develop the forest as ‘ancestor’, at Hatfield the Forest becomes an ambiguous living metaphor of ‘our past’.

83 Chapter 3

Passion and Prejudice: Foxhunting and the morality of land, people and animals In the English countryside.

I was bom at Goldsbrough in Yorkshire in October 1849, and, like many other natives of that country, especially those who bear the same name as myself, I became keenly interested in

sport from my very early days. At the age of six I was duly blooded by Charles Treadwell,

who was huntsman to the Bramham Moor hounds for twenty-three years.

(Gerald Lascelles, Deputy Surveyor of the New Forest 1880-1914)

Hunting is only intelligible as symbolic behaviour, like a game or a religious ceremony, and

the emotions that the hunt arouses can only be understood in symbolic terms. (Cartmill, 1993:29)

It was very sad to see the Buckhounds go. Hunting was part of my life right from as far back as 1 can remember. It became inevitable, with the roads and all the people, and no clear run across the country left at all. Many of us then joined the Foxhounds. (Mrs A. Millar, Retired Master of Buckhounds, 1999)

“Where can I find ‘82 u’? It’s a book about foxhunting.”

“That sounds like social history - or should I say unsocial history. Try in there.”

(UCL Main library, 2000)

There are few issues that have seen as dramatic a change in public opinion over the last fifty years as hunting with hounds. From its roots as the King’s pursuit and the sport of social elites to its contemporary contested state, hunting has witnessed a remarkable reversal of fortune. For those that take part, hunting now stands as a last bastion of an embittered countryside battle that represents far more than simply the wishes of the estimated 240,000 participants^^. It has become the leitmotif of an

The 1997 update to “the Cobham” Report lists 15,300 in employment (FTEs) and 228,500 participants (Phelps, Allen and Harrop 1997:22). Some of these figures together with the economic

84 ongoing debate about the future of the countryside that appears to pit a liberal urban population flexing its economic and leisured muscle against an entrenched and embattled rural population who feel ignored and politically sidelined. The arguments over hunting with hounds also raise important questions about what a sustainable countryside might be like, and thus how values are framed in the debate. In the light of current plans to make the New Forest into a national park, and the most recent ‘Bums Report’ on Hunting with Dogs (June 2000), hunting serves as a litmus test of how to balance local demands with national interests, tradition with environmentalism and ethics with values. In short, with how we decide to live in the world around us.

In an earlier section the connection between perceptions of boundaries and the way these are inscribed in the landscape through practice, discourse and representational methods was raised. Implicit in this analysis is the idea that values are not existential notions (even if thought of and discussed as such), but are embodied: expressed by individuals in words and actions and often strongly held and central to a sense of personal identity. Hunting for the people involved - pro or anti - is more than a set of moral issues, it is something through which and in which they express who they are. Much of the vehemence of the clashes over hunting stems from peoples’ close personal engagement with the animals and the landscape. Yet attachment to the land and animals is not founded in the terms of the current conflict over animal welfare - important though this is - but in the sensate, all-around experience of being in the countryside. It is this sense of immersion, of plunging into the landscape, in the inexpressible moments between conversations and before arguments, between seeing, smelling and touching and then attempting to define those experiences, that attachments are made and from which identities emerge. Writing about these moments also fails by its nature to bridge these gaps.

In this section I attempt to draw connections between these ways of being in the landscape and their political and social manifestations in terms of expressions of identity, relationships to place and animals, and contiguous claims to moral ownership. Given the nature of this attempted link it will, inevitably, be partial. While

impact analysis have been challenged as inflationary. They do however give an approximation of the numbers involved.

85 the sensate landscape can only be partially described - a dim echo - the conversations and expressions people have while in the landscape are more amenable to analysis. Consequently, it is these observable manifestations that I use to point back towards the sensate makings of self, and forward to their social and political lineaments. In particular I examine how legitimacy and authority are inscribed on the land, made moral and contested. The focus is primarily on the members of the New Forest Foxhounds (a foxhunting association), and their perceptions and explanations of their relationship with the New Forest landscape, its fauna and flora. However, during the course of fieldwork a great many conversations with and comments by other people were about aspects of hunting both at the New Forest and at Hatfield Forest. Indeed, it was rare to find someone without an opinion, even more so among those working in the forest.

Researching hunting

The hunting issue is so tense and contested, so febrile in debate and so heated in the defence of positions deemed fundamentally opposed, that my own ‘placement’ as researcher requires expanding. Both Hatfield Forest and the New Forest owe much of their current status to the history and on-going practice of hunting in its various forms. In both places the bodies charged with management responsibility deal, almost daily, with various aspects of the hunting issue. At Hatfield Forest, the National Trust, as private landowners, have the legal ability to simply put a stop to hunting on any part of their land. Led by the wishes of the majority of the membership, but not without a public and acrimonious debate, this is precisely what the NT did by enforcing a ban on deer hunting (as opposed to foxhunting). Commenting on this in conversation, one senior NT official outlined how the deer hunting debate had polarised opinion between an older land-owning membership and the huge new urban middle-class membership. Illustrating how ‘live’ this debate still is the official also requested anonymity.

They would have simply preferred to keep it off the agenda. It very nearly didn’t go through at

all. I think the anti-hunting lobby staged a majorcoup by focusing on the issue of stress -

86 essentially glossing cruelty as stress. As it was worded, once the report commissioned on

stress'*® in deer arrived, if it showed that deer suffered unnecessary or undue stress then

hunting would be banned. This effectively narrowed the terms of the debate to the animal

welfare issue. And of course any animal chased by hounds is bound to feel stressed. How you

decide this is ‘undue’ was not really an issue after that. Nor were all the other aspects of

hunting like heritage, tradition or way of life.

(Conversation with NT Official, Wales, October 1998)

For NT Property Managers, decisions like these are imposed and have to be implemented to the best of their ability. At Hatfield where there is no deer hunting association but there is a foxhunt, the implications of a ban would be extremely taxing for the staff. The terms of the original grant of land to the NT included continuing rights of access for the local foxhunt. Traditionally the Master of the Hunt has also been the chair of the Management Committee. A great deal of the current smooth running of Hatfield Forest stems from adroitly managed and cordial relations with the members of the Management Committee. Placed into this delicately balanced situation, my request, as a relatively unknown (and hitherto unjudged) researcher, for an introduction to the Master of the Hunt, was understandably viewed, perhaps not with outright hostility, but with a certain degree of caution. Polite promises to arrange a meeting later, for a “more convenient time”, subtle discouragement in tone and body language, followed by enthusiasm for other requests or tasks, all served notice of an arena where the potential for strained social relationships was high.

Compared to the sense of cordial social relations of Hatfield, albeit pregnant with carefully managed potential stresses, tensions over hunting in the New Forest are significantly nearer the surface. In an otherwise positive initial meeting with the Forestry Commission to discuss access and directions for my research, a tentative question on the subject of hunting provoked this thin-lipped response.

' If you are going to ask anything about hunting I am afraid that we can have nothing to do with

your project. We are dealing directly with the Minister on the hunting issue and it already

"*® In his executive summary for the National Trust Prof. Bateson states that “lengthy Hunts with hounds impose extreme stress on Red Deer and are likely to cause them great suffering. The Hunts force them to experience conditions far outside the normal limits for their species”. While his report was sufficient to change the policy at the NT, there has since been considerable debate about the interpretation of the results and critique of aspects of the study’s design.

87 takes up far too much of our staff time. I can’t have you speaking to Forestry Commission

staff about it. As civil servants we are required to be neutral. It is just too much of a hot

political potato at the moment.

(Senior Forester, Forestry Commission) About a month before this interview the FC had “been forced” to revoke a foxhunting licence for a short period because hunt saboteurs had filmed evidence of an infraction of the terms under which the licence was issued. For many of the locals this simply reinforced their view of the FC riding rough-shod over their traditional rights. For others this was a small step by the FC away from their cosy relationship with traditional countryside interests and towards fulfilling their public duties. For staff at the FC, again it seemed they could do little right.

As I came to know certain FC staff better, it became clear that hunting was an issue that evoked the whole gamut of responses. Some (most of the Game Keepers) nursed quiet, but bitterly held resentment against the enforcing of “neutrality” on an issue they felt fundamental to their identity and to the Forest. For those in this camp, the fact that I came “down from London” as a researcher with a high degree of access to the FC marked me as probably ‘anti’, likely to misunderstand the depths of their attachment to the landscape and definitely to be treated with suspicion. Other staff champed at the bureaucratic slowness and their inability to change the Forest “for the better” by taking an overt stance against foxhunting. A cartoon that appeared in the Log Roll, an unofficial magazine produced internally by FC staff, makes wry comment on the ambivalence of their role as preservers of the landscape (Figure 9). A slightly larger number (including most of the women) either said they did not feel strongly either way, or, when pressed, said that they “shouldn’t have an opinion while at work”. A degree of uncomfortableness accompanied any conversation that strayed into hunting territory, particularly with the latter set of people. The nearer an issue is to the ‘surface’ of social life, the less room there is for neutrality. Asking almost any question about hunting presupposes a reflexivity about the issue - a thinking through which implies an already known and decided position on hunting. One is expected to have an opinion. In this sense it was virtually impossible to talk about hunting without

88 IVe p resen /e fche r i g h t o F

Figure 9: The problems of preserving cultural heritage {Log Roll, 3"^^ Ed. Christmas 2000)

implicating ourselves in relation to the debate and thus in who we are. For certain senior Foresters the combustibility of the issue forced decisions they might otherwise have preferred to avoid. Staff, for example, had to be specially allocated to manage the FC’s ‘official’ stance. At another level, the Deputy Surveyor, as a civil servant, provides advice and information to the Minister of Agriculture Food and Fisheries and his team, thus directly influencing government policy. Again, in this fraught situation my interest in hunting was bound to provoke strong reactions.

With most initial avenues to the members of the Hunt subtly or firmly shut, I needed a new approach that did not directly implicate the management organisations in my questions nor jeopardise their judicious balancing acts. Eventually, through another academic involved in long term research on hunting, I was introduced to an influential figure connected to the Master of Foxhounds Association and the Countryside Alliance. After a lengthy, but probing interview in his imposing London offices, he agreed to write letters of introduction to the key people in each Hunt who would then shepherd my onward contacts. The resultant formal interviews were cordial, friendly, occasionally expansive, but also guarded and with careful direction to responses. There were some incisive questions regarding my own position, affiliations and potential audience. It was only out in the countryside following the hounds that

89 unguarded moments allowed glimpses of personal enthusiasm, strongly held opinions and an intimation of the importance of ‘being there’ - the sensate connections.

Throughout this section of the research I was highly aware of the potential impact of my questions in such a politically charged field. Not, perhaps, for myself (except in terms of being able to continue my research in this area), but for those whose beliefs and sense of self, both pro and anti, are intimately and personally tied to the outcome of a vociferous public debate. Each question echoed up and down the scale - in offices where government policy is decided, in AGMs and staff meetings, and out in the countryside as decisions and opinions made in these venues come to bear on everyday activity. Out here, in the countryside, in such a freighted atmosphere, each comment and gesture is scrutinised; its import subject to extended analysis. Even ‘normal’ interaction, say conversations about home and work during a hunt, becomes an assertion of identity and a practice of fundamental beliefs about how the countryside should be.

How does a researcher fit into this tensioned field? Any comments I make should rightly be read in the context of the guarded responses and careful direction of conversations by my respondents. This may suggest two things. Firstly, in a manner reminiscent of structuralism, that there is a deeper level underneath the controlled surface presented which would only reveal itself in extended research beyond the means and time available for the current project. Or, secondly, that this managed surface is the stuff of everyday interaction particularly when social life is under such public scrutiny'^ \ This does not of course rule out the possibility of many more interpretations and levels not available to me. One thing is clear, however. Becoming involved in hunting (whether pro or anti) in the current climate, means that people are subject to increasingly professional questioning and are consequently forced to have their opinions and arguments well rehearsed. In turn, these well-thought-out positions together with the overt wearing of allegiance, leads to further blurring of any boundaries between professional and amateur commentators.

This should not be read as a rejection of extended research or the illumination that time spent with people can give. But rather than dismiss the ‘surface’ o f social life, in this case it appears to be highly significant.

90 As Berglund (1998) highlights in her discussion of environmental protest groups in Germany, becoming an expert is no longer - if it ever was - the preserve of academics and professionals. Alongside a reduction in the level of trust in traditional ‘experts’, there is an increasing reliance on scientific method. The stress on method as arbiter can be seen in the circumstances leading to the ban of deer hunting by the National Trust and the subsequent critique of that research. In many conversations about hunting, facts, the results of surveys and investigation, are wielded to support arguments. At the same time, facts as represented by others to support opposing arguments are dismissed through careful demolition or outright rejection. Paradoxically scientific facts, while relied on to clinch arguments, become stripped of their comfortable cloak of objectivity and increasingly shown as political artefacts. The Phelps Report referred to below, was given to me by a pro-hunt activist as an “objective” introduction to hunting even if they did not agree entirely with the Report’s conclusions. On the other hand, despite approving of some of the Report’s suggestions, anti-hunt activists dismiss it for its “pro-hunting bias”. Statements presented as ‘objective’ in the report, they argue, are blatantly not true and pander to the pro-hunt lobby. A description of what happens when a fox is caught by the hounds - it is killed by the “characteristically canine sharp flick of its head...” which breaks the fox’s neck making death “instantaneous” (1997:16) - the antis argue, ignores well known instances'^^ where this is not the case. They point out that an “instantaneous” kill equates to minimal suffering, thus strengthening the pro hunt argument.

This preamble begins to trespass on the ground of arguments presented below. It is important, however, to give a sense of the climate under which this part of my research took place. In doing so I find that already the established language of ‘pro’ and ‘anti’, of pre-set habitual positions, invades my writing and begins to leach colour from the complexities of personal identity and engagement with the landscape. It is impossible to be unbiased; one is always biased in someone else’s eyes. In The next

The ‘Quom incident’ concerned a court case where anti-hunt activists had filmed a fox, still alive after the hounds had been called off, deliberately trampled by the Huntsman to avoid evidence that it had survived.

91 section describes the social and physical arrangements of foxhunting before exploring members’ constructions of a moral countryside.

A Hunt with the New Forest Foxhounds.

Foxhunting with hounds in Britain is a complex, carefully arranged, ritualised activity that conjoins people, animals and landscape in a unique performance. Accordingly there are certain specialist roles, a structure in relationship to daily and seasonal time, and a physical as well as implicit relationship to places and animals in the landscape. The basic organisation of foxhunting associations and the structure of hunting with hounds has been sufficiently described elsewhere (Phelps 1997, Marvin 2000(a), 2000(b), Cartmill 1984). Hence, I will confine myself to a brief sketch of the most pertinent features, before turning to an analysis of a specific hunt that took place in the New Forest in November 1999.

Formal foxhunting has a season that runs from late October to mid March. All formal Hunts belong to the Master of Foxhounds Association (MFHA), which sets standards, agrees boundaries and provides a unified voice to represent hunting at governmental level. The New Forest Foxhounds is one of approximately 220 foxhunting organisations in Britain all registered with the MFHA. Each Hunt has a “country”, an area of land registered with the MFHA within which they have prime hunting rights. Other Hunts are only allowed into their country under certain circumstances'^^. The ‘country’ is a peculiar construction. It is not owned in a legal sense by the Hunt (although some areas may be owned by them as a means of ensuring continuation of hunting rights) but by a mixture of private and public ownership. Nor does the country relate to local political boundaries. Counties or other municipal administration areas. If there is a pattern in the boundaries it is often set by large-scale physical features. The NFF has a country that is roughly coterminous with the ancient

A neighbouring Hunt may follow a fox from their country into another but may not look for a new fox to chase until they are back in their own country. However, local arrangements may be in place whereby one Hunt is given permission to hunt over part of another’s country.

92 perambulation of the New Forest. Moreover, it is a classification of space that is preferentially used by members of the Hunt. It represents, in the words of Marvin “...a sacred space of deep emotional significance and social and cultural resonance" (2000a: 109).

The Hunt Chairman, together with his committee is responsible for the overall running of the association. The Hunt Master is responsible for day to day management and in charge of the “field” during a day’s hunting. He is responsible for the ‘style’ and ‘performance’ of hunting on a daily basis. Assisting him are the hunt “servants”. These include the Huntsman and his Whippers-in, who direct and manage the hounds, Kennel-men, and Terrier-men who are called in when a fox “goes to earth”. However, the two most elaborated ‘players’ in this cultural performance, are the hounds and the fox. It is they that provide the event with its dramatic drive and ever-changing narrative force. It is the hounds that actually hunt the fox, while the other players, humans and horses, are present to bring about the circumstances that enable a successful hunt to be performed, and to witness, judge and appreciate that performance.

Marvin (2000a) has recently expounded on the Hunt as a performance of cultural and aesthetic values and I owe a great deal to his analysis. However, I wish to focus specifically on the flows developed during a Hunt and the relationships created with the New Forest landscape. Map 1 shows the movements of hounds, mounted field and foot followers during a Hunt with the NFF in November 1999. It is drawn from the perspective of four people following the hunt on foot and by car starting at the “meet” at Yew Tree Heath car park. Their path during the day (blue) is interrupted by pauses

(Pi, ? 2, etc.) to watch the hounds (orange) “work”, listen and wait for them to appear, to find out where they are going, or simply to chat. When the hounds are “drawing a covert”, searching for the scent of a fox, they spread out (filled in areas) but when they pick up a ‘line’ or are called to order by the Huntsman they move in a much tighter formation. The mounted field (purple) is kept behind and out of the way of the hounds and does not enter the coverts. Although those on horseback are better able to keep up with the hounds, foot followers often have closer sighting of the action. This was particularly true on this hunt as between P? and Pg a fox (red) passed within 10 meters of the group. The map also differentiates between periods when the hounds

93 and mounted field are visible (solid lines) and when they were hidden in the landscape (dotted lines).

^ / - - ______^gHinger Conw Pm

Mirdwvood IndoMjrc ford I Pottdffl ford

/Riah' Bud;

Cumul )[)GE CP

Back to cumL", m eet\ fB ^ ^ ^

.Cdrtbv.Ktt<

/.I \\\ ') Gimetfldds F uriebrakt

CulvcHc;

Ncr-*^«d

Hilfp«nn;

Wood Rowtwrro»» I LKik Go«w«)i Com* Llttk Hordjrtu)! Wood

Tintany Wood I -r—-j'V ^ "5?>: ■■ i ' t e r

—-— Followers on foot Mounted field - ■— - Followers in car _ — - Estimated route of mounted field Hounds in sight Fox in sight Estimated route of hounds Estimated route of fox

Map 1: A fox hunt in the New Forest

94 From 10am Members begin gathering at the meet, preparing horses, greeting friends and discussing the day ahead. A round of drinks is provided (mulled wine). The Master says a few words of thanks, briefs the “field” on the general direction and reminds them of the rules and whose instructions they are to follow during the day. At 11:15 am the “off’ is sounded on a horn and the Huntsman then leads the hounds to draw the first covert. The mounted field is led off on top of the ridge by the Master while those walking stroll along behind chatting in small groups. From Pi, at the top of a ferny slope overlooking the Beaulieu River valley our group of foot followers is able to watch the action unfold. The hounds are run through the covert - gorse, bracken and small trees - on the slope where they attempt to pick up a scent. The Whippers-in ride wide on either side keeping the hounds moving in the right direction. At the far end of the valley the hounds disappear briefly behind a fold in the landscape, and then reappear, glimpsed through the birches and alder that hide the river. One member of the group comments that the hounds are “showing good form”, and they watch in silence for a while. Though the day is cold, there is a breeze - so this is not an ideal “scenting day”. Everyone hopes that they find a line while in such a good viewing position but it is not to be. The huntsman calls the hounds together again before disappearing into Tarrant’s Copse. The group sets off across the boggy valley, watching the mounted field pass in front of them. Crossing a fence they stand and chat (P2) to another observer under the line of large oaks that mark the boundary of Tarrant’s Copse. The sound of baying filters through the trees and they speculate whether the huntsman will go up on Roundeye hill in Ipley Inclosure. “It depends which way the fox goes. I think it will probably stay in the denser cover lower dovm - across into New Copse”.

Following the judgement of the most knowledgeable present, the group makes their way round the deer-fenced fields of Ipley Manor, to the gate into New Copse (P3). Suddenly the baying of the hounds gets very loud, the note and timbre changes.

Listen, they’re speaking. They’ve got a strong line there. No - not so sure now... there, picked

it up again. Oh, he’s leading them a merry chase.

(Hunt member, November 1999)

95 Listening intently the group comments on what they think is happening in the Inclosure. Three hounds appear briefly and bound off into the woods again. As the “music” of the hounds fades towards the south, the group walks down the edge of the woodland. In the comer (P4) one of the Whippers-in, looking very hot and sweaty, is resting his horse. After a short conversation finding out what happened in the woods, he is intermpted by a loud voice on the radio “Hounds crossing road, unguarded, near Ipley Manor. Heading towards Beaulieu Road. Repeat. Hounds....”. In a msh he mounts up and gallops off.

The group, walking fast across Dibden Bottom heath, attempt to catch up but do not see the hounds again for nearly two hours. At King’s Hat Inclosure (P5), they greet some more friends in cars, say goodbye to others who are heading home and take stock of where to go next. A quiet word is had with people who have radios, before some squeeze into a car for a short lift to North Gate car park, while others walk.

With the Hounds in view again, the next section (Pô - P?) proves to be a reprise of Beaulieu valley “cast"^"^”. This time the hounds are tired and the excited ‘yips’ that characterised moving off from the meet have disappeared. “He’s [the Huntsman] got them moving very well indeed now”, said someone. “They’re concentrating on the job - look at them flow over the valley”. When the hounds are hidden again by Ferny Crofts woodland, they soon begin to speak again, and this time they have a strong line. The full choms of bass, alto and treble hounds can be heard carried by the wind towards the group, but no one is sure in which direction they are moving.

Eventually the lead hounds are glimpsed, and almost immediately a fox is spotted, moving rapidly back up the valley from cover to cover towards the group. “Look at him go. He’s throwing them off the scent by all that weaving. Sly devil. He’s not worried at all.” “No, look they’re on to him again”. The fox bounds smoothly up the slope curving away in front of the group and flying into the trees and bushes at the edge of the field. The hounds are about 30 seconds behind the fox, and crash into the fence, struggling to squeeze a way through. The fox circles the field in the hedgerow and plunges into a gully densely packed with gorse. The watchers and the hounds lose

Sending the hounds in a circular route in an attempt to pick up a scent, particularly after a ‘check’, when the hounds have crossed the path of a fox but are unsure in which direction it is moving.

96 sight and scent of the fox. The hounds are confused, check and split into groups unable to pick up a strong scent again. On this occasion the fox evades the hounds and escapes. It is not long afterwards with the sun low in the horizon that the ‘gone home’ is sounded. Packed into a steamy landrover, wet-clothed and leaden-legged, the group is dropped back at Yew Tree car park to pick up their own cars.

How to ‘be’ in the countryside

Although the basic dynamics and structure of a day’s foxhunting are repeatable and patterned, each day is discussed by the members in terms of its good and bad points. Some days are considered better than others. A few are exceptional. The Hunt described above was considered remarkable for the close sighting of the fox at the end of the day. Explanations of memorable hunts, reminiscences of particularly good days and comparisons with previous meets makes up a significant proportion of member’s conversations and comments about what is going on during a day’s hunting. The intersection of memory and sensate landscape provides a powerful gestalt experience, albeit unremarked and unremarkable for those taking part. Conversations, together with the places in which they happen, give a vivid, passionate and personal measure of what makes an ideal hunting experience. When linked to specialist language - hunting terms and modes of expression - these amount to a rehearsal of identity and relationship with the landscape.

A ‘good’ day can mean a large variety of things to the members. Contrary to the picture Phelps et al (1997) paints, the members I spoke with did not mention long fast gallops across the countryside with exciting jumps in close pursuit of the fox and hounds. This particular ‘ideal’ is an occasionally mentioned tradition more prevalent in hunting iconography"^^ than it is in NFF members’ conversations"^^. For many it is

In two of the homes I visited to interview (be interviewed by) Hunt officials, the rooms and hallways were festooned with mounted fox masks and oil-paintings of hunting scenes. A common theme in these paintings (also found in many pubs) was of the hounds in ‘full cry’ behind a fox with the mounted field following at furious pace. In one home a humorous painting was explained as showing all that could go wrong during a hunt; with the horses overtaking the hounds, some galloping across ploughed fields, the pack split and going in two directions and the fox escaping by doubling back across the field.

97 simply about being outdoors, in good weather and moving over the countryside in relationship to certain animals and birds.

I love it out here. I mean its great if the sun is shining, but I almost prefer it when it is cold.

You know, those frosty days.... [Long pause while we watched the Huntsman across the valley

send the hounds off in a new direction]. And even when it’s raining and the view disappears in

a haze. It gives me time to really see things, to slow down and notice all the life around me.

(Hunt member, November 1999) For others it is about the riding and the chance for cross country “brushing” - galloping yes, but also the challenge in safely negotiating ditches, rivers and fences. Several stated that they came specifically to watch the hounds work - for them a thing of almost aesthetic beauty. But most commented on enjoying the contest between the hounds and the fox, finding excitement in the race to outwit the hounds and the Huntsman’s attempts to guide the hounds. On the other hand, it would be incorrect to suggest that all conversations and comments are about aspects of hunting. Like any group of people who meet through a mutual interest, there is a great deal of sociality that is not of this nature and much more mundane.

The Hunt throws people into proximate and engaged relationships with the landscape. Looking at plants and trees, walking across muddy plains and around obstacles like farmhouses and rivers. Discussing what they would do next if they were the Huntsman, “I’d call them back and draw the wood again”, and listening to the sounds the hounds are making, “They’re not so sure now - I think they lost the scent again” creates a sense of becoming one with the landscape. The ordered and ritual aspects of hunting serve as an emotional entrée, a structure through time and space, that readies and heightens the experience of being in the countryside. During a hunt one knows generally where you are going - but you never really know. The rhythm is dictated by the presence and absence of fox and hounds (Marvin 2000a: 110) which may well set off in unexpected directions. There is excitement, and a ‘natural’ unfolding of the landscape.

This might suggest that each Hunt develops nuances of experience that might reflect their ‘country’

While some, in an open country, might stress a fast exciting gallop behind the hounds, in the smaller more densely wooded spaces of the New Forest, that aspect declines in importance.

98 speaking of the English countryside as a “performance space” waiting to have a hunting event inscribed on it, Marvin comments on how human participants are required to have

acute awareness o f the surroundings, a bodily engagement with it, and an absorption into it. ( )

The physicality of the landscape: the woods, streams, hedges, slopes, open spaces become

objects of intense interest because of the potential drama that they offer (...) as sites of

encounter for hounds and foxes....

(2000a: 110) He goes on to describe how elements of wind and weather, the actions of wild and domestic birds and animals, are considered and mapped by participants as indicators of the progress of the hunt. Hence the landscape is read and becomes “transformed through the intensity of engagement with it and in it” {pp cit.) Through the principle performers, the hunt “ebbs and flows through the landscape spaces, gaining or losing intensity,” according to the proximity and configurations of the fox and hounds. And, we might add, this pattern of presence and absence varies according to the physical position, expertise, role and plain good luck of the participants. While riders might get a broader picture of how the hunt connects up spaces, walkers tend to be in better positions to view details of the unfolding relationship between huntsman, fox and hounds. To use Ingold’s phrase, learning to become a member of the Hunt is an “education of attention”: The Hunt takes on meaning in the “context of engagement with the environment” (1996:40)

A principle tension in the relationship to the landscape is between obscurity and visibility. The landscape that envelopes them also hides things from them; nature keeps its own secrets. The ebb and flow of the hunt is a process of hiding and revealing, a challenge to human interpretation and understanding: both other and ‘us’. For the hunt members it is the relationship between fox and hounds that structures their wider understanding of embeddedness in rural spaces. The fox, as principle performer, is more often absent than present.

The fox is always there as potential or possibility, but it must be conjured out of the landscape.

But this non-presence is not a void, it is not empty o f significance, it is full o f fox-ness, but is

incomplete.

(Marvin2000a: 111) For the hunt members the countryside is full of potential foxes, present, moving around in the process of living their lives and for the most part invisible in the

99 landscape. The fox becomes representative of all other animals and birds that move around and “bring the landscape to life”- a signifier and access point into ‘nature’. Engaging with this hidden nature requires learning and imagination. Observers try and imagine the paths and tracks of birds and animals, but chiefly foxes, flowing through the variable rural spaces. Areas of land become coverts - spaces of invisibility, which are judged for their potential as a place where foxes might choose to be. Coverts, areas that cover and hide - trees, gorse bushes, long grasses, banks - form shapes and spaces in the landscape which are subject to interpretation. How do they link up? How should we send the hounds through them? Observers learn to judge the success of their imaginary traces of foxes through past experience, interpretation of weather patterns, listening and watching when and where birds are disturbed. But chiefly they rely on the hounds to make this hidden (and imaginary) world visible.

Foxes always leave a scent, an olfactory presence that slowly or quickly dissipates, invisible evidence of their choices and movements in the landscape. They leave histories of movement, lines in the landscape that hounds follow, ignoring all the other smells, other histories. When the scent is old the hounds will have their heads lowered, smelling tussocks or fronds for the remnant evidence of a fox’s passing. As they get closer to the fox the strength of scent allows them to lift their heads and follow the evidence in the air itself. In essence, it is the behaviour of the hounds that are read for confirmation of human attempts to pierce the invisibility of rural spaces. Yet this olfactory presence is itself only interpreted through another sensory remove. Scent lines are beyond human sensory capabilities, but hounds are watched for indications of finding a scent line. But, as they are often hidden in a covert, it is aural evidence that indicates for the observers when a scent line is found. The ‘speaking’ of the hounds, intently listened to and carefully judged, indicates, through overall volume and aesthetic sound, the progress of the hunt. It is in the nuances of their baying and belling that evidence of the fox’s movement is interpreted. Hence engagement with hidden natural worlds are primarily aural and imaginative.

This relationship has a structure through time in which the visibility and invisibility of fox and hounds, the connection of the auditory, imaginative and physical landscape, and the raising and lowering of levels of excitement, combine to create a powerful sense of engagement. Table 5 examines the visibility of the hunt from the point of

100 view of our foot-followers. It illustrates the significant proportion of time that the hounds are out of sight, hidden by folds in the landscape, trees, or simply sheer distance. It gives graphic expression to periods of walking and standing still, of viewing and listening. While it is impossible to display the nuances of the baying of hounds, a rough indication is given by the interpretation of volume. (This is not entirely satisfactory as the volume actually drops when the hounds are following a strong scent). At each of the points where the hounds were speaking the group listened intently and then discussed whether they judged a fox to be present or not. If it was judged to be a ‘good line’, therefore bringing the fox’s presence closer, the sense of excitement increased. The sounds unfolded for them an imaginative landscape of evidence and the possibilities of evidence, engaging emotions and landscape together.

Visibility Index

Meet PI P 2

P2 P3 P5 Car part

Car park • p S------

Key

Followers walking _ J Followers In car In car home' H ounds in sight Hounds 'speaking' Fox

Scale: 1km=2.25cm

Table 3: Visibility index and senses in time and space

101 Marvin points out that a hound that dashes into a wood, finds and kills a fox, has been efficacious, but it has not hunted. In order to have hunted the hound needs to have developed a proper engagement.

The transmission of emotion through engagement and loss of engagement is essential for the

hunt to work as a dramatic event and it is the collective performance o f the hounds that

generates and transmits this emotion.

(Marvin 2000: 113).

With this in mind we can return to one of the high points of the day’s hunting for the group of foot followers (Map 2). As the hounds worked through Ferny Crofts woodland, and they were ‘speaking’ with increasing surety of the strength of the scent, the possibility that they were moving in the direction of the group was excitedly discussed. Will they/ won’t they tension mounted until the lead hounds were spotted. It was even more exciting when the fox was spotted and they realised they would witness the unfolding drama with both fox and hounds visible. As both the fox and hounds passed by they were encouraged, cheered in their production of an exciting chase: a satisfactory fulfilment, in the tension between fox and hounds, of the rhythms and potentials of the day. The hounds, running less than 2 seconds behind, echo the fox’s track ten metres down-wind where the scent has floated. At another level this was the one point where the imaginative, olfactory and aural landscape linked and became visible, confirming earlier interpretations and making future forays into the landscape a more exciting possibility.

102 Caille Grid/*

. Buck ; Hill

I Gurnetfields Possibly! f Furzebrake escape.' routes’ Wind Direction Fox Culvcrlcy Hounds Farmr"

Map 2: Olfactory, auditory and visible landscapes of foxhunting

If visibility and invisibility is a key structuring principle of the relationship with the landscape we can also read another tension, between knowing and what is not known. The visibility of both fox and hounds described above confirms and reinforces interpretations of the landscape: what was guessed at becomes ratified and known. From producing the evidence of a correctly interpreted landscape in visible fox and hounds, it is but a short step to claiming legitimate control over the countryside. The flow of the hunt contains within itself a practice of the landscape - its shapes, forms and variability - but becomes an expression of control over the landscape through the movement from unknown to known. Through reading the landscape, inferring movements and motivations, nature is recreated in constant tension: nature is both invisible/unknown and re-rehearsed as visible and known. Nature also moves from being something ‘out there’ in rural space to being intimately connected. Distant ‘natural environment’ becomes lived-in places of personal experience, memory and history, intimately owned and known.

103 The morality of animals in the English countryside

Animals, and human relationships with them, provide the fundamental set of signifiers for members of the Hunt. It is around these signifiers and through them that the Hunt “event” is judged, memorised and ultimately made into part of a greater moral environment. As we have seen, considerable time, effort and attention is given to observing and commenting on certain animals: foxes, hounds and horses feature strongly, but so do deer, birds and domestic dogs. If, as has been argued above, the Hunt is experientially embedded in the landscape through a process of learning and interpreting physical senses, then this experience is also linked to a broader view of what is right and wrong in the countryside. The immediacy of experience becomes expanded into a series of valorised understandings of what it is to ‘be’ an animal, the ‘right’ way of doing things as a human and, hence, of a moral universe of the countryside.

Broadly speaking animals in rural English space fall into three categories: wild, game and domesticated. Each category represents a different degree of human association and intervention. To be wild, an animal needs to exist outside the sphere of human influence, to live its life regardless of human wishes and technology. Domestic animals rely on human interventions and are closely integrated to their lives. Game animals are wild most of the time but cross into the human world when hunted. These categories can also be read as a classification of who is legitimately allowed to kill whom (Marvin 2000c:206jÿ). Foxes behave ‘illegitimately’ when they kill domestic animals, the sole prerogative of humans, while killing other wild animals such as mice is deemed natural. The categories become expressions of what is natural and what is not and it is around concepts of ‘natural’ that hunt members justify and defend their relationship with the countryside.

Foxes Killing is ‘natural’ as long as it is legitimate killing. When a wild animal kills a domestic animal the killing can be considered illegitimate and the wild animal more often than not is re-categorised as a pest. Pests are elaborated as evil, conniving, heartless and dangerous, credited with malicious purpose and devious desires, while

104 game animals are required to be honourable representatives of the wild. A fox, running through a chicken run and killing every chicken present - a story frequently mentioned to me when justifying hunting as pest eradication - is not thought of as fulfilling a natural instinct, but is deemed to be deliberately and unnecessarily cruel. Consequently, the fox is somehow imbued with a sense of morality. On the other hand, a horse killed by a motorist is described as an accident and no deliberate motivations are ascribed to the driver apart from carelessness. However, one of the intriguing aspects of the fox is its symbolic ambivalence (Marvin 2000c).

The organised and formal pursuit of foxes is a much more recent invention than hunting other animals. It was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that foxes were perceived as suitable for the chase. While there had been forms of foxhunting as a country sport practised in the late 1700s, up until then the fox was primarily seen as vermin and killed without ceremony. Carr (1986: 22-24) argues that at the beginning of the eighteenth century there were not enough deer available for the increased number of wealthy people who wished to hunt. It was found that foxes provided good sport when pursued and this rapidly became the new form of hunting. Lascelles (1998 [1915]), in his autobiography about his experiences as Deputy Surveyor of the New Forest between 1880 and 1913, comments on the need to bring order to the hunting in the New Forest as the sheer number of different packs of hounds were depleting the stocks of almost every game species.

For the fox to become a suitable animal to hunt a symbolic move was required. The fox had to become appropriate ‘game’ to be hunted from a symbolic position as ‘vermin’, which could be killed by virtually any means without compunction or ceremony. Chiefly this meant the fox had to be ennobled in some way, given characteristics and endowed with natural skills that make the hunt honourable. Thus contemporary members describe the fox as “cunning little devils” and “much cleverer than the hounds”, or as “quick and fast”, or more simply, an appreciative “just look at him move”. In a sense, the longer and further the fox leads the hounds, the more honour there is in killing it and the less regret there is if it successfully evades the hounds. However, in certain situations, particularly when hunt members seek to

105 justify what they do to outsiders, the fox is again referred to as vermin, dangerous to farmer’s stock and thus in need of extermination"^^.

In the previous section I argued that the fox is key in imagining and making the invisible world of nature visible. Thus an important premise is that the fox, its scent and trails over the landscape stand for other animals and their movements in rural space. On many occasions 1 was told that hunting was “natural” and, because the fox was a “wild animal, it naturally understood” this relationship. However, possibly because of the ambivalence of the fox noted above, and because of the recent demise of the Buckhounds in the New Forest, when ‘wildness’ is discussed, it is to the deer that the conversation turns.

One of the problems with the demise of the Buckhounds is that the deer are no longer hunted.

Just culled from a distance. Now that they are not hunted they become semi-tame. w A ild

animal is now tame. That can’t be right. There are no natural large predators, like bears or

wolves, left in Britain. This is why hunting with hounds is so important. In effect countryside

sports keep the countryside wild.... We also know that deer have to be controlled, and even

more so under the pressure that the countryside already is under people’s feet. Take Exmoor

for instance. It used to be that the herds were small and spread out. Now that they are not

hunted they form large herds of fifty or more. Visitors might like that, but the effect is

devastating. When herds o f that size hit a farmer’s land - well, its like the protestors tearing out GM crops. Its that much damage.

(Hunt member and spokesperson for Countryside Alliance, August 1999)

Hunting and hounds are linked, for Hunt members, in a cycle of maintaining the fox’s wildness, and hence the character of the countryside. The Hunt is an expression of these natural relations for its members. It is a tempting to further model this relationship as a cyclical pattern of death and rebirth, where nature is at risk and it is only through the correct ritualised experience and event (hunting) that moral and physical order is returned. But while entertaining, this does little justice to the ambivalence and dichotomies expressed by members. They know that hounds are not natural predators of foxes, but expound the necessity and naturalness of predatorship. They are aware of the ironies of discussing naturalness in countryside so patently the

This despite hunting with hounds being a far from efficient way of controlling fox populations.

106 product of continuous human intervention. And, they find foxes are animals to admire, animals to loathe, and simply animals, all at the same time.

Foxes are also made moral exponents by careful elaboration of senses of fairness and justice in both official rules and in aesthetic judgements. The official rules of the MF A, for instance, allow the Hunt to bolt foxes from man-made earths like culverts, drainpipes or bams, but not natural earths. If the fox is in a man-made lair they have the option of trying to flush the fox out, and, after about a minute (any sooner would be “unfair”), to call the hounds and put them back “on the line”'^^. Some landowners consider that a fox, which has successfully fled into a natural earth, should be deemed to have ‘escaped’. Others look to the Terrier-men to dig out and kill the fox. Here we can clearly see the fox constructed alternately as deserving of fair treatment, or as vermin requiring death even after an honourable chase.

The fox that escaped during the Hunt described above was judged to be a “strong and young”. In some ways it was “appropriate that it got away”. Later, this led to a discussion of the Hunt’s role in selectively culling foxes.

We help to maintain a healthy, balanced population of foxes. It is only the weak that are

caught by the hounds. It seems to me that the alternative to management of fox populations by

the hunt is far less palatable. What are the alternatives? Snares, poison, gassing? Or leave the

population to increase to such an extent that farmers have even more problems and the foxes

themselves slowly starve to death because there is not enough food. Personally I think the

hunt is a much better choice: out in the open, a fair chance to get away and if they are caught it

is a quick death.

(Hunt member and spokesperson for Countryside Alliance, August 1999)

Foxes are described as carriers and expressions of the morality of nature. In this moral system death is close - “a fact of life” - and the young and hardy survive at the expense of the ill or “genetically weak”. Indeed, some members argued, if left to themselves and not dispersed by the activities of the Hunt, foxes are liable to become “inbred”. Apart from projecting human incest taboos onto the world of animals, the fox is again held to be partially responsible for its ovm (im)moral behaviour. For the

Re-hunting a fox is only permissible if it is bolted from a man-made structure, not from a natural

earth.

107 Hunt members, this moral universe, with all its ambivalence and lack of cohesiveness, is still a means of identifying themselves as ‘insiders’, knowledgeable interpreters of the natural order.

The trouble with the antis is that they don’t understand the natural way. They see killing as

cruel and unnecessary - they don’t understand natural relationships.

(Hunt Member, October 1999)

Hounds The cultural elaboration of hounds is equally detailed and, for the cognoscenti, emotionally involving. Foxhounds are bred specifically for the task and most studbook records go back over 200 years. Apart from an acute sense of smell, hounds are bred for speed, endurance, colour and voice. Considerable aesthetic attention is paid to how the hounds look (their “form”) and sound (“voice”) as a pack. A ‘good’ foxhoimd is judged among other things, on its stance, the line from nose to “stem”, depth of its chest, width and bearing of its head, and its markings. As such they are valued for their ability to represent certain human ideals: stance is meant to be an indicator of endurance, colouration of aesthetic appeal. However a good show hound is not necessarily the same thing as a good hunting hound where the ability to work in a pack, listen to the huntsman, pick up and follow a scent takes precedence.

Puppies spend six months living as domestic animals with families. At the end of this period they are returned to the kennels and to life in a pack. As part of their training young hounds are tied closely to an older experienced hound and through this learn which scent to track, which to ignore and to follow the Huntsman’s directions. Probably based in this practice, hounds are counted in “couples” or pairs. Thus “we have 15 and V2 couple out today” means a pack of 31. There are always an odd number of hounds, which appear to be thought of as encouraging “luck”. As one member explained with a smile and a shrug, “If all the other hounds miss the fox it might be that extra one that sends it away”. After a working life of approximately six years they are put down.

