The Chalk Hills
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| Brass Point nr. Beachy Head |
More on the chalk country I introduced in the previous post. This is a continuation of the story of why the landscape came to look like it does, but also some more impressionistic notes.
Geologically, England has a long strip of chalk running from Dorset to the Yorkshire Wolds. The purest, white stone underlies the rolling green 'Downs' surrounding London, the Thames Valley, and alongside the Channel coast. These are the primordial 'bleached clean bones of old England', and the name comes from the Old English 'dūn', which simply means hill.
Chalk Hills & Streams
Nowhere else on Earth has as much chalk countryside, and it is wonderful stuff. If you are walking, it is usually dry and springy underfoot. On foot or on a bike, the slopes are merciful. Moulded through time, the chalk shapes our landscape.
William Blake was living in Sussex when he asked, "And did those feet in ancient time....Walk upon England's mountains green." Later, Robert Graves thought the Wessex Downs, "Shaped as if by a kindly hand.... For thinking, dreaming, dying on".
Tennyson described the open downland of "Green Sussex fading into blue....With just a touch of sea".
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| The Wessex Downs, from Streatly |
Themes recur. Silence, peace and, perhaps because we struggle to find words for abstract impressions, the sea as a metaphor. The Victorian William Henry Hudson saw a "vast, smooth, undulating expanse, where the hills rise and fall like the waves of a great, solid sea". Kipling talked of the "blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs". My favourite line comes from John Aubrey in the 1700s, who saw the whole as "the greatest remains that I can hear of the smooth primitive world when it lay all under water". 
Cretaceous Seabed
A lover of the countryside might compare them with the bleak mountains and moorland of the north. In Blake's time, these were thought to instil fear and foreboding, confirming man's insignificance and vulnerability, like a minuscule wriggly thing in nature's petri dish.
This led to the idea that the awe such places inspired could speak to aesthetic sensibilities. They called it 'Sublime'. Now, that term is complimentary, but it wasn't then; it was 'awe' as in 'aweful'. I suspect this is partly because we are now familiar with spectacular places such as the Himalayas and the Grand Canyon, through photos and films, so unless you plan to climb them, they no longer appear threatening. Now, the comparison between the northern moorland and the southern chalk and moorland is more a 'wow' than an 'aaah' landscape: Tolkien's Mordor and the Shire.
You can see the contrast in mood in the work of the great English painters; at Tate Britain compare John Martin's biblically inspired 'sublime' images and Turner's stormy seascapes, with Constable's and Gainsborough's romantic and naturalistic depictions of rural Suffolk.
The Lord of the Rings films, set in New Zealand, caught the mood.
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| Tolkien's Shire |
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| Tolkien's Mordor |
So what of the chalk that underneath this green blanket? A short reprise. Most of Britain was a jigsaw assembled from fragments of primordial continents. Chalk is different; it is a type of limestone and started life as seabed. Both are largely composed of the skeletal remains of microscopic plankton called coccolithophores. In limestone, they are mixed in with a lot of other stuff. Chalk is purer, having started to form around a hundred million years ago, when seas covered most of the Earth, in deeper water and farther from land.
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| Cretaceous Earth |
While I also like the 'sublime' landscapes, I am more convinced of our insignificance by astronomically huge and atomically small things, and this is a story of mind-bogglingly big numbers of similarly tiny things. Vast clouds of plankton exist at the bottom of the oceanic food chain. A popular gauge of magnitude is a comparison with the number of grains of sand on the seashore. Plankton wins hands down, not just on the seashore, but on the entire planet. A single teaspoon of ocean water contains thousands of them.
Each is encased in a shell of calcium carbonate, maybe an understandable legacy of a victim mentality. As they died, their shells sank in clouds, fossilising and ending up as a white ooze on the seabed. Over millions of years, this was compressed under its own weight and the water above it, first into a white mud and then chalk. The pic below required an electron microscope capable of seeing individual atoms.
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| Coccoliths |
The creation of rock beds isn't a continuous process; it fluctuates as the climate changes and the seas advance and retreat. In the pics below, the first shows you how deep the chalk layer still is, and how it has been eroded by the sea and, in the dips, by streams. In the second, you can see the layers of chalk, laid down at different times, resembling tree rings.
