Brecklands

The Brecklands is a landscape northeast of Cambridge where wet fen gives way to dry sand, and where military bases, planted forest, old industries, and wildlife occupy the same terrain. In the narrative, it is both a place to watch elusive goshawks and an example of wildness formed through human activity: its distinctive character comes not from being untouched, but from the accumulated effects of land use, ecological change, and history.

Setting and Character

The region lies about forty-five minutes northeast of Cambridge. Its contrasts are immediate: pine stands and sandy ground sit alongside pea fields, roads, and United States Air Force installations. The landscape also holds disused and concealed structures, including houses deteriorating among numbered forestry blocks and former spaces built for nuclear weapons beneath grassy mounds. Golf courses and tattoo parlours appear within this same patchwork. The result is neither a pristine wilderness nor a conventional rural idyll, but a landscape whose varied uses remain visible beside its wildlife.

The place’s name evokes broken ground, and its terrain bears traces of both natural and human disturbance. There are clear-cut areas where tree roots and fallen needles remain exposed in the sand, as well as unexpected patches of reindeer moss and scattered flint. In wet weather, small pieces of worked flint can be found on the ground. The region was a centre of flint-working during the Neolithic, placing traces of early human activity within the same landscape as modern forestry and military infrastructure.

Land Use and Ecological History

Rabbits once shaped the sandy country through extensive farming for meat and felt. Large enclosed warrens, bounded by thorn banks, gave names to places such as Wangford Warren and Lakenheath Warren. Intensive grazing by rabbits, together with sheep, reduced the vegetation to a thin layer over the sand. Where grazing was heaviest, wind carried the exposed material across the land. In 1688, strong south-westerly winds drove a major shifting-sands disaster: the town of Brandon was surrounded, Santon Downham was engulfed, and its river was blocked. Dunes extended for miles between Brandon and Barton Mills, making travel difficult and dangerous.

Later changes did not simply erase these older disruptions. Pines were planted across much of the sand in the 1920s to provide timber for future wars, so the forest that now covers many dunes is itself part of a history of planned resource use. The older reputation of the region as a landscape of moving sand and hazardous travel persists beneath the trees, even though the dunes and the conditions that made them notorious are no longer encountered in the same way.

The wider history of rabbits also gives the landscape an ecological vulnerability extending beyond local land use. Myxomatosis reached Britain in 1952 and killed about 95 per cent of the country’s rabbits within two years. The resulting decline altered grasslands and contributed to changes in predator populations. Rabbits later recovered, but not to their former numbers, and outbreaks continued. This history makes the apparent stability of a rural scene deceptive: its plant and animal life can be reshaped by human introductions and their consequences.

Goshawks and the Return of Wildlife

Goshawks once bred across the British Isles, but their place in the countryside changed as land enclosure restricted ordinary people’s access to falconry and firearms made shooting more fashionable. The birds came to be treated as vermin rather than hunting companions. Persecution by gamekeepers, combined with habitat loss, contributed to their decline; by the late nineteenth century, goshawks were extinct in Britain. A photograph of one of the last birds shot, preserved as a stuffed specimen from a Scottish estate, records that disappearance.

Their return began through an unofficial effort by falconers in the 1960s and 1970s. Members of the British Falconers’ Club recognized that the cost of importing a goshawk for falconry could also cover the purchase and release of another bird. Hawks brought from the Continent, including Sweden, Germany, and Finland, were released in forests or escaped from captivity. They survived, found mates, and bred. Their descendants later numbered around 450 pairs. The recovery complicates any simple division between human influence and wild nature: the goshawks became established through a deliberate human intervention, yet survived and reproduced beyond the direct control of those who brought them back.

The region’s landscape makes that history especially meaningful. Goshawks are woodland birds, difficult to see even where they are present. Their presence may be sensed through a sudden disturbance among other birds or inferred from remains on the forest floor, while a direct sighting can last only an instant. They are much larger and more powerful than the smaller hawks they may be mistaken for, and their relative invisibility has made them a coveted subject for observers. In the Brecklands, their elusive presence belongs to a forest whose own apparent naturalness conceals layers of human history.

The Sighting

On a clear early-spring morning, the narrator entered the forest hoping to see goshawks displaying in open air. At exactly half past eight, while looking down at a small mahonia plant, the narrator looked up and saw a pair soaring above the canopy. The birds were mobbed by crows but continued to move through the air in relation to one another. The male passed above and then below the female; she dipped a wing, and the pair rose again. Their movements made the sky seem briefly legible as a pattern of curves and distances.

The encounter ended almost as soon as it began. The pair disappeared into the trees, and the observer could not recall looking away or even blinking. That sudden loss gives the sighting its force: the birds are present as unmistakable living animals, then hidden again by the woodland. The encounter answers the patient search without making the goshawks available for long possession or easy certainty.

A Landscape Against the Pastoral Ideal

The Brecklands challenges an image of the countryside as timeless, orderly, and separate from human work. Its history includes prehistoric flint production, rabbit farming, shifting sand, timber planting, military construction, and the return of a species once driven to extinction. These layers make the region feel wild without making it untouched. Its strangeness has been produced through interactions between land, people, animals, and industry.

That complexity also gives the goshawk’s return a wider significance. The birds are not remnants of a nature that survived outside human history; their British presence is connected to falconers who imported and released them. At the same time, their subsequent survival and breeding cannot be reduced to human ownership or design. The Brecklands therefore offers a setting in which wildness is not the opposite of human involvement. It is something that can emerge from a landscape shaped by people, while remaining elusive and beyond their complete command.