For all that hounds are the products of intense human intervention over several hundred years, they are held to be organised according to the dictates of ‘natural’ behaviour. Hounds, we are told, live and work in a natural pack, albeit that the

108 Huntsman is the established pack leader and behaviour that would lead to a pecking order firmly discouraged. Because they live in packs, hounds are carefully separated from “domesticated” animals, particularly dogs that are kept as pets"^^. This difference, this level of wildness, is used to explain why they have to be put down at the end of their working life - they are dangerous in any environment other than a pack. Despite the degree to which they are managed, foxhounds are considered to be exponents of natural behaviour. Hence, as prime interpreters of the natural environment for the human followers, they are valued as much for their ability to fit into the natural world of life and death, to be ‘other’, as they are for their ability to work with humans.

The foxhound itself is a very natural predator, and hunting is its way. But it is about

perception. You can watch lions eating zebra or similar things on almost any wildlife

documentary. But kids don’t connectthat with cruelty.

(Hunt member, December 1999)

Hounds enter the natural environment as signifiers both of themselves and of human values and, as has been seen, are deemed to have an important role in maintaining and reinforcing aspects of wildness. As tools both for the maintenance of valued natural aspects of the countryside and the chief means of communicating those same values, hounds, too, are ambivalent moral signifiers. They are natural animals, but culturally produced; they are innate predators, but not of foxes; they are exponents of ‘wildness’, but predicated on domestication; and, ultimately, they can bring about good deaths and bad deaths. For members of the Hunt the flow of hounds running through the landscape, visually and audibly recreating paths of the wild in scent-lines, present a powerful validation of their perceptions of a moral natural environment.

Hounds also make explicit the structure of human relationships with the environment. Talking about hounds, members frequently make analogies to ‘natural’ relationships. Like nature, hounds need to be given time and space to show their innate proclivities. Humans manage hounds, but then they also manage the countryside.

Domestic dogs are referred to as “cur dogs” though without the rancour that this might be thought to imply. Rather this seems, again, to be about hierarchy - a reflection of the human moral universe.

109 What you have to understand is that people come to the countryside because it is how it is. It

is managed by the hunting and shooting conservers. They put the effort into maintaining and

conserving the countryside because it is their way of life. Others won’t put the passion into it.

(Hunt member and spokesperson for Countryside Alliance, August 1999)

Members talk about hounds affectionately as “stupid”, a bit “dense” or “slow”, particularly in comparison to the fox. But they are also much admired for their endurance, tenacity and scenting ability. Puppy-walkers often pick out ‘their’ hound at the Meet to see how it is doing and are proud if it develops into a good hunting animal. “We allow them to behave as naturally as possible”. Hounds, like the countryside, are subject to strong paternalistic attitudes. They are both ‘natural’ and ‘working’. Hounds are looked after, but in the same way as it is sensible to ensure a tractor is working well. Little time is wasted on mourning hounds, but unnecessary suffering or death is deplored. These attitudes extend to the countryside as a whole and ‘outsiders’ are censored when they fail to behave appropriately according to these sets of values.

An incident that took place in late October 1999, resulting in the death of five hounds, was widely reported in the local press. The hounds had followed a scent-line to the fence protecting the railway line. Several found a way through and proceeded onto the track. They were electrocuted before anyone was able to stop them, and subsequent trains had to be halted while the track was cleared. This event was still fresh in the memory in mid November and subject of considerable, if subdued, discussion. While it was acknowledged that the huntsman might have been at the scene more quickly, and that Railtrack, which is responsible for maintaining the fences, could have carried out their duties more carefully, considerable ire was directed at the hunt saboteurs present.

We all have a duty o f responsibility. When I arrived at the fence I saw it as part o f my duty to

help stop the rest o f the hounds get through to the track. Its obvious isn’t it? When you are out

in the countryside you have a responsibility for what goes on in it. What really annoyed me

though was that the sabs who were there simply stood and filmed as the hounds went through

onto the track. They were some of the first people at the scene. It just shows that they don’t

really care about animals. If they did, how could they continue filming and not do anything? I

could understand them better if they were more consistent. But they didn’t care about the

hounds. All they were interested in was proving that they were out of our control.

(Hunt member, November 1999)

110 The limits of morality: intrusions into rural places

Commentators on hunting tend to focus either on the political (Cooper 1997) and ethical (Scruton 1996) arguments, or on the internal logic of the Hunt (Marvin 2000b, Cartmill 1986). Consequently debates either become highly rarefied and distant from everyday experiences, or suffer from the tendency to reify traditional structures of hunting as conclusive in understanding the hunting experience. It is in the tension between the two positions, in the interstices of contemporary hunting and politics, at the contested boundaries of identity, that considerable innovation is going on. What follows examines how politics intersects with experiential landscapes and how the hunting experience is made political.

It is worth paying attention to things that are not considered important in the description of an ideal hunt. Things that are carefully separated out in the Hunt members’ language and often regarded as unwelcome - if necessary - intrusions of ‘modem’ life are particularly revealing. The presence of anti-hunt protestors, various legal officials, and the paraphernalia required in maintaining communication and surveillance are especially bracketed. These are not viewed as part of the hunt experience by members, but are intrinsic to understanding the contemporary fissures in landscape understanding because they reveal the ways in which claims to a legitimate morality are made.

Firstly, those on the periphery of the established hunt performance, the ‘non speaking’ parts. These people are present, important, but not accounted for in the sense that they are not part of the hunting lexicon or its established rituals. Perhaps most importantly amongst these people are the anti-hunt activists. According to the NFF members, their Hunt is one of the most carefully scmtinised in the country. A regular group of anti-hunt protestors use cars, radios and extremely fit runners carrying lightweight video cameras to document any infraction of the Hunt’s licence. At every Meet activists are present, watching the evolving hunt from strategic points and endeavouring to be as close to the hounds as possible. In a sense they have become a part of the hunting experience. The relationship between the Hunt and the ‘sabs’ are frosty at best, with the hunt members trying their best to ignore the

111 protestors’ presence and the anti-hunt protestors endeavouring to upset the smooth running of the day and distract the hounds from the fox. The hunt members know the names and faces of the regular anti-hunt activists and during the progression of the hunt were acutely aware of their presence and position. However this awareness went hand in hand with a studied practice of ignoring them, both when recalling previous hunts and when over hearing their conversations.

Secondly, the Forestry Commission, which awards licences to hunt on Crown land, assigns a staff member to accompany every hunt. Most often it is the Keeper in whose district the hunt begins that is assigned. Keepers are regarded as knowledgeable countrymen and, on the whole, sympathetic to the Hunt. They are, however, the legal representatives of the Forestry Commission and are duty bound to report licence infractions if they are brought to their attention. In the current political climate with pressure within government to ban hunting, the Keepers are ambivalent presences, known personally by Hunt members but also treated as potential ‘enemies’ in their role as representatives of the Crown interest. The same ambivalence applies to the Police Officer assigned to observe the activities and intervene if people are hurt or property damaged, both appreciated for their role and despised for what they represent in the changing fortunes of foxhunting.

In this highly tensioned landscape what is the ‘correct’ way of being in the countryside becomes crucial. No longer is it sufficient to attend to the ‘natural’ pathways, sounds and rhythms of the countryside; to immerse oneself in a moral landscape with nuanced values and judgements on animal and human behaviour; to rely on the invulnerability of past connections with the landed elite and the social realities of class privilege. These ‘structures of feeling’ must take cognisance of changing political realities. Although a number of the hunt members lived and worked in Southampton or London, the correct way of ‘being’ increasingly becomes a set of dualisms about us and others hung principally on the signifiers of the countryside and the city.

The trouble with urbanites, and I don’t just mean people living in the city - its more an

attitude you know - is that they have a skewed idea o f what is natural. They see the fox as

cute and cuddly and the countryside as a sort of overgrown garden where they can do the sort

112 o f things that they do in their gardens at home. Now I know the Forest is, in a sense, [...]

created by people, but it is one of the few places that is still a little bit wild. Non-country

people only like the pretty bits of that. They don’t like seeing dead or wounded animals, but

that is natural too, isn’t it? Wild animals are [seen as] just like their pets, so they disturb fawns

lying low during the day because they see them as ‘abandoned’. But that is what the mothers

do. The worst thing you can do is disturb the baby.

(Hunt member, November 1999)

It is particularly in this aspect of legitimate killing, of closer involvement with the fundamentals of life and death that separates countryside and urban attitudes. As a number of Hunt members put it, their relationship with the countryside is harder, grittier, “more real”. Along the fault lines of these rural/urban identities certain items of material culture become freighted with significance, moments themselves of contested culture.

The ‘Immorality’ of Technology - a brief material culture of walkie-talkies, bicycles and clothes.

For the hunt members one of the necessities “forced” on them by the changing status of the hunt and the increased levels of visitors is the use of radios to keep in contact. All Hunt officials carry them as well as other selected and knowledgeable members. During the Hunt the radios are left on and tuned to a specific channel. They are normally carried in a pouch on the belt and covered by the jacket or coat or otherwise kept out of sight. Exchanges are kept to a minimum, and chiefly concerned with the safety of the hounds or members of the mounted field. Unlike the open usage and display of other accoutrements, the shiny horn, carefully polished riding boots, and riding whip, radios are used furtively and preferably out of hearing of other members. This was more marked than that turning away action of the few people who used mobile phones to direct friends following the Hunt. Indeed, the members I spent time with frowned upon the use of mobile telephones, considering them “not really sporting”.

On one occasion, standing at the edge of a small wood, listening for the hounds and in desultory conversation, the radio suddenly and stridently informed us of the hounds crossing a road unattended in such and such direction. The Whipper-in, with whom

113 we had been standing, gave a terse instruction into the radio, mounted up and galloped off. The others listened but did not offer any comment. When I queried this I was told, “We try to ignore the radios as much as possible and get on with the Hunt as it should be”. Clearly radios are not considered part of the proper hunting experience. “We use radios, but only because we have to. It is not good sport - you never, ever say where a fox is going”. But radios are also growing in importance in the battle of wits and information being fought with the antis. Both sides eavesdrop on the others’ radio channels using the information to get the drop on each other. One member, part delighted, part disgusted, quietly explained that they were investing in a screened digital radio system to “stop the antis”.

A more vocal focus for hunt members’ ire is cyclists. On several occasions it was carefully explained to me that while cycling on the whole was all right, it should be carefully limited to the main tracks through the forest^^. The Hunt enjoys levels of access, including limited car access, to areas where no other groups apart from walkers, FC officials^^ and Commoners can go. Cyclists, particularly mountain bikers;

tear across the countryside with no thought to others, wearing those flourescent, tight lycra

clothes which don’t fit in [to the countryside] and it Just shows how little regard they have.

They don’t care. They don’tsee anything at that speed.

(Hunt Member, November 1999) The irony of these comments while watching the red-jacket “pink” of the Huntsman guide the hounds through a covert, simply serves to highlight the different value systems in operation. On the other hand cyclists are a threat precisely because they epitomise for the Hunt members a lack of connection with nature. The colours and fabric of their clothes are “unnatural” whereas wool and cotton in reds, blues and greens are “colours found in nature”.

When you are in nature [the countryside], you learn to appreciate what nature provides in

colours. You Just need to look around you, you’ll never see anythingthose in florescent

colours. Learn from the animals and birds.

(Self described “hunting man”, Hatfield Forest 1998)

A recurrent theme not limited to Hunt members. Since the FC established official cycle routes this has been a consistent area of disagreement in the New Forest.

This includes companies that have been contracted by the FC to do various works in the Forest.

114 In another, light-hearted, exchange following my query about the significance of clothing colours, a Hunt member offered this intriguing thought.

Well, its mainly so that the hounds and the rest of the field can see who is in charge. You can’t

miss him - and it looks smart. Part o f the hunting experience. I don’t know about ‘natural’

colours. Bit of a weird question.... Maybe the red is a distant reminder of the blood in hunting, in the past.

(Hunt member, September 1999) It is not only the colours worn by cyclists that upset Hunt members, it is also the bicycles themselves. To use a mechanical means to get about just reinforces their notion that cyclists lack an appropriate relationship with animals. Moreover, the distance between the cyclists and the animal world is increased because the rhythm of their relationship to the countryside is dictated by them, not by other animals.

It is tempting to read the not inconsiderable vitriol directed at significant material markers of other users of the Forest, as part of a logical framework of countryside relationships (Table 4). Thus, reading down the second column, deer are mainly elaborated as ‘wild’ in that they are deemed to have an existence outside of human influence, ‘game’ in that they are suitable animals to hunt, and ‘honourable sport’ in that they are beast suitable for Kings to hunt and consequently give the hunter status. In a small way they are elaborated as ‘working’ in the sense that they have a “job” to do in the Forest and maintain its unique landscape. On the other hand, while radios and mobiles are acceptable for their ‘working’ characteristics, they are classed as ‘mechanical’ and ‘unnatural’ and therefore items o f‘dishonourable leisure’. However, this table imposes an order on a series of experiences, feelings, and expressions that little reflects the realities of confusion, the degree to which these opinions are context driven, and their plain fuzziness. Probing the urban/rural dichotomies reveals more complexity and disorder than clear-cut boundaries. Two questions can illustrate. Why are cars, particularly Landrovers, acceptable and bicycles not? Why is sport clearly separated for Hunt members from leisure activities?

Given the elaboration of bicycles and cyclists as ‘unnatural’, why are Landrovers, surely instances of considerably more complex mechanisms, not remarked at all? Indeed, for many they have become integrated and representative of ‘natural’ country ways. Part of the answer lies in the application of notions of workliness. Landrovers,

115 Trees, Birds Fox Hounds Horses Landrovers Radios Bicycles and other and mobiles animals

Elaborated as 'working'

Mechanical/unnatura

Domestic' 'Game'

'Dishonourable leisure Honourable Sport

Table 4: A framework of countryside relations

like saddles and boots, are tools in the moral landscape, defined by their utility rather than their elaboration as signs of something else. It is only when they become associated with leisure, often shiny and clean or spotless inside “where do they put their muddy boots?” that they are again noticed and attract negative comments. The same, somewhat murky notions of workliness operates underneath valorisations of ‘sport’. Sport (of the hunting, shooting and fishing variety) is held apart from the leisure practices of visitors while still being concerned at a personal level with relaxation and excitement. Country sports, like foxhunting, are held to be purposeful and meaningful in the moral landscape of the countryside. Elements of ‘work’ appear as integrated markers of moral process. They “maintain” the countryside, while other visitors simply use, without understanding, the results of this interaction.

Considerable effort is put into discussing and applying careful nuances of fairness and justice in the web of relationships in the countryside. From the point of view of the Hunt members, the problem with other users is precisely their lack of moral framework and ‘real’ connection. Care and lack of care for the countryside is judged against this fuzzy moral framework of natural relations. But for the antis it is precisely lack of true care, shown by Hunt members’ “callousness and cruelty” in dealing with animals, that becomes the focus for their protests.

116 Conclusion

In the executive summary of the Report of a Review of Hunting with Hounds, Phelps et al identifies two sides to the current hunting debate; those interested in sport, agricultural protection and conservation on one side, and those concerned about animal welfare and cruelty on the other (1997:5). Although there is undoubtedly a significant polarisation of opinion, to characterise it in these terms, 1 think, is misleading. Extremists aside, both ‘sides’ describe their concerns in terms of good conservation and moral rectitude. Thus a significant discourse among the hunt members is about animal welfare, fairness and natural behaviour while the anti-hunt lobby are equally vocal about conservation and the importance of locals in the equation. Hence, an ongoing hindrance to any resolution of the conflict over foxhunting lies in the use of similar terms to mean quite different things about the countryside. For the members of the Hunt, many of these terms are embedded in the rituals and pattern of the hunting experience and the sensate landscape in which they exist. Hence, pressure to change their hunting activities becomes a very personal threat to their sense of self and mode of living. Equally, those on the anti-hunt side, are strongly motivated by actions which they see as wrong and experience as powerful pressure on their sense of self-hood.

Politically and socially the English countryside is under immense pressure to be different things for very disparate groups of people. In a country with so little space which is not already built on or farmed, it is not surprising that the English countryside produces so much antagonism. What little "free" space there is, is probably already the subject of strongly held notions of ownership and rights. Nor is it surprising, with tensions so close to the surface of everyday life, and so publicly drawn, that gaining research access depended on people distant from the localities with which 1 was immediately concerned. There is clearly an urgent need to think very carefully about the future of peoples’ relationships with places like Hatfield Forest and the New Forest.

Towards this end this chapter attempts to show how foxhunting is part of a larger moral universe for those that participate, one that draws its strength from inarticulate,

117 sensuous moments of engagement. Given the interpretation of how imaginary, auditory, olfactory, and visible landscapes ebb and flow together, it is possible to suggest that drag hunting, an often proposed alternative to foxhunting, fails to fulfil the animating, connecting role that the fox and other wild animals play. A scent line laid by humans removes that vital bond with ‘otherness’, glossed as wildness, that members value. However ‘wildness’ and conceptions of naturalness, have been shown as powerfully affecting, but fuzzily defined constructs, carrying projections of both peoples’ notions of self-hood and their senses of morally sanctioned relationships with the rural countryside. What is, and is not, ‘natural’ - the definition of which so many conflicting interest groups are trying to assert - is another way of answering that broad question, ‘what, and who, is the countryside is fo rT

The frictions and conflicts are illuminated and recognised in local examples. One New Forest Ranger told the following story which illustrates the moral ambivalence of the tension between established traditions like foxhunting and newer environmental expressions. His own awareness of ambivalence is striking.

When we go out into the Forest we have to try and set a good example and follow the

legislation we are meant to enforce. So in spring during the nesting season if I see a dog

running loose over nesting areas and we have a sign up, I ask them to put their dogs back on

the lead. I will explain why - about rare nesting birds and reducing populations but a whole

lot of them don’t care. But some of them say, “why should we listen to you when you license

the foxhounds to run freely all over the forest?” I mean they are right. We effectively allow a

whole pack of dogs to hunt through the same places that birds nest. What argument do I then have? They only have one dog and can’t honestly see why their pet Fido does anything like

the damage the foxhounds do. All I can do is repeat that they are not allowed That’s to. a

convincing argument isn’t it?

(NF Ranger, October 1999) Here it seems that the Ranger was trying to establish priorities: an official prohibition took precedence over questions of relative damage to the environment and ended the discussion whatever the moral rights and wrongs of the case. He felt constrained to impose a political rather than a moral solution. But, for him as for so many others, the official, the political, and the moral strands are inextricably bound together. Political arguments, and the highly politicised arena of the New Forest, serve notice, if notice was required, of how our senses of ‘nature’ are increasingly on the agenda.

118 Chapter 4

(Re)-presenting Identity: conversations in the Forest

This chapter offers a counterpoint to the discussions of previous sections with their preponderance of academic voice. Here, in edited conversations, lies some of the tonality and diversity of opinions about identity and what it means for three people in and around the Forests. Not only are individual expressions of identity diverse and multi-layered, but the term itself, as a useful methodological category, remains a highly plastic concept. Hence, a fourth conversation attempts to draw out a more theoretical understanding of identity. This could stand on its own, but I have chosen to interweave this with other voices - partly to reflect the style of this section, and partly to recover a sense of the multiple layering of meaning, the chance connections and deliberate echoes, that I think is difficult to achieve in a traditionally voiced/authored monologue^^.

I have used recorded interviews, notes in addition to memories of the flavour of various exchanges to build up these representations. In as much that notes and memory do not carry the same level of reliability and detail as a recording, I have still attempted to be as accurate a possible to the individual’s tone and opinion. Obtaining a representative range of contributions is a secondary concern. Primarily the people selected are those with a thoughtful approach to questions of identity. Some deal with identity specifically, using the word itself to self consciously create a ‘position’, others talk around the issue, letting their sense of selfhood emerge in and out of other concerns and actions. As I wrote up these interviews and conversations each person was held in my mind’s eye, scrutinised and remembered. Curiously, I find that I cannot accurately describe or remember faces - I just know I will recognise them when I next see them. Central to the process of recall, however flawed, was

Here is not the place to repeat the arguments, summarised by Clifford and Marcus (1986) Writingin

Culture, about the problems of subjectivity and representation in anthropological writing. Suffice it to say that presenting conversations is an artifice that also fails to escape this predicament.

119 remembering the places in which we spoke. The more the material was processed the greater the insistence of the physicality of the surroundings in holding together the memories: the sunny library, a walk past that silver birch on that inclosure bank, interiors and exteriors of homes and vehicles. If place and identity become so linked in my memories how much stronger is this link for those whose comings and goings over time have freighted spaces with many more layers of meaning? And how much more do places become embedded in identities when actions, meanings and places bleed into each other, swirling, interlinking and echoing each other over time?

Conversation 1: Captain Barclay; Retired Master of the Hunt

Captain Barclay has had a long relationship with Hatfield Forest. His father was chairman of the management Committee up until 1959 while he took over in 1964. Now an elderly man Captain Barclay is an influential figure in the local rural community and still has banking ties in the City. He proudly describes the Barclays and the Buxtons (the other family with longstanding links with Hatfield Forest) as “bankers, brewers and Quakers” adding with a chuckle that they “brewed beer to keep the peasants off the gin”. I first met him in the sunny library in his Elizabethan home on a warm day in autumn. A fire was glowing in the large grate, old leather-bound books and oil paintings of hunting scenes were spread around the walls. In the entrance hall coats of arms vied for space with mounted fox masks. After a cautious hour of conversation he called his assistant (a visiting Australian) to get his Landrover Discovery ready and to help him into it. Mounted in a row on the centre line of the bonnet and standing about lOcms high, was a leaping fox and a pair of silver stag antlers. She then drove us to Hatfield Forest, where we met with the National Trust staff. Captain Barclay had requested their presence and three senior members were there to greet him. After a lunch we drove around off road as the Captain pointed out various areas of the Forest. After a short tour of the surrounding countryside and farmland, we returned to Hadham Hall.

In these excerpts from conversations over a 5 hour period. Captain Barclay paints a picture of connection with the forest and surrounding countryside that stretches back over three long-lived generations. It is a connection about which he is clearly proud

120 and from which his sense of place and important aspects of identity stem. In genial mood when we visited the Forest, he told me to ask any question I liked of “his” staff at Hatfield. Perhaps this is not surprising when most of the National Trust staff have been there less than 6 years. I first asked Captain Barclay (CB) about his connections to Hatfield Forest and hunting.

CB: The Buxton fam ily rescued the Forest in 1924. At that time it looked like it was going to be sold off to a developer who would first clear cut and then sell the timber. The same fate o f many o f the surviving forests in Essex. But this is where the hunting saga came in. I mean it has always been a hunting forest, back to the time o f William the Conqueror, I think. But the connection with foxhunting grew out of that history. Well, Grandfather Buxton was nobbled by his daughter who had had a fun day out hunting on the Forest. She had heard about the threats of cutting Hatfield Forest down and told her Dad that it must be saved. And I think that started it off really. The Friends o f the Forest [an association aimed at protecting the Forest] started after that. But it was still a bit o f a problem. I don't think we really knew what to do with it, just that it was right to stop it disappearing entirely. We have lost so much of rural England. It’s important to know where we come from don’t you think?

AG: Yes, probably. But it is interesting that ‘where we come from’ is a bit of a movable feast. I mean for a large section o f people a Forest is just a group of trees - at best a backdrop for a pleasant day out. It takes a great deal of interpretation to make a group o f trees into something that is significant in terms of a sense o f history and knowing where we come from.

CB: Well I think for a lot o f visitors it is just that, a nice place for a picnic. But history isn’t something that just disappears because we don’t recognise it. Its there even if the Forest is cut down. I suppose saving Hatfield was a way o f saving a piece of history that tells us about our past in a unique way. I think that’s it really. Even if we didn ’t know everything about the Forest, which we don’t, we knew enough to save it. That comes from being in touch with the land. When you work on the land, you learn enough to respect its patterns.... I mean it is a nice little story about Buxton’s Grand daughter but it shows that there was a revulsion at the prospect of losing something that... well it makes our countryside what it is. And we know that is important.

121 AG: Is the ‘we’ that you refer to basically those who own land or does it extend further?

CB: O f course it extends further, but I think that the reality of it is that landowners can actually do a lot more about it if they want to. They had the political clout to get things done I suppose. But then I think it was handed over to the National Trust to protect it... it was also quite difficult to manage properly. I think the high point of the thing was that we preserved it and kept the Forestry Commission at bay. There was a time when the NT were entering into agreements with the FC to begin to manage the Forest for timber again. O f course for the FC that meant planting the faster growing pines - and I think there were some monetary arrangements tied up with it too because the FC were very well funded at the time. They thought of the Forest as neglected woodland needing a bit o f proper management to make it profitable again. I don’t think the National Trust at the time really knew how important the Forest was. To be fair, nor did we, in the sense of the exact history o f the place. All we were sure of was that it couldn’t be right to plant new trees that hadn’t really ever been there before. I think one can get quite affectionate of our English trees. Particularly ones that are well known to you. We have a magnificent oak tree just at the edge of our garden. I t ’s huge. I ’ve grown up with it and it will still be there when I ’m gone despite losing some o f its branches in the storms.... Take my son fo r instance. He wants to be a farmer and spends most of his days in and around our land managing it. But wherever he goes he takes a pocket-full of acorns and scatters them as he goes. I suppose he just wants to see trees back where they were before. But it is more like a mission fo r him.

AG: There’s quite a history in that. I remember reading about one gentleman in the 18^^ century, about the time when there was the huge shortage of Oak trees for building the navy fleet, who used to wonder around with a pocket full of acorns scattering them wherever he went. Planting was seen as a patriotic duty. A way o f ensuring a national future. And that’s part of it. Because when you plant acorns you are never going to be around when they are large enough to be harvested for timber. Its like you subsume the self for something that lasts beyond your death - and thereby make a very powerful statement about what you think is important. One thing that is

122 obvious sitting here [I point to the paintings on the wall] is that hunting is very important for you.

CB: Yes, you could say it was partly because of hunting that the Forest was saved. The Puckeridge and Essex Hunts - we think the Puckeridge was the older of the two and more rural - always shared the Forest. It is on the borders of both Hunt Countries and effectively no-mans land, called neutral country. We hunt there by mutual arrangement. But between us Wallwood [an adjacent woodland effectively extending the contemporary boundary of Hatfield Forest a bit closer to its original boundary] was given to the National Trust. While we owned it we dabbled in planting a few trees, nothing too significant. I just wonder what would have happened if we hadn’t protected it. Why? Well its important to preserve some o f old England. What are we saying about ourselves if we don’t? It’s the same as losing the old trees without making sure there are new ones planted. There is so little of the original English countryside left as it is. We’ve lost so many trees and hedgerows already. It was also part of the contract with Stansted airport on the other side o f the road. The site was originally acquired by a timber merchant after the World War who chopped down most of the oaks. So it was pretty decimated anyway. But we lost some country because of it and consequently there was an agreement with them to help protect land on the other side of the road. We still hunt over the Forest of course. I don Y think we have many complaints about the Hunt there, unless Tess [the Property Manager] has protected us - which I wouldn Y put past her. I know they have had a little trouble with some beagles that have run loose across the Forest. They belong to Nick Herbert, a bit o f a character: a budding politician and countryman. I think he is known as Mr B e e f!

AG: What makes a Countryman do you think?

CB: That’s a leading question isn’t it? [Pause] I am a farmer. Every day is spent dealing with some aspect of managing the farm and that also means the land itself. But also the people. We know and are known by most people that are actually involved in the countryside. So that is one way. But I think we need to be clear that I don Y think we are treated very well. Blair is only interested in London and the people who live in cities. For him there is just not enough o f us in the country to worry about.

123 So we are sidelined, and the difficulties we face are ignored. Which is fundamentally wrong. I think people forget that there is a rural Hertfordshire and only think of the towns and motorways that run through it. But we are here and we are the root o f the rest of the structure. How long do you think the cities would last without the countryside, without the food we grow? I think that is the main thing, we are rooted in the land. People might forget, but our lives come from the land and we have long connections with it. Farming is in a very difficult period right now. At the moment it is not a profitable business - labour costs are very high and capital investment in machinery is staggering. I farm mostly arable; wheat, barley, oats, and oil-seed - rape, linseed. Traditional crops. But because of the economic pressures we are thinking ofjoining up with a local farmer and operating together.

AG: Being 'rooted' is a very powerful metaphor. But don’t you think that people can be ‘rooted’ in different ways? While your connections with Hatfield seem to be through the countryside and all that that means, do you think that the visitors to Hatfield are also finding connections with the land, just in a different way?

CB: Well yes, but it is not the same. Numbers o f visitors at Hatfield keep on going up. We have had a wet month or two and numbers have slackened off recently because of that, but still they keep on coming. I think it is already at the limit. On a Bank Holiday it is horrible. It is a different place. Left to nature they would just keep on coming and we would lose the Forest in a different way. Our next step really is to think o f how to control the numbers of visitors and that is a major hurdle. I don’t like lots of people on Hatfield [pause] but that is purely a personal opinion because of how I like and remember the place before. Yes it is right that people have access to such a beautiful place and they must like it because they keep on coming. But the average visitor, I don’t think, is really concerned or ‘connected’ to the Forest. I t ’s a nice place to have a picnic, let the kids run around and kick a ball around but that is on the open areas or around the lake. The rest o f the Forest doesn’t matter - the trees and the rides and the history - 1 don’t think is that important to them.

AG: So part o f the importance of the Forest for you is the bits that most o f the visitors don’t see? And that extends outwards from the rides into the surrounding country.

124 CB: On a Hunt we meet just off the Forest and then go in and look for a fox. I know the Forest very well indeed - I feel very strongly about it because I have been involved with it for so long. If you have a good pack of hounds, and a good straight fox that covers the distance we can cover a lot of country. We are a bit constricted now but I have hunted a fox halfway to Chelmsford. You have to get the landowners on board - and so far we have including the National Trust at the moment. But how long hunting will go on in the Forest I don’t know. What with the people and the 'planes. But I think Mr Blair will probably see to it anyway. Seven eighths of the population don’t really know anything about it. We have to fight hard to preserve it and educate people about what is going on. There wouldn V be any Forest but for hunting in the first place. We don’t like being dictated to and I think that shows in our active supporters club. They are mostly fellow country folk and it’s important that we are all part of the education of the general public about the countryside. The sad thing is that it is all ‘development’ now and this is where we are fighting a losing battle. Development and the growth of general suburbia. The traffic around here is quite phenomenal now.

Identity in the intersection between local constructions and larger cultural m o v em en ts.

By continually emphasising the length of his association with the Forest and the historical importance of the Forest itself Captain Barclay effectively makes claim to the ground over which the significance of the Forest (and his family) is to be judged. This is reinforced by reference to oak trees where the significance of individuals, families and trees almost meld into one, each becoming more important by their connection. In comparison to the National Trust Wardens, who also revere trees for their age. Captain Barclay’s connection is less individually intimate in the sense of close working relationships with trees, but more tied to longstanding family and social relationships with the land. The Wardens slip rapidly between categories of personal significance “I didn’t fell that hawthorn because I liked its shape” and global significance “Not only do we have a unique historical record of a medieval working forest, but Hatfield also supports several endangered insects and birds”. Captain Barclay, however, moves - in a more intermediate space - from the personal to the

125 rural community. History for the wardens means judging Hatfield in terms of comparisons with other places in its ability to communicate a distant past and, because of that past, a unique ecology. Captain Barclay barely mentions history except in terms of a personal living memory and a feeling of connection with “old England”. Ecological significance, with its more global terms of reference, does not feature at all. Yet the construction of Hatfield Forest as a national and globally significant site already begins to play an important role in the self-perception of those closely involved with it. Captain Barclay’s Hatfield Forest is beginning to give way to a new set of constructions chiefly expanded by the National Trust staff^^. To my mind this raises interesting questions, if not about new processes of identity creation, then certainly about new ways of understanding identity.

The process of constructing individual ‘places’ and ‘identities’ in a particular social milieu, of paying attention to the intersection of past experiences and places, is well rehearsed in recent landscape studies. As Berglund comments;

[I]t is no longer an insight to note that knowledge about the world is constructed socially, let

alone that human activity from food gathering to industry has interacted with and moulded

landscapes. However, she continues,

...the implications of this for taking action in an era of ecological crisis is a more difficult

question. (1998:7-8) This turn to considerations of the simultaneity of local, individual, emplaced identity and the priorities of larger global and environmental structures concerns other contemporary writers too. Like Berglund, Sider and Smith (1997) find that rather more attention needs to be paid to the complexities of conjunctions between local constructions and larger cultural movements. While their concern is primarily with useful junctions between history and anthropology, their general points have implications for the current considerations of identity and place.

Sider and Smith start with Medick’s article (1987) on the links between history and anthropology. Acknowledging that there is much to learn from anthropologists’ treatment of cultural distance, Medick raises hermeneutic questions about the

It would, however, be very difficult to ignore the impact of Professor Rackham’s work in championing the cause of Hatfield as a significant historical and ecological site.

126 accessibility of subjective experience. On the assumption that the social historian and their subjects shared an existing tradition and thus a “shared context”, the historians “had all too quickly reduced the alien to the familiar” (1987:84). The corrective to be applied, Medick suggests, is Geertz’s “thick descriptions” which increase the “duration of perception” hence reversing the trend and allowing writing that makes the familiar alien again. On the other hand, anthropologists, deeply enmeshed as they are in notions of distance and difference between scholar and subject, are now

forced to examine a much more complex process in the formation of strangeness and

difference, in the form of the pervasive transformation of production toward increasingly

violent national and international forms of regulation

(Sider and Smith 1997:7).

The fundamental point for Sider and Smith is that these positions have implications far beyond that of simply different levels of perception or method. Using several illustrations, including a German Officer put in charge, by his American captors, of imprisoned American (enlisted) soldiers at the end of WW2, Sider and Smith argue that chaos in the exercise of power is as useful to contemplate as any ordering that it may bring.

It is only when we leave the terrain of history and read the small story through the eyes of its

inhabitants that we begin to understand that power creates both order and chaos simultaneously, and that people must struggle against both.

(Sider and Smith 1997:11)

In the case above, we could read that class identity among officers cut across national loyalties despite the social upheavals resulting from warfare. At the same time we can imagine the chaotic feelings of enlisted men, expected to die for their country, and now guarded by the enemy. Hence Sider and Smith can neither privilege nor deny either a grand narrative history or multiple individual histories. Nor is it a matter of scale with ‘history’ as large systems and process and ‘histories’ concerned with the specific and particular. Instead they suggest focussing on the “rents of culture”; on “what a culture takes and appropriates and from whom” (1997:11). In a sentence where ‘histories’ might usefully be replaced by ‘identities’ or ‘places’, Sider and Smith develop their position.

127 [W]e are suggesting that these histories emerge both within and against larger social processes

- against ‘history’ - and also, in significant ways,against the local and the locally known as well.

(Sider and Smith 1997:12 italics in original)

Hence the chief concern running throughout the various papers in Sider and Smith’s collection is how individual stories become emeshed in larger cultural systems - indeed make those systems - but also how they work against them. Their model of society is one where chaos and disorder are at least as important as the order that regulation brings. Consequently, they are concerned with the making of silences and commemorations (the subtitle to their book) which they see as attempts to force closure, not simply because these events can highlight the positions of the ‘voiceless’ but also because they reveal the complexities of the construction of social silence that almost continually undermines itself. The ‘voiceless’ are only precisely this - without voice - in certain contexts. Is Captain Barclay ever ‘voiceless’, we might wonder?

Any construction of identity, which ‘the voiceless’ is, presumes altereity, the exertion of power and corresponding resistance. Listening to Captain Barclay allows us hear regrets about the waning of certainty of influence in the countryside in the face of economic and political changes in the UK, and an assertion of power to determine the future of the countryside in the face of urban encroachment. There is also a political element to Captain Barclay’s sense of threat. For him encroachment is also about Prime Minister Tony Blair’s misunderstanding and consequent negation of what the countryside is about. Claiming an identity also involves a simplification of self: we are far more complicated than what comes across in any single context. Creating an identity, for others or for oneself, involves slippage with the other things we could be. This is not simply about performing a ‘self for consumption by others, in the sense of Goffman and his followers, but trying to understand the processes by which the options for an ordering of a self become both regimented and resisted.

128 Conversation 2: Olwyn Mowatt - an ‘incomer’.

I first met Olwyn on a guided walk run by Pete, a New Forest Ranger. We started the walk in Whitewater car park. Olwyn, a tall, spare, elderly lady with greying hair and a slow deliberate walk, seemed absorbed with the things around her and spent considerably less time chatting than others in the party. When I found myself walking next to her we started talking about the trees we were passing. Her speech pattern was gentle, considered and marked with the broader vowels of Australia where she grew up. Over the next twelve months I spent several afternoons with Olwyn, either at her home or visiting places in the Forest. Olwyn was a newcomer to the Lyndhurst community and still regretful about the home she left behind to move into her small modem semi-detached house about five minutes walk from the Queens House. She felt that she was only beginning to learn about the Forest and was very aware of her newcomer status. She was a regular churchgoer, an amateur historian (a description she did not feel her interest warranted) and spent a great deal of her time painting in the sun lounge at the back of her house. It was with much sadness that I learnt of her death in June 2000 shortly after a severe fall in her home. The following conversation took place in her sun lounge in early spring.

OM: You asked about my paintings - let me show you one that I am working on at the moment. You don’t mind do you? [She propped up the watercolour of a summer woodland scene on the easel]

AG: What is the tree in the centre? The colours remind me of a Blue Gum tree. Its something about the mauve tones....

OM: Yes, I can see what you mean. It’s very annoying though because it’s meant to be a silver birch! [We stand and look at it for a moment].

AG: I wonder if those colours are almost an unconscious choice. I know that there are sets o f colours that remind me o f South Africa.

129 OM: [Laughs] That’s a funny thought. As though we can’t escape from our early experiences. But you are right. There is a particular colour palette for the New Forest that isn’t the same for Australia. And I do miss the Gum trees. That is partly why I moved here rather than anywhere else - its a beautiful, natural part o f the world and not too fa r from my family.

AG: What was it like moving here?

OM: I really miss my old house. It was lovely and spacious and had a nice big garden. But it was getting to be too much to look after and it was too fa r away to be able to see my children regularly. Actually I think it was mostly their idea. So it has been hard in some ways. But I love the New Forest. I ’ve been coming here regularly for the last 15 odd years and had some very happy times here.

AG: Do you feel that you are fitting in here then? Becoming a local?

OM: Not at all. I mean I have friends, mainly through the different groups that I have joined, but I don’t think I will ever be a ‘local ’. You probably need to have Norman ancestors to be properly local here! Not that that really bothers me much. I think I have always had a more international outlook. I mean I lived in Australia and I live here and have family and friends all over the world. The payoff is that I am not sure where I really belong in the way that some o f the locals here do. They say that ‘home is where the heart is ’ and that really means my family for me. Some o f the people you meet here, they are all very welcoming, but I won’t ever be on the same level as them in terms o f being local. How could I be? And I respect that. But I think there is still a lot of the old class system around. You remember I told you about the ‘big houses ’, that’s what they call them, and would say things like “That was when George was a nipper and things were decided by the big houses”? Well I tried to ask a few people subtly what went on at these “big houses ”, but they won’t talk about it much at all. And I wondered - this is just speculation mind you - whether they used to work in these house as staff - servants. That can be quite embarrassing to admit these days, can’t it? But at the same time, and this is what seemed strange, they talk about the big houses almost with affection. When you say locals what you might mean as well is that local also carries these old-fashioned class affiliations still. Maybe because I

130 grew up in Australia, where people are more equal, I am much more aware of the class system here. 1 mean why he embarrassed about work that you did in the past?

AG: Of course in Australia the Aborigines might not feel quite as equal as the white Australians.

OM: Yes you are quite right. We all have our blind spots. Have you heard anything about the Gypsy community around here? I was reading something the other day that suggested that they were well established in the New Forest. But again most of the people I have spoken to tend to be pretty blunt about them.

AG: I had a discussion with the forest work-gang I worked with about Gypsies. It was quite ambivalent really. They remembered things about going to school with them, and some of the friendships they made, but were also pretty certain they didn’t want them moving in next door. The other big category of people that have a big impact must be the visitors and tourists. What do you feel about them?

OM: Well many of the local people are pretty rude about them too, which I think is unnecessary. They are the ones that bring in a lot of money. But if you go down to Lyndhurst centre during the height o f the holidays there are so many people there you can’t move. They are all so pushy and the traffic is driving past just next to you - 1 can quite understand why people might become upset. They are talking about reducing the numbers somehow, which would be good.

AG: But you yourself were a tourist once....

OM: Yes - but not everyone needs to come to the same few places. I don’t feel that strongly about it. Not like some of the locals here. They think that too many people are moving into the area anyway. I can see how you could think like that - but I do feel a bit of a fraud sometimes. The result is that I don’t feel it is right for me to express an opinion.

AG: Really? I think that is quite topsy-turvy. You are allowed to live where you like in this country and this is where you live now. Just because your grandfather didn’t

131 grow up in this particular little corner of England shouldn’t mean that you cannot have a say about what goes on where you live. There is a democratic principle somewhere here. This is when ‘local ’ can be used to prioritise one group o f people over another. It has horrible echoes in my mind with apartheid South Africa and the group areas Act.

OM: Yes... we all experience some prejudice at one point or another. Iloved Australia but it was quite a m an’s world in some ways. Not that I questioned it then. I think what opened my eyes was the way that my son was treated. I... I don’t know if I have mentioned this... one son was born a Mongoloid - Downs Syndrome it is called now. Mongoloid has all those other connotations, but we didn’t know any better then. That is one of the reasons we moved to Britain, to get some of the help that was unavailable in Australia. No-one thought it was worth doing anything for him out in Australia. But I am not sure I could totally cope either. I mean when you live in that sort o f world it is easy to just go with what everyone else thinks. Even if in your heart o f hearts it still feels uncomfortable. In Britain the help was fantastic, special schools and people who knew about how special children with Downs Syndrome are. But things don’t always work out how you expect them to. You grow apart and you can grow together again.

AG: Against that kind o f experience my questions about trees must seem very trivial.

OM: Well yes...but also no. When I think about it trees were always an accompaniment to my life. They were there when these very human dramas were going on - not that I always noticed them - but still they were always there. Since you have been asking me these questions I suddenly think about them and remember them in all sorts of places when other things were going on. I loved the outdoors, and I loved the Eucalyptus trees, and I love the trees in the New Forest. When everything gets too much they are still there, calming, peaceful. Just getting on with the business of being a tree. [Laughs] Now you’ve got me at it too! I ’ve always enjoyed new things. So when I go for walks with Pete [the Ranger who runs the ‘Fit for Life’ walks] I want to look around and absorb each new bit as we walk and not talk so much. Some o f those others on the walk, as nice as they are, just don’t know when to

132 shut up! [Pulls a pained face]. I am also trying to think how I can paint the shapes and colours o f the trees.