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| Brass Point, nr. Beachy Head |
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| Chalk layers in cliffs near Beachy Head |
It might take a century for a slim sliver of slime to be added to the ocean bed, but after, say, fifty million years, you would have a layer far thicker than we see now. The difference is down to compression and erosion. As soon as movements in the Earth's crust had hoisted the chalk out of the ocean, rivers, rainwater, wind and ice set to work splintering, crumbling and dissolving it to sculpt the gently rounded hills we see now, shorn of peaks and jagged edges.
The glaciers never reached the Downs, but the land would have been frozen nonetheless, and outflow rivers carried the debris away, sometimes ditching it as clay. Now, the process of erosion continues, accelerated by the impact of intensive farming.
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In the Chilterns and Downs, you might hear references to upper and lower chalk, simply because one often sits on top of the other. 'The lower' chalk or 'marl' formed earlier and can be seen most easily in the west and the north of the chalk lands, and in the quarries. It is grey because it isn't as pure, and is sometimes sharply divided from the more recent or 'upper' chalk, which is the lovely bright, white stuff which you see best when the Downs lifts its grassy skirts at Beachy Head and Dover. (Where, incidentally, you won't see any bluebirds. They are an American species).
A quick note for fans of pulp cinema. The pic below is Pitstone Quarry, at the foot of the Chiltern scarp in Bucks. This is the old chalk, and was quarried here for use in cement. You might recognise the location as part of the Marvel Universe, from scenes in 'Deadpool and Wolverine'. It was also the dead moon of Kef Bir in the Star Wars series.
The Earth is restless, and every landscape is a work in progress. It was thought that, after the ice age around 12,000 years ago, when mankind arrived to stay hereabouts, the Downs were blanketed by primaeval forest, but it now seems more likely that any coverage was patchy and often just scrub. Even that was quickly cleared by early stone-age farmers.
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| Palaeolithic Buckinghamshire |
For a long time, the Downs were mainly used to rear sheep which, for centuries, were the cornerstone of the English economy. High-quality wool was exported to be processed overseas, initially in its raw state and later as higher-value, tougher and more weather-resistant ' broadcloth '. This came to an end, first with the increasing popularity of cotton, and later in wartime when much of the Sussex and Wessex downland was converted for arable farming, even though the soil is thin and porous. Needs must when the devil drives!
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| Sheep on the South Downs |
In contrast, much larger areas in the Chilterns and North Downs are coated with thicker clay soils. They didn't lend themselves to the creation of the communal, open-field farming of the medieval period nor, nowadays, to modern mechanised arable farming. The result was more woodland and mixed farms in a relatively unchanged and venerable landscape, bisected by more tracks and roads. Many of the old farms remain. But the old farmers (and many of their pubs!) have been replaced by the green welly and SUV brigade. In both, stables and golf courses abound.
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| Wendover Woods |
Of course, much of what you see reflects the way the land is farmed. For the most part, the soils of the chalk hills are alkaline and thin, not least because the counterpoint to the purity of the chalk is the relative absence of the clay minerals that build thicker soils and which stop the rainwater from simply sinking away.
Arable land is found closer to the scarps in the open downland. Wheat (for baking) seems to predominate where the potential yields are higher. Barley (for beer) doesn't give the farmer as much, but looks happier. Maris Otter Barley, married with Fuggles and Goldings hops to make the Great British Pint!
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| Barley / Wheat |
A difference you might notice is that, on the windy downs, stiff wheat stalks will stand their ground while a field Barley will dance, making waves. It's the glorious sight that Sting sang about in 'Fields of Gold'. 'Gold' might be over-egging it. Perhaps for a while, in some lights, that is their colour, but they often look beige to me, and I prefer it in spring when the crops are still green.
To keep the soil in good condition, the wheat and barley are rotated with crops of beans, clover and the garish and smelly yellow rapeseed. There is more variety on the dip slopes where, more rarely, you will see fields of beautiful blue linseed, beloved of cricket's batsmen. I am no farmer or naturalist, so if you think I have got it wrong, please let me know.
