John Aubrey’s Natural History, Part 11: The Wiltshire Downs

Aubrey loved the Wiltshire downs. His description of them at the opening of his chapter on the subject is beautiful — the turf 'of a short sweet grasse, good for sheep, and delightfull to the eye for its smoothnesse like a bowling green', the plains 'the most spacious in Europe', the landscape a 'remain of the smooth primitive world'. But even as he celebrated the openness of the downland, he recorded a question that had been put to him by a more sceptical mind. Edmund Waller, the poet, had wondered aloud, 'many years since', whether the plains had ever been overgrown with wood. Aubrey recorded the question as a 'quaere', something to be investigated, something unresolved.

Aubrey did not pass on the question. He looked at the landscape around him for evidence, and what he found was suggestive. At Everleigh, a village on Salisbury Plain itself, there was 'a large oaken coppice, but not thriving, but very dwarfish'. Oaks growing on the chalk downs just clinging to existence in stunted form. Similarly, the few thorn trees that managed to establish themselves on the plain did ‘not flourish'. The message from the landscape was consistent: trees can grow here, but only just.

This is a significant observation, and more ecologically sophisticated than it might look. Aubrey was not simply noting that the downs were treeless. He noticed that the conditions for tree growth existed, that seeds germinated and saplings established themselves, but that something prevented them from thriving. That 'something' was primarily grazing pressure. Centuries of sheep and cattle maintained the open grassland by consuming any tree saplings before they could get established. Remove the grazers, and the chalk downland would scrub up and eventually revert to woodland within decades.

So far, so local. But it is here that Aubrey's thinking pivoted and he considered a global perspective. In Virginia and Jamaica, he noted, the natives 'did burn down great quantities of wood for the cultivation of maiz and potato rootes, and these made plaines they call savannas.' And then Aubrey related it back to Wiltshire: 'Perhaps in the old world the same way might be used here.' This is a remarkable sentence. Aubrey proposed that the open landscape of Salisbury Plain might be, like the savannas of Virginia and Jamaica, a human creation: a landscape made by burning, maintained over millennia, and mistaken for a natural feature of the environment.

The comparison to Native American land management practices as a model for understanding English prehistory and the evolution of our environment is, so far as I am aware, without precedent in seventeenth-century English writing. In doing this, Aubrey was willing to take indigenous American agricultural practice seriously as a form of knowledge; to think comparatively across very different cultural contexts; and to see the English landscape not as a given, natural fact but as the product of human agency over a very long period of time.

Research has now shown that the downlands were indeed largely wooded before the Neolithic, and that woodland clearance was a gradual process extending over millennia of prehistoric human activity. The smooth open character of Salisbury Plain was not, as Aubrey rightly suspected, a natural baseline: it was, and remains, the accumulated result of thousands of years of human management of the landscape.

As we grapple with modern debates over rewilding and in Wiltshire specifically, whether to reintroduce trees to the chalk downs or whether the open grassland is itself a habitat worth preserving much turns on precisely the question Aubrey was raising: what is natural, and what is made? Aubrey was, as so often, ahead of his time in recognising that the landscape was not simply a backdrop to human history but a participant in it. As ever, I am blown away!"