AG: That is fascinating about how you feel about trees. I feel much the same at times doing this research where its like a whole new lesson in learning to notice - notice things that have been there all the time influencing me. Trees on the way to school that I liked without consciously noticing. As deeply tied up as, say, the school teachers - but I can’t remember them half as well. I see there are two directions in this issue of how a ‘local’ identity is formed. One is about the experiences in the past that lend meaning to how you interpret what is going on here and the other is about ongoing current experiences that create new patterns and mesh in new ways. If I may pick up on one thing that you mentioned, you said it was a ‘man’s world’ out in Australia. Why did you say that?

OM: Well remember that it was quite a while ago now. I didn’t really worry about it then, Just got on with what I wanted to do. But I look at my daughter now and the opportunities that young women have in all sorts ofjobs and just wonder what I might have done if I was young now. There are also the things that Ijust accepted as normal then, particularly in the domestic sphere, which I just wonder about now. But I am mostly happy here. I might never be a proper ‘local ’, but I have had experiences that they never had, and in some ways opportunities fo r women o f my generation in the Forest were even worse. Farming and Forestry are still men’s jobs. Tourism is changing that a bit I think - you see women running the shops and businesses like cycling and horse riding. I enjoy finding out about the history - and practising my painting. I think I must make a concerted effort to learn to recognise more trees.

Order, Resistance and Ambivalence

Scott’s (1985) Weapons o f the Weak: Everyday forms o f Feasant Resistance with his foot-dragging, gossiping, pilfering peasants, subverting at any opportunity the material and symbolic dominance of their social masters, seems a powerful precursor to the work of Berglund (1998) and Sider and Smith (1997). Still working within a Marxist model of class conflict, Scott nevertheless shows how identities are deeply

133 implicated in the details of everyday life and opposes large social changes against that informal detail. If there is a fault it lies in his interpretation of so much of ordinary life as being resistance and in being sure of the target of that resistance. In Sider and Smith’s model neither resistance nor complicity is given priority. Their ‘individual’ is a figure made up of order and resistance to order, but in both directions - against powerful incorporating histories and also against local knowledge.

This latter seems the more dynamic model. But both, perhaps because of the nature of the examples that they use to flesh out their theories, understate the importance of ambivalence that, at times, appears very significant in my fieldwork. People might feel more international or more local, love or hate representatives of various aspects of their lives at different times. Olwyn moves through a number of levels of identity. She is both Australian and British: they have different sets of colours, and trees and feelings but both are core to her sense of self. She also defines herself as more international than local, highlighting the opportunities she has had and maintaining a distance from local class affiliations. However, she identifies with locals against tourists but still feels a fraud because she was a tourist. We can read in Olwyn’s experience recognition both her complicity with the societies in which she moves and the points of wrenching away - and the ambivalence this engenders. She was complied in a world that condemned her son and gave her certain feminised roles. Despite learning resistance through other experiences, part of her pain is realising her complicity with those patterns. Olwyn, like many, seems to move to a neutral topic or a joke when things get a bit personal. Behind these various constructions of identity, which can be viewed as both adopted choice and enforced regimentation, the silences and spaces, the experiences of pain, removal, distance are as vital as the ordering of self and place that is presented.

This has not led her, however, to question the local/incomer divide that seems so prevalent in the New Forest Region. This divide is given huge impetus in legal, historical and everyday constructions of local power. It is expressed in the Minister’s Mandate for the New Forest, in current Forestry Commission literature and their drive to consult ‘locally’, and the way in which the Verderers and Commoners have become signifiers of all that is ‘local’. ‘Local’ has become a powerful cultural category against which we can read the slippages and connections of individual stories. This category

134 orders identities in the Forest to such an extent that Olwyn removes herself from ownership of the right to make decisions over the future of the Forest, despite making the Forest her home. The next conversation highlights ambivalence and slippage for an insider of this powerful cultural category.

Conversation 3: Richard Stride - Commoner and PC Forester.

At least four different people had suggested that I speak to Richard Stride. Our first meeting took place during a lunch break at the bottom of an FC track near Brockenhurst. The choice of venue spoke almost as loudly as Richard himself was quiet. When we arrived, having confirmed the position over the radio network, Richard was already there, leaning against his Forestry Commission pick-up in the shade of some Beech trees over-looking a sunny clearing around a sluggish river. He nodded to Gill (the Ranger who had organised this meeting) and looked back towards the river. It was full of muddy splashing boys and girls trying to complete various tasks against the clock. The woods all around echoed with the shouts and screams of excited teenagers who ran in and out of sight behind the trees. Some caught their breath in the sun, chatting loudly with friends before a new project suggested itself and they surged off to investigate. On the other bank the track rose through the trees and in the distance was a hint of open heathland. We stood and watched for a while. Gill asked whether they had a permit and Richard explained that it was an end-of-year school trip from Southampton and it was all officially agreed. Eventually he turned and questioned me closely on my research project. After a few minutes he turned back to face the clearing.

RS: We’ve had it our way for a long time. It’s not going to go our way for much longer. It has been our Forest but we are now losing control. Maybe that’s the way it’s got to happen, but I still think we are in danger o f losing the Forest.

AG: By ‘our’you mean the Commoners?

135 RS: Yes, and the old Forest people, but especially the Commoners. It’s good that they are having fun there, but I remember when it was empty around here. You could be out all day and only meet one other person. I used to play in this river when I was a nipper.

GS: Look at that muddy water they have stirred up. I know they are having a good time, but look at all the erosion it is causing. [Pause] Still, it looks like good fun.

RS: They have a rope net thing they are using Just behind the trees there. It’s got a lot of different sized holes which you’ve got to pass your team through. Spiders web I think they called it. I watched that for a bit. Looked like fun... But about the river though, when you take a herd of horses through, or when they come down to drink they ’II stir it up too. I don’t think those kids playing there is much different.

AG: What was it like when you were growing up here? Do you think it was very different to the experiences these kids are having?

RS: Yes, when you grow up here you know it. It’s your place isn’t it. [Chuckles] We were a wild bunch then. We used to get up to all sorts of things when my Dad wasn’t around. I remember once we had to take a stallion through here on the way up to the paddock. My Dad had told me and my brother to take it up there. It was a wild one that one, strong. Very strong. I think he was testing us to see whether we could cope with him because he walked with us for a bit making sure that the stallion was under control and not going to get away. And then he stepped in front o f him and waved his arms around to get him to buck. We were swung around all over the place but we kept hold of the halter no matter what. He Just testing us - but it was a hard lesson. After that he left us and we got that pony back ourselves.

AG: Is that connection with animals important for being a commoner?

RS: Thats part of what we do. An important part, yes. Ponies, and Commoning and the Forest are all part o f each other. You can’t really have one without the others. It’s not an easy life, you have to be strong, take the knocks. When we have drifts [gathering the ponies off the open Forest] you are going to take a tumble or two. But

136 you go off with your mates and have a good time doing it. People think it’s easy but you are always going to have a problem pony or two. They can be wily buggers. I remember trying to catch this one stallion for weeks. We didn Y get him in the drive, and nor did we catch him later. He would stand there looking at us from a distant plain while we slogged through a bit of woodland. And then he completely disappeared for a while. We didn Y know where he was until someone spotted him the other side of the A31. Then we knew we’d got him. We weren’t going to run around after him any more, just wait until he tried to get back onto this side. We closed o ff the underpass and put a sign up saying 'Temporary disease Barrier ’ or something like that and hoped that no one would take it down. You not meant to block off a track like that. A few mornings later we found him near the railway line and just drifted him in and shut the gate behind him. Got him. I t’s cheating a bit doing it like that but we needed to get him o ff the Forest and we had already wasted so much time. The funny thing was no one had dared to move the fence.

AG: You have to take stallions off the open Forest don ’tyou? Only a few are allowed on during the breeding season.

RS: That’s right, it’s something that the Agisters check on behalf of the Verderers.

AG: You were a Verderer for a while weren ’tyou? Why did you give it up? Surely you were in a good position to influence what went on in the Forest?

RS: That’s a difficult one. There were lots of reasons. I had done it for a while and it was hard work. Whenever you are in that sort of position you are always going to make decisions that other people don Y like and sometime they make it very difficult for you. You go out shopping or doing other things and suddenly the fact that you made a decision that they didn Y like makes it difficult. I don Y agree with that sort of behaviour.

AG: Did the fact that you were also an FC forester make it difficult because as far as I can see the Verderers opposed most o f what the FC were doing?

137 RS: Not really. I did my job as a Verderer and then did my job as a Forester. Of course I thought the FC made some daft decisions but if you are sensible you can get round most things.... Maybe it did have an effect because some people didn’t understand how I could work for both at the same time. Both jobs are about protecting the Forest and that’s what I care about. The Verderers had a very important role in protecting the Forest. When I was on the court I was doing the best I could. But the FC is powerful and devious. They are always trying it on to get any concession they can. You have to be strong to fight that sort o f pressure and I don’t think the Verderers are strong enough anymore. We are not going to win. All we can do now is fight a rear-guard action for as long as possible to slow the inevitable down. We won before and managed to protect the Forest from turning into a timber plantation. The Forest would be a very different place if we hadn’t fought with everything to protect it. You probably wouldn’t be standing here if we hadn’t protected the Forest. Right now they are trying it on about campsites and because they are on the Open Forest the Verderers permission should be obtained. But at the moment it looks like they might not even be consulted. They are testing to see how far we will let them go.

AG: I have this theory that the nature of the Verderers court has changed. If you go back to the time of Lascelles and the Office of Woods all the Verderers were important landowners in and around the Forest. They included people like Lord Beaulieu and were basically a powerful local elite. Their interest in protecting common rights was because the rights attached to properties that were rented from them. If the tenants, the commoners, no longer had access to the Forest the properties would no longer be so valuable to them and the rents would drop. Now the Verderers are associated even more closely to the Commoners and you no longer have the propertied elite there because it is no longer in their interest. The nature o f Commoning had changed because most are now owner-occupiers. Part of your previous success lay in the correspondence of interest between Commoners and large property owners.

RS: Maybe. I hadn ’t thought o f it like that.

138 AG: One of the complaints I have heard recently is that because so many visitors come here and like it they decide to buy up local property often with common rights attached. I mean if you have the property and you keep ponies or cattle doesn’t that make you a proper commoner?

RS: I see what you are getting at but... I think there are two types of Commoners, those like me that actually make a living out of it and have worked at it for all our lives. We understand the Forest and its character. Those others I call ‘hobby' commoners, only keeping one or two ponies because they think it is a nice thing to do. There is a core o f people who understand the Forest who are not all Commoners and the new people who think they do and make decisions about the place without really understanding it. But things are changing. Even the new chairman of CDA [Commoners Defence Association] is an outsider.

Being ‘local’

Richard’s identity as a Commoner, rather than his role as an FC Forester is what comes across most strongly in the conversation above, this despite the very visible signs of FC membership in his clothes and vehicle. The Forest is central to his sense of identity and is explicitly tied to a triangular relationship between the Forest, Commoners and their animals. The Forest is what he loves and his role as a Commoner created and maintains this environment in the face of repeated attempts to break that link. Indeed, it becomes a moral world - “our way” - life in it is hard, and comes with a carefully weighted sense of fairness, in dealing with both it and the animals. Visitors are clearly a key threat to whom “we” are losing control. The message of his choice of venue is powerful counterpoint to his conversation. On a sunny day, when hay collecting was a priority, he chose to meet me in an area away from his usual beat where evidence of perhaps the largest single change to the Forest in the last hundred years, mass tourism, albeit in educational guise, was in full shouting and screaming flow.

The temptation to ‘read’ Richard’s identity as local above all else is powerful. Yet the place and his conversation point in ambivalent directions. He obviously enjoyed the

139 fact that children were appreciating the Forest. His childhood experiences both separate him from them and then lead him to wish they too had a similar love for the place. Engendering that appreciation comes with a loss of control and the privacy that he once enjoyed. Commoning identity also becomes ambivalent as we learn of “hobby” Commoners, of ‘real’ Forest people who are not Commoners, and of the treatment meted out to him and his wife in a small community when some objected to his decisions as a Verderer.

A striking feature of both Captain Barclay and Richard Stride’s conversations is the extent to which they use metaphors of battle. The Forest, in being described as threatened, as a leitmotif of small wins in a continuing confrontation, becomes a signifier of all things rural. Richard feels the right image for his job is warfare: protecting the Forest is almost like protecting a vulnerable person from ravaging enemies. For him in particular, the Forest becomes almost personified, attributed with characteristics, moral rights and a life that requires urgent protection. ‘Localness’ requires a realisation of risk to this ‘life’, and a taking on board of the moral necessity of protection. Yet the Forestry Commission, members of whom might well share this position, is part of that pathogenic environment. ‘Local’, ill-defined and plastic as it is, makes a powerful claim on identity and consequent senses of inclusion and exclusion.

C onclusion

Am I in danger, however, in equating the rising importance of ‘local’ in discourses about both Hatfield and the New Forest with the more global cultural pressures that Berglund and Sider and Smith refer too? That is, am I confusing levels of analysis? I would argue not - because even large cultural pressures have to be played out at the interpersonal level and take on meaning at that level. What I would like to stress is the greater importance of ambivalence in people's understandings. Categories, while convenient, always break down and blur at the edges, revealing not more clarity but more complexity. When being local becomes equated with a heritage environment that needs protecting through national and international agreement, then who is local is increasingly at issue. There are connections and slippages and damage done to other

140 identities. Who is and isn’t iocal/landowner/countryman/commoner/real commoner also creates its own resistance. Olwyn’s reluctance to express her opinion in the face of ‘real’ locals points to other identities lost in the complicity with structures of local ness.

At one level, forests have become icons of environmental concern, flagship environments, indicators of wealth and health. But we can also read individual stories against that as people try to co-opt or resist definitions that become important because of this process of cultural valuing. Making Forests like Hatfield and New Forest into high priority, at-risk environments also brings them into focus as ways of thinking about how we want them to be in the future and in consequence who we see ourselves as being. Local stories become co-opted into powerful cultural constructions in ways that can be both complicit and resistant, but that are also ambivalent, dynamic and context driven.

141 Chapter 5

The ritual of tools and magic of place; work, class and gender in the Forest.

It was mid morning by the time that everything for the new information sign was loaded onto the truck at Burley Yard. The main timber upright, 10-foot long and 2 square, was raised by forklift, but it still took four men to place it on the truck bed alongside digging and tamping tools - and there would be no machine on site. Tom, the young carpenter, nervously checked his tools and loaded them into the footwell of the cab. Stan, soon to retire, came along to see how well Tom’s sign would fit together on site. Meanwhile Pete, the Gaffer (""Lead Gaffer, if you please ”, he would light-heartedly insist) was going via the Queen’s house to pick up the Recreation Forester who wanted to see the first o f the new signs go up.

The information board was for Whitefield Moor, one of the larger, “high impact” car parks outside Brockenhurst in the New Forest. Once public warning notices were up, Jeff and Mac set to digging out the old posts while Tom carefully marked out where the new ones were to go. ‘Si ’ (Simon) and Fred rapidly dug a two-foot hole before hitting gravel and changing tools to continue. Aware of an audience, the work gang were putting on an efficient display. Tom made a comment about how long they were taking and was offered a shovel in response. He declined, insisting on his professional carpenter status to save face. Having removed the old sign and ‘‘cleared up ” to their satisfaction, Jeff and Mac pressed to take over the digging. Conscious that the Forester might arrive soon. Si and Fred were reluctant to relinquish their task, but by the time the Forester arrived Jeff and Mac had got their way. A member o f the public who had come over to watch pedantically started counting FC staff.

Typical Forestry Commission! Lets see, we have nine people here all standing around

watching two men dig. Don’t you think this multiple redundancy has gone too far? Too many

chiefs and not enough Indians. No wonder the Forest is in the state it’s in. Pete scowled. Someone else moved over to placate the man and answer questions.

142 The posts were “offered up” to the holes and only when Tom was satisfied did the work gang start to fill around the posts. When the last dowel had been hammered in and sanded off Tom patted the now solid frame. Stan gave a grudging, but approving nod, “You were lucky you got the height right the first time, though”. The sign was prominently displayed, sturdy and substantial - “a clean job ” as Jeff said later. I asked what he thought of the visitor’s comments. “Well, he didn’t really understand what was going on did he? ”

Understanding “what is going on” is a continual and highly positional task in the whip and pull of social life. Even completing straightforward tasks such as setting up a sign involves considerable social co-operation and understanding. But there are also tensions, jostling for position, individual success within a team framework, joking and teasing. In the example above, Tom was wise not to take up the challenge of the proffered spade, because although sturdy, it was both unwieldy and set at the wrong angle to cut through turf and gravel. He would have worked hard to little effect and, while the work team understood this, no one would have told him if he had accepted. This chapter, then, examines how tools are constructed by, and in relationship to, knowledge, people and places in the Forest.

Chapter 2 on identity creation at Hatfield Forest suggested that objects such as trees have actor-like roles effectively shaping the performances of sociality. Furthermore, that for the Wardens at Hatfield, trees helped structure the creation of individual identities especially with reference to the creation of expertise and knowledge. Through engagement with trees in the landscape, and through their construction as living heritage, processes of making place, past and self were identified. In the discussion of felling trees, reference was made to the use to tools such as chainsaws, tractors and ropes. Implicit in the analysis was the notion that techniques and artefacts are embodied - that chainsaws become part of the social world through their expressive use and through their ability to change the physical context. At Hatfield and the New Forest tools play an important role in the establishment and practice of

143 identities as skilful, knowledgeable woodsmen^'^. This chapter expands these ideas through an analysis of the role tools and machines play in constructing different senses of gendered self, group knowledge and local place, primarily in the New Forest. The focus here is on the work gangs^^, and their relationships with tools, the Forest and the people that manage them. Contrary to characterisations of rural relationships as adhering to class as a major factor in social arrangements (and ways of perceiving the landscape), I suggest that context and role, play a greater part in constructing social meaning in the countryside. Hence when class identities are deployed becomes more important than the mere fact that they are deployed^^. A focus on the contexts of daily work engages specifically with the types of embodiment that differing tools engender and their resultant impact on the construction of knowledge and skill.

Section one identifies two trends in the literature and distinguishes ‘tools’ used as evidence of general human processes from those embedded in specific social contexts. While it may be useful to differentiate the concept of tool use from that of the artefact, it is argued that because tools represent embodied practice, separating artefactual from communicative roles fails to engage with the reality of everyday tool use. Section two describes the professional practice of Forest workers showing how processes of coding and highlighting create patterned bodily, spatial and aesthetic relationships to the landscape. Sections three and four expand the analysis to dwell on how tools become implicated, in ways that matter to the workers, in expressions of class, status and gender. Moving tangentially to the rest of the chapter, section five takes up the case of a female Forester to cast in relief the complexities and ambiguities of the working world of the Forest. Here are attempts to enforce organisational models, and

“Woodsman” was never used as a self-descriptive, only in describing others. I use the gender specific term deliberately (despite there being several female Foresters) to highlight the implicit gendering of forest worker’s roles.

While the terms work “gang” or “squad” was used in the New Forest they jar in the Hatfield Forest setting, where “teams” or “groups” of volunteers under supervision did much of the labour. The choice of referent is as much indicative of power variations as it is of organisational culture and history.

Here I treat class as a nuanced set of explanations about identity used by people in everyday life rather than as an imposed, systematic and structured grid stemming from socio-economic categories.

144 unexpected convergences of interest in undermining these same models. These strands are brought together in the conclusion.

Tools in culture and tools of culture

Machines, tools and technology play an important role in the working worlds of the men and women in the Forests. Knowledge of the application and use of multiple specialist and non-specialist tools is an important marker of identity separating those working in the forest from those who “only” live or visit. Conversations about the relative merits of different makes of chainsaw, or the latest new machine, are used as a quick way of establishing rapport, marking areas of common experience and rapidly excluding those without equivalent knowledge. Early on in my research I was often shown items which were considered appropriate, and suitably impressive. The new bench-saw, for instance, was carefully uncovered but not turned on. (It wasn’t until several months later that I actually saw it used.) I was taken to watch a forwarder^^ being loaded with logs, and a mechanical felling machine. On another occasion it was a stump remover, and the quad-bike and trailer. In the office I was shown the GPS^^ computer mapping systems, and the classrooms. Other tools, such as chainsaws, spades and shovels, post-drivers, hole-drillers, hammers, wire-tensioners, and the compasses, pens, paper and photocopier of the office and classroom were ignored. These items, more intimately connected with everyday work, were not objects highlighted in and of themselves. Rather they were subsumed under the tasks they were used in: ‘manual’ felling (that is, with chainsaws), digging, brashing, fencing, timber repair work, education, administration, mapping etc. Just as Pellegram (1998) has shown how the circulation of everyday objects in an office, such as paper, is not just about efficient communication but embodies all kinds of messages about social positioning and status, the ordinary objects and tasks of forest work embody social practice. Hence it is to these mundane activities, and not the carefully displayed performances of a few specialists with complex machinery, that this chapter turns. But before examining the social and cultural elaboration of these everyday objects of the

57 A flat-bed truck with a mechanical arm used to extract felled timber to the roadside.

Global Positioning Satellite system.

145 forest world, the tools of the trade so to speak, a brief summary of current thinking is required.

The resurgence of interest in material culture in recent years has led, among other things, to a re-focussing on processes of production and use of artefacts. One strand of investigation has attempted to theorise the role of human artefacts in the creation of cultural knowledge and the transmission of skills (Burkitt 1999, Dawkins 1989, Haraway 1991, Ingold 1986, 1996). A second trend has been driven by a desire to assess the impact of artefacts and technologies on sociality and is informed by the postmodern destabilisation of subject object relations, theories of the decentered subject, and notions of objects as semi-actants in social life (Cockbum and First-Dilic 1994, Gell, 1999, Green and Adam 2001, MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999, Tacchi 1998). While it could be argued that new technologies have driven this renewed interest in material culture, there have also been significant steps forward in understanding the sociality of everyday, mundane objects (Pellegram 1998, Miller 1998, 1994, Buchli 1999). Both approaches work towards a similar end of understanding human involvement with material environments, but from opposite directions. The former group move from a primarily theoretical interest towards objects in specific socio-cultural settings, while the latter move from carefully located settings towards theoretical interpretation. For the purposes of this section 1 will distinguish between the former - glossed as tools of culture - and the latter - tools in culture.

In the introduction to his book on human ecology and social relations, Ingold (1986: 1-15) presents a picture of a hunter armed with a spear setting out on a hunt. He characterises this event as encompassing all four components that anthropologists use in building systems of understanding social life: environment, society, technology and culture. Technology, represented by the spear in his example, is used by Ingold in preference to ‘tools’ as he wishes to separate the concept of tool use from the artefact. “[T]he primary reference to the concept of technology is to knowledge and skill, and not to instruments made and used” (6). Driven by the debate over humans being distinguished from other animal by their use of tools {homo faber), Ingold shows how, as increasing numbers of animals, birds and insects were discovered to be tool users, the definition of a tool was refined away from the objective artefact to conceptual

146 issues of construction and use. Nevertheless, for Ingold’s hunter, tools provide a crucial intersection between the cognitive, symbolic and material worlds. The spear is both a highly complex cultural symbol, (of, say, adult male identity, environmental knowledge and learnt skills) and a material agent of an animal’s death. Primarily however, Ingold is concerned with a meta-level debate about modelling the nature of being human and human relationships with the environment. Under this regime of analysis tools become objects o f culture, artefacts that represent a ‘crystallization’ of social activities (Leontyev 1981) waiting to be interpreted for what they can tell us about the general nature of human society^^. Hence tools are examined for their ability to distinguish between human and natural worlds, as evidence of cultural processes in the broad sense, and only cursorily as specific to a particular social context. In the search for theoretical clarity tools are disaggregated, carefully pulled apart from their social context and laid open as separated artefact and cultural transmission - dry universalistic bones.

The second trend does not attempt to distil essences so much as celebrate complexity and variation. Tools are examined not for what they can tell us about the fundamental nature of being human, but rather for what they can tell us about specific social milieux (which may include what it means to be human in that society). Thus Mackenzie (1991) analyses the looped string net-bag {bilum) in New Guinea and shows how this everyday tool becomes a powerful metaphor used by men and women to negotiate their gender roles. Bilums are made by women and have strong associations with their productive and reproductive roles. The bilum is noted for its womb-like characteristics and marked by its constant presence in women’s tasks. But men also use bilums to carry hunting equipment, heirlooms, household and ritual items. Various markers appropriate the net-bags into the male sphere. For instance, men carry them over their shoulder rather than with a band over the head as the women do. They also redecorate the bags in secret with feathers and other items both to mark their entry into the masculine world and to further differentiate from women’s bilums by concealing the contents.

Dawkins, working within a strongly evolutionary framework, coins the wordmemes to represent cultural things that have an objective existence. For him, though, memes are part o f natural processes.

147 Cars, specifically Toyotas, are also implicated in gender relationships among aboriginal communities in Australia (Edwards 1994, Young 2001, Stotz 2001). Young for instance, writing about cars among the Anangu in the Western desert, shows how they have become integrated into social life and used as social bodies. Not only are they tools for fetching and carrying people and supplies, and vital to hunting trips and for creating shelter, but they play an important role in religious ceremonies. Indeed the Anunga say they cannot “look after” country without access to Toyotas (2001: 38). As they travel along dirt roads the cars are transformed both physically and socially, acquiring odd tyres and mismatched panels at the same time as becoming social bodies, subject to appropriate ways of driving in the bush and rules when visiting other people and places. Inside they become opportunities for expressing hierarchical arrangements in seating, and private spaces in which to avoid obligations to share things like tobacco. Young concludes,

...cars mediate, not only, the constant dynamic of social relations but also,

crucially, the strong emotional relationship of people with country. Rather than

rendering this relationship ‘inauthentic’, the car can reinforce Anangu’s spiritual

connection with the land

(Young 2001: 52)

As tools in culture both the net-bags and the cars reveal the complexities of social life in specific contexts. Clearly, the process of using tools is inherently a social activity and should be examined as such. In Tilley’s words, “making things and making people are part of the same seamless order of things” (1999: 57) and tools are at the fulcrum of this relationship.

The use of the word ‘tool’ implies not just the artefact (say a spade shaped thing) but also its use (digging). Indeed, an artefact can only be defined as a tool in relation to its purposeful use. While there is no need to rehearse these arguments here (see Ingold 1986: 40 ff), drawing attention to the implicit sociality of the word tool, the human purposes it serves, highlights the assumptions we make of shared meaning when referring to a supposedly straightforward work object. Yet as Tilley (1999) has argued there is no ontological reason to separate the material realm from the metaphorical, nor to give either priority. In other words there is no reason to treat the artefactual

148 dimension of the tool as separate to its communicative and symbolic role. Gell (1999, 1996, 1992), in his ruminations over the last decade about art and technology, goes further in suggesting that art is meaningful precisely because it embodies the social and technical processes that have made it. To the artefactual dimension (be it a tool or a painting) we need to add the processes of being made, of becoming. Gell describes this as a ‘halo’ effect adding to the ability of the object to ‘enchant’ us. “Art, as a separate kind of technical activity, only carries further... the enchantment which is immanent in all kinds of technical activity” (1999:163-4).

In broad terms Burkitt (1999) takes a similar stance arguing that objects do not take on meaning because of their inclusion in symbolic systems like language, but rather we should see words and language as one part of humanly constructed meaningful artefacts. Echoing Gergen (1994), Burkitt argues that objects are not “ontologically mute” unable to claim certainty of existence beyond their construction in language. Rather, objects exist in the “artefactual dimension, with its meaning-giving properties, [and are] always fundamental to conscious perception, blending with the reality [they] diffract” (Burkitt 1999:37). Here Burkitt allows for both human hegemonic meaning systems and that this system can change in order to account for structures in the world independent of human existence.

Key to most contemporary analysis then, is the notion of an artefact’s communicative role. For Burkitt (1999) an artefact is an item of material culture (which also includes tools, implements, signs and words) which is primarily a unit of cultural transmission. It is the notion of transmission that allows humans to be active agents and thus artefacts are “created object(s) in which human activity is embodied because it has to be fashioned for some use within human practices” (1999:35). Intriguingly, and to my mind counter to the implications of his main thesis, he wishes to assign roles to the ‘artefactual dimension’. While relations to other people are mediated mainly by language, artefacts mediate relations to the non-human world, although these roles are not necessarily exclusive (Burkitt 1999:38). I suggest below that while initially attractive, there is no easy way of distinguishing between these two roles. However, it

149 is in the question of transmission of knowledge and skills that proponents of both positions, tools of culture and tools in culture, find common ground.

One way of approaching questions about the transmission of cultural knowledge is to examine how artefacts are organised and arranged within specific social situations. Goodwin (1994) examines an archaeological field excavation and legal argumentation to help develop a “practice-based theory of knowledge and action”. While Goodwin is specifically concerned with understanding the interaction between objects and people in constructing professional (archaeological and legal) knowledge, there is no reason why his analysis should not apply to the production of skill and knowledge among forest workers. Goodwin argues that the ability to see a meaningful event is not a transparent process but instead a socially situated activity accomplished through the deployment of a range of historically constituted discursive practices (1994:606). He examines the interchange between a professor and student mapping a profile at an archaeological dig, paying particular attention to the interplay between language, the soil face and the measuring tools they are using. The student is following instructions about where to place her tape measure, but needs to be coached by the professor in recognising appropriate changes in the soil colouring (which indicated where post holes had been dug in the distant past) in order to measure where the soil markings change angle.

Goodwin (1994:606jÿ) suggests that there are three key practices going on in the transmission of professional knowledge. Firstly, “coding” - which transforms the phenomena observed (a soil face) in a specific setting into the objects of knowledge

(post-holes) that animate the discourse of the profession. Secondly, a process of highlighting (drawing the student’s attention by pointing with a trowel to the disturbance in the soil that marks the post hole and the secondary traces left by the post itself). Highlighting makes certain phenomena in a complex perceptual field salient by marking them out in some fashion. Thirdly, the production of further material representations (the map), that further models and constrains the perceptual field. The student is introduced into a community of competent practitioners, not only through mental processes, but also through embodied, situated practices.

Talk between co-workers, the lines they are drawing, measurement tools, and the ability to see

relevant events in the dirt all mutually inform each other within a single coherent activity.

150 Simultaneously, the practices clustered around the production, distribution and interpretation

o f such representations provide the material and cognitive infrastructure that make

archaeological theory possible”

(Goodwin 1994:626). Insofar as these practices are lodged in communities, they must be learned, and the organisation of learning is encased in embodied practice. The dirt in front of the student is not an object of contemplation but a locus of practical application and part of a process of highlighting and then remedying gaps in her knowledge. Goodwin is quite right to stress the importance of highlighting because it “structures the perception of others by reshaping a domain of scrutiny so that some phenomena are made salient, while others fade into the background"(Goodwin 1994:628). This has strong rhetorical and political consequences. What Goodwin does not expand is the role tools play in extending the range of embodied practice and as artefactual interfaces already ensconced in processes and practices of ‘highlighting’. The bases from which the work gangs set off and to which they return, provide a good place to start examining these processes.

Working in the Forest

Coding - the Yard At both Hatfield and the New Forest preparing for the day ahead, collecting plans, materials, and tools began a process of coding in which the forest is made an appropriate setting for the work gang’s objects of knowledge^^. There is a rhythmic sense to this; a setting up of patterns that subtly, but powerfully, organise knowledge and shape perceptions of the day ahead and the landscape in which it takes place. At one level there is a move from the domestic landscape of home to imagining the ‘taskscapes’ of the day ahead. At both sites, unless it was raining, people would gather outside in the early morning sun, hands cupping steaming mugs of tea in winter, or finding shade in summer. This was an opportunity for banter, poor jokes and desultory digs about something that went wrong yesterday. At no point did

^ For the purposes of this discussion, ‘objects of knowledge’ refers to the bringing together of tools, skills and materials in the process of fencing, building rails, erecting signs, brashing etc. The finished artefacts, become the material representations which further organise knowledge and shape perception.

151 conversations turn to domestic issues, or for that matter, to people not concerned with work in the forest^V

Back at the base conversation would gradually come to a point where the Warden or Gaffer outlined the tasks for the day. Sometimes this was simply “carry on fencing where you left off yesterday”, while at other times, especially during preparation for special events, the disposition of staff vehicles and tools over the day was carefully explained. Then the team moved off to gather tools, materials, and lunch packs and load them into the vehicle or trailer. Each task required its own specialist tools, as well as spares and the ones personally favoured by the workers. On one of my first days with the work team, I was asked to go and get the “spoon”. My look of complete confusion caused laughter and Jeff went to fetch a flattened over long spade. It had a small, flat shield-like blade welded to the end of a long iron pole and looked like an overgrown, long-handled jam spoon. The ‘spoon’ had been broken and repaired again over many years, and in practised hands could rapidly cut through turf, soil and roots. When putting up the sign at Whitefield Moor, the work gang knew from hard experience that the ‘spoon’ was the better tool, not the shovel that Tom was offered. Hence, part of my learning was to be able to get the right set of tools together, correctly anticipating potential problems because of the weather and where we were going to be working. My learning process took time, experience, and a gradual increasing ability to interpret forest places in terms of their task affordances. Moving around the base, collecting tools and materials developed a certain bodily pattern linked with mentally imagined tasks, places and potential problems.

Figure 10 and Figure 11 are sketch plans of the bases at Hatfield and the New Forest respectively. At Hatfield, the Bam contains the office, tools and specialist equipment, and scattered around the heavy plant (tractors and handsaws), forest waste and timber storage^^. While education activities take place in the building near the lake, the bam

On the occasions when conversations did turn to domestic issues they were usually took place later in the day during one of the breaks once out in the forest, but never at the base.

“ The plan of the Bam and environs is presented as found in early February 1999. The Drying shed was later moved as it was discovered to be under a tree with a protection order. Many of the piles of material around would change as different demands were made on the storage area.

152 is the central meeting place for staff and volunteers at the start of the day. Core staff, the Wardens and estate manager gathered from 7am and had discussed the problems arising from the previous day and agreed tasks for the day ahead by the time the volunteers started arriving at 8am. The work team collected tools from inside the bam and loaded into the trailer behind the quad-bike, before moving around the site to load up other materials like posts, railings or fencing wire. Burley Yard (figure 2) is one of several depots in the New Forest from which work teams set out into the Forest^^.

Felled trees Takely Hfll (open plain)

Frailer Timba- for oak ban nch Saw Metal W \ \ Waste wood for Other rubbish bo TractOT stand Power tools

Fuel barels \ Handtools Woik bench I Veteran a Office O ak O PoUard The / Kitchoi Barn z . Circular Saw Wood d-ying racks Safety equipment

Parking Area Fire wood s

To main entrance and Bush End To Takely Street

Figure 10: The Bam, Hatfield Forest

As found in August 1999. Over the next two years several storage bins were moved and other vehicles such as ‘portacabins’ left on the site.

153 Burley Yard is the base for the largest remaining work squad the Recreation Gang^"^. The site is slightly larger than the one at Hatfield with less space given over to the production of timber products and more to the building and maintaining forest furniture (signs, gates, fences, benches and tables). Here staff begin to arrive from 6:30am, the ‘Gaffer’ a little earlier, leaving time to look over the job reports from Queens House, and deciding how to assign staff and resources over the day. Ongoing tasks, like gate repairs and fencing, were often interrupted by emergency repairs or priorities sent by the ‘office’ staff, a fact that was often resented by the staff at Burley Yard. At Hatfield, with less emphasis on hierarchy and less staff to do the tasks, volunteers often had the factors leading to a change in priority explained to them. At both Hatfield and the New Forest, although it was relatively easy to return to the base during the day, doing so took too long. In the New Forest it could take nearly two hours to return to base from the more distant areas of the Forest especially when the roads were clogged with holidaymakers.

Over the last decade the New Forest PC have been reducing their manual work force and increasing contracted out work. Hence most timber extraction and a portion of recreation tasks are now done by contractors.

154 Dust room Main '(lathes, Rails Tools & workshop sancfers gates storage saws)

Gafler’s Dry Office storage, flnidted Cab træisists & planks Fork-lift flat bed truck

Burley Yard Other Scrap

Metal Waste Tree

To Burley Road To Indosure

Figure 11: Burley Yard, New Forest

Part of the coding of the forest is built on previous experience. In high summer, putting rails around car parks in the north of the New Forest required extra digging poles (heavy, round iron posts sharpened to a point) to break up the dry, compacted clay and stone soil. In winter, it was possible to dig the same hole with just a spade. From the patterned preparation at the yard, the forest becomes subject to a new set of structuring principles, based on the interface between tools and the environment. It is coded according to task, season, relative hardness and softness of the soil, accessibility, and distance. The forest is talked about as a set of distances, times and estimates set for how long each task would take. This latter was highly variable. A tree guard that took two hours one morning could take four the next, simply due to variation in placement, and materials used^^. Hence a prime aim of coding at this

65 A constant problem when driving wooden posts into the ground in summer was splitting. At one point a “weak set” caused much aggravation as the splintered posts then had to be removed before new ones could be driven in.

155 stage is for efficiency. How best can the tools and the forest be brought together to expedite matters?

A second aspect of coding concerns the interface with the organisational hierarchy. For the work gangs there is no easily maintained boundary between coding and the eventual production of further professional artefacts. Indeed, in the desire for theoretical clarity, Goodwin’s case study does not deal with the degree to which artefacts and material products of other professional gazes impact and intermesh in the process of encoding^^. Making a perceptual realm the subject of a professional practice (the process of learning what to notice) perforce includes that realm being subject to previous material products of professional practice. Thus, along with collecting tools for making a tree guard, the team was given a copy of the approved plan. Part of the work team’s job is to take objects of others’ professional practice, encode them within their own professional perceptual field and produce further products of professional practice. Signs are made to conceptual drawings, gates to within approved parameters. Each adds to the discourse of potential ways of encoding the forest, each impacts in the workmen’s perceptual skill field. This was not without its own stresses.

Its a nightmare. They sit in the office and come up with the next brilliant idea. It sounds good

to them, it looks good drawn on paper in pretty colours, but then we have to actually make it -

you know, make it real. They don’t think about the limitations of the work.

What limitations?

Well take those new signs we are putting up in the big car parks. Something that big we had to

specially order in. More cost, and they are not easy to work with. We shouldn’t really be

lifting them without machines, but sometimes you can’t get the fork lift truck where it needs

to be or it just takes too long and we’d be putting up these damn things forever.

(Conversation with Pete, July 1999)

66 His theoretical model however makes allowances for the role of further material representations in structuring future action. The implication, however, is that this takes place within groupings of professional practice. Whether or not forest managers and labourers share the same ‘profession’ is a moot point. From the perspective of the work gangs, their objects of knowledge are very different.

156 Collecting tools for the day ahead often includes picking up ‘planning’ tools that embody, particularly in the New Forest, organisational hierarchy. While many of the tools and machines in daily use are regarded with a curious mixture of affection and loathing, they are always personal: extensions that increase the bodily range of effects in the landscape and as such used unconsciously. (The jar riding up the spade does not result in thinking that there might be a stone. You can feel it.) The maps and plans, however, are marked out in language and use. “Where’s their damn plans gone?” or “Pass that map over”, followed by a pause and often conversation about how to interpret it. The maps and plans are never as fully integrated or used in the same way as other tools. The latter, for instance, would virtually disappear from verbal marking. As each work team member knew (or learnt) what was needed next, tools would be handed over, posts supported, and places swapped with no verbal cues at all. When concentrating on the task, exchanges are kept to a minimum and most often deal with aspects of placement (higher or lower, left or right a bit). The plans and maps, however, are already freighted, within the hierarchical system of the organisation, with notions of power, status and control. It was noticeable how, in the context of the base these items were treated with considerably more solemnity than the carelessness and annoyance that was acceptable away from the base. This more careful treatment in the base occurred whether or not representatives of authority were actually present or not.

Highlighting - networks and neatness

At the base or yard the forest is encoded as a suitable setting for professional practice but once out in the forest a different set of processes take over. If encoding is about making the forest an appropriate place for efficient application of skill and the enforcing of hierarchical relationships, highlighting is about organising knowledge towards more egalitarian relationships and the practicalities of task. In other words, highlighting is about what you need to know in order to be proficient. Highlighting here encompasses two main processes. Firstly, placing tasks within a specific forest- knowledge framework that establishes the terms under which these tasks are understood within the group. Secondly, highlighting aspects of material form of professional practice that establishes shared norms and ways of doing tasks.

157 Firstly then, for the work teams the ‘objects of knowledge’, for example railings, are spatially arranged within the conceptual landscape of the forest. This is not about where the railings are eventually physically emplaced (something normally discussed once at the site), but rather theirpotential placement within a forest landscape of networked relationships. Conversations as the team leaves the yard reveal this process.

I think we’ll take the road out past Appleslade Farm and then up through Mockbeggar to

Chris’ place. I’ll have a quick word with him about leaving the tractor up there this week.

He’s got some new horses I’ve heard...

All you are interested in are those girls that look after his stables. What’s her name? Sally or something.... [Laughter]

Isn’t that old Gary’s place? No it’s the next one. Yes, there’s his new tractor he was on about.

Don’t know what he needs such an expensive one for...either he’s nicked it or he won’t be

going out for a while. Nice tractor though.

A new brain is what Fred needs. That’s his house down between the trees there. Since his wife

died he’s really let it all go. There’s nothing in those greenhouses is there? Can you see? No.

It’s a real shame to see everything a mess like that.

That one on the comer, that’s a Forestry house. John was the last person to live there - I think

he’s moved up north now. Another FC job. Nice place. It be worth a fortune if they sold it

now - if they were allowed to that is. Did you hear about the time he helped Pete [the Keeper

whose beat we were driving through] stake out that track for the poachers? They got wind of it

in the pub beforehand. You would have thought they wouldn’t be stupid enough to discuss it

in a place that FC staff go wouldn’t you?

It’s this road we go down isn’t it? Yes, I remember fixing that gate last year. You and me.

Mac, do you remember? It was so cold we had to stop halfway through the job just to warm

up in the cab.

Mr Greenford will be pleased when we get these railings up. He’s always complaining about

joy-riders out on that gravel top behind him. It’s only a matter of time before one of them hits

his stock he reckons.