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| Linseed Crop |
The valley soils can be acidic, and chalk, being alkaline, provides some balance. In some places, it was dug out and spread directly on the fields, or first dried in kilns to create dust. In places, mainly on the hills, you can see the pits that were dug.
It is also still used for aggregates, which is rather sad in my view. Couldn’t they stick to using the ugly lower, grey stuff instead? And of course, you can still find it in some kinds of toothpaste and your packet of Rennies! (Oddly, blackboard chalk isn't chalk, but gypsum).
Among the trees in the wooded Chilterns and North Downs, yews are native and might be the oldest you will see. Some date back over 2000 years. They are commonly found around churches. The idea is that their ability to rejuvenate lends an optimistic note to graveyards! It has been suggested that early churches were simply built on sites that were already sacred in pagan times, so keep an eye out for vengeful deities as well as ghosts. The churchyard yew in the pic below, sitting on the Chilterns scarp, is probably 500 years old, and a mere stripling.
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| St Nicholas, Ibstone |
Hawthorn, hornbeams, box and cherry trees also thrive on the chalk. Others just tolerate it; oaks, maples and conifers grow in sheltered spots or where the soil is more obliging. Over half of the Chiltern woodlands (not the individual trees!) is classified as 'ancient' insofar as they were marked on maps in 1600 AD.
There are many, often ghost routes created to link places that no longer exist. Some have been cut deeply by livestock and carts.
The Icknield Way is thought to be a Neolithic trackway that follows the foot of the scarp slopes of the hills to the North of London. Edward Thomas wrote that 'The road here is a beautiful, pale, and small thing winding through the immense, uncultivated downs.....There is no sound but of a few sheepbells and the wind in the gorse, and the beauty of it is the beauty of old things that have survived into a world that has no further use for them, but leaves them in their loneliness'. I doubt that he would feel lonely there now.
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| Icknield Way |
Dry Valleys
Valleys are usually occupied by the rivers that created them, but many in the chalk country have no river. The Devil's Dyke near Brighton is a classic example. The pic below is the Manger, next to the White Horse at Uffington in Wiltshire. Legend has it that this is where the horse goes to feed! The odd fluted pattern on the valley sides is caused by the ice penetrating the chalk and freezing and fracturing it until it comes adrift and slumps down the hillside.
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| The Manger, Uffington |
The traditional view is that the ground would have been frozen solid during the ice ages, so water couldn't sink through it, and streams and rivers could carve out a valley in the normal way. When the glaciers melted, those streams sank through the earth and porous rock and disappeared, leaving the valley in place. A more recent suggestion is that fluctuations in the water table level might be responsible. It rises when it is cold and wet and falls when it is warm and dry, on a seasonal basis or as a result of longer-term climatic changes. When it sinks, the upper reaches of the stream can disappear, re-emerging as a spring lower down the valley. These seasonal springs are often referred to as 'winterbournes'.
Chalk Streams
Despite the efforts of the water companies, England still has most of the world's chalk streams, and they are full of life. Trout are actively farmed, and watercress grown, in the clear water. In the free-flowing streams, you will mainly see tiddlers, but if you are lucky, perhaps a shy water vole, a handsome grayling, the vicious pike and, in the west, salmon.
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| River Chess nr. Latimer, Chesham |
In many places, the ground is littered with black pebbles made of flint, a type of quartz found in sedimentary rocks. When the chalk layer was forming, the sediment had cavities left by dead sea sponges whose skeletons were made of silica. Initially, they were gelatinous, but they crystallised as the gloop was compressed.
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| Flints |
Erosion eats away the chalk, leaving the flints behind, sometimes encased in a thin white layer of quartz that is partly chalk and partly silica. It is quite hard to rub off. I am told that flints can contain fossils, but most of those that I have found have been small and ill-defined, like the small ammonites below.
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| My tiny ammonite fossil |
Flint was the original multi-tool for our frequently underestimated Palaeolithic forbears. It can be knapped to create sharp edges, good for cutting up trees, animals and neighbours. Evidence from elsewhere indicates that even 50,000 years ago, Neanderthals were using stone tools for dentistry! Much later, they were put to use for lighting fires and, later still, in the ‘flintlock’ guns which were used as an updated means of dispatching those neighbours.