(Conversations on the way to Hatchet Green, June 1999)

158 The landscape emerges in a constant flow of visual and conversational markers building up and rehearsing networks of relationship and personal memories that link places and tasks together. Every morning conversations turn to where they are going but, more importantly, to the people on the way. As Jeff later explained.

You need to know people and what they are doing. You need to be able to judge what is going

on. You never know when a piece of information might be useful. In a way I am always doing

a recce for next time. Take the tractor for instance. Its only because we trust Chris that we can

leave the tractor there overnight. Otherwise it’s drive it out and back again each day taking

two, maybe three hours each way. We don’t want to do that if it can be helped.

(Jeff, July 1999)

On the last day of this particular job (it had taken two weeks to install the rails) the gang collected the tractor for the last time and passed by again in the afternoon on the way back to the Yard. Mac opened the gate and disappeared into the farm to “have a word” with Chris. Meanwhile, the remaining posts and rails, about ten of each, were unloaded and left neatly piled just outside the farm gate. Chris appeared with Mac, shook hands and nodded to the others. Neither he nor anyone else made reference to the material left behind, nor was any further mention made of it. The non-official terms of this exchange marks the degree to which tasks and professional practice are embedded in arenas of local knowledge and reciprocal networks^^. It is this form of detailed practical knowledge that marks out and delineates part of the work gang’s area of skilful practice from others in the organisational hierarchy.

One further point reinforces this claim of the importance of highlighting the landscape in this way. No other grouping within the FC, with the possible exception of the Keepers, constructed the forest landscape so entirely along lines of personal and kin networks. The Foresters for instance, navigate through the landscape primarily by reference to Inclosures. Thus the route taken by the gang above was later described to by one Forester to another as “Past Slufters and Milkham Inclosures up to the area round Godshill”, and the route back through Fritham which passes “Studley Wood

Other examples include the semi-permanent loan o f a bench saw in return for helping coppice a small area o f woodland on private land; feeding ‘inside’ information to friends who worked as contractors such as where work might be “coming up”; spotting straying stock and stopping long enough to inform the farmer or Commoner.

159 and the Bentley Inclosures”. Rangers and Ecologists tend to use the Inclosures to establish proximity to their objects of knowledge, hence “Meet at the Mark Ash Wood car park on the Bolderwood Ornamental Drive”, or “The alder carr between Matley Wood and Denny Inclosure”. When dealing with the public, however, the mode of spatial reference was changed to account for the types of knowledge visitors have, thus, for the same alder carr,

Take the A3 5 out o f Lyndhurst towards Ashurst. Just after the big pub on your right, turn right

onto the road to Beaulieu. The second car park on your left is the one you need. If you hit a

sharp left bend in the road you have gone too far.

(Ranger, May 2001) The work team are also able to navigate the landscape through reference to Inclosures, and roads, but tend to do that only when talking to FC staff further up the organisational hierarchy.

The second form of highlighting bears a much closer resemblance to the exchange between student and professional archaeologists that Goodwin discusses. In the work group too, this transmission of skill is clearly embodied and became very clear in my own process of learning. Like the archaeology student who knew how to use the tape measure but not how to correctly apply her knowledge, I knew how to use a hammer and saw, the basics of putting wooden frames together, how to drive a tractor and how to get a right angle on paper. I didn’t know how to mark a square on an uneven, sloping bit of muddy ground, nor how best to nail a frame together to stop it working loose. But my learning too advanced through direct application, failures of understanding, and being physically shown how to do the task appropriately. Learning proceeded from the application of basic skills through to the finer details of finishing. For instance, the precise angle that the four upright posts driven into the ground required considerable group communication between those lifting and dropping the post driver and the person standing back to check the angles. Nailing the crosspieces required a particular technique in order to withstand the pressures of cattle scratching and leaning against the frame. The rabbit fencing stapled around the bottom of the frame needed to be buried a certain depth in the ground and the rough edges tucked around the inside of the frame.

160 Across all the tasks the work groups at both Hatfield and the New Forest undertook, a unifying aspect of learning the practical skills was the emphasis on orderliness. Fence lines needed to be straight, tree guards even, and signage perfectly squared. The important thing to be grasped, however, was not that these artefacts of knowledge needed to be mathematically exact, rather they needed to “look right”. The process of highlighting draws attention to how these artefacts “stand” in the landscape. It requires both drawing back and viewing the artefact’s placement from a variety of angles, and a close attention to details of the finished “look”. Primarily this is constructed in a series of reinforcing aesthetic judgements about the artefact’s relationship to place. “You want it [the fence] looking straight and clean”, does not mean running a spirit level along each wire, rather it concerns the visual and aesthetic relationship with the ground and trees around and is an expression of skilled practice. “It’s got to look level and that means judging it against the slope. If you actually make it level [moves wire]... you see... it looks funny” (Warden, Feb 1999). This emphasis on professionally shared understandings emerges in many of the comments about finished jobs; “clean and tidy” (rails, gate), “neat job” (tree guard, brashing, fence repair), “wrapped up” (clearing the bridleway). “Looks good” (various, very common), “That fits in nicely” (repair on footbridge), “good clear edges” (path), and also in the negative assessments; “looks shoddy” (gate hanging at angle), “messy” (ruts and equipment left by contractors, gate repaired in a hurry). There was a sense too, of establishing a firm relationship with the landscape; “She’s solid” (driven post), “that isn’t going anywhere fast” (bench), and “I’d like to see the joyriders try to push this one over with their cars”.

Taking pride in the neatness of the finished artefact was also a way of distinguishing their work from that of contractors. On one occasion I pointed to a recently repaired gate and asked whether they had done that job too, expecting more reminiscences about when they did it. Jeff peered at the gate briefly and then said.

That’s not one of ours. They must have made a contractor fix that. Probably knocked it over

getting their gear in. Look, they never even replaced the turf.

(Jeff, June 1999) At both Hatfield and the New Forest, the work gangs always removed the turf before digging holes and carefully packed it back around the base of the finished item. Even on items built with rough wood each piece was examined before deciding which

161 “face” would be best on the outside. The aesthetic of orderliness and neatness however is subject to notions of naturalness and appropriateness. Asking why, if planed timber was less expensive than the pressure treated half rounds they were working with, they didn’t use them, I was told that while planed timber might be alright for signs, it was too “finished” for the rest of the work out in the forest.

It doesn’t look natural enough I suppose. Its too,... well straight edges if you know what I

mean. I mean, if you were to walk along a path and see a fence, a wooden one, like you see at

the edge of motorways or A-roads, all planed timber and that... then you wouldn’t know you

were in the Forest. You might as well be anywhere. It’s a way of saying you are somewhere

different.

(Jeff, July1999)

Through the construction of artefacts and the highlighting of orderly practice, tools create realities out of the mental and social categories working groups have of the forest. They help create a physical landscape that divides people and places into appropriate categories. Hence, indirectly, a great deal of conversation and practice on site swings around notions of appropriate boundaries. Here’s Jeff again planning where to put the rails at the edge of the car park.

We’ll have a line running down here just into the grass [pointing] and then a curve round there

to stop them [visitors] going into the gorse and messing up that bit. Over there, two rails to

stop them dropping their bikes over that bank. Any heavy rain and that will gully in no time. And then later explaining why railings are necessary:

Well I remember when you could drive anywhere in the Forest. People would drive off the

road and set up camp anywhere. By then we had so many visitors that everywhere you went

there would be toilet paper lying on the ground. I know it’s a loss of freedom but they had to

be controlled and ... I suppose we are doing that in a nice way - so they don’t notice. These

rails effectively stop your car. But they look... what’s the right word... natural. You have to

get out and walk if you want to go further in and that’s good. They make you realise you are

going into something special where you need to behave differently. Not that everyone does

[indicating the tracks heading away from the car park] as you can see by the fact that we have

to put these rails up.

(Jeff, September 1999) On another occasion, clearing an overgrown path. Mac explained how much to cut back.

If you stand here you can see right over that valley. That gives you a line to cut to. You need

to be able to walk down here as a visitor and see that view neatly framed by the path. It needs

162 to look good. If it’s right, visitors won’t notice what we’ve done because they see that [waving

hand at valley].

(Mac, August 1999)

By consciously framing and controlling visitors’ access the work gang create their own notions of ideal landscape and reinforce organisational disciplines of space. For instance, one explanation often given by the work gang for blocking tracks into the Forest with padlocked gates is that they help control fly dumping, in their eyes a prime cause of “mess” created by the “public”^^. On the other hand the gate physically controls vehicular access to the forest to those who have been given keys by the FC, Meeting non-FC vehicles in the Forest nearly always provoked comment and resulted in attempts to establish the identity of the owner and ‘just cause’ for being there. While this could be seen as an extension of a relationship network approach to landscape, it is also about maintaining an interior space against inappropriate access.

Relationships in the Landscape It might be tempting to establish an opposition between the richness of social relationships embedded in the work-gang’s landscapes and the relative paucity in the landscape frameworks of foresters, managers and, at the far end, visitors (Figure 12). Indeed, in broad terms the evidence points to a continuum, moving from a landscape valued for its imbedded social relations to one valued for its ability to signify rural countryside; from a view of country relationships to a relationship with countryside views.

It was also noticeable that they carefully distinguish between mess caused by visitors (bags, crisp packets and drink cans) and the mess caused by the “public” (fly-dumping, “dirty magazines and condoms”, burnt out vehicles and scooters). Generally visitors’ mess is categorised as stupid, while public mess is considered deliberate and antisocial. “They just spoil it for everyone”.

163 Labourers F oresters/manager s Visitors

Landscape as series o f Landscape as series o f social relationshps romantic views

Figure 12: Idealised landscape relations

However persuasive this argument may be, and it is one that finds powerful echoes in Bell’s (1994) work on ‘Childerley’, a village in Hampshire, there are enough exceptions to cast doubt on a linear relationship like this. Si, for instance, while perfectly at ease with navigating social networks through the Forest, also took every available opportunity to pursue his hobby of photography. It wouldn’t be long after we had finished our sandwiches before he reached for his camera and walked off in a likely direction.

I used take pictures of the views, like out there [indicating across the valley]. Its beautiful. I

wanted to catch something o f that. But as I got more into it, and started to read the

photography magazines, I realised how difficult it was to take really good photos of scenery

like that. I wasn’t ending up with what I wanted at any rate. So now I try and get photos o f

details, of insects, leaves or a log...and birds. That’s what I am really into at the moment. You

have to be quiet and still and very patient to get them.

(Si, August 1999)

How easy would it be to distinguish Si’s lunchtime landscape from the pursuit of romanticised views by any visitor with a keen interest in photography? Indeed, tea- breaks and lunch-breaks seemed specifically structured to engage in viewing the landscape. While travelling resulted in opportunities to discuss networks of social relationship, breaks always involved moving away from the work area to a spot that on all occasions was chosen for its view^^. Even in downpours the vehicle was parked so that we caught glimpses of the valley between squalls. There were also marked attempts to move out of sight of visitors and to view landscapes without people in them, all factors that would contribute to a romanticised, pastoral, individual idyllic

Other factors were also relevant: trees for shade in hot weather, somewhere relatively dry to sit and somewhere that did not disturb other people.

164 landscape more commonly assigned to visitors. Each member of the work team placed considerable emphasis on the experience of being outdoors in such a beautiful place as a prime reward for what they see as low-paid, low-valued work. Jeff was particularly eloquent on this point. On this occasion we had parked on a small track just off the tar road to have tea. Bracken rose to door height all the way around the vehicle but we could see over the top across a valley and into the middle distance. No houses or roads punctuated the view.

Just look at that. [Long pause. No-one responded]. I look at that and it makes my heart

happy... deep inside. No one can take that away from us. It’s not everyone who gets to work

in a beautiful place like this. I think of all the office work my sons have to do, and yes they

have an education and opportunities I never had but... look at that.

(Jeff, August 1999)

In this section Goodwin’s notion of an embodied construction of professional practice through processes of coding, highlighting and the creation of new artefacts of knowledge has been applied to a group of forest labourers. While not traditionally considered a ‘profession’, their work is shown to have similar processes of transmission of skill, reproduction of specialist knowledge and construction of artefacts that arrange and structure the world around them. This model, however, selects and classifies actions, conversations and artefacts in relation to the given aim of understanding professional practice. It fails to address the degree to which professional practice can also be about other significant and influential social arrangements such as gender, social differentiation and establishing and maintaining power inequalities. The next section examines ways in which tools become caught up in these structures.

Tools of class and status

Returning to the sign-erecting occasion that introduced this chapter, it is clear that Jeff and Mac made sure they were the ones “working up a sweat” when the senior Forester arrived. Si and Fred didn’t particularly want to hand over and probably could have happily continued but found it difficult to argue the point with everyone present. Usually they were not this reticent. Jeff and Mac successfully asserted their authority within the work gang and were able to show deference to the Forester. When he

165 arrived they both respectfully paused to acknowledge him (not something they did for anyone else) before continuing. Signs of deference and status, circumscribed by the hierarchical arrangements of the organisation, are crosscut by and meshed with notions of class. Indeed, rural social relations have usually been presented as deeply hierarchical and a bastion of an ordered, layered English class system. Bell’s (1994) study of ‘Childerley’, a village in Hampshire, for instance unveils a village in two parts. He opposes the attitudes to the countryside of working-class villagers living in Council housing or tied cottages, with those of the upper-middle and gentrified classes in their manor houses or converted bams. The working class villagers operate informal backdoor relationships, borrowing cups of sugar and sharing food if a meal happened to be in progress. By contrast the middle classes tended to operate social relationships through formal front door dinners, and carefully circumscribed access to domestic spaces. Certainly the homes of the work-gang I visited were accessed through the back door, but so were some of the Rangers’ houses, while members of the Hunt controlled my access through the front door. My impression in the later case though, was that this was more to do with the ‘official’ purpose of my visit than representative of everyday use. However, as Miller has warned, “studies that map material culture onto gender and class are hardly likely to do other than reiterate the ideas of class and gender they start with” (1998:1). Instead he re-emphasises the need to focus on the “concerns of those being studied” and why things matter to thern^^. In the forest class appeared primarily in conversations about change, tools to matter because they carried professional identities, and gender an issue because of changing working relations.

To expand on this, it is worth returning to the processes of coding and highlighting in the previous section. What emerges through these processes is a remarkable degree of structuring of space. The Yard/Bam, it was suggested, is a key site of interaction between representatives of the organisational hierarchy (be they actual people, radioed-in or paper instmctions) and the work gang. This arena is, at the same time, an important site for codifying their own practice and expertise. The base is

This remains a very traditional ethnographic approach and as such highlights again the problems of interpretation inherent in the anthropological project. Re-stressing the need for such a focus might mitigate, but does not remove, this problem of prior assumptions.

166 consequently an arena under tension, both owned by them and a fulcrum point for the organisational hierarchy. The Forest, however, provides the space for the skilful application of knowledge. Here, most of the time, the work gang manages their own time and knowledge. This is their professional arena, and it is one they are comfortable in. Judging by the distinct change of tone, the degree to which the members of the team relaxed when they leave the base, it would not be incorrect to mark the Forest as a zone of increased freedom. Although the Forest is the place of work, it is also the arena in which they are able to express a sense of pride and satisfaction in a job well done. Going out into the Forest also provides opportunities for rehearsing and updating the kind of local knowledge they value. The work gang has a well-developed sense of their role and status within the Forest community and aspects of this were a frequent subject of discussion. However, their perception of their status and value were not necessarily cohesive and consistent. As has already been suggested though, greater value seems to be embedded in their relationship to the landscape of the Forest and lesser value to those occasions when the authority of the organisation was most obviously displayed.

Firstly then, constructions that valorise their work. Much of this has already been commented on in terms of the sense of professional pride in a good ‘clean’ job. Here’s Mac answering a question about respect.

When we are out here, people can see us working and they can see the result. There is a

respect you get from that which you can’t get from a uniform^'. Visitors will often stop and

watch us work, which can be annoying sometimes, but they can see we know things about the

Forest. (August, 1999)

It is through the use of tools and the direct working of the landscape, the smooth handles and soiled hands, which create respect. As Si said later, “We are the ones that

This was in reference to an earlier conversation about FC uniforms. The work gangs are the only group in the FC that are not expected to wear the familiar green colours (unlike Foresters, Rangers,

Keepers and even Volunteer Rangers). While they drive vehicles clearly marked, they themselves appear not to be part of the corporate image. According to various managers this is due either to cost, the fact that they often needed to wear safety clothing, or that they preferred wearing their own clothes.

The work gang thought having FC clothes would save wear and tear on theirs. A year later they had been issued with fleeces. They chose to “save” these for times like the New Forest Show when they were seen more by the public.

167 actually do things. We make things and change things in the Forest”. Their knowledge is something that wise Foresters acknowledge. Steve, a Forester with oversight of the work gang, responded to a quiet question about how much supervision he did of their work by raising his voice sufficiently for them to overhear and saying in mock shock “Good heavens. I don’t do the work. I wouldn’t know where to start. I just tell them what I want and let them get on with it.” In their relationship with Steve, there appeared a certain surety of roles, and respect that makes best sense in terms of a patron/client relationship. “You know where you stand with him,” said Jeff,

H e’s an old Forester. He knows what the job is about. Not that that makes him easy. Far from

it. Tough but fair, I’d say. But because he knows, he will try and make sure we are all right.

Do things in our best interest... within reason.

(Jeff, July 1999) It was to Steve that they wished to show respect at Whitefield Moor.

When conversations moved away from details of the Forest to how their work has changed over time a very different discourse emerges. This second range, about the devaluation of their work, hits a steady beat about low pay^^, low status and minimal security that must echo across much of the countryside labour landscape. For instance, there was a steady undercurrent of complaints about the erosion of their status and numbers.

We used to do the rubbish runs until Tony ballsed it up for us. [Raising voice to address Tony] Didn’t you Tony. [Tony looked as though he was about to protest then thought better of it and

bent his head to take another bite of his sandwich] Yes that’s right. It was you, wasn’t it?

[Turning back to his audience] He was too dozy even for the rubbish. But now they have to

pay twice as much to get someone else to do what we were doing anyway. If they actually put

that money into getting us better tools and training it would be cheaper in the long term than

paying what the contractors want.

And the trouble with contractors is they don’t care how well they do a job just that its done

quickly - get their money and off. When we do a job we do it properly...

[Interrupting] Because we know we’ll be back again if we don’t and it will be winter and we’ll

be freezing our knackers o ff [Laughter]

72 Annual pay at the time of this research was in the range of £7,000 -£10,000. Overtime pay might earn another £1,000 for those willing to give the time.

168 ... because we are proud of what we do. Don’t get me wrong though. I don’t begrudge them

the pay, a lot o f them are mates. It’s just sad that fewer and fewer people are taking pride in the forest anymore.

(Conversation, June 1999)

In more reflective moments, especially for Jeff, Mac and Greg, the older members of the work team, the decline of certainty over work, pay and pensions, the eclipsing of the surety of patronage systems, became a threnody on class opportunities.

When I grew up, I left school and went straight into forest work. I was good at school. I

enjoyed learning things. But all the time me and my mates knew what we were going to be

doing when we left. I never really thought I could do something else. I didn’t want to. At the

time we went to school and we learnt reading and writing and maths, enough to make our way

in the world, so that we were properly brought up. But you never heard of anyone going to

work in the city or something. That was for the people with money. We didn’t have

expectations that way. You kept to your class. Not like my sons now. My eldest is at

University now. I don’t think either of them will stay in the Forest which makes me sad

sometimes. In a way they are less certain about what they are going to do because they have

so many choices.

(Jeff, November 1999)

This used to be a plum Job. Working for the Commission was where you wanted to be. You’d

get your Commission house and pension and you’d be doing better than your mates. N ow its

different. Instead of weekly pay they want to pay us monthly into an account - what do we do

for the four weeks before hand? The crap they tell us...! And they are trying to make the

houses ‘economic’ so the rents doubled but our pay hasn’t. Is that the way to treat people who

have worked for you over twenty years?

(Mac, July 1999)

No-one wants to learn this Job anymore and I don’t blame them. You use a spade or put up

signs and people think you must be a bit slow. But the thing I ask myself is once everyone has

a degree, and everyone is an ecologist or a planner or works in the city or whatever, who is

going to dig the holes?

(Greg, May 1999)

Here tools become signifiers of a less desirable social status, and signs of changing values. Jeffs sons are unlikely, metaphorically or literally, to pick up the tools he identifies with. The lack of continuity that runs through their conceptions of change, of certainty now gone, makes Si’s reasons for joining pertinent. In his early 30’s, he is

169 the youngest and newest (four years) member of the work team. Known as “The Townie” (until I joined the team), he moved from working in a furniture factory in Southampton. Si considered the relatively minor drop in pay a small cost for the opportunity to work outdoors in the Forest. He had no illusions about this being a job for life and was happy to earn sufficient to pay for beer and his frequent camping trips either for walking breaks or to pop festivals. But it was “no job if you [had] to support a family”. In contrast to the rest of the team he presented his work as a matter of choice - not ideal, but better than the other options.

Yes I took a pay drop to work for the FC, but if you could see what that factory was like you

wouldn’t ask a stupid question like that. They didn’t care if you lived or died just so long as

you packed up the next piece for the customer. I was indoors all day in a noisy, dusty, hot

factory. This job’s not perfect by any means, but I’m outdoors, and we knock off early enough

to enjoy the rest of the day - especially in summer.

(Si, August 1999)

These contrary perceptions of work and status mesh with the structures of freedom in the Forest and tension at the base to produce a complex interweaving landscape, that from the point of view of the work team, is both source of their power and place of their social disempowerment. The sense of burden by the organisation on their skilful practice can be at times distant and generalised and at other times immediate and overbearing. Thus the presence of a Forester at a work site in the Forest changes the power structure from one generalised in place (like the Yard) to one made specific in a person^^. Work team members appear to respond to these pressures of context by one of two key methods primarily aimed at reasserting a sense of control. In the face to face situation they might respond by an increased work rate, serious expressions or other signs of deference. Alternatively, a Forester they did not trust, or whom they felt was particularly overbearing, would be partially ignored until he insisted on their attention. Then tools would be elaborately put down before listening to him. Responses would be short and uncommunicative. Once, two fingers were lifted at the retreating back of a Forester who came to issue a stream of tasks while the New

Foresters, too, experience this context of meeting the work squads as formal. On several occasions I witnessed different Foresters move from a relaxed persona commenting on what they enjoyed about the

Forest, to one that quickly assessed the situation and issued rapid orders. Both the speed, tone and choice of words changed markedly.

170 Forest Show^'^ was on. From the point of view of the work gang, the Show was one of their busiest times of year and the three days while it was happening was a brief opportunity to rest before the hard work of taking it all back down again. They knew the Forester was issuing makeweight work and trying to assert, in their eyes, illegitimate authority over their area of specialist knowledge.

When the organisation was more distant, there were a steady stream of subtle and not so subtle actions aimed at undermining both official rules and their trappings. I have already noted some of the unofficial methods of arranging working relations in the Forest. Other attempts were subtler and required a shared understanding within the work team to understand the point. One example was the offering of the incorrect spade to Tom described at the beginning of this chapter. Another took place one afternoon when I had a lift back to the Yard in Mac’s car. As we drove down the track to the Yard he kept his speed up sufficiently to raise a cloud of dust which drifted into the faces of those (including Cathy, a female Forester) talking in the sun. I looked at Mac with raised eyebrows. He caught my glance. “Teach them to sit there and yak to the old bird”, he said. I later gathered that the work team understood this was done deliberately, and enjoyed the joke because everyone knew and but no one commented. Whilst there might be open deference, and little opportunity to challenge the hegemony of the organisation, there were also small opportunities to assert control, albeit in the form of a subtle joke.

Rural masculinity and “hard men” of the Forest

Tools are also strongly implicated in notions of masculinity and appropriate gender behaviour. In the New Forest, the work teams are exclusively male, and despite the relatively recent^^ appointment of female Foresters, notions of masculinity and

The N ew Forest and Hampshire County show has been an annual event since 1921 and is one of the top-rated agricultural and equestrian shows in the country.

The female Forester who had operational oversight of both recreation and operation work squads, took up these duties between 4 and 5 years ago. Prior to this all managers had been male.

171 femininity are more strongly marked in the New Forest than at Hatfield. At Hatfield, for instance, in addition to the female Property Manager and Education Warden, one of the other Wardens was supervising the training of a young female Forester. The trainee was sometimes put in charge of groups of volunteers, and the volunteer groups themselves were often mixed. There were, however, more female education volunteers than male, and more male 'forest' volunteers than female. Indeed, at Hatfield, it was while dealing with some members of the local rural community, that the National Trust staff would consciously adapt their presentation of gender roles. This section proceeds by providing a brief review of contemporary work on rural masculinity before returning to the work gang and their notions of what it is to be a “hard man” and a “true man of the Forest”.

Academic studies of masculinity emerged in the 1970's and 80's in the wake of the rapid expansion of feminist gender theories, and in response to a popular sentiment that men had become alienated and could no longer live up to their 'sex roles'. 1987 saw the publication of a number of important books by Brod, Kaufman, Kimmel, Connell and Philips. A position shared in these texts with feminist theorists of gender was that masculinity was not an essential biological state but rather socially constructed in different times and spaces. A recent review article by Campbell and Bell (2000) note the current bifurcation of masculinity studies into critical and neo conservative approaches aimed at rescuing an imperilled male identity. While giving short shrift to the latter position, they highlight the importance of Connell's development of 'hegemonic masculinity' for the former.

For Connell, hegemonic masculinity is the version "that occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations" (1995:74). It is, in the words of Campbell and Bell, the masculinity that is "considered legitimate, 'natural', or unquestionable in a particular set of gender relations" (2000:535). They then note four ways in which notions of hegemonic masculinity have moved the debate forward. Firstly hegemonic masculinity has highlighted what Donna Harraway has termed the "god-trick" of masculinity: being everywhere, and yet unseen and unmarked. The sort of masculine invisibility, Campbell and Bell suggest, that leaves male MP's unmarked while specifically commenting on the gender of female MPs (2000:536). Secondly, hegemonic masculinity has effectively criticised 'sex-role' theory as ignoring power

172 relations by describing masculinity and femininity in ahistorical terms, by concentrating on attributes rather than practices, and by reinforcing oppositional assumptions. Thirdly, hegemonic masculinity brings attention to historic specificity, and hence, fourthly, that within any specific milieu there is always a range of relationally empowered masculinities.

Campbell and Bell also offer a critique of how other writers have used hegemonic masculinity particularly noting a tendency to use a functionalist teleology in explaining the preservation of male power. A similar tendency to ignore the emphasis on the relational nature of hegemonic masculinity, coupled with a resistance to notions of agency, results in little space for the finer grained picture of complicity and resistance. Indeed, it is in notions of gender agency and in a more fluid ‘take’ on modes of resistance that current debates look for direction. For instance, for the study of rural masculinities Campbell and Bell propose a distinction between the various ways in which masculinity is constructed within ‘rural’ spaces and sites (the masculine in the rural), and how notions of rurality, such as in the ‘Marlboro cowboy’, help constitute masculinity (the rural in the masculine). For them, the interplay of plural masculinities needs to be more sharply focused on issues of power. Peter et al (2000) characterise the interplay of plural masculinities based on the distinction between monologic and dialogic masculinities. Monologic masculinity is one that maintains sharp distinctions between acceptable performances of masculinity and femininity with little acknowledgement of other gender pathways. Conversely, dialogic masculinity has a more open and relational account of gender. All men in particular contexts, the authors argue, display both monologic and dialogic tendencies with some exhibiting more of one than the other.

Connell (1995) himself has begun to take into account agency and bodily practices in understanding the construction of individual biographies of masculinity. He argues that the individual subject constructs and is in turn constructed by gender through “reflexive” bodily practices and differentially empowered relationships. Hence the body, its attributes and activities, is a key agent in the gendering of the human subject. Commenting on Connell, Star (1999) speculates that the logical end to this development, is either a rejection of orthodox gender politics in favour of the multiple positionality of gendered subjects, or the wholesale abandonment of the individual

173 subject for the analysis of masculinities as representation in the discourse about gender. Neither end seems entirely desirable. While the examination of the représentions of masculinity would probably be fruitful, it ignores the importance given to gender in the construction of self identities. Masculinity may well be about representations but ‘in the field’ it is strongly attached to a sense of the individual subject. What it is to he a man may be subject to considerable normative debate, that you are a man, for the forest workers is, however, self evident. Equally, a recognition of the multiple positionality of gendered subjects, should not, to my mind, lead to an abandonment of the radical edge of gender politics, even if it means reinventing those politics as considerably more plural.

Hence, framing tools as a key sight-line in discussing gender, represents a conscious attempt to engage with the bodily practices which have been the subject of this chapter. As much as they are implicated in the construction of professional practice, tools are also often highly gendered. While the plethora of home improvement programmes on television may have encouraged some change, in most homes power- drills are still predominantly bought and used by men (Gershuny 1982) while ironing remains a largely female preserve^^. Following from this an important initial distinction is that tools used by the work gangs are already subject to a primary structural difference in that they are tools used outside the home. With one exception, all the workmen had wives or partners who had prime responsibility for running the home and preparing the food. The forest tools existed in the men’s sphere, and arrangements at home were not discussed at any time while the whole group was present^^. Home figuratively inserted itself into this sphere in the form of the lunchbox and the rigid eating times, “lunch” at 10:30am, “dinner” at 1pm, with “tea” more flexibly arranged in the morning and again in the afternoon. The one discussion that did turn around lunchboxes was illuminating. Tony was the butt of a great deal of

Miller (1988) for instance, in his study of kitchens on an estate in London, notes that DIY kitchens are usually part o f a reciprocal exchange between a woman and her male kin, which also delineates appropriate spheres of influence.

This was made even more clear when I attempted to ask questions about their home life. Answers were evasive and it was only in one-to-one situations or away from work that they were prepared to countenance this sort of discussion.

174 daily comments, jokes and roughhousing. He was also planning to get married that summer, the subject of many private conversations, usually less than complimentary.

What have you got there Tony? Urgh. Look its that usual tasteless turkey. Do you call that

meat?

Look at the bread [brown whole grain] and the salad. He’s dieting to make sure he can fit in his suit.

You’ll have to train her up you know [Tony looks confused, there is a smattering o f ribald

laughter]. No, not that way you idiot. You’ll have to train her to make you decent food with taste not that plastic stuff you’re eating.

(Conversation during “dinner”, June 1999) The implication here, of ‘real’, tasty food being the sign of appropriate gender relations is powerful. Moreover, the individual nature of lunchboxes and eating (at no point did I witness anyone sharing food in this context), further underlines the difference between this metaphor of personal domestic and primarily female relationships, and the public, professional, shared and primarily male nature of working tools. Each person had their own lunchbox and while these could be considered tools for carrying food and are used at work, they fall into a muted, feminine category exterior to the world of forest work. This indicates a difference between tools elaborated in the first instance as tranformative (used in changing objects of knowledge from one state to another), and tools that are passive (useful for holding and containing things but which do not physically change them). For the work gang a spade falls strongly into this first category, used in transforming pieces of wood into signs in the landscape - tools in the sense that they would recognise. However, the tool-like aspects of lunchboxes are unelaborated and hidden beneath meanings of personal exchange and in the ‘treats’ (an extra chocolate or favourite filling) indicative of emotional relationships.

Constructions of masculinity can be roughly divided between those that are remarked, primarily in normative statements, and those that remain unremarked and embedded in bodily practice. While the former are relatively easy to identify, in conversation, in statements of approval or censure, the latter are often harder to isolate as they are part of the ongoing, intermeshed frame of bodily action. The question to ask is: when, in

175 the constant flow of meaningful activity, is an action, or a way of being, or a habitual bodily expression, about gender? How, in the process of learning practical knowledge and expertise, are you also learning about being male and female in this context? Clearly neither physical nor verbal actions are ever solely concerned with expressions of gender. They are intricately tied up in other conscious and unconscious meaningful practices where objects, identities, emotions and happenstance muddle together in daily life. Moreover, a sense of ‘unremarked’ masculinity can only be built up over time in small increments of habitual practice. Therefore what is presented below in terms of unremarked masculinity is itself a process of picking out certain actions as representative of a continuum of minutia that may be more or less meaningful, but that together create a powerful sense of what it is to be a man in this context.

Working up a sweat Not only do members of the work squad need to learn how to use tools knowledgably and correctly, they also need to use them ‘manfully’. While it is perfectly possible to take short turns digging or hammering, longer turns where you work up a sweat, raise the heart rate and begin to breath deeply is more appropriate. Attacking the job, demonstrating stamina and strength (even if strictly unnecessary) were rewarded with subtle signs of approval. A sustained bout of digging would eventually attract people’s attention in a way not repeated for people using power tools. On three occasions working up a sweat developed into an understated, but dogged, competition of stamina. Another telling indicator occurred while setting up for the New Forest Show. The work gang shared some tasks with the Keepers. Jack, one of the younger Keepers, a wide, deep-chested man, was helping them drive posts into the ground with a large sledgehammer. This requires both strength and dexterity as miss hitting usually resulted in splitting the wood. Jack however, was both strong enough to lift the heaviest sledgehammer with ease and use it with remarkable accuracy. When someone suggested timing how long it took him to sink a post, the rest stopped to watch. None of the work squad could get close to his time. What this also suggests is the fluidity with which masculine identities flow in and out of focus. The relationship between the Keepers and workgang was at best ambivalent. Sometimes the Keepers were effectively in charge of the workgang, on other occasions (such as this one) they were all under supervision. Hence, a common sense of masculinity, which at times seems close, at other times vanishes as gulfs in other areas appear.

176 Thumbs to the ‘homeboys ’ A minutia of habitual practice, giving the thumbs up sign to certain people in passing vehicles, is one of those actions that is barely noticeable, possibly about a great many other things, but which also seems to be strongly gendered. The action takes place either between two passing vehicles or between people working in the forest and a passing vehicle. Sometimes it would be proceeded by a short question, “That’s John, isn’t it?” but usually not. The performance of the exchange of signals was a study in laconic nonchalance, fingers barely curled over, thumb often pointing back over the shoulder while the head was held slightly dipped but still facing forward. Usually the two vehicles would be ‘working’ - pick-ups, trucks or vans - with tools or materials bouncing around in the back. The signal was always between men who were considered proper New Forest locals^*. Women whom they recognised would receive a polite wave, as would children if they waved. Adult visitors were on the whole studiously ignored, faces turned blankly ahead. If it is accepted that small practices such as this can help build up a contextual and embodied sense of what it means to be a man, then it is worth speculating about the model of gender delineated by such layered action. A demeanour of coolness and nonchalance is clearly important in their dealings with other ‘Forest’ men. Even when they admitted later they were startled by a particular piece of information, at the time it was imparted they remained cool and unsurprised. In acknowledging only certain types of people, a strong sense of who ‘we’ are is built up. This ‘we’ is male, competent outdoors, skilful and knowledgeable about one or other aspect of working in the Forest, and, moreover, is hegemonic in the sense that the maleness of these roles remains unquestioned and uncommented.

Farting in the Forest Jacobson-Widding discussing the Fulani proverb, “Three things are indignities for a respectable person: I have lied, I have farted, I have stolen...” (1997:50), argues that these indicate an ethical breach because they constitute a lack of self-mastery. Among the Fulani, self-mastery and the avoidance of shame, is a fundamental to Fulaniness

Each time I inquired who they had just acknowledged I was told the man’s name, what he did for a

living, and often where he lived. This description was normally preceded or followed by a statement

like, “He’s a local lad”, or “He comes from one of the old Forest families”.

177 and the proverb becomes a cultural script regulating ethical relations with others, While there are strong social taboos and a powerful sense of shame that surround farting in public in England, one would be hard-pressed to assign strong ethical or moral values. At best farting is powerfully subversive, associated with the carnival and a Rabalaisian grotesque body, both literally and metaphorically deflating pompous authority and mocking the simplicity of rude countryfolk. In most working situations in the Forest, farting would be inappropriate, highly embarrassing and offensive. And yet, among in the work gangs out in the Forest, very few days would go by without someone farting. Both at Hatfield and the New Forest this took place, but only in men-only groups, and usually only by one or two particular people. The question then is what social purposes might this serve?

One telling example took place shortly after a Forester had harangued them about how much they still had to get done on site after a particularly slow morning plagued by breaking machinery, splitting posts and stony ground. As the Forester turned his car around, Ted picked up a sledgehammer and violently attacked a post. Each time he hit it he farted, leaving the team trying to keep their faces straight as the Forester drove away. Farting was also used to deflate tension at other times such as after an argument within the group when a well timed ‘comment’ could provoke laughter and potentially ward off further disagreement. Sometimes farting would not provoke any remark at all and seemed to operate as a marker of familiarity, as though saying, “I don’t mind doing this usually taboo thing because you all know me and it’s a normal, manly thing to do”. The extent to which this was tied to perceptions of masculinity is more difficult to establish, but two things are indicative. First the social arena in which farting took place was always working, male, and outdoors. The one occasion where a woman was present in a work group and someone farted, he was quickly shamed by the serious faces, lack of laughter and quiet “Not now, Greg” from the others. The second reason begins to stray into the arena of remarked masculinity and normative statements and was a pattern repeated in both research sites. In this case farting was the precursor to a discussion of what happened the night before.

Did you have to Ted?

Yes, ‘cos I was out drinking last night. I was on the Old Peculiar and it always

has this effect. Nice stuff...do you know Old peculiar Andy? [I nod]

178 I suppose you got rat-arsed again?

Completely caned mate. But its left my insides a bit buggered. (Conversation at Hatfield, November 1998) Hard drinking, particularly consuming large quantities of beer (though not spirits), and being able to adequately perform work tasks the next day is clearly part of their valorisation of masculine identity^^. Moreover, drinking further becomes enmeshed with senses of localness, with what were “proper” local pubs that served “real” local brews*^, further legitimising this expression of rural masculinity. This strongly echoes work by Campbell (2000) and Campbell, Law and Honeyfield (1999) who have analysed pub drinking in rural New Zealand. Campbell (2000) details two dynamics of pub drinking, “conversational cockfighting” and “disciplines of drinking”, the performance of which naturalises and hence makes invisible to the participants very specific behaviours of masculinity.

Parenting I now consider constructions of masculinity that were remarked and normative in effect. Conversations about parenting, children’s behaviour and their expectations for their own children provided a powerful discourse on notions of masculinity and the values they thought important for living. When a family or a group of young children passed near where they were working, the gang often stopped to watch. In part this was an issue of safety, making sure children were not near their tools and equipment, and in part they seemed to enjoy seeing what the children were doing. A young boy (8-10 years) having a tantrum about not being allowed to cross a stream on a log provoked the following conversation with Jeff.

H e’d feel my buckle if he did that. That poor Mum. Its... a nice day like this and he’s

completely spoiling it for her. If she was my Mum she would’ve told my Dad straight away

and that would have been it.

Bell (1994) notes a similar emphasis on the ability to drink large quantities while at the pub and not admitting the inevitable results the next morning.

Local ‘brews’ (beers) were appreciated for their presence in the pub but in practice were not necessarily the drink of choice. Lager, particularly for the younger workers, was a more usual choice.

179 What, you’d hit him?

Urn...well I know it’s not fashionable now - I can understand why they stopped teachers

doing it...well kind of, but at home... when a kid misbehaves like that it’s the only thing that gets through. [Mac nods].

And if it was a girl?

That’s different. But if they were like that they would probably get a slap. But boys are

tougher. You have to get through to them because they think they know it all. No, don’t get

me wrong, you grow up in the Forest and you have to learn to take the knocks and get up

again. The way you bring up a family in the Forest is hard but fair and you can ask any Forest

family and it’d be the same. At least we respect our parents, and...[Si has been listening too

and interrupts].

I agree about the respect for your parents but...but I don’t think its necessary to actually hit a

kid. I mean if you look at a Forest family, say like Jack’s, the boys are polite when you are

there yes sir, no sir and everything but they are always getting into trouble...

(Conversation, August 1999)

Later, sitting with Jeff and Mac I recalled this conversation and asked about their childhoods. They steered the conversation away from punishments to memories of the things they would get up to on the way back from school.

It’s not like today when someone’s watching you the whole time. We were gone for the whole

day and if you fell over you got yourself home.

I think in some ways we were more responsible then.. .you had to be. You had to help out with

whatever jobs needed doing. We learned how to work in the Forest almost from birth.

(Conversation, August 1999) Despite disagreements about method, notions of toughness, respect and independence are clearly valued in young boys and are seen as essential aspects of growing up in the Forest. The real learning of forestry skills (as opposed to official courses that the PC sent them on) took place in a context of working as children and teenagers. By the time they became men, part of their sense of identity was already tied to knowing how to use ‘forest’ tools.

180 The ‘hard’ Forester Waiting for some material to arrive one afternoon while setting up for the New Forest Show, Mac and Jeff strolled over to have a chat to Thomas, a retired Forester who was preparing a demonstration of how to make split pole fencing. After a short conversation they strolled back and commented that in the past they would have been making and using split pole fencing themselves.

You know what else, that fencing might look a lot thinner than the stuff we work with, but it’s

a lot stronger. Ours is machined and sawn to set standards regardless of the wood itself. But

you see how he is splitting that section? He’s following the natural grain o f the wood, it’s

sympathetic to the wood itself and even though it’s not straight it makes it a lot stronger.

[We watched him lift and reposition a large, heavy tree trunk against which he was working.]

He’s a hard old forester that one. Course we’re not meant to lift things that heavy these days

because of health and safety. But Tom’s not going to see it that way....

(Conversation, August 1999) Perhaps because they had been thinking of retirement in the next few years, both Jeff and Mac frequently returned to conversations about what other retired Forest workers were doing. Those that they recognised as role models were invariably described as “hard” or “tough”, admired as much for their stubbornness as their putative physical strength.

If you work out here all year you toughen up and I don’t just mean the exercise and fresh air.

You learn to get on with it whatever the weather and you don’t complain. Those old boys

know a thing or tw o... they’re as hard as nails.

(Mac, September 1999) Being a tough man of the Forest is also equated with a degree of canniness, an ability to know what is going on: when to keep quiet and when to use that information to the best advantage. In these conversations they are, in part, identifying the things that they valorise in their own work and thereby constructing a historic continuity of masculine values. These values however are not uncontested, unquestioned, or even consistently held. For instance, while valuing the toughness that being out, uncomplaining, in all weathers imbues, the reality of cold, windy, and wet working days were a constant source of carping. Indeed, the circumstances that develop ‘toughness’ were also identified by Mac as contributing to the number of forester workers that died within a few years of retiring.

All that abuse your body suffers - what you put it through doing this kind of work - and then

your body sort o f gives up. It’s not a glamorous life at all.

(Mac, September 1999)

181 Managing masculinities; Female Foresters

Up to this point perspectives of members of the work gang have located the discussion. However, for the last five years the daily management of the work squad has fallen to two female Foresters, Cathy, and more recently Julie. Both were in daily contact with the squad and responsible, among other things, for checking hours and delivering pay packets. Their presence, metaphorically and literally marks the beginnings of changing gender expectations in Forest work, at least so far as the organisation is concerned. Their perceptions, and the relationships developed with the work gang members, serves to underscore the degree to which notions of masculinity are never securely fixed but are themselves in flux, subject to constant re-negotiation and the changing realities of working contexts. Consequently, this section moves tangentially to the rest of the chapter, adopting a different perspective to render in relief the working worlds of the work gang.

Cathy gave the impression of always being in a rush. She drove rapidly between one section of the Forest and another, only slowing down when driving through Inclosures. She spoke almost as fast, moving rapidly from one subject to the next, breaking off to change signs or send me to open the gates. She had been moved to the Rangers office while off sick and resented what she saw as being packed off out of the real work of Forestry which she loved. Back in Operations eight months later she now draws up contracts for sale of standing and roadside timber as well as managing the work gangs. She calls them “the lads” when in the office and privately admits to thinking of them as “her boys”. On three different occasions we discussed her experiences of being a female Forester and how she went about managing the work gangs.

Yes it is different but I don’t think about it really. Most o f the time it’s work and I just have to

get on with it. I like working with blokes, much more than with women especially when they

are in charge and really bitchy. I shouldn’t say that should I? Actually I don’t care, it’s true, I

always am blunt about what I think. I think some of the older FC types expect me to be quiet

and accept what they say and speak in a girly voice but that’s not me as you can tell, so they

just have to take me as I am.

182 Was the fact that you talk a lot why they moved you over to the Rangers?

[Laughs] That’s one way of putting it. I don’t mind doing what the Rangers do, it’s an easy

job most of the time but I don’t like all the hassle and swearing and dealing with the idiots that

they have to do. Most of all though I was hacked off at how they did it, just moved me over,

just like that without taking into account what I wanted and now that you ask me it could well

have been because I’m a girl, probably not consciously but still it’s the right sort of job and

maybe it was because I said what I saw in Ops. It’s that glass ceiling thing - I know I work as

hard as the next bloke but somehow it takes ages for any promotion to come round. I feel I

work harder than them just to get the same recognition.

Do you think you work differently? I mean from the blokes?

Um, again not consciously. But I like working with blokes so that says something. I suppose

there’s the male female thing that makes it more fun working with blokes - a little bit o f

flirting makes it easier to get on with the job, trouble is most of them are married or downright

disgusting and those who aren’t have got girlfriends. With the lads it’s like that. It was a bit

difficult at first taking orders from me, you know what they’re like, all polite to your face and

then go and do what they want anyway but we worked it out. They got to trust me when they

realised I wouldn’t go and tell everyone their business and because they know I stick up for

them in the office. I think it’s important to build trust and I trust them to get on with it. ...Um ,

working differently, yes I think what I do is listen to them. You know as good as Steve [the

senior Forester] is it’s always quite formal with him. He’ll ask about their families and make it

his business to know what’s going on but it’s always that formal thing but I don’t think that

work should be so separated from life. If you want to keep the good workers you don’t just

stop at the end o f the day. You make sure they are happy at home as well and try and help out

there too. But they’re not going to tell Steve that their marriage is on the rocks or health

problems or that kind o f thing and they don’t really talk about relationships amongst

themselves either, you don’t want to embarrass yourself among your mates do you? But they

talk to me because I’m not part of that formal thing. That’s whaf s different, I can flirt with

them and also mother them at the same time because I’m also young enough to be their

daughter for some of them and that makes the relationship different. It’s like they have no one

they can talk to about that sort o f thing and I can offer a sympathetic ear. I love them, but it

can also get a bit much sometimes.

(Cathy, June 1999)

Here Cathy presented herself overcoming the suspicions of the work gang primarily by slotting into a role as confidante and manager with the personal touch. She was ambivalent about “being too much of a sympathiser”, complaining it is a role too

183 “easy to slip into” and worried about the implications of this for her promotion prospects. She spoke of “winning” their respect through looking after them while simultaneously setting task deadlines that “show I’m a real Forester and know what I am talking about - I don’t take any shit from them”(August 1999). On the other hand the work gang were far more reticent about their relationship with her and tended to evade questions on the subject. However, two comments are telling:

The problem is not that she is female, but more because she is so much younger than us... I

think she needed to prove herself to us

(Jeff, June 1999).

At the beginning we might have checked what she was telling us with Steve [the senior

Forester] but he just told us it was up to Cathy. She was quite organised... most of the time so

it was OK. She can really yak. Julie, though...I don’t think she really knows what she wants.

(Mac, March 2000) If it is accepted that tools and their central role in expressing professional knowledge are also a crucial arena through which the work gang embody, arrange and constitute their notions of masculinity, then the appointment of female managers must highlight areas of ambivalence. Both Cathy and the work gang members are caught up in processes of reinvention of gender roles, forcing new ideas of femininity into face-to- face interactions in working worlds where previously women were kept at a metaphorical and literal distance and, conversely, renegotiating the boundaries of masculinity. Cathy also sees herself as struggling against organisational attempts to move her into what she perceives as feminised roles of communication (the Rangers) and out of “real forestry”. In consequence, there are unexpected convergences of interests between Cathy and the work gang that run counter to a model that places managers’ interests as isomorphic to those of the organisation. Both Cathy and the work gang manage a complex relationship with the Forestry Commission, meshing together and moving apart against perceived organisational attempts to arrange and structure relationships. This new set of relationships marks an opposition to the certainty of tools, and options for new roles and relationships. But also show how these notions can never be removed from contexts of power, class and space with which they are inextricably meshed.

184 Conclusion

The New Forest Show takes place over the last three days in July. A major event in the New Forest calendar, it attracts over 100,000 visitors from all over the country to the various horse and animals competitions, stalls and events. The Forestry Commission occupy a glade in one comer of the site and it is here that the work gang help set up and remove the display. On either side of the glade areas are laid down to exhibit skills such as splitting wood, turning, carving and hurdle-making. It is not the impressive new machines and technology that are put on display by the FC at the Show but rather the less technological woodland skills suitably reformed as tradition and converted into heritage exhibit. Skills cast as outdated paradoxically become valorised in settings that lay claim to continuous connection to the past. The contemporary labour of forest workers however, is kept away from the public stage: the backstage putters-up and takers-down of the Forest landscape. It is this mundane, everyday, and unremarked use of tools that has been the subject of this chapter.

By examining process of coding and highlighting in this routine world of the work gang, tools have been shown as richly expressive and fundamental to notions of their professional practice. The ‘ritual’ of tools - the skilful, patterned, repetitive use of objects around which is constructed practical specialist knowledge - make people and places. Through tools the work gang transform both the physical landscape and their place in it. Tools emerge as ambivalent markers of professional pride and positive self-identity on the one hand, and of disempowerment and the organisation’s ability to control their working experience on the other. They become expressive opportunities, showing at various times pride, control, resentment, knowledge, deference and masculinity. Primarily, however, tools are about action and engagement, doing things in and to the landscape: verbs to the grammar of social life (Figure 13).

185 Transformative Action Tools

Organisational attenpts to control action Places People Specific Identities places

Figure 13: Dimensions of Action

Using tools in ways that change the landscape, organise perceptions and structure future interactions creates specific places. Three distinct ways of organising space in the Forest have been identified. Firstly the Forest as a spatialised set of objects of knowledge. While for Foresters knowledge is organised around Inclosures, for the work gang it is primarily an organised network of social relationships that requires constant upkeep and rehearsal. For them it is a requirement of professional practice and an arena of that practice. Secondly the Forest is organised and framed to maintain a distinction between interior and exterior. Much of their work is concerned with this boundary - at car parks, tracks, footpaths, roads and gateways, access points to the interior of the Forest. Here they implement and make material ideas of appropriate and inappropriate behaviour by setting up physical markers such as signs, gates, fences, railings and ditches that create metaphorical boundaries, limit vehicular access, and frame the view of the Forest according to aesthetics of beauty, neatness and rough-edged order. Working at this interface reinforces their own conceptions of an interior of individual freedom away from managerial oversight and the exterior marked by requirements for deference and relative powerlessness.

Thirdly, the Forest as source of, and arena for, expressions of identity. For the work gang, pride in a job done well, identities as “Forest people” and as “hard men” are all inextricably intertwined. Moreover these are often ambivalent and partial, subject, as

186 with the new female managers, to renegotiation and re-assessment. Counter to models that assign unvarying class and gender roles, I have sought to emphasise the contingency of expressions of identity and the consequent importance of context. Thus while the Forest interior may offer freedom, the presence of a Forester has considerable effects, restyling place as hierarchical and foregrounding organisational power. But no places are closed, and no identities are without moments of ambivalence or unexpected meetings across boundaries. Structuring future engagements does not shut off the possibility for new ways of being and the creative capacity of ambivalence. The magic of place is that it can be used to communicate things that matter to people. What has been shown here is that forests have unexpected forms of ritual and surprising magical powers to create people and places.

187 Chapter 6

The making of nature at risk: topologies of management in an “ethnically cleansed” Forest

As long as they haven’t built a Tescos, or an NCP car park here, or houses and

roads, then we have been successful. Whether or not mires have been protected, or

exotics removed is immaterial in the long run.

(Forest Ranger, September 2000)

In the end, perhaps, the only justification for the careful protection of the land and

life-forms from total exploitation and final destruction is our recognition that they

possess an intrinsic value and worth. Indeed as we begin to acknowledge our own

implicit value and even essential divinity, we shall begin increasingly to see the same qualities in the world around us.

(Taylor 1997:265 )

[L]ife is a relation that only can be sustained as an ecology, as a series o f

interrelationships between different life forms, and between these life forms and

the environment. If there were changes in one of these life forms, or in any other

aspect of the environment, then this has consequences for all the others and the

whole ecology of life may change. Ecological conditions are, then, in a continual

process of change and within this envelope of life is a series of relations.

(Burkitt, 1999:16)

Why do I come here? It’s a way of getting closer to nature and getting in touch

w ith...w ell something deeper. Its more natural innit?

(Visitor, Hatfield Forest 1998)

It was a glorious summer day in South Wales. The Head of Forestry at the National Trust was running a seminar for property managers and foresters and had taken the opportunity to walk round the estate to illustrate his points. Standing in the shade of an Ash tree we looked down into a valley where there had been considerable clearance of an old stand of rhododendron. “Look at that. What do we see? A

188 management intervention possibly left too late? A problem area because the rhododendron will grow back in a few years unless you eradicate it all? Yes, quite probably all correct. But what I want you to do is think about the basis for making that decision. Why are we doing it? We have categorised the rhoda ’ as an invasive exotic and spend thousands removing it. Why? What if we say that this plant clearly does well here and value it for the specific ecology, new as it may be, that it brings? I ’m not necessarily saying we shouldn’t remove it, but, by challenging the models we work with, asking us to be clear about our reasons... ”.

A few minutes later, ambling up the side of the valley at the back of the group, two Foresters were grumbling about what they perceived as yet another change in management direction. “When I started you knew what you were, a forester, and what you did, grow trees, and then you made money from them. Next thing they want us to clear out all the good timber trees because now they ’re exotic and only let indigenous stuff grow because that’s good for the ecology and now he’s telling us just to leave it all alone. I tell you, another 10 years and we won’t have any job left at all. I wish they ’d make their minds up! ”

From the human point of view trees are slow, sluggish things. In Britain poles from a coppice stand might take 5-7 years, fruit and nuts yields might take anything from 7- 12 years and as for timber - trees might be ready for harvesting at anything between 30-60 years. Yet all these are an arboreal snap of the fingers next to the time taken to establish morphological maturity and a full range of biodiversity. Consciously, or unconsciously, humans have become fully implicated in creating Britain’s forest environments and the specific environments with which we now deal are the result of complex interactions between animals, including the human species, biology and time. This chapter examines the ways in which the managers of the Forest construct these interactions, amplifying certain aspects of the relationship while ignoring others, and in so doing construct a particular vision of the environment. Managing the forest, the broadest description of their job that the staff at Hatfield and the New Forest use, becomes a conscious expression of relationship with their surroundings, a way of acting in and thinking about specific places, and part of a discourse that creates, justifies and rationalises their engagements with the environment. Concurrent to a description of these constructions of ‘necessary’ intervention is a theoretical

189 conversation that asks how the insights gathered in cross-cultural explorations of human-nature interactions can apply to the study of conceptions of nature ‘at home’. Specifically this points to ways of asking questions that step outside the Western framework of a nature-culture duality.

Managing forests, whether for economic, heritage, aesthetic, timber, recreation or biodiversity reasons, requires a particularly long-sighted form of planning and management. Choosing whether to plant, coppice, fell, restore, protect or just “leave alone” becomes even more decisive as time passes, increasingly constraining the field of decisions future managers can make, just as the current generation of managers deal with the implications of past decisions. Perhaps because of this time scale, those charged with managing forests put considerable effort into discussing and planning the long-term futures of the forests in their charge. Unlike the members of the work gang where the desired form of landscape is mostly implicit in their skilful practice, a good deal of the discourse of the managers, at least superficially, is explicit: a familiar and frequently chewed conversational bone. What will Hatfield Forest be like in 50 to 100 years? What do we want it to be like? What is our duty of care? How do we balance our statutory obligations in the New Forest with increasing self-sufficiency imperatives and rising visitor numbers? How should we manage the demands of tourists and locals and keep the Forest in the best possible ecological state? Eventually these questions turn on specifics; should we plant specimen trees, timber trees or indigenous trees? Do we recreate a past, ‘the best-preserved medieval wood pasture system’, or be proactive in creating a new organising principle - say specimens of different points of past history. Or should we focus on re-establishing ecological diversity? Which trees do we fell and when? Should felling be driven by economic return, to maximise recreational possibilities, or to return the area to another kind of environment? When communicating with the public which aspects should be stressed?

In this chapter I argue that the impact of recent theoretical developments in the fields of ecology, environmentalism and anthropology, leads to a reconsideration of how we approach the analysis of the relationship between people and their environments. Using the notion of topologies (Brosius 1999) I explore how managers create, and are created by, the forests they work in. Specifically, this exploration attempts to draw

190 connections between forest landscapes, the politics of engagement, and the creation of certain kinds of subjects - of what should and should not be there. The politics of engagement takes the immersion of all living things, including humans, in their environments as a pregiven. Thus, for managers the objects of knowledge (see chapter 5) are different to those of the work gangs, but are created in the same processes of physical and mental engagement. Here I attempt to draw the landscape more fully into the process of the construction of meanings.

The chapter proceeds as follows. The first section reviews the past, present and future directions in anthropological engagements with environmentalism through an analysis of four recent publications. It is argued that antiessentialist insights have been efficient at deconstructing ontological assumptions about the relationship between people and their environments. This is especially effective when antiessential insights are coupled together with a greater sensitivity towards political articulations. At the end of this section future trends are assessed and topologies are defined in the light of this analysis. Section two considers how managers create and value the natural environment, emphasising particular subjects and hence the creation of necessary actions. Two different management topologies nature-far and nature-near are identified and their contours explored. Specific examples are presented which highlight how nature is differentially created as at risk. Such examples include the removal of Turkey oak, the valuations of Sika deer, beech woodland and grey squirrels, as well as decisions about managing a Victorian landscape. The conclusion argues for greater openness about why decisions are taken and raises questions for further exploration of management topologies of the environment.

From Ecological Determinism to Hybrid Natures

Recent years have witnessed a florescence of research and publications on ecology, environmentalism and related arenas. There is little doubt that contemporary environmentalism provides a rich ground for cultural production, and arguably, provides a key intellectual ground over which academic debates will range in the coming decades. A number of recent publications have set out to assess this terrain, tracing paths of intellectual heritage and spying routes for future research and

191 interventions (Biersack 1999, Brosius 1999a, Escobar 1999, Ingold 2000). This section briefly reviews this heritage before taking soundings of the future directions proposed by these writers through the material gathered at Hatfield and the New Forest. While it is difficult to encompass the range of writing on the environment I have followed Biersack in identifying three main strands of ecology - symbolic, historical and political - that roughly equate to a linear development in nature paradigms.

“At the end of the 20^ century,” writes Escobar, “the question of nature remains unresolved in any modem social or epistemological order”( 1999:1). The basic tools with which modernity has equipped us, he goes on, including ‘nature’, ‘culture’, ‘society’, ‘polity’ and ‘economics’, “no longer allow us to interrogate ourselves and nature in ways that might yield novel answers” {ibid.). Marilyn Strathem (1992), writing a few years earlier, suggests that we have entered an epoch defined by the sense of being “after nature” where there is a crisis in nature’s identity. Writers such as Haraway (1991), Rabinow (1992) and Soper (1996) speculate that in the wake of an unprecedented ability to intervene in nature through molecular biology and gene technologies, we are witnessing the end of certainty in a pristine nature outside of history and the processes of human apprehension. Brosius (1997a, 1997b) and Berglund (1998) describe how environmental activists develop their arguments about the destruction of rainforests in Sarawak and pollution in Germany respectively. Both highlight how activists use scientific discourse but, at the same time, raise fundamental questions about the politics of scientific environmental practices and the ‘nature’ they study and protest about. The impact of post stmcturalist and antiessentialist thinking on key areas such as politics, identity and gender is now feeding into a reconsideration of the environment.

The cutting blade of this critique is that ‘nature’, as broadly imagined, is not an objective and bounded thing but rather a product of a particular moment and set of discursive practices in western culture. The effect of this is to radicalise any assumptions about nature as a predetermined given. Once the boundaries that keep humans apart from an external nature are shown to be a matter of cultural - specifically western - perception, then we need to redraw the boundaries around other constitutive practices. A recurring problem, however, is that a constmctivist position

192 about nature puts many cultural theorists at odds with ecologists who continue to work within a framework of an external, prediscursive nature. But there does appear to be a central theme uniting recent attempts at defining this relationship. Escobar puts it like this: "Is there a view of nature that goes beyond the truism that nature is constructed to theorise the manifold forms in which it is culturally constructed and socially produced while fully acknowledging the biophysical basis of its constitution?” (1999:2)^^ In other words, how can a recognition of the cultural basis of ‘nature’ be reunited with an analysis of the biological and physical such that the insights derived from a culturally relative position are not abandoned?

Symbolic, historical and political ecologies

In a review article on ‘new ecologies’ written in honour of Roy Rappaport, Biersack (1999) traces the development of ecological approaches in anthropology from the 1960s. An earlier ecological anthropology defined its project in terms of an idealism versus materialism debate. For the materialists, represented by Rappaport’s earlier work, culture was an adaptive tool, a part of a total ecological system that thermostatically regulates itself in the face of perturbations and tending towards homeostasis (Biersack 1999:6). Rappaport describes the kaiko ritual among the Maring in Papua New Guinea - a pig sacrifice to ancestral guardians in time of war - as the regulator that maintains the ecological system. The kaiko monitors the ‘‘[rjelationships between people, pigs, and gardens” (1968: 3-4), the distribution and consumption of pigs and the frequency of warfare, helping to maintain “biotic communities existing in their territories” (1967: 17). This model views nature as part of an objective, whole system, made up of flows and connections, in which human culture becomes just one node among many that interact to maintain that system. Change is accommodated within the system on a cyclical basis but the model assumes that these changes take place within a closed and ultimately static state.

Brosius phrases it like this: how can we understand “the human impact on the physical and biotic environment but also ... [show] how that environment is constructed, represented, claimed and contested” (1999:277).

193 The idealists, on the other hand, noted that human cultures were just as likely to be maladaptive and work against the supposed ecological balance. Furthermore they argued that culture could only be understood as an autonomous, self-determining order of reality separated from nature rather than as part of the system. Pointing to evidence from societies where the category of what is considered part of ‘nature’ may well be one that makes no distinction between the world of animals and the world of spirits, or between rituals concerning ancestors and those to do with plants, idealists argued that our category ‘nature’ should be seen as similarly culture-bound. Hence cultural perceptions of nature could only be dealt with on their own terms. This said, most analyses up to the early 1970s were influenced by the predominate structuralist paradigm which sought to show how certain parts of ‘the system’ mapped onto other parts, making a logical whole. The insights developed through this paradigm, Biersack claims, led to the development of a symbolic ecology, “that study of a culturally variable poetics of nature” (1999:8) which Rappaport, by focusing narrowly on utility, failed to anticipate.

By 1979, having taken account of some criticisms levelled by the idealists, Rappaport had “concluded that human life is interstitial poised between nature and culture” and had redefined ecology away from a functionalist system that premised human cultural adaptations (Biersack 1999:7). Ecology became instead a “heuristic device for discovering dysfunctional aspects of human-nature relations”(/è/

194 For Rappaport though, the environment always remained extracultural and a priori, a positivist nature that provides the raw material to which culture adapts. The environment provides a series of possibilities for life - ecological niches - which impose the conditions under which organisms (or cultures) can exist {cf. Ingold 1992:41). In contrast to this environmental determinism, historical ecology asserts that the relationship between humans and the environment is dialectical. Hence space is no longer a prediscursive container but is itself “a contingent product, a sediment of human practice, a construction in the material and not merely semantic sense of the word - in short an artefact” (Biersack 1999:9). Human societies, in the process of shaping their environments, also reshape themselves. Historical ecology traces the ongoing relationship between “human acts and acts of nature. Practices are maintained, decisions are made, and ideas are given shape; a landscape retains the physical evidence of these mental activities” (Crumley, 1994:9). In this rendition ecology is focussed on the production of space as relative and historical; places are made through activities, informing ideas and values. For example, Bolderwood, discussed below, owes much of it present incarnation to the Victorian planting practices in the 1860s, but the residue of previous and later interventions can also be discerned.

A third strand in the development of ecological approaches to the environment grew out of the critiques of the political economy developed in the 1970s. This research specifically highlighted asymmetries in relationships of power between local, national and global bodies. The power relationships and processes were analysed within an overarching world-system framework. In the 1980s and 1990s political ecology absorbed poststructuralist analyses of knowledge, development and social movements, and feminist insights into the gendered character of knowledge and environments (Escobar 1999:2). Much of this was concerned with how power asymmetries are discursively created through constructions of identity such as race, class, gender, and nation. The very process of their construction creates inequalities (Mouffe 1993 and see discussion in chapter on identity). Taking the lead from these accounts, political ecology explored the role of power relations in determining human uses of the environment. As part of a critique of capitalism, authors paid attention to the environmental ravages that were often missed in traditional political economy approaches. Indeed, for some writers (Eckersley 1992, Harvey 1996) human-nature

195 relations are themselves envisioned as power relations where nature itself is cast as ‘other’ and dominated, tamed and ravaged. Others trace the links between ecology and colonialism (Peet and Watts 1994), race and gender (Rocheleau et al 1996), and movements to promote environmental rights or justice (Johnston 1995, Harvey 1996).

Current Trends

Brosius (1999) identifies three trends - essentialised images, contestation and transnationality - in current anthropological engagements with environmentalism. Such engagements expand on insights developed in symbolic and political ecology. For Escobar (1999), covering similar ground, it is antiessentialism that supplies the critical drivers, while Biersack (1999) refers to a new synthesis that avoids the reductionism and dichotomies of idealists and materialists. I propose to summarise current trends under two broad platforms: firstly the continuing critical engagement with the assumptions and constructions that essentialise nature; and, secondly investigations of the political articulations that motivate and contest the natural.

Escobar fields antiessentialism as a litmus test with which to radicalise perceptions of nature. It has become, he suggests, a way of questioning what is taken as essential in both ‘man’ and ‘nature’. “[G]iven that meaning cannot be permanently fixed - a basic postulate of hermeneutics and poststructralism - ... no identity or society can be described from a single universal position” (1999:3). Hence, if nature is construed as having no essential identity, then analysis should be directed at the constitutive relations - biological, social and cultural - that account for that nature. Thereby science is also deprivileged and shown as neither ahistorical nor non-ideological. This argument does not to deny the existence of biophysical reality, but says that for us humans nature is always constructed by our meaning-giving and discursive processes. Modernist conceptions of nature which hold culture as a separate category, a basis on which much scientific epistemology is predicated, is seen to be itself a cultural category. The aim, Escobar argues, should be to reveal discourses of nature that do not reduce multiplicity to a single overarching principle “the laws of the ecosystem”, or “the mode of production” (1999:3).

196 Similar concern with antiessentialism (although never put in these terms) underpins much of the work by Tim Ingold over the last two decades, usefully collected and brought up to date in The Perception of the Environment (2000). Rooted in his ethnographic interest in hunter-gather societies where ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ take on a wholly different cast, Ingold, like Escobar, seeks to overcome dualisms inherent in western thought. These dualisms mark out nature as the appropriate object for scientific analysis and culture as an appropriate subject for the human and social sciences.

Intentional words

Culture

Nature (cultural^ “Western’ perceved)

Culture

No nature, \ no culture ] (e.g., Strathem/ ‘non-Western’ 1980) /

Nature (really real)

Figure 14; The primacy of a 'Western' ontology (after Ingold 2000:42)

Particularly important at this juncture is the attention he brings to the tenacity of this dualism, showing how even after Strathem’s (1980) analysis which powerfully puts the case for cultural relativity, a realist perception of nature remained intact (see Figure 14). Indeed, Ingold argues that a cultural constructionist approach to environmental perception, rather than challenging an essentialist nature, actually reinforces it by holding separate a space for organism-environment interactions (2000:59). On the one hand there are the realist ecological interactions, ‘really real’ nature, and on the other the cultural constructions of nature. Ingold believes that

197 by paying attention to what hunter-gatherers are telling us, this is just what we

should be questioning, and in doing so laying down a challenge not only to

cultural anthropology but to ecological science as well”

(Ingold 2000:59). His challenge is premised on a basic repositioning of the fundamental relationship of humans to their environment. Rather than the separation of the perceiver from the world, form over substance, he recasts the environment as an integrated entity that surrounds the “organism-person”, and which is “saturated with personal powers, ... embracing both humans, and animals and plants on which they depend, and the features of the landscape in which they live and move” (2000:47). Getting to know plants and animals is the same process as becoming familiar with other people (see Figure 15). It is a matter of mutual dwelling, of investing in relationships with “care, feeling and attention” (ibid.). Which is why forays into the forest by hunter-gatherers are considered time well spent even if there is little tangible return. The stress should properly be put on the activity, the process of engagement of entire persons (not disembodied minds) with humans and non-human kinds. “.. .[T]he constitutive quality of their world is not intersubjectivity but interagentivitÿ" (2000:47 italics in original). I shall return to this idea below.

other humans

Human being

Inanimate Non-human entities animals, plants y

Figure 15: Being in the environment (after Ingold 2000:46)

While Ingold explores how essentialisms about hunter-gatherers have been grounded in a fundamental ontological opposition between nature and culture, Brosius (1999a,

198 1999b, 1997a,) is more concerned with the contemporary political implications of how essentialised images are fielded to generate particular points of view. He remarks on the degree to which outside specialists and international environmental organisations, who took up the case of protecting the rainforest from commercial exploitation, tended to use images and discourses that essentialised indigenous people as ‘naturally connected’ to their environments. From 1987 and going on into the 1990s, the images and discourses of the Penan people used by environmental pressure groups tended to “objectify and dehumanise the Penan, making them Ferngully icons rather than authentic political actors” (Brosius 1999a:280). The point of analysing these essentialisms is to reflect on their cooption in national and international political systems which create an unequal articulation between local aspirations, national aims and overseas pressure. Although Brosius thinks it is “compelling” to produce such critiques he contends that it is something of a dead-end. Not all essentialisms, he argues, are the same. For instance, he draws out the differences between “romantic” and “strategic” essentialisms noting that historically marginalized groups have just begun to realise the “political potency of strategically deployed essentialisms” (1999a:281).

A key effect of constructionist interpretations is to relativise perceptions of the environment and to emphasise elements of contest between different groups. A more general trend within the discipline can be seen by the number of recent publications with ‘contested’ titles {Contested Landscapes, Bender and Winer 2000, Going Wild: Hunting, Animal Rights, and the Contested Meaning of Nature, Dizard 1994, Contested Lands: Conflict and Compromise in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, Mason 1992). While this literature has provided a number of important insights, Brosius suggests that overall it has the effect making contest part of the process. As contest becomes routine and managers discuss “stakeholders”, Brosius instead directs attention to the examination of articulations between local and transnational environmental discourses. For example, Berglund’s (1998) intimate ethnography of German environmental activists shows how deeply entwined but politically precarious their relationship is with an environmental science that is both nationally and internationally produced. On the one hand ‘scientific facts’ about pollution are deployed in an attempt to change government practice, while those same facts.

199 coming as they often do from government-funded research, are constantly examined for evidence of political bias.

Berglund’s achievement is to portray the dynamics of consolidation and fragmentation of individuals, groups and national and international organisations into discernable political forces and the complex interactions between them. Here the environment emerges as differently constructed by different groups, but constructed in processes of action and discourse (conversation, writing, shouting, demonstrating, letters, leaflets, articles etc.). Furthermore these constructive processes beg questions of identity and scale. Who is and is not ‘local’ connects to who can or cannot have an opinion. In turn, localized movements have found common ground outside of national borders. Local concerns are raised in terms of global environmental discourses, and in turn, transnational networks fund and provide resources for local groups. Brosius characterises this trend as one which pays attention to

the processes by which environmental discourses are deployed, appropriated,

transformed, circulated and recirculated by variously positioned actors [and how

these] are framed and deployed with respect to claims about local authenticity,

national sovereignty, or global significance.

(Brosius 1999:281)

New Directions

So far I have traced the ontological transformation of nature from essential nature to constructed nature, noting the critical importance of antiessentialism in driving this change, and the consequent theoretical and empirical engagement with political articulations. Broadly speaking this seems to be the basis for most contemporary critique. However, in anticipating future directions, the four writers I am concerned with here (Biersack, Brosius, Escobar, and Ingold) differ considerably. In this section I propose to distinguish between those outlining future directions that offer amplifications of existing positions and those offering a more radical departure.

It is instructive, however, to comment on areas of similarity first. All four writers, for instance, are extremely careful about the language they use and, indeed, all offer new words or meanings in an attempt to escape the pitfalls of the past. Brosius is explicit: “Central to my argument is that we need to problematise the vocabulary with which

200 we frame our engagements with environmentalism....” (1999:281). Similarly, Biersack refers to a new “incipient language” to approach an “ecology of incommensurabilities” (1999:12) while Ingold, among other words, offers “interagentivity” and “taskscapes”. If nothing else this is a fertile ground for new words. Secondly, and as already mentioned, all are concerned with reconnecting the material, biological and social in some way. Thirdly, all deem the investigation of ‘landscape’ and ‘place’ as a promising way of considering the material and semiotic together. Fourthly, they all address the issue of how resources for the invention of nature are unevenly spread and differentiated.

For Biersack each new ecology discussed - symbolic, historical, political - is rehabilitated as a different angle on the same “multiplex spatiotemporal reality” (1999:12). She identifies a new synthesis, “the new materialism”, as attending to the textual and semiotic on the one hand and history, politics, economy and biology on the other (1999:11). However, she finds this new ecology lacking precisely because it fails to study the “incommensurabilities” of biology and history, of meaning and ‘natural’ law. It seems that what she is attempting to do is look for ways of bringing “nature into the cultural realm without effacing nature’s autonomy.. (1999:11 italics added). To do that a number of terms are offered. A “lifeworld”, referring to “an indivisible material/symbolic/political/social/historical reality ... inherently an ecology of incommensurabilities predicated on the fact that human life ‘lies betwixt and between’” (1999:11). Also approved is a distinction between first (original and pristine) and second (made and historical) nature in which the first always passes through the second (Smith 1984, Soja 1996). Landscape falls into the latter and is at once material and semiotic. In fact, it is difficult to distinguish between what Biersack offers and the new ecologies she critiques except for an insistence in maintaining an ontological difference between natural law/biology and history. Ultimately there is an idea of a really real nature remaining even though, in effect, the concept of a ‘lifeworld’ appears to offer dissolution of the very dialectic Biersack maintains.

On the other hand Brosius (1999) seems relatively indifferent to the ontological status of nature, concerning himself instead with how the environment is variously constructed. Rather than worry about maintaining a separate nature (he is, on the whole, a constructivist), he proposes future investigations be guided by ideas that

201 frame questions in such a way as to consider the physical and cultural as inextricably tied together. Key to the current task is his notion of “topologies” understood as “constructions of actual and metaphorical space” (Brosius 1999:281). In Brosius’ terms, topologies are discursively produced, create certain subjects, and hence define their own political and institutional space (1999:281-2). For example, attending to how “local” is encoded and represented in phrases such as “grass roots”, “top down” and “bottom up” development creates a particular vision of place and in turn specific subjects - locals and non-locals, managers and those managed.

As already mentioned, environmental topologies have valorized certain categories of people so that it is possible to say that some people should live in the forest - indigenous residents - while excluding other categories such as migrants or peasants. Against the potential of studying these topologies as cohesive hegemonic structures, Brosius proposes that we should attend to “temporalities and dynamics”. Thus the different discourses are not simply a matter of multivocality but rather one of changing positions and powers. Spaces open up for some discourses and close down for others (1999a:283) and topologies are articulated in the process. As such Brosius’ topologies seem directly applicable to the discursive and material landscapes of the managers at Hatfield and the New Forest. But while Brosius merely hints at their materiality, I wish to place this at the very centre. I am thus bringing physicality to the fore rather than allowing it, as Brosius appears to, to be the subject of a prior discursive process. To better explain how this might work I also borrow selectively from Escobar and Ingold.

Despite its theoretical orientation Escobar’s paper, to my mind, offers the clearest research agenda. Our job, he suggests, is firstly to examine the constitutive relations that account for nature and, secondly, to imagine discourses that are not reductive (to the Taws of the ecosystem’ for example). He proposes three nature regimes, capitalist, organic and techno, for investigation. These regimes overlap and coexist and, indeed, their precise lineaments can only be determined through empirical enquiry. These regimes are, in fact, a form of meta-topology, theoretical constructs against which each individual case can be examined. Capitalist nature developed in Europe out of the new ways of seeing instrumental in the birth of modem science (Foucault 1975, Jay 1988). Capitalist nature is cast as “uniform, legible, manageable, harvestable.

202 Fordist” (Escobar 1999:7). It is rational and governable - regularised, simplified and disciplined, managed and planned for. Strong links could be drawn here with foresters for whom trees are a crop - produced with clear, rational methods and outcomes (cf. Peterken 1996:30, and Cathy in chapter 5). Organic nature represents an ontological unity between nature and society, a view Escobar ascribes to indigenous communities. Here there is no severance of the biophysical, human and supernatural worlds: local practice-orientated knowledge dissolves the boundaries between these categories. A similar effect is possible through techno nature. This is the domain of artificiality, where, “more than ever, the natural is seen as part of the social” (1999:11). Techno nature occurs when it becomes possible to play with “unprecedented combination[s] of the organic and artificial” (ibid.)

The future, Escobar contends (and here he moves to imagining non-reductive natures), lies in new articulations between natural and human sciences (1999:15). These new hybrid natures^^, which have yet to be worked out, offer the potential for human-environmental and human-human relations to escape from purely economic and utilitarian principles. He values both techno and organic nature as having the necessary redemptive possibilities to wrest control of life away from purely capitalist goals. Escobar’s notion of nature regimes, similar in many respects to Brosius’ topologies, offers a strong theoretical framework^^ against which to test empirical data and additionally goes some way towards articulating a perspective which does not assume the primacy of the Western ontology.

It is strange, then, that Escobar, offering a programmatic antiessentialism as a method of moving forward, still falls prey to a basic nature/culture dualism. Take the following statement for instance.

It is necessary to strive for a more balanced position that acknowledges both the

constructedness o f nature in human contexts - the fact that much o f what

ecologists refer to as natural is indeed also a product o f culture - and nature in the

realist sense, that is, the existence o f an independent order o f nature, including the

Hybrid in the sense of mixing and selecting out of the available natureregimes rather than hybridising the natural itself.

A reasonable criticism levelled at Escobar’s framework is that it is perhaps too prescriptive about the forms of nature regime. Why, for instance, provide only three possibilities?

203 biological body, the representations of which constructivists can legitimately

query in term o f their history or political implications.

(Escobar 1999:3). As such, this statement reads happily in a western cultural context - an ecologist would, perhaps, not find too much to challenge in this account. It does, however, sit very uncomfortably against Ingold’s analysis that critiques the maintenance of an ontological distinction between nature and culture. Indeed it is not too difficult to discern a really real nature, and a western dichotomy, returning to haunt Escobar at this point^"^. It is a revealing sentence even though it seems to run against the tenor of the rest of his paper. In a sense Ingold is trying to do the same thing {c.f. 2000:1-2), to reconnect the social and biological^^. But rather than positing an external nature he starts, as we have seen, with the notion of agent-in-its-environment (2000:173).

Perhaps the clearest statement of this position is in his discussion of the difference between building and dwelling. The question he tackles is what distinguishes an animal’s construction from a human’s? Or to put it another way, “by what right do we conventionally identify the artificial with the ‘man-made’?” (2000:174). He points out the inconsistency of explaining the construction of a beaver’s lodge as stemming from an extended phenotype (natural), while asserting that humans build according to a plan or form (cultural). This is premised. Ingold argues, upon the “separation of the perceiver and the world such that the perceiver has to reconstruct the world, in the mind, prior to any meaningful engagement with it. ... [WJorlds are made before they are lived in” (2000:178-9, italics added). Rather than remain with a logic that assigns intentionality only to human animals, leaving them split - half in and half out of nature (2000:172), Ingold follows Heidegger in arguing that “to build is in itself already to dwell”(1971:146 ff. quoted in Ingold 2000:186). People do not import their

Escobar in fact defines political ecology as the study of the articulations between “biology and history” (1999:3) and explicitly raises the objection that these might be seen as “new and perhaps essential and binary centres of analysis” (1999:4). He argues that biology and history displace nature and society from their position of privilege and, moreover, are explicitly implicated in each others articulations presumably in a way nature and culture were not.

It could be argued that Ingold’s working through of hunter-gatherer perspectives of the environment, equates to Escobar’s ‘organic’ regime. However, what this juxtaposition highlights is the difference between Ingold’s theoretical investigation and what I take Escobar to be doing at this point - providing a schema for empirical research.

204 ideas or plans into the world since being in that world is the basic starting point for all their thinking. Ingold puts it like this:

...the forms people build, whether in the imagination or on the ground, arise

within the current of their individual activity, in the specific relational contexts of

their practical engagement with their surroundings.

(2000:186) Thus we can reverse the earlier statement to read ‘worlds are lived in before they are made’. This position has implications for understanding both evolution and history, and biology and culture.

For if, by evolution, we mean differentiation over time in the forms and capacities

of organisms, then we would have to admit that changes in the bodily orientations

and skills of human beings, insofar as they are conditioned by the work of

predecessors (along with enduring products of that work, such as buildings), must

themselves be evolutionary. And if, by cultural variation, we mean those

differences of embodied knowledge that stem from the diversity of local

developmental contexts, then... such variation must be part and parcel of the

variation of all living things....

(Ingold 2000: 187) Hence, as Ingold claims, it is no longer necessary to use one theory to account for the change from nest to hut (biological evolution) and another (cultural history) to account for the change from hut to skyscraper. Equally, this dissolves any straightforward differentiation between built and unbuilt, between what is ‘natural’ and what is not. For as much as a house is built in the context of (mainly) human dwelling, so too is a tree built in the context of (mainly) animal dwelling. All the various inhabitants of the tree played their part in creating the conditions under which the tree has grown to assume its particular shape, and so too have animals and humans, in their various ways of dwelling in a house, served to create its particular form. The distinction between a house and a tree is thus not absolute but relative, and specifically relative to the degree of human involvement in the process.

In summary, of the four writers considered here, all of whom critique the nature/culture dualism. Ingold offers the strongest theoretical position with which to challenge essentialist standpoints. Moreover, it is a stance from which it is possible to radically recast human relations with the environment as beginning with dwelling. If we return to Brosius’ notion of ‘topologies’, it is now possible to clarify what it means to place physicality at the centre, rather than allowing topologies to be the subject of a

205 prior discursive process. To do this is to embed experiences and engagement as the precursor to discursive practice: we dwell before we make. Consequently, important to an analysis of topologies of management is the notion of agency as “situated doing” - it can be, indeed necessarily is, both discursive and engaged. Secondly, the dissolution of the boundary between nature and culture allows a variety of other, perhaps unexpected, actors to contribute to the creation of topologies. Thus, for the purposes of this chapter, topologies can be defined as material and discursive configurations of humans, biology and history in particular places that are arranged so as to highlight certain relationships and ignore others.

One fundamental problem remains. In rejecting a pure constructivist position that ultimately maintains the ontological distinction between nature and culture, and opting instead for an approach that takes engagement as key - doing is as important as thinking - how then should one deal with the fact that most people interviewed in the Forests take the world as fundamentally arranged by the distinction between nature and culture? This was brought home to me when one member of the PC had a ride in my car. I had left Laura Rival’s book The Social life o f Trees on the seat and he flicked through it.

What a load of bollocks. I can’t get on with this social science stuff. It doesn’t say

anything useful like ecologists do.

(Ranger New Forest, July 1999) Berglund phrases it rather well: the problem of tackling the concept of nature is that “in practice it remains a key ontological foundation for acting morally and intellectually in the world” (1999: 16). One way to deal with this is to draw a distinction between research theory and the constructions of the researched. Unfortunately this returns to a position that posits an extracultural, objective science, a position rejected earlier. The alternative view draws a comparison. Just as research practice is inherently engaged in the sense of taking place (literally) in ways of being- in the world (conversations, writing, recording etc.), so too are the practices of people in the forests embedded in being-in the environment (talking, looking, digging, mapping etc.). It is a matter of taking note of the priority of dwelling, which subsequently becomes a position from whence nature could be constructed as separate. The ecologist measuring species with a quadrant might think of nature as a

206 separate realm, but this nature, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty (1962:24), is already the homeland of her thinking (c/Ingold 2000:186).

Topologies of Management in the Forest

The official management structure at Hatfield is considerably flatter than that of the New Forest, directly reflecting its smaller size. Here, most of the operational decisions are made by the property manager in consultation with the permanent staff. Areas of responsibility are divided between the Head Warden and the other two Wardens. At the time of research the two senior Wardens were taking it in turns to act as Head Warden. There is also a permanent officer running the education programme and an office secretary. The Property Manager together with the Wardens take most of the management decisions and have oversight of the volunteers and people on work placements. At the time of writing there were six permanent staff, three part-time and seasonally employed staff, and a variable volunteer base of up to twenty, about ten of whom regularly gave time^^. The Property Manager in turn reports to a number of people at regional and national level in the National Trust. The regional level has most immediate influence as managers there set targets and allocate resources between the various properties.