It really is incredibly hard and can damage the toughest drilling equipment, to the extent that tunnelling for the HS2 was routed to avoid layers of it as well as layers of clay that might hold water that had sunk through the porous chalk above, and could flood the tunnel.
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| Boring HS2 Tunnels |
There must have been flint mines and quarries everywhere, with the best stones prized and traded. But if (like me) you are not an expert, it can be hard to spot the difference between a flint mine and just another patch of stony ground!
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| Downland Neolithic Flint Mine |
The Human Imprint
Although the chalk hills are young in geological terms, they are old in human reckoning and littered with prehistoric relics. The Icknield Way is one; so are the stone rings, sarsens, hillforts, barrows and images, often of horses, cut into the chalk. The Bronze Age Britons were keen on them and had horse gods which, by the Iron Age, seem to have morphed into a regular goddess. Epona protected livestock and became so important that she was included in the Roman pantheon.
Even though the outline of the horse shown below looks sleekly modern, the accompanying debris indicates it was created about 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. When they venerated the horse by cutting the image of it into the hillside, they didn't just scrape away the turf but dug into the chalk underneath. Quality endures!
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| Uffington White Horse |
Travelling around the chalk hills, you can see a zoo of similarly carved figures. Many claim antiquity, although the dating is often dubious and they can be safely attributed to self-promotion, boredom or booze. Notwithstanding, they are loved and a magnet for self-appointed druids, witches, deities, spirit guides, necromancers, bards and romantics.
My favourite is the well-endowed Cerne Abbas Giant, shown below, which, thanks to some recent scientific magic with lasers and snails, we now know is medieval and was cut in medieval times, maybe 1000 years ago, give or take a few centuries.
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| Cerne Abbas Giant |
Left untouched, he would quickly disappear, but people seem strangely interested in keeping him in peak priapic condition. In the pic below, you can see the volunteers cleaning his balls!
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| That tickles! |
The Long Man of Wilmington, near Eastbourne, has been dated to the 1700s, but what you see now owes something to the addition of lime mortar. It was carefully cut to make the figure's proportions look lifelike when seen from below.
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| The Long Man of Wilmington |
Legend has it that the Westbury White Horse, under Bratton Camp Iron Age hillfort in Wiltshire, was originally cut to commemorate King Alfred's victory at the Battle of Eoandun here in 878. In fact, it dates to the 1600s. But why ditch a good story?
Horses, horses everywhere. There is another outside Weymouth that dates back to 1808 and is supposedly being ridden by King George. You can see another just before entering the Channel Tunnel at Folkestone. This was the realisation of a bureaucrat's promotional dream in 2003. Similarly, the giant lion on the hillside beneath Whipsnade Zoo in the Chilterns was carved there in 1933 at the behest of.......Whipsnade Zoo.
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| Whipsnade |
Is it fakery? I actually don't mind the modern versions. They are decorative and playful. Why should the ancients have all the fun? Anyway, hopefully, we will be the ancients one day.
An entirely different type of fake are caves found near West Wycombe in Bucks. Caves are common in limestone, but rare in chalk. These started life as quarries. In around 1750 they were repurposed by Sir Francis Dashwood as a venue for his 'Hellfire Club', a venue for hard drinking, arcane rituals and the odd orgy. The subterranean landscape included a 'River Styx'. He claimed it was done partly to provide work for the unemployed. Righto. That isn't a policy option I can see currying favour now.
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| Dashwood |
The Chalk today
I am sure that my readers (both of them!) are familiar with these places. But if any places deserve a second look, or a third, it is these. I still get a sense of amazement when a kick of the turf uncovers, not the grey-brown stones created earlier in the planet's story, but dazzling white. It has welcomed people from across the waters for almost the entirety of human history, each group creating a palimpsest for a new story which, thanks to the archaeologists and, latterly, the odd scribe, can be at least partly revealed. There is always more to see.
The next post in the series takes me through to the Ice Ages: Link. Chilling Out