In contrast, the management structure at the New Forest is more complex and allows for more specialisation of task. At the top, reporting to the Commissioners and head office in Edinburgh and taking an active part in advising the Government as a senior civil servant, is the Deputy Surveyor^^. Senior Foresters, each with oversight of a particular department, report to the Deputy Surveyor. These are: the Planning Department, Operations (mainly concerned with silviculture), the Rangers (dealing

At special events, of course, more volunteers were drafted in. Bare numbers also do not give a sense of the changing makeup of the staff. While I was there, two new staff members were recruited, a trainee left to take up a permanent post, one of the senior wardens secured a job elsewhere, and a couple gave a year of their time and lived in a caravan at the back of the Bam.

The name marks the ascendancy of silviculture over the hunting Forest system. The management of crown woods was formalised in the Act of 1542 which created the Court of Surveyors and the post of

Surveyor General of the Kings wood. The Deputy Surveyors had oversight of forestal duties in specific

Forests (Tubbs 1986:73).

207 with the public and external communication) and the Keepers. At the time of research the duties of the various grades of Foresters were set by specialism. By the beginning of 2001 the New Forest district had returned to a beat system where Foresters, Rangers and Keepers all share responsibility for specific areas (‘beats’ or ‘walks’) of the Forest. In all the New Forest District employed about eighty permanent staff and around forty volunteer rangers, and several other groups and individuals who volunteered their time, labour or skills. For the purposes of this chapter I take management to be a broad activity. I include all those who have an officially recognised role in making decisions about the arrangement and application of human and physical resources whether or not they are officially recognised within the organisation as ‘managers’.

At both Hatfield and the New Forest management consists of a series of tasks, such as measuring (numbers of visitors, supplies and resources, distances, spread of a particular species), counting (budgets, salaries, trees, contracts), talking (meetings, ordering, telephoning, guided walks) and writing. The tasks are then given substance in documents, maps, presentations and pictures. These objects of knowledge are created in processes of dwelling in particular ways. For instance the office, the setting for many of the activities identified as management is unremarked. One is merely “at the office” whereas the Forest is always something to go into for task-specific purposes - “I’m going to check the contractors over in Anderwood”. The Forest, despite being the ostensible object of management and a place where many tasks, such as “data gathering” or “supervision” take place, is separated in language and practice. In language it is “out there...”, “over there...”, or “in there...”, the place from which information ultimately comes and into which objects and activities are put. In practice, for managers the Forest is a continually unfolding place of movement between points where ‘management’ happens; a peripatetic landscape of roads, paths and tracks to “monitor contractors”, “check” volunteers or work gangs, “meet” representatives of various interest groups, and to “communicate” information. The office by contrast is far more static, the starting point and conclusion for most of these

208 trips into the Forest^^. In practice, too, the Forest also means specific clothes (waterproof, warm) and an outward focus and attention to the surroundings. The fundamentals of ‘management’ are, however, thought of and discussed by staff as primarily office based.

Before discussing specific examples of management topologies attention is given to three configurations important to daily management practice in both research sites. These configurations set the parameters and key discursive grounds in which ecological interventions are created and justified. Firstly, the centrality of mapping in the creation of objects of knowledge, such as “species diversity” or “economic maturity”, around which practical interventions are based. Secondly, the current importance of local identity in its various expressions in animating discourses of management. And thirdly, the casting of visitors as problematic outsiders to the processes of management.

Mapping as practice In the office a prime object around which professional management knowledge is organised, a significant tool of the trade, is the planning map which comes in several forms. At Hatfield Forest, the main office (a room in the Bam) has a large-scale Ordinance Survey map, mounted and sealed on one wall with pins and notes tacked to it. Smaller maps are used to record areas that had been thinned and coppiced, or where new trees had been planted. Other maps record the positions, sizes and approximate ages of veteran trees together with information about other species, and when last a tree had been pruned or pollarded. It is through these representations that staff plan to bring coppices “back into cyclical management”, or where next to “remove scrub” and “stop encroachment”. Areas are hand coloured or hatched to represent different stages of this process and they are periodically updated with information gathered in the Forest. Photocopied maps are taken out into the forest, in pockets or on clipboards and annotated on site. Information such as tree species, specific location and date of planting or building a tree guard are recorded and then

A significant subsection of these trips however would be on the “way home” or while going to the office in the morning, as many managers made use of their trips at the beginning and end of the day to divert to places they wanted to check.

209 used to up-date the originals in the office. These maps solidify policy discussions and break up the Forest into task-oriented sections. For example, while the decision to re establish a coppicing cycle at Hatfield has been long standing, how long each coppice area should be allowed to grow-on, 12 years, 15 years or longer, and the limits of the area to be tackled each year, were still under discussion. Decisions taken in meetings were solidified in maps, hence summarising the debate and closing off other options for intervention. Sections of these maps were then used to plan working days in the Forest and adjusted to reflect actual work done.

Much the same process goes on in the New Forest except that managers here have a dedicated department at their disposal using a sophisticated GIS system with the ability to allow for complex layering of information. This is a remarkably flexible system, allowing maps to be drawn to a high standard for almost any situation. Again there is a similar process of recording when planting, clearance, felling or drainage occurred, even down to recording specific locations of rare or endangered species so as to “avoid too much disturbance”. An overall map of the New Forest district divides the inclosures and Open Forest into areas in which certain activities take priority. One inclosure might be coloured dark green to indicate that its prime use should be for timber production, white would indicate an area managed for ‘recreation’, and purple for areas with a high conservation value. Each particular area is then represented in greater detail on another map. While an inclosure might be set aside for timber production on the overall map, the more detailed map is able to show areas with high recreational importance at the edge or following tracks through the inclosure, or equally where a rare habitat is found in a recreation area. Then the maps are reproduced in time series showing a “snapshot” of how the Forest should look at certain time intervals - operational plans for the coming year. Forest design plans for the next twenty years and then strategic long term plans up to a hundred year indicative strategy plan.

The plans set our long term goals. We can make sure there is a constant supply of

mature timber, and that we are balancing this with conservation and recreation.

But equally priorities change so the future plans might look very different. Ones

for the next two years are increasingly set in stone.

(Forester, New Forest 1999)

210 Hence maps are an important means through which managers initially organise, create and value natures. They configure the landscape of the forest into areas that are expressive of particular discourses of the natural. They create places of high and low economic importance, distinguish “rare” or “endangered” habitats (and thereby identify what is “common” or of low value), and model appropriate inhabitants and behaviour such as areas set aside for nesting birds or places for tourists to walk or foresters to work.

You know we have certain broad legal responsibilities for protection and

conservation. How do we fulfil those responsibilities? We first need to know what

we have, and these maps help us define that. They tell us which areas need thinning and which we can release for felling and where to focus our conservation

efforts. They help in making decisions because they give the overview.

(Forester, New Forest)

Another map that has a significant role in daily use is one that shows the different beats and the Keepers and Rangers that have responsibility in each. Drawn over a standard Ordinance Survey map of the District, this is prominently displayed in the Rangers Office and smaller copies are available near the Receptionists’ desk at the front door next to the main telephone switchboard. When telephone calls come in with questions or information about specific areas, if the Receptionist or Ranger does not know the area immediately, the map is used to check who needs to be contacted. The map divides the New Forest District into a landscape of responsibility. It is used to clarify the connection between a specific place and certain people. It acts as an aide- mémoire, an object of knowledge that encodes and fixes people with special knowledge and places together in the few seconds it takes to look at it. It is used frequently but transiently, glanced at briefly between receiving information and deciding where it needs to go next, an object of everyday practice.

The tight, controlled representation of the environment by those drawing maps, especially in the New Forest, casting it as fully controllable and understandable and subject to rational processes becomes far less clear-cut in action. Habitat re establishment plans differ substantially to what is actually agreed on site, and these in turn are modified by the work gangs according to their own measures of knowledge and expertise. Contractors fell according to what they can sell rather than what the managers would prefer. Volunteers start planting or clearance in the wrong places and

211 visitors ignore signs or fail to cycle on approved tracks. The attempts at reducing management tasks to clearly laid out and rational plans are consistently subverted by the realities of practical engagement.

Plans at both Hatfield and the New Forest are also subject to various consultative processes. Following statutory provisions managers at both sites need to consult English Nature, English Heritage and Local and County Councils at different stages. Local wildlife societies and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) are also mandated. In addition, in the New Forest, other interest groups and representatives, such as the Verderers and Commoners have an officially recognised voice, and since 1999 the FC has undertaken a programme of submitting their Forest Design Plans to public scrutiny at specially arranged events. At both Hatfield and the New Forest considerable effort is put into persuading often opposed interest groups of the necessity of the actions described in the plans and equally these interest groups attempt to influence the decisions of the managers. Co-opting “stakeholders”, and avoiding as much contest as possible, is increasingly built into presenting nature as threatened or at risk. Unless we do this, the logic goes, we will lose something valuable - be it cultural heritage in Hatfield or species diversity in wetland mire systems in the New Forest. Maps are constantly used in the attempts to persuade others of the necessity and logic of the managers’ proposed interventions.

Local identity in management discourse

In the process of producing appropriate forest subjects, the discursive construction of ‘local’ is increasingly implicated in topologies of management. In part this is a reaction, particularly in the New Forest, to a perception that previous decades of management had been autocratic and self-serving, concerned at best with national priorities and at worst with simply increasing profitability according to professional forestry standards. Meanwhile overseas, NGOs and ecologists are arguing against full-scale commercial exploitation of the rain forests partly on the basis of a reassertion of the rights of indigenous people whose ‘traditional resources are being destroyed’. If that provides the tenor of international critiques the argument goes why not apply those same principles at home?

212 In the New Forest who is considered “local” remains a lively issue. According to the Commoners Defence Association, after a period in which the Forestry Commission effectively stonewalled interest groups and occasionally resorted, in their eyes, to subterfuge, they are now beginning to take cognisance of the political weather-vane and attempting to increase local participation. On their side FC staff point to two examples as indications of the seriousness with which they now take “public consultation” as a central requirement: the process of arranging public events to present their Forest Design Plans (referred to as ‘New Forest: New Future’), and, since 1998, a programme of recruiting volunteer rangers. In each of these examples who is ‘local’ emerges as differently constructed.

The process of presenting the design plans in each area takes considerable time, effort and cooperation between the planning department and the ranger team^^. Proposals for change are mapped and figuratively drawn, presentations carefully stage-managed and groups of people taken on walks to look at sites where work would be done. Responses are then invited in the form of questions from the floor or in questionnaires. But ultimately this was an exercise in communicating, as one manager put it, with the “local community at large”. In conversation the ‘New Forest, New Future’ programme was usually cast as “public consultation”, or aimed at “members of the public” or “open to the public”. Pressure for “more transparent management”, as another senior Forester had it, resulted in more public consultation. ‘Public’, in this case is a signifier filled by an amorphous ‘local’, one which is defined in terms of living in proximity to the Forest and using it mostly for leisure and especially dog- walking. This proximity of residence is usually further termed as “new” or “recent” in opposition to “long-term” locals. Equally in the emergence of this discourse there are internal differences. Some managers view the process as “purely a PR exercise”. Rangers, on the other hand, view public communication as one of their central roles. A failure to get public support for the planned changes, and equally for the organisation to ignore the wishes of the public, is a failure of communication. Planners, however, tend to view this as a rather uncomfortable experience of having

It is difficult to put a specific time frame to a process that involves many different stages, activities and departments, but from research through to redrawing plans following consultation takes approximately three years.

213 to justify their professional knowledge to people who do not understand the bigger picture and moreover are disinclined to accept any change.

We have to simplify the maps - produce them with drawings because Joe public

doesn’t like looking at complex maps.

(Forester, June 1999)

Apart from the usual suspects who turn up at everything just to have a go, these

are mostly people who walk their dogs, or live next door to that particular bit o f

Forest. They’ve moved into the new housing estates that ring the Forest or bought

up a home in the Forest. They don’t really know about the Forest. They just want

to make sure it stays the same on their patch.

(Forester, May 1999)

They are the people who walk their dogs who think that they have purchased the

right to access the forest by paying their rates. You won’t believe the

conversations I’ve had. They think the Forest is an extension o f their private garden.

(Ranger, June 2001)

I can understand how some people might see ‘New Forest, New Future’ as

window dressing. Only in a few places were people listened to or should I say

noisy enough for the plans to be changed. If we take Fawley Inclosure, people

objected to trees being removed and now a thin screen will be left. But most of the

plans haven’t changed much. Maybe we just got it right. On the other hand the

Inclosures were planted in the 1960s and we still have pictures of heathland being

ploughed up and trees planted and they don’t seem to understand that either.

(Ranger August 2000)

Secondly, and in opposition, is a discourse about “real locals”, a discourse in which the FC has, perhaps unwittingly, become complicit. These locals are “forest families” whose identity is defined partly by length of residence and partly by types of activities. From the point of view of the managers, these locals, empowered through the Verderers Court, are particularly problematic. They view the FC with most suspicion, and construct their identities specifically in their perception of having “saved” the Forest from the worst depredations of timber-or-nothing forestry. In this second discourse “local” becomes coterminous with “Commoner” and they are assumed to have certain specialist knowledge or at least a different relationship with

214 the Forest. A reasonably common question when discussing strategies at internal meetings was “How do we get them [Commoners/locals] on side?” or “How do we get this past them?” The creation of a Volunteer Ranger service is viewed as a key platform for achieving rapprochement. It has specifically set out to recruit ‘locals’, both men and women of all ages, particularly those with long term Forest links. Indeed, of the Volunteer Rangers recruited for 2001, I was proudly informed, only one person accepted was from outside the local district^^.

What I think is important is the cultural aspects and keeping the Commoners. I

think we are getting obsessed with ecology. We are not doing very well keeping

Commoners’ future benefits in mind - providing them with jobs and the ability to

keep on doing what they have always done. We need more people like Lucy from

a local commoning stock. Even if people have moved away and then come back.

(Ranger, August 2001)

The following was in response to a question about “forest families” being a tiny minority in terms of those that live locally and hence being an unrepresentative group of people:

But they are the ones that generally have the continuing family line, they are the

ones that keep animals on the Forest, they have more understanding of the animals

and they have the links which they pass on. Mmm. Maybe I should think again.

You’re right they are unrepresentative. I know that a lot o f people who moved

down here say 12 or even 40 years ago, maybe I am saying that they have less

right than those who have lived here and have those links with the animals. On the

other hand I think the Commoners are a bit of a self-destructive group, they don’t

agree and don’t provide a consistent view. They are too narrow-minded, can’t

seem to work well together. They need to know that they need to work with people

and make a positive assistance. On the whole they are a ‘no’ association.

(Forester, July 1999)

A little later in the conversation ‘local’ is redefined in terms of passion about the forest.

Equally I agree with Peter [being there] - he comes from outside - he is the person

best qualified to do the job- not a local. The thing that is important for me is if they

This years intake including waterfront is about 70% last years nearer 80%.

215 are passionate about the Forest. Daniel is about the bracken, and Peter about the

Forest, and Toby, for his sins, about the environment.

(Forester, July 1999)

At Hatfield who is and is not ‘local’ is far less marked in management discourses than at the New Forest. For instance, at Hatfield a process of soliciting comments on what ‘local’ people found of value in the Forest was aimed broadly at visitors and school groups. However, in conversation other locals were highlighted:

Real locals aren’t the people from Bishops’ Stortford (the nearest town) but the

guys who walk their dogs morning and evening everyday. And that’s all that most

of them want to do.

(Warden, conversation on way to scrub clearance Hatfield, September 1999)

The real bane o f our life is administrating the licenses. Riding licenses are mostly

taken up by people who can get their horses here easily because they live locally.

Fishing licenses are bought by some locals but most come from farther afield and

they’re the worst for littering.

(Warden, August 1999)

At both Forests the recognition of the importance of human activities in creating and maintaining specific ecologies intersects with conceptions of local identity. At Hatfield the managers were worried lest the sole farmer who turned out his cattle on the Forest decided to remove them permanently. In the New Forest a Ranger foresaw problems in putting ‘environment’ as their top priority.

Our problem is that in putting environmental protection at the top of the Minister’s

Mandate we effectively have to protect the practices that made that environment.

Does that mean we have to protect Commoning and other local practices in order

to fulfil our mandate? Will we have to subsidise commoners to keep their animals

turned out on the Forest? Personally I think we should let nature take over again.

Yes it would be a different Forest, but for my money a better one. I don’t suppose

it will happen though.

(Ranger, August 2001)

Problematic visitors and management dreams

While locals in management discourse are mostly viewed as a political problem, visitors are, on the whole, considered more tractable. However, they also make

216 considerable demands on time and resources. Exasperated by the difficulties of dealing with members of the public, all the managers I interviewed, at one time or another would imagine a Forest without people. More often than not these outbursts reveal visitors to be the problematic part of an ecological equation - nature would be so much easier to manage without people. A striking feature at both Hatfield and the New Forest was that variations on this theme occurred sufficiently often to become the subject of serious consideration as well as ironic comment. At Hatfield a number of individual conversations coalesced into an explicit discussion prompted by the property manager at one of the morning meetings.

OK. Let’s just suppose...here we have an environment that is so special it is a

registered national nature reserve and that means we have a responsibility to

protect it. But what do we do? We invite them in, on good day in the thousands,

and when there’s that many we open up the plains and say ‘please park your car

here’. And the pressure can only get worse...

And we litter-pick everyday the next week... !

Exactly, but that’s not the worst of the damage - all those wheels digging in and

the kids kicking ball into the pollards. And throw into this the fact that the regional

office want us to build a bigger restaurant and shop so that we can make more

money out of the visitors we do get, I can only imagine the pressures will get worse. So what if we brought one of the surrounding small woods - the ones

outside the Forest boundary and make that our reception centre for Hatfield Forest?

We could have a Forest off the real Forest with parking and play areas that don’t

matter so much.

Yeah, and most of the Bank Holiday crowd wouldn’t know the difference, just so

long as they’ve got space to kick a ball around and somewhere selling burgers

they’d be happy. Most of them wouldn’t even know it wasn’t Hatfield. I mean

they don’t even go very far into the woods when they’re here, do they?

We could sell them bits of wood labelled ‘genuine Hatfield Forest produce’ and

have a mini example of coppicing so they could see the Forest without actually

going there.

(Conversation at meeting in the Bam, Hatfield 1999)

217 Underpinning management comments about visitors is an implicit topology of place. Some places in the Forest matter because of the specific plants and animals that exist there. Other places, ones that don’t matter as much, are where visitors are channelled. These are places that are “sacrificed” to the pressures of visitors in return for a degree of “protection” for the valuable places. In the New Forest, areas like Bolderwood which are managed primarily for leisure usage, appear as blank white areas in the overall planning maps, with little priority given to producing the same quality of maps provided for the New Forest, New Future programme. It seems that the more recent and obvious the human intervention in the landscape, the less likely this is to be valued. Thus at Hatfield plans to replace trees planted by the Victorians around the lake turned on a discussion of tree safety. The existing Horse Chestnuts were deemed less than ideal because they tended to shed branches putting at risk the people who visited this area in large concentrations^'. As one Warden commented, “What species you plant doesn’t really matter just so long as its not Horse Chestnut and its unlikely to brain a visitor or break their cars”.

Sometimes comments about visitors simply express the sentiment of the moment: frustration, anger, and annoyance.

Just imagine how easy this would be if we simply shut the gate for the Bank

Holiday. They would have to walk in and most of them would be too fucking lazy.

(Warden, litter picking at Hatfield Forest, August 1998)

Sometimes, when the ’phone is just going and going you wish they would all go

away and visit somewhere else. On days like that it’s a real pleasure to turn the answer phone on and walk away.

(Receptionist, New Forest 1999)

It would be so much easier to look after the environment if we could simply say

‘no-one goes there. Its too special’ - and [then] just let nature get on with it. To be

honest, people are such a hassle.

(Ecologist, discussing the impact of visitors on biodiversity, New Forest 1999)

91 This seems strange given the number of Horse Chestnuts planted in urban settings. Other Foresters I checked this out with were also surprised, but the Warden at Hatfield remained adamant that this was the reason.

218 At times I hate it here. Too many people and then they come up with the most

ridiculous excuses as to why their dog’s off the lead, or why their little darling has

impaled themselves on a branch. I have to go and find some empty space as far

away from other people as possible to get my head right. There’s certain people

who should just be banned from coming to the Forest.

(Ranger, Moors Park, New Forest 1999)

At other times the same wish was aired with a strong sense of humour and irony at the fact that really they knew how central people were to their job. If we accept the proposition that humour often serves notice of points of strained social relationships, then we can sympathise with the staff below.

[Waving and smiling at a departing busload of children] Just imagine teaching

without having to have the kids here...

(Teacher on Education programme, Hatfield 1998)

You know how muddy the Forest is at the moment? Some of them turned up for

the walk with white trainers and wanted to know if they’d get dirty! I just despair

- I think they’re off with the fairies. I like the enthusiasm but they need another Forest. One that’s clean and dry... and another Warden.

(Describing a guided walk, Hatfield Forest 1998)

A similar sentiment is expressed in the cartoon that appeared in the Christmas 2000 edition of Log Roll (Figure 16) commenting on the large ‘Tipi’ (modelled loosely an north American Indian tent) the FC had at the New Forest Show that year. It has added bite because the previous year the FC tent had offered visitors a choice of paths through a dense ‘forest’ of cut conifers with ‘views’ and information panels onto set pieces of forest life. These included stuffed birds (species to be found in the forest), burnt out motorcycles (the problems we face), and sawn logs (timber operations).

219 •jATüRF l'^ ll (tTUMP)

f l

Following criticism of the rangers Tipi the Forestry Commission returned to their traditional display at the New Forest Show

Figure 16: The production of nature for visitors.

Underlying these concerns and frustrations is an ongoing debate about the extent of the production of nature for visitors. It is clear for most managers that the political job of persuading other interest groups to their point of view is made easier by encouraging as many people as possible to have an interest in forests. Two distinct pressures are the result. Firstly, that in order to communicate as widely as possible complexity is lost to the necessities of accessible performance. Hence, the discussion about creating a simplified mini-Hatfield outside the Forest boundary. In the New Forest the rapid expansion of the Rangers department led a number of staff to voice concerns about the FC’s direction.

220 They want to make it into a Theme Park, I’m telling you. Now think. When all the

enclosures are opened up and you pay to park your car and for your child to play

on the swings they’ll build, and Commoners are paraded round as heritage where’s the real Forest going to be? It’ll be destroyed, that’s what.

(Keeper, May 1999)

Secondly, the effect of encouraging large numbers of people to visit the Forest disturbs the ‘nature’ they have come to see. The Forest is produced as worthy of visiting but on the basis of an underlying notion of an ancient, in some sense ‘untouched’ wilderness. One manager in the New Forest put it thus: “How do we stop destroying what we have but still get the message to new people?” The manager’s conundrum relies on the exclusion of humans from a perception of an ideal forest. The next section explores how different management topologies make different senses of nature.

Nature-near and nature-far topologies

To hear it from those Foresters trained in rational, production-forestry recent years have seen a change from certainty to uncertainty, from measurable outcomes to managing complex inputs aimed at environmental conservation and heritage preservation for which there are less clear-cut outcomes. However, at both Hatfield (where arguably timber was never a main concern) and at the New Forest, environmental conservation is now the top priority. Under this regimen new ground for the making of nature opens up, policy and money coalesce around new poles of environmental focus, while capitalist nature, to use Escobar’s (1999) term, suffers a linked decline in importance. We can see this movement illustrated in the tensions expressed by Foresters in the New Forest, especially those involved in forest operations, over the change in direction. Figure 17, another page taken from the unofficial, internal magazine Logroll, illustrates this rather well.

221 To mark the move away from commercial forestry in the New Forest. Here is the new FC logo. No Forest

No Future..No jobs Forestry Commission

Figure 17: ‘New Forest: New Future’ parodied in the December 1999, Log Roll.

While Escobar’s (1999) capitalist nature has some pertinence in discussing English Forests, his organic and techno nature^^ seem less applicable. Instead, in attempting to discern the contours of these new management topologies of the environment, I propose a distinction between nature-near and nature-far topologies^^. All managers interviewed work within a discourse that maintains the ontological separation between

A proposal to replant areas in southern England with Elm trees genetically modified to be resistant to

Dutch elm disease, however seems to fall strongly into the latter category.

These could be called, following Escobar’s lead, ‘environmental nature’ and ‘conservatory nature’.

However, rather than risk confusion with the use of these terms elsewhere, nature-near and nature-far offers a clearer distinction.

222 nature and culture. However, beneath this lie considerable differences in approach which this distinction attempts to highlight. In nature-near management topologies the environment is explicitly human constructed, the result of human interactions with the natural environment over millennia. Nature is configured as intimately engaged in human history and the resultant landscapes modified within the parameters of this relationship. Given the more prominent role afforded to human agency in nature, the crucial question for managers then becomes what do we want this environment for?

In nature-far topologies the natural environment is strongly detached from the human environment and constructed as a separate realm from which humans are excluded. In this topology nature is constantly at risk because virtually none of it survives. While managers may well acknowledge human agency in the creation of forest environments in England, their actions and discourse focus on a natural environment set apart and at a distance to human involvement. The question for nature-far managers then is how do we save this environment? Each topology creates its own subjects and discourses, making certain kinds of management interventions logical and necessary. It would also be wrong to characterise these topologies as mutually exclusive - most managers favour one or other perspective but can and do move between them. The topologies interweave, creating certain possibilities of action in some parts of the landscape and closing others off elsewhere.

Nature-far topologies

Nature-far management topologies have a common basis in an established history of ecological development. By tracing this, and then showing how the logic is selectively applied in the New Forest, I hope to demonstrate how a nature-far management creates a specific discursive and physical space. The section proceeds as follows. First, I describe the importance of the idea of a ‘wildwood’ in ecological descriptions of British woodland landscapes. Then I trace how language is used by managers to categorise plants and animals in the Forest and illustrated in a programme for the removal of Turkey Oaks in the New Forest. The application of key terms such as habitat, biodiversity, indigenous or exotic, and natural regeneration are shown to be highly variable in use and yet crucial in constructing the logic of intervention.

223 The idea of 'wildwood'

Almost every guide book or ecological history of woodland in Britain has a section devoted to the evolution and spread of trees. Influential statements of this history can be found in Peterken (1996 especially chapter 2) and Rackham (1986 chapter 5). Tubbs (1986 chapter 4) adds detailed analysis of site studies in the New Forest to the story, while Rackham (1989 chapter 2) reprises the information in his earlier book for Hatfield. More recent summaries can be found in Miles (1999) and White (1995). However, it is not my aim to analyse the ongoing and detailed investigation of prehistoric biotic landscapes, but rather to draw, in broad strokes, the fundamentals of this story. Most of the information about this period comes from the analysis of tree pollen found in core samples taken across the country. Given the variability of factors such as differential quantities of pollen production and prevailing weather patterns, this research is often subject to extensive extrapolation.

The story usually begins with the end of the last ice age and the retreating snowline. Between 12,000 and 11,000 B.C. trees begin to spread from Europe across the land bridge into Britain. Starting with pioneers like Birch and Aspen, a succession of species established themselves before the rising sea level cut off the land bridge. All thirty-five species of tree that had arrived in Britain by then are considered ‘indigenous’ or ‘native’. These developed into a dense forest cover over much of Britain. Often maps tracing the maximum spread of specific species at various times are then provided. Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris), for instance, moved north following the retreating ice. While at some stages it was found in lowland England its natural range is further north. In the New Forest it was re-introduced in the 1800s as an important timber crop. Over hundreds of years the climate fluctuated between the warmer atlantic and colder boreal periods and vegetation came and went in response (see Figure 18). Rackham (1986) coined the word ‘wildwood’ to describe the prehistoric cover of woodland in Britain while Peterken (1996) prefers the term ‘virgin’ forest.

224 TIME PERIODS FOREST; HEATH LOESS FOREST DEVELOP MIRE CULTURAL BEFORE PRESENT OPEN LAND SPECIES DEPOSITION, -WENT EROSION FORMATION PERIODS 2,000 MODERN SUB-ATLANTIC 1,000 - AND - 1,000 (wetter, cooler, MEDIEVAL oceanic) AD 2,000 - ROM-BRITISH BC IRON AGE 3,000 - . 1,000 SUB-BOREAL BRONZE AGE (poeslbly more 4,000 - continental) 2,000 NEOLITHIC 5,000 - 3,000 ATLANTIC 6,000 - (warm, damp, - 4,000 cNmatIc optimum)

7,000 - 5,000

BOREAL MESOLITHIC 8,000 - - 6,000 (continental)

9,000 - - 7.000 PRE-BOREAL 10,000 - (improving) - 8,000

11,000 - - 9,000 UPPER LATE GLACIAL PALAEOLITHIC 12.000 - - 10,000

13,000 11,000

Figure 18: Post glacial changes in the New Forest (Tubbs 1986; 54)

When humans arrived in Britain they began to fell trees and clear the forest for building materials, to graze animals and to grow crops. By the end of the Iron Age most of the wildwood had been cleared, and humans had helped establish new environments either accidentally or in pursuit of their economic aims. New species continued to arrive but humans were particularly effective at bringing useful plants and animals with them and managing native fauna and flora. While some mires may have pre-existed the arrival of humans, increasing mire formation tallies with substantial woodland clearance and the establishment of heathlands. Most species that arrived in Britain after the land link was severed are considered ‘exotics’. By this token, Sweet Chestnut {Castanea sativa) absent in the pollen records and thought to have been introduced by the Romans, ought to be exotic but few managers or ecologists talk about it in this way. It is however, considered to be ‘naturalised’, a species that successfully reproduces outside of human care. Other examples include Common Rhododendron {Rhododendron ponticum), Douglas Fir (Pseudostuga menziesii), grey squirrels and fallow deer.

225 The semi-natural woodland found in southern England today differs substantially from the wildwood of 5000 years ago. Lowland wildwood was dominated by lime trees {Tilia cordata), while present-day woodland is dominated by oak {Quercus robur), ash (Fraxinus excelsior), beech (Fagus silvatica) and hornbeam {Carpinus betulus). The elms (JJlmus), common in some areas, also suffered periodic catastrophic population drops, similar to that caused by the current outbreak of Dutch elm disease. Today if humans were magically removed from the scene woodlands might be dominated by Sycamore {Acer psuedoplatanus). Both Peterken and Rackham note the difficulties in talking about natural environments and propose typologies of natural and semi-natural to overcome these difficulties. Hence Peterken (1996:13) proposes five different sorts of naturalness: original-, present-, past-, potential- and friture-naturalness. At root, his classification relies on a definition of naturalness in terms of human activity characterising naturalness as a continuous variable from completely natural (100%) to totally artificial (0% natural) (1996:14).

Without following the subtleties of various definitions, or ecological arguments about the character of the wildwood, it is possible to point to the basic ontological structure that marks human involvement as ‘unnatural’ and part of a separate sphere. Only from the conception of undisturbed nature - the wildwood - is it possible to talk about exotic or naturalised species, even while struggling with the conceptual complications this sets up. Admitting that there is probably no natural woodland left in Britain, Peterken still wishes to keep the notion of virgin forest primarily as a methodological ‘original’ that enables experimental hypothesis-testing (1996:20). The conceptual artefact of wildwood remains a secure ontological feature in sophisticated ecological analyses to date.

It is possible to retell this story from a perspective that takes dwelling as the initial starting point. A major effect of doing this, of overturning the nature/culture ontology, is to reveal the creeping essentialisms that holding nature separate allows. It also gives a lever to analyse the cultural basis of the construction of ‘scientific’ nature in Hatfield and the New Forest. After the land bridge was cut off various different organisms continued to make their homes in the wildwood. Other species continued to arrive carried by birds or floating across water. One organism, humans, were particularly successful and their homebuilding created a whole new series of

226 relationships between other organisms - increasing options for some (oak trees, grey squirrels) and reducing them for others (lime trees, wolves and bears) {cf. Rackham 1986:31-61). This organism continued to be highly successful in changing the environment to suit its own demands - much more so than others. The question then is, why remove people from the environment? Why cast their homebuilding as unnatural and consequently their interventions as artificial and the plants and species they encourage exotic? Indeed, why consider change caused by this organism as external and separate to nature? The difference between the effects that humans and other species have when creating liveable environments for themselves, is a matter of degree rather than kind. Moreover, even if it were possible to point to an area of Forest that is as close as possible to the concept of a ‘wildwood’, any attempts to define this as separate, might be well-nigh impossible. For instance, to protect its pristine nature would necessarily involve some people telling other people what they can and cannot do. Consequently, such an attempt would be politically engaged and already part of the constitutive processes of place.

Constructing nature at risk: Manager’s nature-far discourses

The next step in tracing a nature-far topology is to examine how the conceptual notion of an original woodland, however muted by a recognition of human factors in the making of the landscape, plays out in the contemporary language, descriptions and justifications of managers. To do this I examine a European-funded programme, the Life project, one aspect of which was to remove Turkey oaks {Quercus cerris) in the New Forest. Taking the lead from Brosius (1999:278) that “it is important that we examine the assumption that there exist self-evident environmental problems requiring some equally self-evident rational solutions”, I attempt to trace some of the articulations of nature as it is envisioned on a European, national and local scale. Let me also be clear about what I am challenging here. This is not an exercise in debunking the research on which the decision to intervene was made (although the implications are that a broader discussion is required). I have little doubt that Quercus cerris is spreading in precisely the ways documented by ecologists, resulting in a change in the landscape and ecosystem. Nor is the personal and professional commitment of the people initiating this programme in question. Indeed, this

227 discussion is a critique of a view I am inclined to share. Nevertheless, like other theories, it has specific cultural bases, which I shall identify.

Reproduced below are extracts from a leaflet on Turkey Oak removal produced by the Forestry Commission for the Life partnership in 1999.

Britain’s ancient woodland habitats have existed continuously for at least 400

years. O f such woodland in the New Forest, some are particularly important

examples of the primary woodland which has descended directly from the

primaeval wildwood. Other areas have been wooded for long periods but the link

with wildwood may have been lost. Many of the ancient woods may be classified

as semi-natural because they owe their features to both natural processes and the

influence of people down the centuries.

Turkey Oak {Quercus cerris) is then described as a native of southern Europe which was introduced in 1735 because it was hoped it would be able to produce a rapid supply of timber. In the event the timber turns out to be inferior to other hardwoods. The leaflet goes on to describe how Turkey Oaks are able to “colonise” because they grow tall and produce many acorns.

Its natural regeneration is consequently often more successful than that o f English

Oak. Moreover,

Turkey Oak is one of the hosts of the Knopper gall wasp{Andricus

quercuscalicis), which has become abundant since its first record in Britain in the

early 1960’s. The wasp has a complex life cycle which involves both the male

flowers of the Turkey oak and also the acorns of the pedunculate oak. Knopper

galls therefore tend to be far more common on pedunculate oak if there are Turkey

oaks growing in the vicinity.... The presence of the gall greatly reduces the

acorn’s chances of successful germination.

Turkey oak therefore presents a long term threat to the New Forest’s ancient

woodland because it is successful and it tends to suppress the success of the native

oaks. It is also thought that Turkey oak can hybridise with native oak species,

threatening the genetic variation of the native English oaks.... The continuing

invasion of the exotic Turkey oak is damaging the wildlife and character of the

ancient woodlands. Consequently, it is recognised that the need for Turkey oak to

be systematically removed from these important habitats in the New Forest is

essential.

228 Several features of this deserve comment. First of all the initial metaphor of descent from a primaeval wildwood sets the tone for a valuation of the New Forest woodland in terms of its connection to a distant past untrammelled by human contact. Even if small pockets of wildwood remain as left-overs of a pre-social landscape, they are no longer part of a vast similar system, but areas significantly changed and effected by thousands of years of human intervention. Most ecologists would accept this, yet the idea of the value of untouched wildwood remains. The oak and beech woodland characterised as “ancient” is itself a result of a specific history of human and biological interactions. Species with utility, be that utility economic or aesthetic, have been encouraged while others are suppressed.

Secondly, and based on this initial premise is the language that creates Quercus cerris as an artificial interloper. It was “introduced” (by humans) in 1735 for economic reasons, it is described as an exotic invader that, furthermore, threatens the national patrimony of “English” oaks, albeit that a large part of that patrimony is equally ‘artificial’. When discussing knopper galls and “Turkey” oaks FC staff invariably referred to their impact on “English” oaks and not to the less emotional tag “pedunculate” or indeed the latin name Quercus robur. Pedunculate oaks are also common in most of Europe and coexist there with Turkey oaks. Thus, to describe the oak as “English”, like the “English yew” {Taxus baccata) of the medieval long-bows, when so many other indigenous species do not carry the epithet, reflects a particular powerful relationship with a national history.

Thirdly, the effect of the knopper gall wasp on the viability of acorns from the pedunculate oak is mentioned. The wasp, well known in Europe, was first recorded in Northamptonshire in 1962 since when it has spread rapidly throughout southern England (Jukes 1984). While the wasp arrived ‘naturally’ (i.e. without human intervention and thus presumably could now be called indigenous) FC staff talk about its rapid spread as “unnatural”^"^, representing too rapid a change in the environment.

On further questioning this was qualified as unnatural only because facilitated by presence of

Quercus cerris.

229 The suggestion is that “natural regeneration” of the penduculate oak is threatened by the wasp, but according to Jukes “only in years where Knopper populations are high, and mast poor, will natural regeneration be affected” (1984:2). Moreover the removal of Quercus cerris, according to Strouts and Winter (1994: 150), would not eradicate the wasp since the females fly long distances^^. Jukes (1984) adds that a number of different parasitoids attack the agamic^^ generation of the knopper gall wasp and that these species are common in Britain. The expectation is that in time “parasitoids will adapt to the gall and exert some degree of natural control” (1984:2). On pursuing this issue with members of the FC they clarified their position arguing that the relevant fact was the rapid spread of Turkey oak in the ancient semi-natural Forest. In fact one member of staff went so far as to suggest that removal of these trees was easier to justify to the public and to the funders in Europe than other ecological tasks they might have attempted. Others hotly contest this view.

Just remember that you are not an ecologist. This is not Just a matter o f playing

with cosy little categories - we have to make real decisions based on proper

scientific evidence. Turkey oak removal is just one section of what we are doing in

the Forest, and its not always easy to explain the complexities of the ecological

system to the public.

(Ecologist, July 2000)

At the same time this intervention needs to be investigated alongside attitudes to other species. The New Forest has a large and growing population of grey squirrels which were deliberately released at different times between 1876 and 1929 (Rackham 1986:51) They could easily be classified as recent introductions, exotic, invasive, aggressive and threatening genetic variation. Grey squirrels compete very successfully against indigenous red squirrels which now exist in a few pockets around the country mostly in conifer plantations. The FC used to operate a policy of shooting grey squirrels but in the last four years have opted instead for a passive system of poisoned

How far ‘a long distance’ is, is, however, not clear.

^ The life cycle of the Knopper gall wasp has several stages. The wasps that emerge from the galls on the Q. robur are female only (agamic) and they fly in search ofQ. cerris. Eggs are inserted on the male flower buds giving rise to an alternate generation of galls on the catkins. The wasps that emerge from these are both male and female. After fertilisation, the females fly in search ofQ. robur to start the next generation of agamic female wasps.

230 seed in special squirrel hoppers, which is largely ineffective^^. One of the effects of the growing number of grey squirrels is increasing damage to trees, especially beech. The arbitrary nature of many ecological initiatives was a recurring topic of conversation returned to on many occasions. A memorable image was used in the following example:

They get all worked up about it. We have to protect this, and that is destroying the

natural environment. So they say we have to protect oak trees because they

support the widest range o f plants and insects, and beech trees are part o f this

forest. But oaks and beech are only here anyway because people wanted them. It’s

already an ethnically cleansed forest because of that. And it’s going to be even

more cleansed in the future because o f the squirrels. We have stopped culling them

and the numbers have shot up and so has the damage they do to trees especially

beech. Its not the ones that are over 70 years - they seem to be able to cope with it.

But they are killing all the younger ones. Another 70 years and the Forest will not

be oak and beech woodland but oak and something else.

(Ranger, November 2000)

The policy operating in the New Forest is aimed primarily at the removal or control of what are considered invasive or aggressive species. Yet once the ontological basis of this process is highlighted there do seem to be certain inconsistencies. Scots pine {Pinus sylvestrus) was “re-introduced” to the New Forest even though following the last ice age it had a more northerly range. It is still being planted in parts of the Forest despite being a successful pioneer species of heathland which the FC are trying to increase. Douglas fir, which one might expect to be considered for removal as an exotic, is left and now provides an environment suitable for the Redstart, an endangered bird species^^. Fallow deer were introduced by the Normans to provided hunting in their forests, and Sika deer are a far more recent introduction, but while deer populations are controlled no attempt is being made to remove them. Despite the language that keeps nature at a distance, the degree to which human influence emerges even in constructions of nature at risk is revealed in the answer an ecologist gave to the question “Why do you protect Sika deer and remove turkey oaks?”

Perhaps not surprisingly the Keepers, who did most of the shooting, are particularly dismissive of the effects of poisoning. The have since been allowed to shoot squirrels again but not as part of an official culling policy.

According to staff the Douglas fir is not considered sufficiently aggressive to warrant control or removal.

231 Well basically it’s because it’s an animal rather than a tree. People object more

about killing animals even if there is a good ecological argument. But you have to

spread the net wider. Sika deer are threatened in their natural range and the ones

we have here are relatively pure bred - they tend to hybridise with red deer - so we have a role for protection even though they are not indigenous. But people also

object to us removing trees and we have to do a lot of education to get them to understand why we are doing it.

(Ecologist, November 2000)

Despite the ‘reality’ of human constructions of the environment illustrated above, when places are identified as ‘more natural’ the human interface is theoretically removed. Nature-far topologies are those that discursively increase the distance between humans and the environment, creating a language that enables a divorce between human involvement and the nature being managed. Thus nature-far topologies include ideas of place as “habitat” - something in which particular sets of plants, insects and animals live - but which in usage excludes humans. While managers might speak of “priority recreation areas”, they never speak of ‘recreation habitats’. The following conversation is about efforts to repair erosion and re-establish mires. The speakers tended to connect specific habitats to specific valuable species. Thus, erosion encourages sand wasps and basking reptiles but also represent habitats at risk.

Erosion is not good when there is too much. Yes, but erosion can provide habitats

for sand wasps and basking reptiles. Its not in itself a bad thing, we are just trying

to concentrate on the worst bits and theyare bad. Once we have carried out these

changes we will have only effected a small bit of the forest. Mires are totally

different habitats and have already to a great extant been degraded. You could say

they are the same issue in that they are both problems being exacerbated by water.

But the are both problems in the forest that are easily identifiable for management.

They are obvious in terms of habitat loss and habitat degradation.

(Ecologist November 2000)

A second key idea in nature-far topologies is the notion of biodiversity as in “important sites of biodiversity” (referring to the management of broadleaf woodland) or “rhododendron threatens the diversity of indigenous species” (referring to a removal programme). While a garden planted with species from around the world might be diverse in the life forms found in it, “biodiversity” is almost exclusively used to refer to complexes of life considered indigenous or naturally adapted. But

232 managers almost always use the term biodiversity in conversations about threats to certain environment or to particular species.

If we lose the Dartford warbler - that’s just one more loss to the biodiversity.

(Ranger, May 1999)

You need sufficient biodiversity and sufficient size for populations of rare plants

and animals to be protected. They are vulnerable in small ecological islands.

(Ecologist, June 2000)

A linked part of the topology is how and when “regeneration” is used. Valuable ancient woodland is one where “natural regeneration” has taken place over many hundreds of years. A conifer plantation, however, is not the same. On two occasions when out with Foresters, they commented on the “regeneration at the edge” of the forest. However natural that process might be, “natural regeneration” was always reserved for habitats, never conifer plantations.

Nature-near topologies

In contrast to nature-far management topologies, nature-near topologies allow humans a considerably greater role in the living landscape. Despite managers sharing a similar understanding of ecological history, the emphasis is not on an ‘original’ wildwood but rather on woodland grown together with humans. At Hatfield, for instance, where it is, perhaps, possible to claim over 700 years of ecological continuity, the managers choose to stress the degree to which the Forest represents an extremely fine example of a medieval wood-pasture system. Indeed, they are acutely aware of the futility of attempting to recreate a working wood-pasture system as it appeared in 1500s. “The Forest”, as the Property Manager put it, “has a different set of meanings now, and we would be foolish to claim anything else”.

One of those meanings is the environmental value Hatfield Forest is now accorded as a place with considerable continuity of wooded cover, and the ecological value ascribed to the veteran hornbeam {Carpinus betulus) pollards. Despite this, discussions about how to manage the landscape at Hatfield Forest usually turn on questions about how good an approximation to the desired end is the proposed intervention? Fundamentally, Hatfield is constructed as a place where humans and

233 nature have intersected over a long period of time. Nature is conceptually nearer, a place created by humans but also an expression of what is natural. Nature-near topologies are less likely to justify their actions in terms that increase the gulf between nature and humans. Rather the connections are highlighted. In comparison to nature- far topologies where the basis for making decisions is presented as more or less a matter of straightforward logic, highlighting the connections has the effect of destabilising the basis on which decisions are made, hence widening the discussion for alternative interpretations. In nature-near topologies we are part of and embedded in nature, we create it and in some sense are created by it. Nature-near topologies tend to look at why people did things in the environment, what were the results, and then reflect on how to make current decisions. To illustrate this I turn to the example of Bolderwood in the New Forest, showing how the landscape is both an artefact of past dwelling and a living environment of the moment, one in which management decisions need to be made. The language of these decisions, however, is very different to that fielded in nature-far topologies. Trees and Empire at Bolderwood arboretum

This section examines the articulation of biology and history at Bolderwood paying attention to how the environment emerges in contemporary management discourse. I attempt to show the effect of previous practices in the landscape focusing on the underlying structures of meaning and how these are used in constructing and influencing today’s decisions. A nature-near approach emphasises human histories in the making of the environment and consequently makes management actions in the landscape considerably more relativistic than nature-far topologies would allow. The contention here, moreover, is that the physical expression, the dwelling-in-place of trees and other life at Bolderwood, creates its own dynamic adding to the topology of a nature-near management. Field Notes - Bolderwood

Peter is the Ranger responsible for the area around Bolderwood, including the deer hide, arboretum and Mark Ash Wood. Bolderwood is one of the biggest and busiest recreation sites in the Forest with up to 80,000 visitor cars per year. We were there to meet Phillip, a retired civil engineer who had volunteered to help replant part of the arboretum, which had suffered from neglect and the storms of 1987. When we pulled

234 into the car park on an overcast, slightly drizzly autumn day, he was already standing by his trailer crammed with approximately twenty ‘whips’ (2-3 year old saplings) with some more in his estate car. Phillip was a reliable and trustworthy volunteer who gave unstintingly of his time and moreover was happy to buy the trees himself as long as he was involved in planting them. “It’s my way... [of] leaving a mark - something that will be there long after I’m gone”

As he examined the saplings Peter asked him if his “team” (other retired friends) were coming to help. “I had to persuade them it wasn’t really going to rain but they are all here - already walking down to the site”, Phillip said with a smile. Most of the saplings were Western Hemlocks (Tsuga heterophylld) but there were also Coast Redwood {Sequoia sempervirens) and Lawson Cypress {Chamaecyparis lawsonii). As we walked down to the arboretum with Phillip following in his car, Peter explained how to recognise Western hemlock by its flattened needles and drooping leader before laughing, “You’d better not let any of the Foresters know I’m planting Hemlocks. They’d go berserk. They planted up several inclosures with Western Hemlock about 20 years ago. It was the next fast growing, high production tree, everyone was trying it out. But it didn’t do well in this climate, suffering from rot and never really getting going. Its also got a spiral grain which makes it difficult to work at the sawmills. They just level it now and replant - its not even worth harvesting the few good ones. They hate it now”.

“Why are you planting it then? ”

Peter paused, looking over the clearing. “It goes back to the issue we were talking about. This arboretum is now my responsibility ...for a while at any rate I can take a lead in making decisions about what it is going to be like. Suddenly I have to make some difficult decisions - no, not so much the decisions as justifying them. So I ask myself what should I do in it? What should I plant? Should I do anything? Maybe it should be allowed to go slowly back to beech and oak woodland? This place has a history and we need to respect that - but on what basis do I make my decision? Look down there... That’s a Redwood, and over there... Wellingtonia Sequoiadendron giganteum, to the left Noble Fir and a there's Japanese Cedar and Monterey pine and lots o f others I can show you later. When this arboretum was established in 1860

235 these were all new plants, new introductions to the country. This was about showing o ff- showing that you knew about the most recent scientific findings. That’s not going to work now ”.

A Victorian landscape

The question Peter articulates is how to understand and value past planting decisions and their legacy in the contemporary landscape in the making of current decisions. Put differently, on what basis should he justify his interventions^^ in the landscape? What should his model be? From whichever direction one approaches Bolderwood, be it by car, horse, cycle or on foot the landscape writes itself dramatically into one’s perception. Bolderwood Hill stands at the end of a promontory of higher ground, marking the change from heathland to woodland. Whether coming from the open heathland passing the Canadian war memorial and seeing spectacular views across the New Forest, or rising through the deep green shade from the valley floor, the impact on the landscape of the planting in the 1860s is breathtaking. Patrolling the ridge is a stand of enormous Douglas Firs {Pseudotsuga menziesii) scattered with Coast Redwoods {Sequoia sempervirens). The sheer scale of these trees, their emphatic, not- to-be-ignored presence, creates a very different atmosphere to the oak and beech woodland in other inclosures. Crossing the road and dropping down into the arboretum presents another, more open, landscape. On the windward slope an open space in the arboretum, thick with grasses, bracken and briars, speaks of the devastating effect of the hurricanes in 1987. In the middle of this clearing, a square of fencing protects newly planted saplings from the attentions of deer and rabbits. Scattered throughout are the ‘specimen’ trees, some showing the effects of storm damage, age or other assaults. Unlike the relatively minor 19^*^ century additions at Hatfield, the contemporary landscape at Bolderwood bears emphatic witness to Victorian planting practices.

Instructions to plant an arboretum in and around the old walled garden of Bolderwood Lodge were given in 1860 by Lawrence Cumberbatch, Deputy Surveyor at the time. One of the earliest maps, published in 1799, of the New Forest (Map 3) shows the

^ In the language o f management the assumption is that it is possiblenot to intervene in the biological.

236 substantial buildings of Bolderwood Lodge (upper right) and the Under Keepers Lodge (left). Between them, a walled area labelled M,N,0 and P refers to a “Potatoe Ground”, “Fruit Garden”, “Kitchen Garden” and “Orchard” respectively. According to Lascelles, Deputy Surveyor between 1880 and 1914, Bolderwood Lodge had been “one of the best” Master Keepers Lodges, occupied in 1787 by John Richard, Earl de la Warr, Master Keeper of Boldrewood and Eyeworth Walks(l998: 56). Certainly it was large enough to warrant a sizeable walled orchard and kitchen garden. But by the early 1800s its importance had been eclipsed and the last occupant was Lady Londonderry who died in 1833. That same year the house was pulled down and “a great sale of all the materials was held” {ibid. 57). The focus then moves a few miles south to Rhinefield lodge, also “much reduced” {ibid. 57), but which was occupied by the new head nurseryman from 1855'^^ who used the grounds to establish a large nursery from which much of the planting in the following years developed.

Map 3: Bolderwood, 1799

Lacelles has a head nurseryman living there from 1851 (1998:57), but forest documents of appointments and pay (PRO F 10/9) record John E. Nelson of Dixons and Turnball’s Nurseries of Perth being appointed head nurseryman in 1855.

237 The trees were primarily “oak, larch and Scotch fir” but “many thousands also of beautiful ornamental trees were successfully grown” {op. cit.). Lascelles suggests that the “great pinetum” at Bolderwood owes much to the Rhinefield nursery. But it would also make sense not to have to move trees too far. Driver’s Map (1814) (Map 4) clearly shows the same four walled areas at Bolderwood near the “Groom keepers Lodge” which by 1853 were being used as a nursery with only N retained as a garden. What is likely is that if one were contemplating planting an area to showcase new species of trees and demonstrate an interest in the increasingly fashionable science of botany, then an existing nursery would be as good a place as any to kick start an arboretum.

Map 4: Bolderwood, Driver’s map 1814

238 But in order to build up a picture of why Bolderwood was planted up we need to spread the investigation further to the political scene in the Forest in the mid 1800s. The Deer Removal Act of 1851 marked a final recognition of the importance of silviculture over the economic and judicial inheritance of a medieval hunting reserve and the privileges of forestal appointments that grew out of this system. Indeed, the first half of the 19^*^ century saw a more vigorous approach to silvicultural inclosure and the virtual overthrow of the medieval system of forest management by the Office of Woods (Stagg 1992, 1990) The 1851 Act was also a major attempt at an accommodation with the increasingly strident Commoners through an accord to put in abeyance certain Crown interests in return for fixing Commoner’s rights once and for all through an official survey and register. In return the Crown was able to inclose and plant 10,000 acres more in the Forest. Stagg agues that the major landowners, twenty of whom held 75% of the land to which common rights were attached, viewed the 1851 Act as a reasonable compromise (1992:148). The small commoners, however, found little to their advantage. The reduction in area available for grazing and turbary and the opposition of the Office of Woods to their claims of common rights at every turn led to considerable discontent^^\ However, according to Stagg, the Office of Woods never saw it as a settlement, “...but as a further step towards their objective, the extinction of common rights in the New Forest” (1992:148). The removal of common rights was necessary in order to clear the way to maximise crown returns when, ultimately, a bill for dissaforestation would be put forward. If Stagg’s interpretation is correct, and certain letters appear to support this position^then the planting at Bolderwood (whatever the actual trees) was mainly driven by political exigencies determined by the Commissioners in Whitehall

While the 1851 Act allowed the Verderers Court to determine common rights, the crown lodged objections to every claim ensuring that the case was taken to a less sympathetic tribunal (Stagg

1992:143)

A private report from Cumberbatch to Kennedy in 1853 makes this clear, “...the Crown should, as soon as possible, exercise its right of inclosing..., because, ...by so doing, all the best pasture would be taken from the commoners, and the value of their rights of pasture, would thus be materially diminished , which would be of importance to the Crown in the event of any such rights being commuted...” Report 1854; 123, quoted in Stagg 1992; 150.

Stagg notes that despite considerable differences between Kennedy, Commissioner of Woods from

1851, Cumberbatch the Deputy Surveyor, and the Treasury, they were all of one mind when it came to the diminution of common rights and increase of crown interest (1992; 149).

239 This said, there were already strong indications of the growing importance of new forms of recreation. At the same time the public seemed willing to forgo income generated for the public purse through timber (and potentially land sales), in return for continuing protection of what was beginning to be a highly valued recreational landscape. Lascelles, Deputy Surveyor from 1880, attributes the defeat of proposals to disafforest, (which by 1868 had seemed almost inevitable in government circlesto the lobbying pressure raised by a public enthused by the Great Exhibition of 1851 and, moreover, now accustomed to travelling in style down to the New Forest on the newly opened London to Dorchester railway^

Despite the agreement reached through the Act of 1851 the register of common rights stirred up further dissatisfaction. A committee of the House of Lords was set up to investigate the ongoing grievances of the Commoners, and in 1868 suggested that the idea of disafforestation, first mooted by a

Royal Commission in 1789, was the only way to solve, once and for all, the causes of discontent.

“The Office of Woods and the Committee of the House of Lords had overlooked the great and growing craving for open spaces free to the public. They had quite forgot the increasing love of beauty and of fine scenery which was becoming implanted in the minds of the general public. They altogether overlooked the force of the aesthetic movement... which would induce the majority... gladly to waive some thousands of pounds of additional income rather than lose this magnificent park to take their pleasure in” (Lascelles, 1998 [1914]; 9-10).

240 1

Figure 19: The Great Exhibition of 1851 - Elms and conifers inside the Crystal Palace

All the world in a tree What the public did see at the Great Exhibition were the new exotic plants, centrally displayed among the exhibits of EmpireWhile there is little record of why Cumberbatch decided to establish an arboretum, we do have considerable contextual evidence and a substantial record of what was chosen in the trees themselves. An arboretum was a relatively new*^^ and fashionable idea, “a place devoted to the

One o f the deciding factors in favour o f Joseph Paxton’s design for an iron and glass crystal palace was the fact that it was built to accommodate the Elm trees which in competitors plans needed to be felled. In its catalogue o f the Exhibition, theArt Journal glowingly wrote; “Forming the centre o f the entire building rises the gigantic fountain, the culminating point o f view from every quarter o f the building; whilst at the northern end the eye is relieved by the verdure o f tropical plants and the lofty and overshadowing branches of forest trees...”

The Oxford English Dictionary (1981 20* Impression) records 1838 as the earliest use o f arboretum in this specific semi-scientific sense

241 cultivation and exhibition of rare trees” (OED 1981), able to express the concerns and enthusiasms of the scientific age. They represent a change from trees planted for their utility in an orchard, say, or timber plantation, to trees cultivated specifically to express an aesthetic interest. Of the species listed for the arboretum (Figure 20) ten were introduced to Britain between 1830 and 1861, fourteen were earlier introductions from Europe, Russia and the American Colonies, two were early introduced at the cusp of the 20^ century and three species represent a later planting in the 1960s. Douglas fir {Psuedotsuga menziesii), introduced in 1827, was very popular by the mid 1800s and it took until 1845 to secure a reasonable supply of seed for the Chile Pine {Araucaria araucana), introduced by Menzies in 1795. Thus the arboretum at Bolderwood was planted in 1860 with all the newest species. Cumberbatch, while driven by the political need to establish inclosures, may well have taken the opportunity to showcase the trees of the moment, at the same time as having an eye on the commercial potential of new tree species. His head nurseryman, yet another Scottish professionalfrom Perth, probably had an important role in developing these directions. But nor should we ignore the driving passions of many who were genuinely interested in new botanical and scientific findings: the new species, after all, were not the magnificent trees we see today, but saplings.

The trees of the arboretum represent and encompass three key nodes in the making of the Victorian landscape: support of high status individuals, a newly flourishing scientific community, and commercial exploitation. All three of these nodes were exemplified in Sir Joseph Banks, whose exploits on the Endeavour with Captain Cook, found royal favour. In 1772 Banks was appointed as Scientific Advisor on the Plant Life of the Dependencies of the Crown, de facto director of Kew. He set about changing Kew from a royal pleasure ground to a research orientated botanic gardens. It was Banks who initiated formal plant-hunting expeditions by trained professionals and the commercial exploitation of economic crops by plant transfers between the colonies. In 1804 he helped establish the Horticultural Society, which, through its subscriptions funded major plant-hunting expeditions. Menzies (who introduced the

John Nelson was paid £65 per annum in addition to Reinfield Lodge and four acres of land. This compares to forest worker who would have received approximately £20 per annum.

242 This arboretum was planted in 1860 near the grounds of Oregon Pine. Native region Pacific coast from British Columbia the old manor house. Many of the species planted there had to C^tfomia and growing to 90m in height. not long been introduced from their native home in North 29 Easleni Hemlock Ttuga canadensis. (26.0m height) Planted only as an onumental because of its tendency to fork. West America. Introduced in 1736 Native region New Brunswick and Wisconsin south to Alabama growing to 30m in height. Some notes on individual species 30 Yew Ttxus baccata. (19.0m height) List is by numbers on map and on tree, common name, One of the three native conifers, but o f limited commercial botanical name. Tallest or finest specimens in Great Britain value. CTiaracteristic of alkaline soils and also common on the o' acid soils of New Forest. Native region Europe. N Africa and 3 are indicated f W Asia and growing to 18m in h e i^ t and 200cm or more in diameter. 1 Lawson C y p n a Chamaecyparis lewtoniana, (34.0m height) 31 Sitka Sprnce Picea ifrcAensii, (41.0m height) 2 Popular garden and hedge conifer. Many cultivated varieties. Now most widely planted tree in Britain. Introduced in 1831 n> Minor use as a timber tree in Britain, introduced in 1854. Native Grows especially fast in moist climate. Valuable timber for region SW Oregon and NW California and growing to 60m in paper pulp. Native region Alaska to California and growing to O orci h ei^ t. 90m in height. c 2 Cherry Pnutus sp. 32 Bhutan Pine Firms wallichiana, (30.0m height) 3 Corsican Fine Firms nigra var maritima. (35.0m height). Only planted in gardens in Britain. Introduced in 1823. Native a> 3 Extensively planted in New Forest for its valuable timber and (A) Douglas Fir Pseudotsuga species, oval brown papery bud; no region the Himalayas west to Afghanistan and east to Nepal at high volume production. Introduced in 1759. Native r^io n pegat hare,- needles leave round scars when pulled off; needle 1800 - 3600m where It attaint IS • 45m In height. y. w Corsica, S. Italy and Sicily and growing to 45m in height. arising from flat round base; pointed bud, (B) SRver Fir Abies 33 Copper Beech Fagussyhiatica varcuprea, (28.0m height) 3 * o 4 Redwood Sei/uoie Sempervirens, (40.Umheight) species, blunt bud; no peg at base; needles leave round scars when A copper variety of our native beech. Legend has it that where n> I A Redwood of 110m (in 1966) in California was the tallest pulled off; needle arising from flat, round base; pointed bud. five brothers were killed in Zurich, Switzerland, purple seedlings known tree in the world. It was introduced into Britain in 1846 (C) Pine Pinus species, needles in two's, three's or five's according sprang up and produced purple coloured trees - from which all œ and is grown mainly as an ornamental. to species, needles in groups with sheath at base. our copper beech have originated. Native rMion California and coast of S. Oregon. 34& ;eN o.4 o 5 Deodar Cedar Cedrut deodara, (36.0mheight) Native region the coast of Monterey County in California and 35 Masidsae Pint Firms pinaster, ( 3 1.0m height) Planted mainly for ornamental purposes in Britain. Introduced growing to 30m in height. i Also known at Ouster pine. (Xten planted on the coast in south in 1831. Native region Himalayas and Rowing to 60m in height. 15 Japanwe Cedar Oyptomeria japonica, (31.0m height) of England, but rarely as a plantation. Introduced before 1660 ÏÏ 6 Western Himalayan Spruce Picea smithiana, ( 34.0m height) Often planted as an ornamental. Introduced in 1842. Native Native region Meditenanean as far east as Greece and growing A popular ornamental tree. Introduced in 1818. Native region region Japan and China growing to 45 m in height. to 35m in height. W Himalayas, growing to 45m in height. 16, 17. Oder Gum Eucalyptus gunnti. 36 See No.31 7 European Silver Fir Xhies ariw. (34.0m height) I K) Planted in 1962 as a trial to establish these Australian trees. 37 See No.8 4^ Important timber tree in Europe, but little planted in Britain Frost protection is needed and is provided by the surrounding 38 Northern Pitch Pine Finus rigida, W owing to insect attack. Introduced approx. 1603. Native region woodland. Planted only in Arboreta. Introduced about mid 18th century. Mountains of Central and S Europe and growing to 45m in height 18 Swamp Cypreas Taxodium dlsrlchum,( 30.0m height) Native region Eastern N America and growing to 25m in height, 8 WeUiagtonia Sequoiadendron giganteum, (45.0m height) Planted only for ornamental purposes. Introduced in about 1640 39 See No.27 i Lives to over 3,(100 years in its native forests. Widely used as Native r ^ o n swamps of S of USA and growing to 45m in height. 40 Crimean Pine Pinus nigra var caramanica. ( 38.0mheight) an ornamental tree in Britain. Introduced in 1853. Native region 19 Black Italian Poplar Populus serotina (38.0m height) Oosely related to Corsican pine. Only planted in Arboreta. California and growing to 96m in height. Native region Asia Minor. 9 Noble Fir Ahiesprocem. (45.0m hei^t) The fastest growing broadleaved species in Great Britain. Poplar timber is much used in match manufacture and for fruit packing 41 See No. 10 1 Often planted as an ornamental and now more widely planted 42 No. 13 I cases. This specimen rvas planted in 1900 See in plantations on high level sites. Introduced in 1830. Native 43 See No. 23 region Washington and south to N California and growing to 20 Mybssd Poplar Tacamahaca (TXT 32) 76m in height. A recent hybrid. This group was planted in 1965. 44 See No. 40 21 Blue Gum Eucalyptus pauclflora salicifdOa. Planted in 1962. 45 ScoU Pine Anus syhestris, (29.0m height) 10 Western Red Cedar Thuja pikata, ( 37.0m height) Our one native conifer of commercial importance. A very Produces a natural durable timber much used for weather boards 22 Falae Acacia Robinia pseudoacacia. (24.0m height) 0 Native of Eastern America. valuable timber. Re-introduced into the New Forest in 1776. and roof shingles. Introduced in 1853. Native of Western N Native region Europe (including Scotland) W&N Asia and growmg America where it grows to 60m in height. 11 Chinese Fir Cunnittghamie lanceolata. 23 Weymouth Pine Finus strobus. (34 J)m height) to 45m in height. Planted only as an ornamental. Native region S and W China 4 Important timber in USA but little planted in Britain because 1 where the timber is used in coffin making. It grows to 45m of fungal attack. Named after Lord Weymouth of Longleat who o in height. planted many in early 18th Century. Timber known as Yellow 3 Pine. Native region Canada, N United States and growing to Further reading: 12 European Larch Larix decidua. ( 34.0mheight) Explore the New Forest. Official F.C. guide, 1975 CD Widely planted in Britain especially on private estates for its 75m in height. 2 4 S eeN o ^ New Forest Guide Map. F.C. leaflet. valuable timber. Introduced in 1861. Native region Alps of The Ornamenttd Drives. F.C. leaflet. o Central Europe to N Russia and Siberia and growing to 45m 25, 26 Serbian Spruce Picea omorlka. (17.0m height) Very similar to Norway spruce but not svidely planted because Oberwater Walk. F.C. leaflet. in height. New Forest Camping, armual F.C. leaflet. 13 ChBe Pine Araucaria araucaru, ( 22.0mheight) of its slower growth. Introduced in 1889. Native region SE B" Commonly known as Monkey Puzzle. Planted only as an Europe on calcareous sites and growing to 30m in height. a 27 Norway ^nicc (30.0mheight) ornamental although there is one small plantation in Sussex. Ftceaabtes. CD Introduced in 1795 Native region Chile to N Patagonia and The traditional Otristmas tree. Introduced to Britain approx. P growing to 45m in h c # t . 1548. Now extensively planted. Timbe» known as white deal 14 Monterey Pine Firms radiata, ( 35.0mheight) and a valuable pulp wood. Native region N and central Europe Used for shelter and ornamental purpose.: near the coast of and growing to 60m in height. ft) south and south west England. Extensively planted in fast 28 Douglas Fis Pseudotsuga menziesii, (38.0m height) growing plantations in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, Extensively planted arid valuable timber tree in Britain especially Deputy Surveyor New Forest. Queen's House Lyndhurst. where the timber is used for butter-boxes. Introduced in 1833. in the New Forest. Introduced 1827. Timber knoam as July 1980 Xi 10 II Pfhmwd ky LymdkwfW Phntimg C *..U d. H srdi«y, Hych«, Southam pton. The trees most influential in the making of the landscape at Bolderwood were those introduced by David Douglas (1799-1834). Douglas Fir {Pseudotsuga menziesii). Noble Fir {Abies procerd), Sitka Spruce {Picea sitchensis), Monterey Pine {Pinus radiata) and the Coast Redwood {Sequoia sempervirens) were all collected by Douglas during trips to America’s western seaboard between 1824-1827 and 1829- 1833^^^. Douglas was driven by a scientific passion to collect and describe new species whatever their form. His trips, however, were made on behalf of the Horticultural Society and paid for by subscriptions from wealthy members. In return they received seeds from the new exotic and rare plants found. The Society benefited by being at the forefront of the introduction of new species, while also feeding the patrons’ appetite for novelty (Musgrave et al 1999: 73). Such was the lure of new species for fashionable society that some funded their own plant hunting trips’ Another tree in the arboretum, the Western Red Cedar {Thuja plicata), was introduced by John Jeffrey in 1849 on his return from a trip to Oregon funded by a group of Scottish landowners.

By the 1830’s scientific expeditions were being sent all over the world. For example the Deodar Cedar {Cedrus deodara) and Bhutan Pine {Pinus wallichiana) are both native to the region of the Himalayas made famous by Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker’s rhododendron introductions. Hooker went on to become the second Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and one of the most influential botanists of the 19^^^ century. In the south-western comer of the arboretum is a Japanese Cedar {Cryptomeria japonica). This was introduced in 1842 by Robert Fortune, also a Horticultural Society collector, during his exploration of a newly accessible China. Fortune made extensive use of the new Wardian cases, small portable green houses, which meant considerably more specimens were viable after the long sea trip home.

The Coast Redwood{Sequoia sempervirens) has an interesting tale attached. It was first described by Menzies who was astounded at its size. Douglas reputedly collected seeds and seedlings but they were lost sometime during the trip home (Musgrave et al 1999:72). Eventually the tree found its way to

Britain in 1843 by way of Portugal (Harding, P and Tomblin, G. 1996:23)

See, for example the history of Westembirt Arboretum in Gloucestershire. This is a major arboretum that was energetically planned and planted from the 1850’s by Captain Robert Holford.

Further information can be found at http://www.forestrv.gov.uk/westonbirt.

244 While scientific exploration might have led the way in bringing new plants to the old world, commercial exploitation was never far behind. One of the first to realise the potential in the new suburban gardens was John Loudon who marketed easily digested horticultural information through his Encyclopaedia of Gardening (1822) and the novel idea of a gardening magazine (1826). The new gardeners needed the new plants and catering for this demand was the firm of Veitch and Sons whose nursery in Chelsea dominated the commercial market for nearly fifty years. Their success was partly due to their foresight in sending out twenty-two plant hunters specifically for the Veitch nurseries. It is one of the Veitch collectors, William Lobb, who brought back sufficient viable seed to market the Coast Redwood {Sequoia sempervirens) and introduced the Giant Redwood {Sequoiadendron giganteumŸ^^ This latter was a highly popular tree but caused considerable argument when it was named Wellingtonia after the Duke of Wellington - the Americans thought it should be Washingtonia.

Bolderwood arboretum represents a fusion of powerful forces and influences: money, high fashion and scientific endeavour mesh social pre-eminence with political necessity. Plant hunting, the growth of profitable nursery businesses, together with newly affluent middle-classes all add to an understanding of the context in which Bolderwood arboretum was planted. In this sense Bolderwood becomes a botanical shorthand of empire, a living map of the whirl of scientific interest at the time, and a physical testament to the political machinations of the Office of Woods. This of course does not exhaust the possibilities in the making of the landscape at Bolderwood. We could, for instance, discuss geology and erosion, or look back to the peculiar set of historical circumstances that created a place called Bolderwood “Walk”, or indeed forward to the sporadic plantings and increasing tourism of the 20^^ century. But it would be difficult to avoid the shadow cast by the Victorian plantings.

Not only did this create a physical landscape, but it also created an important vector in a topology of management that we can trace today. Perhaps one of the greatest powers

William Lobb is credited with introducing the Giant Redwood because he had the plant classified even though the tree had been brought to Britain four months earlier.

245 of those who ‘manage’ is their ability to set the terms by which they frame their objects of knowledge. This becomes an important way of imagining the landscape, of creating it in terms of a series of ‘givens’ that precludes alternate visions. For Peter, Bolderwood presents a complex of human and natural interactions and seems to offer a number of alternate paths for making decisions. It also, however, creates some of those very parameters by which Peter is able to imagine alternative paths. Nature is inextricably grown together with the human world of aesthetics and politics. A nature- near topology is made further possible for Bolderwood, because the nature-far constructions are absent in the planning map stage. Bolderwood is depicted and characterised as an area given over to recreation. By that initial construction of place, value in terms of ‘habitat’ and ‘biodiversity’ is already distant, hidden behind the metaphorical wall of the “invasive” and “destructive” effects of thousands of visitors. It is, we could argue, more difficult to create a nature-far topology for some environments. Peter is denied the certainty of nature-far topologies for Bolderwood and perhaps, with that lack of surety, is clearer about the difficulties of deciding on strategy.

I need to make sure that bit of the forest I have influence in, is in-keeping and

appropriate to its character. Beyond that...well...what do you think?

(Peter, June 2000)

C onclusion

Using recent anthropological work on ecology and the environment it has been argued that antiessentialism, grounded in a dwelling perspective, is a revealing way of furthering investigations into human relationships with their environments. The approach suggested ways in which questions that step outside the western framework of a nature-culture ontology can be asked of ecological constructions in Britain. To do this the notion of a topology of management was introduced as a way of imagining and tracing the particular shape of a process of management as it emerges from an amalgam of discursive, symbolic, practical and physical arrangements. A dwelling perspective was used to separate certain assumptions built into these topologies and then to trace the implications of these in creating the Forest as a subject for management interventions. It was proposed that two distinct topologies of

246 management, nature-far and nature-near, operate in Hatfield Forest and the New Forest. While both topologies exist within an ontological system that posits the separation of the world of nature from the world of human production, nature-near topologies allow a larger role for humans in the making of woodland landscapes. Under nature-far topologies the boundary between these two categories is more strongly policed, maintaining fine-grained distinctions between the natural and the artificial or exotic. With the rising emphasis on environmental priorities, and the greater influence of ecologists within both the National Trust and Forestry Commission organisations, the assertion of nature-far values in the landscape reflects broader national and international political changes. Indeed, landscapes previously valorised mainly for their heritage status, are now sieved for their environmental value as well. Thus it is not sufficient to value Bolderwood only for its ability to speak of a particular Victorian history but also for its ability to support a population of rare birds.

I have further attempted to draw connections between forest landscapes, political articulations, and the creation of certain kinds of subjects - of what should and should not find a place in the Forest. For instance, among other nature-far discourses, ‘habitats’ and ‘biodiversity’ are found to be powerful cultural constructs that include aesthetic and political articulations created in the context of the landscape. On the other hand, in nature-near topologies, while humans are accorded a significant role in the making of the landscape, the problem remains: which particular historical moment should be the focus of management interventions? Furthermore, in both topologies the physical landscape is shown to be not simply something to which things are done, a passive object to the organising knowledge of the managers, but rather a semi-active participant, and one that itself limits the field of options available to decision-makers.

One result of identifying two different topologies of management is a better understanding of some of the political dilemmas managers in which managers of Forests find themselves. While these topologies often coexist they each have a momentum in a different political direction. Nature-far topologies, reflecting changes in broader society that increasingly valorise the ‘environment’ in its broadest sense, are becoming more and more sophisticated in fielding scientific arguments to

247 underpin their interventions. This represents, to some extent, a hardening of professional attitudes - a ‘we know and you don’t’ syndrome.

We can’t let everyone do what they want because it will be a disaster. Nor can you

say that what we manage the Forestfo r is just a matter o f choice. We have a

consistent policy and that is based on proper knowledge and information. I know

that even among the experts there is a lot of disagreement but you can’tsay that. In

the eyes of some people that would be admitting that we don’t know! And then

everything we have worked for would be lost. And another thing. If you open up

the decision making process to everyone at what level do you draw the line? Is it

Just locals? What about the importance of the New Forest at a national level or

even international? It’s a nice idea to get everyone involved, but you’ve got to be

realistic.

(Ecologist, July 2000)

Conversely, nature-near topologies tend to be driven in an opposite direction. Once a landscape is recognised as being historically contingent, a matter of emphasis or choice, and not essentialist nature, it admits a greater degree of uncertainty and permeability to the decisions managers make. Thus, on the one hand, emphasising nature at risk makes managers feel increasingly obligated to control and protect what is thereby valued from people who do not know or just care less. On the other hand, a recognition of the uncertainty underpinning management interventions in nature-near instances results in a pressure to have decisions validated and understood by a wider group of people. Hence a growing emphasis at both Hatfield and the New Forest, and in environmental agencies generally, on the importance of communicating with ‘stakeholders’. This role is vital for the wardens at Hatfield, and even more dramatically demonstrated in the establishment and rapid growth over the last five years of the Rangers department in the New Forest. The difficulties of communicating and justifying management interventions in the New Forest is subject to wry, but pointed comment, as another extract from the Log Roll demonstrates.

248 Work at Bolderwood

Important Work Is happening at Bolderwood which we understand and you do not. 1 We have closed the paths and quite frankly your presence is a hindrance to our Important Work.

We would therefore be grateful if you would return to Southampton and not darken our cattle grids again.

Thankyou

for further information please contact the rangers team at

Forestry Commission

Figure 21: “Important work” (from Log Roll, 'Millennium edition')

The impact of recent theoretical developments coupled with pressure for more openness and a questioning of scientific ‘knowledge’, has led, I would suggest, to an increasing emphasis on the importance of communication. As more resources are diverted to this nexus the need to understand the relationships between management topologies and landscapes also grows in importance. This chapter has attempted to present and trace two examples of these topologies.

At another level following arguments that cast ecology free from its ontological moorings can be an exhilarating experience. Forests in England have moved from economic production to leisure, from a place integrated in agricultural aspects of rural

249 life to history preservation and personal recovery. Now what are they for? For people like Peter at Bolderwood the result is a search for new ways of justifying management interventions, a situation that leaves him groping for a way that expresses something important but still recognising his personal interest: a reflexive uncertainty. “The best I can do is explain why I am making these decisions”. Nature-near and nature-far topologies are not mutually exclusive and nor do managers operate only in one or other mode (although they may well tend towards one or other). But rather than a conflation of these topologies occurring, each has a propensity to adhere to specific places in the Forest. Peter is engaged in a nature-near management topology at Bolderwood, but ask him about mires, and the points of reference change to a nature- far arrangement. Hence we can say that landscapes attract habitual modes of management and these modes are culturally expressive. Russell (1996) puts it clearly:

If we are going to succeed in understanding what is a wood (or what is Nature) we

need to acknowledge that purely scientific or statistical analysis will take us only

so far and indeed may deny us a richer experience of the reality. We must at least

acknowledge that value judgements are implicit in conservation and respect the

aesthetic roots which nurture preferences.

(Russell 1996:5)

250 Conclusion

In Landscape and Memory Schama (1995) defines his subject in typically mellifluous prose.

Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata o f memory as from layers o f rock.

(Schama 1995:6-7) In this Study I have argued that landscape is as much the work of the senses as it is the repose of the mind. The link between discourse and landscape, mind and material culture, is made in processes and actions of dwelling. This has not been dogmatically pursued. Rather I have attempted to discuss both discourse and action together, taking note, instead, of the points at which thoughts and ideas enter the world and at how the world articulates those same discourses of the mind. For instance, we have seen how ideas of ‘naturalness’ emerge directly in material culture as physical areas, actual boundaries, spaces where there are appropriate and inappropriate ways of behaving. Such material and cultural constellations, in turn, structure the ways in which we rethink the Forest.

Hatfield Forest and the New Forest have been explored through a series of ‘people’ prisms illustrating, among other things, the degree to which their landscapes are already deeply political, personally meaningful, and enmeshed in controversy. This study started with the question that Clark et al asked in their report on the countryside for the Council for the Protection of Rural England. “Given the intense pressures on the countryside, how can people's increasingly varied aspirations and values be accommodated?” (1994:5). The authors make a case for analysing the deep cultural tensions that arise from the widely disparate expectations of what the countryside is for. Given events over the last few years, especially the BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) crisis, the steps taken by the government towards an outright ban of fox-hunting and a right-to-access bill, the mass demonstrations by the Countryside Alliance in London, the rapidly growing market for organic produce, and the Foot and Mouth crisis in 2001, the countryside is at issue as never before. And central to the rising political and cultural temperature are the mobilisations developing either side of fault lines of belief about the future of the countryside.

251 These fault lines run as much through the organisations managing the countryside as they do between rural and urban populations, or between rich and poor. For people working in organisations that manage the Forests, significant allegiances often run counter to the aims of the management. The work gangs and volunteers see the Forest very differently to the management, ecologists oppose economic forestry almost as much as the Commoners disagree with the ecologists, and the higher echelons of the Forestry Commission and the National Trust often have very different visions for the future of the Forests from the staff on the ground. While there is insufficient space here to fully explore the legal framework and the effects of statutory designations^ or the perspectives of other organisations and pressure groups^ the evidence points strongly to similar cross-cutting allegiances without lessening the strength of feeling that motivates individuals. From this research it is possible to recognize five major points which underpin current mobilisations about the countryside: the degree to which these mobilisations reflect identity; the relationship to and with the material culture of Forests; the relationship with animals and plants; and, at a broader level, how these interact with the policy decisions of management organisations; and economic, structural and social pressures. These are interlinking factors and it is difficult to consider one without reference to others. However, I will comment on the economic, social and policy arenas first, as they provide the structural warp to the detailed weave that has been the focus in this research. In effect this is an attempt to place the results of my research within a broader framework and consider the implications for further investigation.

A summary of applicable statutory designations and the political backdrop to these for the New

Forest, can be found in Tubbs (2001: 92-110), and, from the Verderers’ perspective, in Passmore

(1977). For Hatfield, Rackham (1989:259-272) briefly reviews the equivalent period in his last chapter.

At the New Forest Show in the New Forest enclosure in 1999,1 counted 17 ‘interest’ groups, which included national organisations like Friends of the Earth, Council for the Protection of Rural England,

National Trust, Ramblers, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, as well as area specific groups like the N.F.Commononers Defence Association, the N.F. Pony breeding and Cattle society, and the Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society.

252 Economie and social changes

In economic and employment terms forests have declined significantly in importance throughout the 20^ century. While forestry operations still provide a substantial income in the New Forest this is considerably less than that derived from recreation'''^. At Hatfield, on a smaller scale, visitors provide the main income with timber and wood being sold to a small number of specialists at their annual fair. At the same time the numbers of people in and around both Forests that make their living from farming and agriculture have substantially dropped. On the other hand, both Forests have seen a dramatic increase in the number of people living in the towns and villages at their perimeter. Near Hatfield, the close proximity of Stansted Airport and the Ml 1 with good links into London, has resulted in a rising demand for housing and several new housing estates have been built on the edges of Bishops Stortford. In the New Forest, much of the growth has been on the Southampton side between Totton and Waterside along the east perambulation of the Forest. One result of this pressure is the dramatic increase in house prices, which is often the subject of bitter comment by locals, and according to one informant, “the beginning of the end of a rural way of life” (NF, August 2001). There is little doubt that, in the wake of increases in population and in changing patterns of employment, a fundamental transformation of the meaning of the Forests is under way.

In chapter 5 I commented on the class perceptions of the work gang. Their experiences are indicative of change. Life-long employment on the estates of large landowners, and the certainties of social roles that went with the worker-landowner relationship are no longer the norm. “Contracting-out” and short-term employment in the countryside narrows the gap between the experiences of rural workers and those of their compatriots in the city. The remaining influence of class distinction continues its dissolution into other forms of identity. In chapter 5, the work gang’s experience of these changing life parameters emerges in discussions about opportunities in the past, the available options for their children, and the effects of shifting gender roles. However, these observations about economic and social change need to be put against

Of a total income of £3,414,000 recreation and camping provide £1,894,000 while timber and woodland products give a return of 1,306,000. (Figures for 2000 kindly provided by Forestry

Commission)

253 one other significant transformation - the growth of leisure and tourism. Recreation is becoming a key modality in the perception and construction of contemporary woodland (Macnaghten & Urry 1998)^^.

Visitors and tourists are, perhaps, the group of people whose activities in the end carry the greatest impact in determining the future of Hatfield and the New Forest^ They have ‘appeared’ in each chapter: reading maps and learning the landscape in chapter 1; visiting Hatfield Forest and going on a ‘ramble through time’ in chapter 2; distant lycra-clad and “ignorant” in the landscapes of the followers of the Hunt in chapter 3. Visitors appear up-close and personal in Olwyn Mo watt’s view, in chapter 4, of the New Forest and her understandings of her current situation in relationship to other places and times. Visitors and tourists become consumers/audiences in the landscapes of the work gangs in chapter 5 and the managers in chapter 6. Indeed, from this perspective (and contrary to what the Commoners say) it could be argued that ultimately both the New Forest and Hatfield, were ‘saved’, from enclosure in the 19^^ century and industrial forestry in the 20th, by the pressure brought to bear by public and private individuals who began to see the Forests as valuable in their own right rather than simply as an economic or political resource. Indeed, the meaning and significance of leisure has evolved rapidly over the last two decades from 'trivial' (non-work) time, to becoming increasingly central in the social identity of individuals. What is done with leisure time becomes a matter of lifestyle choice rather than simply a break from work. Furthermore, the practice of these leisure identities within local landscapes has national and global significance both economically and in the emergence of new environmental issues.

This can also be seen in the marked rise in the number of research reports commissioned on woodlands and leisure over the last decade.

Tubbs puts it like this: “The Forest is a highly dynamic ecosystem resilient to trauma or catastrophe.

Indeed, events and processes, which can be regarded as catastrophic are to my mind part of the ecosystem. They include drought, hurricanes, summer fires, the recession of the beech population, intensive grazing and the past exploitation of the heaths for gravel, turf and marl. All such events, however, are cyclical or periodic. The new pressure for public recreation may be an altogether different matter” (Tubbs 2001:350).

254 In terms of income the effect of the Foot and Mouth crisis has been devastating for both Forests. In the New Forest, particularly, the closing of most areas hit hard. During the crisis staff at the Forestry Commission describe receiving telephone calls from hoteliers, people running bed and breakfast accommodation, and those owning businesses relying on the tourist trade asking them to reopen the Forest as fast as possible. At the same time the FC staff were fielding calls from Commoners asking them to keep it closed as long as possible to protect their livestock from infection. At several points the Forestry Commission was facing threats of legal action from both sides. The argument that commoning practices have played a vital role in the making of the landscape in the New Forest is well made (Tubbs 2001:359). However, the economic reasons that sustained commoning are losing their persuasiveness in the face of the amount of income and employment generated by visitors - a fact that the Foot and Mouth crisis has strongly highlighted. I anticipate that there is some distance yet to go in finding a balance between a sustainable industry that provides significant employment on one hand, and the practices that have created and maintained the landscapes that the visitors want to see. A prime arena for this contest will be over the political control of expressions of identities (see discussion below).

The context of Management Policies

Also influential at the structural level are the policy decisions of management bodies. Since the CPRE report was published (1994), public and non-govemmental organisations charged with the conservation and economic management of woods and forests in Britain have been reviewing their management plans in the light of a series of post-Rio initiatives about sustainability. Such initiatives operate at different levels. One attempt to produce global guidelines for sustainable forestry has been developed by the Global Forest Stewardship Council. Nationally there is a UK forestry standard developing under the Forestry Authority (within the Forestry Commission), and the UK Forestry Accord, and locally there are projects initiated under the Agenda 21 plans. It is not clear, however, how successful attempts to provide accreditation for sustainable forestry are. Indeed, it could be argued that sustainability has become the new rhetorical wallpaper to paste over the deeper cultural tensions to which the CPRE report refers. One problem with national and global standards is that they fail to take into account the particular socio-cultural circumstances that managers of specific

255 forests face and that have been discussed in the preceding chapters^ Such circumstances illustrate the distance between the decisions that managers make and the rhetoric of policy initiatives.

Despite claims to be running a successful multi-use operation at the New Forest, at the national level, the Forestry Commission is still embedded in a cost/benefit approach, notwithstanding the growing realisation of its drawbacks. This realisation is reflected in various commissioned research projects which are aimed at clarifying how to deal with recreation demands. For instance, Goodall and Whittow (1973) first examined the recreational potential - in terms of profit - of woodlands in Britain. However, it was Willis and Benson's (1988) analysis of values in recreation that proved influential. They studied forest areas across Britain focussing on fifteen different clusters of value. Using a travel-cost method and a contingent valuation method they concluded that the average worth of visits to forests was £2/visit. Principally this allowed managers to argue for investment (but it was also limited by the relatively small estimation). More recently a UK Day-Visitor Survey (1992) estimated 350 million visits to woodland per year and an average spend per visit of £3.20. The narrowness of this method of valuing forests completely ignores many of the other ways in which people engage with their surroundings that have been discussed in the previous chapters. Indeed, a report entitled The Place o f forests in Modern Welsh Culture (Psychology Unit, Bangor University 1998) argues that the different meanings people attached to forests led to communication failure between them and the Forestry Commission - a finding which would not surprise many New Forest people. The respondents' values were based in personal values and the

At a conference on forests and leisure (Chiltems University College, November 1998) John Tribe, head of the Tourfor Project, an investigation into the introducing a European wide 'green flag' system for forests (similar to the successful 'blue flag' award system for beaches), pointed out the difficulties in implementing any universal accreditation system even on a general level. While partners in the project in Spain faced problems of extensive overuse of certain forests, those in Norway were attempting to attract more visitors to theirs. In both situations the cultural context and specific valuations accorded to forests made a green-flag system difficult to apply. “Like apple pie and family values”, Tribe suggested, “a green flag award is something that most can agree to in principle but find difficult to put into practice”.

256 connection of trees to concepts of nature. Economic values - which have governed the FC since its conception - were virtually ignored^

Recent management agendas can be summarised along two ranges of concern: aspects of property ownership and control, and corresponding (but often opposed) considerations about accountability and stakeholders*^^. There has been a lively debate over the authoritarian and conservative nature of bodies such as the FC and the

N t ^^o NT and perhaps more so, the FC, have been scrambling to regain the initiative (Winter 1996:191). Principally they have been reassessing whom they should consider as stakeholders and how their accountability as organisations should be expressed, a crucial point given Brosius’ (1999) observations (chapter 6). The NT has conducted an exhaustive internal policy review involving “grass roots” employees and external experts to investigate the impact of the new thinking on its way of holding and managing large tracts of land (Winter 1996:191). One result is a “statements of significance” project which asks “Significant for whom?” and “In what ways?” The FC have recently been emphasising their credentials of allowing free access on all their land*^*. In a number of organisations the conclusions reached are

Terence, Lee and Surrey (1989) claimed a similar position in their examination of perception,

attitudes and preferences. They used focus groups and expert seminars, household surveys and visitor

counts, and interviewed landscape architects. They divided visitors into categories; forest enthusiasts,

day-trippers, sports enthusiasts, and dog walkers (1 out of 5 people). Crucial characteristics for these

groups were: water, space, and diversity. They also noted the importance of ideas of solitude, peace and freedom in a natural environment

In terms of the first point Simon and Aitken (1992) surveyed the attitudes of private owners of woodland across five areas in England. The interviews and administered questionaire indicated a wide diversity of views among owners, but for all control was important. For example, of those who encouraged access most preferred locals and school groups (who were supervised) over 'outsiders' who were deemed to be more likely to damage the area and create a mess.

Wright for example has this to say about the Trust. "The inalienability o f the Trust's property can be regarded (and also staged) as a vindication of property relations; a spectacular enlistment of the historically defined categories 'natural beauty' and 'historic interest' which demonstrates how private property simply is in the public interest." (1985:52). See Bender 1998 for a recent statement of this position.

A study by Peter Scotts Planning Service (1997) on plans for wood recreation and accessibility, commissioned by the FC, highlights how difficult forest land is to access. Of those forests with least access, 58% were in private ownership. In the case studies, even though access was allowed, in many

257 that there suggest the need for the development of methodologies for finer-grained understanding of what people want, an understanding that should focus also on non use values of forests.

The attempt, in chapter 6, to define and articulate two distinct topologies of management, nature-far and nature-near, operating in Hatfield Forest and the New Forest, is one step in developing a tighter focus. Nature-near topologies allow a larger role for humans in the making of woodland landscapes, while under nature-far topologies the boundary between these two categories is more strongly policed, maintaining fine-grained distinctions between the natural and the artificial or exotic. With the rising emphasis on environmental priorities, and the greater influence of ecologists within both the National Trust and Forestry Commission organisations, the assertion of nature-far values in the landscape reflects broader national and international political changes.

The centrality of identity

The construction of identity, in contingent and contextual circumstances, is a theme often returned to in this study. I have taken identity to be not simply about performing a ‘self for consumption by others, in the sense of Goffman and his followers, but about trying to understand the processes by which the options for an ordering of a self become both regimented and resisted. The conversations in chapter 4, in particular, attempted to illustrate this point. Identity is shown to be both ambiguous and contextual and the basis for strongly held beliefs and motivations. Following Mouffe (1995) and Sider and Smith (1997), it is useful to think of identities as being formed in both the exertion of power and hence difference, and in resistance to that power. For instance, the work gang (chapter 5) is both complied in the constructions of the managers and rebels against those same strictures in many small, but important, ways. In chapter 1, assertions of knowledge about the landscape become statements of robustly defended beliefs that are indivisible from senses of self.

instances it was actively deterred. All of which reflects better on the access privileges the Forestry

Commission allow.

258 Following Mouffe (1995), it is identity itself which is at stake rather than its connections to place or property. Most respondents who identified themselves as “country people” or “from the country”, spoke in terms of feeling their identity to be incredibly threatened by others who had little understanding of who they are. Given the current valorisation of ‘local’ it is not surprising that assertions of identity in both Forests are often embedded in claims over what it means to be located in and emotionally attached to place. But, as we have seen, who is and isn’t local is equally contested. At Hatfield, in chapter 2, the different constructions of place and their connection to skilful knowledge had the effect of creating personal and place identities that emphasised a public exterior (the plains and lake) over a more private internal area (the coppice woodland). In the conversations in chapter 4 there were several different claims being made to a ‘local’ identity.

On the other hand, there is now evidence from other tourist destinations to indicate the insufficiency of the claim that tourists are part of a global phenomenon that is slowly, but inevitably, dispossessing people of their homes, their societies and their cultures - although the place itself inevitably changes (Boissevain 1992, 1996, Picard 1992). Waldren (1996), in her intimate portrayal of the Mallorcan town of Deià, has this to say:

Drawing on traditional aspects of their past, insiders have found ways to combat the disruptions caused by outsiders; their sense of place and a consciousness of local distinctiveness are products of their relations with the outside world rather than the result of isolation. (Waldren 1996:ix)

Notions of 'community' may well be a creation by people when they are forced, for whatever reason, to articulate their sense of self/place in response to questioning/threat from outside. But as much as identifying oneself as part of a 'community' might be a reaction to outside questions or threats, the idiom of that expression is one that politically 'works' elsewhere, outside of the locale. 'Local community' becomes a useful articulation of self/place partly because of its currency on a national scale, where nostalgia and an environmental discourse conspire to make it culturally impactful. At the same time people whose lives are intimately tied to the Forest, find arenas and modes of expression that reinforce their mutual understandings of place and self (chapter 2, chapter 5).

259 Two examples serve to underline the extent to which an understanding of identity, in all its complexity, is crucial to the future of the Forests.

1. Tensions over 'heritage ’ The emphasis on commoning as a central feature in the creation and on-going management of the New Forest landscape results in a degree of privileged access to political power structures. The ability to practice certain rights of common, especially keeping ponies and cattle on the Open Forest, is crucial to the construction of a commoning identity. Despite commoning being an increasingly marginal activity, most are prepared to bear the expense of owning animals and look to their main income from elsewhere. This assertion increases their legitimacy and hence the pressure they are able to bring to negotiations with the FC and other statutory organisations. As a consequence communing activities attract a measure of interest. Hence, a concern often raised with the FC is to ensure that visitors appreciate the role Commoners play in maintaining the landscape.

An activity which is not advertised, but that interested parties can find out about, are the pony drifts. These are occasions, mostly in the autumn, when ponies are collected off the Forest, corralled, given injections against infection, marked, and some sold at auction. The drift itself takes considerable skill, determination and horse-riding ability. It is exciting for participants and on-lookers alike. With the declining numbers of Commoners there are fewer people directly involved in the drifts. However, more and more visitors are interested in the spectacle, leading to complaints from Commoners that too many people are turning up as spectators endangering themselves and the success of the drift. Moreover, they said, the visitors did not understand what they were doing. For their part the FC support for the drift by providing Volunteer Rangers who liase with the Commoners, informing the public and closing paths as necessary. Moreover in trying to foster better working relationships with the Commoners, the FC has a vested interest in being successful at these roles. In 2001, having consulted with the Verderers and the Commoners Defence Association, the FC tried setting up a guided visit to a drift. From the Commoners point of view numbers would be limited and controlled, and the Rangers would be able to provide information about commoning and the drift.

260 A few days before the first one of these trips was to happen permission was withdrawn. The reason given was that it was not right for the FC to charge and make money out of their work. “We are not heritage to be gawped at. This is our livelihood”. Later speculation in the office was that this was done in retaliation because the Health and Safety Officer had just told the Commoners that they were no longer allowed to let their children take part in the drift as it was too dangerous. Given the ideas of toughness, self-reliance, and learning the hard way that are a frequent thread of self identity among the Commoners, this was taken very badly.

2. Creation o f an interest group by Foot and Mouth crisis. As the F&M crisis dragged on, the Forestry Commission began a programme of opening limited parts of the Forest. At the same time they were enforcing a much stricter policy on keeping dogs on leads. The ecologists and bird watchers were delighted and began talking about “the greater concentration of ground-nesting birds” because birds were no longer suffering from dog disturbance. Dog walkers, however, used to letting their dogs run freely, were becoming worried. Several people started to ask staff whether this was the beginning of a change in rules, and where to register their complaints. They were told that in order to have a say in the decisions they needed to create a group that the FC could negotiate with. A Dog Walkers Association was duly created as a direct result of the impact of Foot and Mouth on peoples’ practice. Creating a ‘stakeholder’, in this way, staff said later, made it easier to get self-regulation in place.

Then its not us telling them to keep the dog on the lead during the nesting season, it’s the

Association which we have an agreement with. If they abuse us because they don’t like it we

can tell them to take it up with the Association.

(Ranger, NF 2001) While dog walkers account for up to a quarter of all visits to the Forest, one of the single largest interest groups, until this crisis there was little sense of a united identity. Under pressure, unconscious practice is transformed and made political.

261 The engagement of material culture

A key theoretical concern in this research has been to investigate the connections between material culture and peoples’ senses of place. The role of trees, tools, maps, signs, gates, physical features, sounds and animals, in making place and making self have been closely examined in the previous chapters. In emphasising the argument for paying close attention to the points at which ideas and action intersect, I have found it useful to consider material culture as a semi-actant in social life. Hence, trees are not simply symbolic stores waiting to be raided, or signs waiting to be filled, but have a moment of their own - a being-ness that adds to the sum of social life. Trees are able to materialise a human history, to make our history slow, as well as their ovm organic dwelling. Considering things as more animate rather than inanimate, enables us to take account of a two-way process - being influenced by the structures that surround us and making those structures is the same process. At Hatfield growing trees and growing selves are part and parcel of making place. Indeed, it is possible to say, as Rival (1998) has suggested, that trees in Britain are able to materialise many of the same concerns found in cross-cultural contexts. They can be a prime metaphor of life, able to embody notions of self, society and place, stand for nature, and are venerated for their great age and their ability to carry the past into the present. In addition Forests have been shown to be metaphors of freedom for the work gang, but also rangers, keepers, foresters, and wardens and visitors. What that ‘freedom’ means however is highly contingent. For many visitors it is cast in terms of freedom from “work”. For the work gang, it is freedom to exercise their knowledge and skill away from the supervision of managers.

A similar approach to tools, has been equally illuminating. Several chapters have explored how tools like chainsaws, maps, and spades are able to make place and identity. Tools work in two directions: as the way of framing and creating objects of knowledge, the professional skills and ideas that find their clarification in and through tool use; and, in how those ideas become physically enmeshed in the landscape. Paying attention to the physicality of people’s relationship to the landscape has been successful inasmuch as it is able to show unconscious ways of being, things that on their own seem trivial but that taken together add to our understanding of how powerful identities and notions of place are constructed.

262 Connections were also drawn between forest landscapes, political articulations, and the creation of certain kinds of subjects - of what should and should not find a place in the Forest. In chapter 6 the physical landscape is shown to be not simply something to which things are done, a passive object to the organising knowledge of the managers, but rather a semi-active participant, and one that itself limits the field of options available to decision-makers. In a move that highlights the connections between the sections in this conclusion, I identified two different topologies of management and argued that this allowed a better understanding of some of the political dilemmas in which managers of Forests find themselves. Under nature-far topologies, which reflect the valorisation of the ‘environment’, managers are becoming more and more sophisticated in fielding scientific arguments to underpin their interventions. This represents, to some extent, a hardening of professional attitudes - a ‘we know and you don’t’ syndrome. Conversely, nature-near topologies admit a greater degree of uncertainty and permeability to the decisions managers make. Thus, on the one hand, emphasising nature at risk results in increasing attempts to control and protect valued landscapes from people who do not care. On the other hand, a recognition of the uncertainty underpinning management interventions in nature-near instances, increases pressure to have these decisions validated by a wider group of people. Hence, a growing emphasis at both Hatfield and the New Forest, and in environmental agencies generally, on the importance of ‘stakeholders’ returns us to the problematic arena of contested identities. One of the most difficult things for agencies managing Forests to admit, are the limits of their knowledge, and the equally painful implication that considerably more effort needs to be put into public communication and consultation. I would argue that a recognition of the fundamental importance of creating genuine arenas for discussion, however much they frustrate managers’ senses of needing to “do” things, should be a prime aim of management of publicly accessed (and funded) Forests.

The construction of relationships with ‘nature’ and animals

Forests throw people into contexts which force consideration of their relationships with ‘nature’. How people perceive Forest landscapes is fundamentally to do with how they construct and relate to the fauna and flora they are faced with. In chapter 3

263 the perceptions of the landscape by members of the New Forest Foxhounds were considered. Their senses of a passionate landscape emerge in and across a number of contextual terrains. Sound, sight and scent are linked through the foxhunt in a dramatic performance of landscape. But for the members this is not simply a one-off performance, but part of an ongoing expression of relationship to the countryside. It emerges in a consideration of clothes and colours, in the expansion of a set of feelings about radios, mobile telephones and cars, and in expositions about wildness in animals. Each manifestation, contradictory and partial as it often is, is a commentary on self-identity and on the place of that identity in relation to conceptions of what is ‘natural’. Members of the hunt talk about hounds pursuing the fox as an expression of a deep natural relationship found in the ‘wild’, which is performed in this peculiarly cultural way because there is little real nature left. For the antis, there is nothing quite so unnatural as dogs chasing another predator.

The focus developed in this thesis, informed by a phenomenological perspective which pays attention to those precise points where the material and the semiotic intersect, lends itself to a consideration of sensual landscapes which goes beyond the visual. However, while we may see, hear, feel and taste the same things in the landscape, they often mean quite different things. Birds calling in the trees are studied by hunt members for what they reveal of the progress of the hunt; for antis they reveal the disturbance caused to nature by the hunt; for bird watchers the particular species is important while for many others the calls are an unnoticed part of the texture of place. These differences become woven into a moral topology that is powerfully motivated by conceptions of what is natural. In each chapter in this study, the particular prism of ‘the Forest’ at issue, is as much about a morally freighted way of being in the landscape as it is about the sensuous constituents.

Even for ecologically trained professionals, concepts of nature remain plastic, subject not just to a scientific discourse, but also to aesthetic judgements and an ethical sensibility. Chapter 6, which deals directly with the theoretical implications of a deconstruction of ideas of nature, argues that there are two opposing modes nature- near and nature-far that filter the perceptions and decisions of the Forest managers. Understanding how these work is important because they have a direct effect on not

264 just the physical landscape we experience, but also on the landscape we make. ‘Nature’ never just is, it is always powerfully political and moral.

Several avenues touched on in this study merit further attention. In the wake of the BSE and Foot and Mouth crises, the issue of the relationship between humans and animals, both wild and domestic, is, once again, firmly on the agenda. The increasing distance of the majority of the population in urban centres from the processes of mass production of animal products in the countryside is becoming a political flash point for the arguments over the future of the countryside. This is more than simply the difference between those that relate to animals primarily as pets or distant representatives of nature, and those for whom animals are connected to work. Indeed, it is a contest which is all the more marked in Forests where leisure is pitted against production in blunter terms than might be found in agricultural countryside. An allied theoretical aspect, raised by attempts to use phenomenological insights to uncover animal ‘natures’, is the degree to which this approach can be linked to an ethical understanding of being-with animals (Steeves 1999).

If one set of contests cluster around perceptions of what is valuable and what is ignored in nature, or what is to be protected and what left un-valued in plant, animal and bird life, I suggest a second contest is broadly about access. This is not simply about access to a place (as important as this is) but also about who has right of entry to the valorised arrays of knowledge which animate various exclusions. If there is any sense in which Hatfield Forest and the New Forest are places invested in the public, then the fact that the public using the Forests is unrepresentative of the population as a whole need further consideration. Moreover, the ways in which local identities are currently exerted in terms of intimate ties to place, should merit attention. If, as Mouffe (1993) argues, identities are created in difference, then the flip side of the valorised local is the excluded outsider - and some people are more excluded than others. Equally, the short term, thoughtless visitor, exercises an identity at the cost of people who remain long after they have left. The managers of Forests in Britain have a unique opportunity. If they succeed in steering a path between strongly opposed conceptions of what the countryside is for, they can lead the way in developing a better understanding of the role and place of rural areas in the new century.

265 Bibliography

Am it, V. (ed.) (2000) Constructing the Field: ethnographic fieldwork in the Contemporary world, London: Routledge, Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, London: Verso. Atkinson, P. (1990) The Ethnographic Imagination: Textual Constructions of Reality, London: Routledge. Atran, S (1990) Cognitive Foundations of Natural History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Augé, M. (1995) Non-Places, London: Verso. Barnes, T. and Duncan, J. (eds.) (1992) Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape, London: Routledge. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: towards a new modernity, London: Sage. Beck, U. (1996) 'World Risk Society as Cosmopolitan Society'? Ecological Questions in a Framework of Manufactured Uncertainties', Theory, Culture & Society, 13: 1-32. Bell, A. (1994) 'Climate of opinion: public and media on the global environment', Discourse and Society, 5: 33-64. Bell, M. M. (1994) Childerley: Nature and Morality in a Country Village, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Bender, B. (1993) 'Introduction: Landscape - meaning and action', in Bender, B. (ed.) Landscape: Politics and Perspectives, Oxford: Berg. Bender, B. (1998) Stonehenge: Making Space, Oxford: Berg. Bender, B. and Winer, M. (eds.) (2001) Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place, Oxford: Berg. Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing, London: BBC and Penguin Books. Berglund, E. K. (1998) Knowing Nature, Knowing Science: an ethnography of environmental activism, Knapwell, Cambridge: The White Horse Press. Berglund, E.K. (1999) Comments on Escobar, A. ‘After Nature: Steps to an Antiessentialist Political Ecology’, Current Anthropology, 40(1): 1-16. Berlin, B. (1992) Ethnobiological Classification: Principles of Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Biersack, A. (1999) ‘Introduction: From the “new Ecology” to the New Ecologies”, American Anthropologist, 101(1): 5-18.

266 Bloch, M. (1995) 'People into Places: Zafimaniry Concepts of Clarity', in Hirsh, E, and O'Hanlon, M. (eds) The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bloch, M. (1998) 'Why trees. Too, Are Good to Think With: Towards an Anthropology of the Meaning of Life', in Rival, L. (ed) The Social Life of Trees, Oxford: Berg. Boissevain (1992) 'Introduction: Revitalizing European Rituals', in Boissevain, J. (ed.) Revitalizing European Rituals, London: Routledge. Boissevain, J. (1996) 'Ritual, Tourism and Cultural Commoditization. Culture by the Pound?', in Selwyn, T. (ed.) The Tourist Image: Myths and Myth Making in Tourism, London: Wiley. Bonnemère, P. (1998) 'Trees and People: Some Vital Links. Tree Products and Other Agents in the Life Cycle of the Ankave-Ange of Papua New Guinea' in Rival, L. (ed) The Social Life of Trees Oxford: Berg Boon, J. (1982) Other Tribes, Other Scribes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boyer, P. (1994) The Naturalness of Religious Ideas. A Cognitive Theory of Religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Boyer, P. (1996) 'What makes anthropomorphism natural: intuitive ontology and cultural representations'. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2(1): 83-98. Bramwell, A, (1989) Ecology in the 2(f^ Century, New Haven CT: Yale University Press. Brod, H. (ed.) (1987) The Making of Masculinities: The New Men's Studies, Boston: Unwin Hyman. Brody, H. (1981) Maps and Dreams, London: Faber and Faber, Brosius, J P. (1999a) ‘Analyses and Interventions: Anthropological Engagements with Environmentalism’, Current Anthropology, 40(3):277-309. Brosius, J. P. (1997a) ‘Endangered forest, endangered people: environmentalist representations of indigenous knowledge’. Human Ecology, 27:97-110. Brosius, J. P. (1997b) ‘Prior transcripts, divergent paths: Resistance and acquiescence to logging logging in Sarawak, East Malaysia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 39: 468-510. Brosius, J. P. (1999b) ‘Green Dots, Pink Hearts: Displacing Politics from the Malaysian Rain VoxQsP, American Anthropologist, 101(1): 36-57. Buchli, V {\999) An Archaeology of Socialism, Oxford: Berg. Burawoy, M. et al. (2000) Global ethnography: forces, connections, and imaginations in a postmodern world, Berkeley: University of California Press. Burgess, J. (1995) Growing in Confidence: understanding people's perceptions of urban fringe woodlands. Countryside Commission, CCP 457.

267 Burgess, J. (1996) 'Editorial: The Future for Landscape Research', Landscape Research Vol 21,Nol,5-12 Burkitt, I. (1999) Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity & Modernity, Sage: London. Burns et al (2000) The Committee of Inquiry into Hunting with Dogs, London. Campbell, H. (2000) ‘Pub Drinking?’, Rural Sociology, 65 (1). Campbell, H., Law, R. and Honeyfield, J. (1999) ‘What is means to be a Man: Hegemonic Masculinity and the Reinvention of Beer’, in Law, R., Campbell, H. and Dolan, J. (eds) Masculinities in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Palmerston North, NZ; Dunmore Press. Carr (1986) English Foxhunting, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Cartmill, M. (1993) A view to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Clark, G., Darrall, J., Grove-White, R., Macnaghten, P. and Urry, J. (1994) Leisure Landscapes: Main Report, London: Council for the Protection of Rural England Clifford, J (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the late Twentieth Century, London: Harvard University Press. Clifford, J and Marcus, G. (eds.) (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press. Cloke, P. (1994) '(En)culturing Political Economy: A Life in the Day of a 'Rural Geographer', in Cloke, P et al (1994) Writing the Rural: five cultural geographies, London: Paul Chapman Publishing. Cockbum, C. and First-Dilic, R. (eds.) (1994) Bringing technology home: gender and technology in a changing Europe, Buckingham (England), Philadelphia: Oxford University Press, Cohen, A. P. (ed) (2000) Signifying Identities: Anthropological Perspectives on boundaries and Contested values, London: Routledge. Connell, R. W. (1987) Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics, Sidney: Allen and Unwin. Connell, R. W. (1995) Masculinities, St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin. Cooper, D. (1997) “ For the sake of the deer’: Land, local government and the hunt’, The Sociological Review, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 668-689 Corbin, A. (1986) The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the social imagination, London: Picador. Cosgrove, D. (1990) 'Landscape studies in geography and cognate fields of the humanities and social sciences'. Landscape Research 15(3) 1-6. Cosgrove, D. (1993) 'Landscape and Myths, Gods and Humans' in Bender, B. (ed.) Landscape: Politics and Perspectives, Oxford: Berg.

268 Cosgrove, D. and Daniels, S. (eds.) (1988) The iconography of Landscape, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crumley, C. L. (1994) ‘Historical Ecology: A Multidimensional Ecological Orientation’, in Crumley, C. L. (ed.) Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes, Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Daniels, S. and D. Cosgrove (1988) ‘Introduction: Iconography and Landscape’, in Cosgrove, D. and S. Daniels (eds) The Iconography of Landscape, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, D. (1988) ‘The Evocative Symbolism of Trees’, in Cosgrove, D. and Daniels, S. (eds.) The Iconography of Landscape, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dawkins, R (1989) The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Boeck, F. (1998) 'The rootedness of trees: place as cultural and natural texture in rural southwest Congo', in Lovell, N. (ed.) Locality and Belonging, London: Routledge. De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987) Thousand Plateaus, London: Athlone Press. Descola, P. (1996) 'Constructing Natures: Symbolic Ecology and Social Practice' in Lovell, N. (ed) (1998) Locality & Belonging London: Routledge Descola, P. and Palsson, G. (eds.) (1996) Nature & Society: Anthropological Perspectives London: Routledge Douglas, M. (1970) Natural Symbols. Explorations in Cosmology, New York: Vintage Books Dudley, N., J. Jeanrenaud, and F. Sullivan (1995) Bad harvest?: the timber trade and the degradation of the world's forests, London: Earthscan. Dunlap, R., Gallup, G. and Gallup, A. (1993) 'The health of the planet: a global concern'. Environment, 35: 7-15, 33-9. Eckersley, R. (1992) Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach, Albany: State University of New York Press. Edwards, B. (1994) ‘Mutuka Nyakunytja - Seeing a Motor Car. A Pitjantjatjara Text; Jacky Tjupuru Wankanyja’, Aboriginal History 18:2, Department of Pacific and South East Asian studies, Canberra: Australian National University Escobar, A. (1999) ‘After Nature: Steps to an Antiessentialist Political Ecology’, Current Anthropology, 40{\y 1-16. Feld, S. (1996) 'Waterfalls of song: an acoustemology of place resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea', in Basso, K. and Feld, S. (eds.) Senses of Place, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Font, X. and J. Tribe (eds) (2000) Forest Tourism and Recreation: Case Studies in Environmental Management, Wallingford: CABI Publishing.

269 Foucault, M. (1975) The Birth of the Clinic, New York: Vintage Books Geertz, C. (1988) Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cell, A (1999) The Art of Anthropology, London: Athlone Press Cell, A (1996) ‘Vogel’s net: traps as artworks and artworks as traps’. Journal of Material Culture,Yo\. 1(1): 15-38. Gell, A (1995) The language of the forest: landscape and phonological iconism in Umeda', in Hirsch, E. and O'Hanlon, M. (eds.). The Anthropology of Landscape, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gell, A (1992) ‘The technology of enchantment and the enchantment of technology’, in Coote, J. and Shelton, A. (eds.) Anthropology, art and aesthetics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gergen, K. J. (1994) Realities and Relationships: soundings in social construction, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gershuny, J. (1982) ‘Livelihood IV: household tasks and the use of time’, in Wallman, S. (ed.) Living in South London, Aldershot: Gower. Giambelli, R. (1998) The Coconut, the Body and the Human Being. Metaphors of Life and Growth in Nusa Penida and Bali' in Rival, L. (ed) (1998) The Social Life of Trees Oxford: Berg Goodwin, C. (1994) ‘Professional Vision’, American Anthropologist 96(3):606-633. Green, E and Adam, A (eds.) (2001) Virtual gender: technology, consumption and identity, London: Routledge. Grove-White, R. (1993) ‘Environmentalism: A new Moral Discourse’, in Milton, K. (ed) Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology, London: Sage. Grove-White, R. (1997) 'The environmental "valuation" controversy: observations on its recent history and significance', in J. Foster (ed.) Valuing Nature: economics, ethics and the environment, London: Routledge. Hannerz, U. (1992) Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organisation of Meaning, New York: Columbia University Press. Haraway, D. (1992) 'The promise of monsters', in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, and P. Treichler (eds.) Cultural Studies, London: Routledge. Haraway, D.J. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association Press. Harding, P and Tomblin, G. (1996) How to Identify Trees, London: Harper Collins Harrison, R. (1992) Forests: The Shadow of Civilisation, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Harvey, D. (1996) Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, London: Blackwell.

270 Howell, S. (1996) ‘Many contexts, many meanings? Gendered values of the northern Lio of Flores, Indonesia', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2: 253-69. Inglis, F. (1977) ‘Nation and community: a landscape and its morality’. Sociological Review, 25 489-514. Ingold, T (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill, London: Routledge. Ingold, T. (1986) The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on human ecology and social relations, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ingold, T. (1992) 'Culture and the Perception of the Environment', in Croll, E. and D. Parkin (eds.) Bush Base: Forest Farm, London: Routledge. Ingold, T. (1993) ‘The Temporality of Landscape’, World Archeology, 25: 152-174. Ingold, T. (1996) ‘Hunting and gathering as ways of perceiving the environment’, in Ellen, R. and Fukui, K. (eds.) Redefining Nature, Oxford: Berg. Ingold, T. (1996) ‘The optimal forager and economic man’, in Descola, P. and Palsson, G. (eds.) Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives, London: Routledge. Jacobson-Widding, A (1997) “ I lied, I farted, I stole...’: Dignity and morality in African discourses on personhood’, in Howell, S (ed.) The Ethnography of Moralities, London: Routledge. Jay, M. (1988) ‘Scopic regimes of modernity’, in Foster, H. (ed.) Vision and Visuality, Seattle: Bay Press. Johnston, B. R. (1995) ‘Human Rights and the Environment’, Human Ecology, 23:111-123. Jukes, M. R. (1984) ‘The Knopper Gall’, Aboriculture Research Note, 55, 84, ENT, issued by the DOE Arboricultural Advisory and Information Service, Alice Holt: Famham, Surrey. Kaufman, M. (ed.) (1987) Beyond Patriarchy: Essays by Men on Pleasure, Power and Change, Oxford: Oxford university Press. Kimmel, M. S. (ed.) [1987] (1988) Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity, London: Sage. Knight, J. (1996) 'When timber grows wild: the desocialisation of Japanese mountain forests', in Descola, P. and Palsson, G. (eds.) Nature and Society, London: Routledge. Knight, J. (1998) 'The Second Life of Trees: Family Forestry in Upland Japan', in Rival, L. (ed.) The Social Life of Trees, Oxford: Berg. Lacan, J. (1994) The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis, London: Penguin Books. Lascelles, G. (1998 [1915]) Thirty-five Years in the New Forest, Lyndhurst, Hamps.: The New Forest Research and Publications Trust. Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space, D. Nicholson-Smith, trans.Oxford: Blackwell. Longman Concise Dictionary (1985), Harlow:Longman UK.

271 MacKenzie, M. A. (1991) Androgynous objects: string bags and gender in central New Guinea, London: Harvard Academic Press. Macnaghten, P. and Urry, J. (1998) Contested Natures, London: Sage. Marvin, G (2000a) ‘Natural Instincts and Cultural Passions’, in Performance Research 5(2) pp. 108-115. Marvin, G. (1999) ‘Unspeakability, Inedibility and the Structures of Pursuit in the English Foxhunt’, Conference Paper. Marvin, G. (2000b) ‘Foxhunting in England and Wales: An Interpretive Description’, prepared for: The Committee of Inquiry into hunting with dogs, London. Marvin, G. (2000c) ‘The problem of foxes: Legitimate and illegitimate killing in the English countryside’, in J.Knight (ed.) Natural Enemies: People - Wildlife Conflicts in Anthropological Perspectives, London: Routledge. Massey, D. (1995) Thinking radical democracy spatially'. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 13:283-288. Mauzé, M. (1998) 'Northwest Coast Trees: From Metaphors in Culture to Symbols for Culture', in Rival, L. (ed.) The Social Life of Trees, Oxford: Berg. Medick, H. (1987) “Missionaries in a Rowboat’? Ethnological ways of knowing as a challenge to social history’. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 29. Merchant, C. (1982) The Death of Nature: women, ecology and the scientific revolution, San Francisco: Harper and Row. Miller, D. (1988) ‘Appropriating the state on the council estate’, Man, Vol. 23; 353-72. Miller, D. (1994) Modernity: An ethnographic approach, Oxford: Berg. Miller, D. (ed.) (1998) Material Cultures: why some things matter, London: University College London Press. Milton, K. (1993) Environmentalism: the view from Anthropology, London: Routledge. Morphy, H. {\9Z9) Animals into Art, London: Unwin Hyman. Mouffe, C. (1993) The Return of the Political, London: Verso. Mouffe, C. (1995) 'Post-Marxism: democracy and identity', in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 13: 259-265. Musgrave, T., Gardner, C. and Musgrave, W. (1999) The Plant Hunters, London: Seven Dials, Cassell and Co. Oelschlaeger, M. (1991) The Idea of Wilderness, London: Yale University Press. O'Riorden, T. (1995) ‘Frameworks for choice: core beliefs and the environment’. Environment 37:25-9. Parkin, D. (eds.) Bush Base: Forest Farm, London:Routledge. Pasmore, A. H. (1977) Verderers of the New Forest: A history of the New Forest 1877-1977, Beaulieu: Pioneer Publications.

272 Peet, R. and Watts, M. (1994) ‘Introduction; Development Theory and Environmentalism in an Age of Market Triumphalism’, Economic Geography, 69:227-253. Pellegram, A. (1998) ‘The message in Paper’, in Miller, D. (ed.) Material Cultures: why some things matter, London: University College London Press. Peterken, G.F, (1996) Natural Woodland: Ecology and Conservation in Northern Temperate Regions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Phelps, Allen and Harrop (1997) Report of a Review of Hunting with Hounds, London: The Stationary Office. Phillips, J. [1987] (1996) A Man’s Country? The Image of the Pakeha Male - A History, Aukland: Penguin. Picard (1992) 'Cultural tourism in Bali: National integration and regional differentiation', in Hitchcock, M., T. King and M. Pamwell (eds.) Tourism in South East Asia, London: Routledge. Porteous, J. (1990) Landscapes of the Mind: Worlds of Sense and Metaphor, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Prince, H. (1988) ‘Art and agrarian change, 1710-1815’, in Cosgrove, D. and Daniels, S. (eds.) The Iconography of Landscape, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Probyn, E. (1993) Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge. Rabinow, P. (1992) ‘Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality’, in Crary, J., and Kwinter, S. (eds.) Incorporations, New York: Zone Books. Rackham, O. (1989) The Last Forest: the Story of Hatfield Forest, London: Phoenix. Rackham, O. (1996) [1976] Trees & Woodland in the British Landscape: The Complete history ofBritian's Trees, Woods and Hedgerows London: Orion Books. Rappaport, R. A. (1968) Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rappaport, R. A. (1984) ‘Epilogue’, in Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People, New Edition, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rapport, N. (1997) 'The Morality of locality: On the absolutism of landownership in an English village', in Howell, S. (ed) The Ethnography of Moralities, London: Routledge. Rival, L. (ed.) (1998) The Social Life of Trees: Anthropological Perspectives on Tree Symbolism, Oxford: Berg. Rocheleau, D., Thomas-Slayter, B. and Wangari, E. (1996) ‘Gender and Environment: The Study of Cultural Ecology’ in Rocheleau et al (eds.) Feminist Political Ecology: Global Issues and Local Experiences, London: Routledge. Rojek, C. & J. Urry (eds.) (1997) Touring Cultures: Transformations o f Travel and Theory, London: Routledge.

273 Rose, C. (1995) 'Future of Environmental Campaigning', Royal Society of Arts, 6 December. Russell, D. (1998) ‘Forestry and the Art of Frying Small Fish’, paper with publisher. Schama, S. (1995)Landscape and Memory, London: Harper Collins. Scott, J. C. (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Scruton, R. (1996) Animal Rights and Wrongs, London: Demos. Scully, V.1962 The Earth, the Temple and the Gods, New Haven: Yale University Press. Serres, M. (1995) Genesis, Ann Arbour, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Sharpe, B., Burnham, P. and Graziani, M. (1998) The Social and Institutional Context of Forest Resource Utilisation and Management in South-East Cameroon: The Case of Lomie Arrondissement, University College London. Department of Anthropology Shoard, M. (1980) The Theft of the Countryside, London: Temple Smith. Shoard, M. (1987) This Land is Our Land: The Struggle for Britain’s Countryside, London: Paladin. Sider, G. and Smith, G. (eds.) (1997) Between History and Histories: The Making of Silences and Commemorations, Toronto, Buffulo, London: University of Toronto Press. Smith, N. (1984) Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space, London: Basil Blackwell. Soja, E. (1996) ‘Reassertions: Toward a Spatialized Ontology’, in Agnew, J., Livingstone, D. N. and Rogers, A. (eds.) Human Geography: An Essential Anthology, London: Blackwell. Soper, K. (1996) ‘Nature/‘nature” , in Robertson, G. et al, (eds.) FutureNatural, London: Routledge. Stagg, D. (1989) ‘Silvicultural Inclosure in the New Forest to 1780’, Proceedings of Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society, 45: 135-145. Stagg, D. (1990) ‘Silvicultural Inclosure in the New Forest from 1780 to 1850’, Proceedings of Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society, 46: 131-143. Stagg, D. (1992) ‘Silviculture Inclosure in the New Forest from 1850 to 1870’, Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society, 48:143-159. Stotz, G. (2001) ‘The Colonizing Vehicle’, in Miller, D. (ed.) Car Cultures, Oxford: Berg. Strang, V (1997) Uncommon Ground: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental Values, Oxford: Berg. Strathern, M. (1982) 'The village as an idea: constructs of villageness in Elmdon, Essex', in A. P. Cohen (ed.) Belonging, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Strouts, R. G and Winter, T. G. (1994) Diagnosis of ill-health in trees, London: HMSO Tacchi, J (1998) ‘Radio texture: between self and others’, in Miller, D. (ed.) Material Cultures: why some things matter, London: University College London Press.

274 Tacon, P. (1991) 'The power of stone: symbolic aspects of stone use and tool development in western Arnhem Land, Australia', Antiquity 65 192-207. Taylor, D. (1997) ‘Nature as a Reflection of Self and Society’, in Drengson, A.R. and Taylor, D. (eds.) Ecoforestry: the Art and Science of Sustainable Forest Use, Cabriola Island BC: New Society Publishers. The Society of Wildlife Artists in the New Forest (2000) Drawn to the Forest,, Lavenham, Suffolk: The Wildlife Art Gallery. Thrift, N (1996)Spatial Transformations, London: Sage. Tilley, C. (1994)^1 Phenomenology of Landscape, London: Berg Tilley, C. (1999) Metaphor and Material Culture, Oxford: Blackwell. Tomkins, S. C. (1989) Forestry in Crisis: The Battle for the Hills, London: Christopher Helm. Tubbs, C. (1986) The New Forest: A Natural History, London: Collins. Turner, M. (1999) New Forest Voices, Stroud: Tempus Publishing Turner, V. (1967) The Forest of Symbols, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Uchiyamada, Y. (1998) 'The Grove is Our Temple. Contested Representation of Kaavu in Kerala, South India' in Rival, L. (ed) (1998) The Social Life of Trees Oxford: Berg Waldren, J. (1996) Insiders and Outsiders: Paradise and Reality in Mallorca, Oxford: Berghahn. Westoby, J. (1989) Introduction to world forestry: people and their trees, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Williams, R. (1985) The Country and the City, London: The Hogarth Press. Winter, M. (1996) Rural Politics: Policies for Agriculture, Forestry and the Environment, London: Routledge. Young, D. (2001) ‘The Life and Death of Cars: Private vehicles on the Pitjantjatjara Lands, South Australia’, in Miller, D. (ed.) Car Cultures, Oxford: Berg.

275