The myth of Old England

The myth of Old England is a vision of countryside made to seem timeless, native, and complete. In Helen Macdonald’s account, it is not a reliable description of a historical landscape but an attractive story assembled from images and omissions. Its danger is not simply that it gets the past wrong: it can make belonging seem rooted in purity, and direct attention away from the layered histories and present ecological losses of the land.

An imagined landscape and its history

The countryside that prompts Macdonald’s reflection is not a surviving fragment of an untouched past. The chalk, fields, and animals around her carry histories of settlement, trade, invasion, farming, and hunting. The running hare and fallow deer may look like figures in an ancient landscape, but their presence belongs to histories of introduction: hares are thought to have been brought by the Romans, fallow deer certainly were, and rabbits arrived in the medieval period. Pheasants came from Asia Minor; the partridges on the ground originated in France, and the birds seen there were raised in game-farm incubators. Even the squirrel in a sweet chestnut has a history of arrival from North America. These animals may now possess the ground in practice, but their presence does not confirm an unchanged native inheritance.

The same layered history appears in the ground itself. A pond in the Brecklands is a bomb crater left by a German bomber over Lakenheath, an unexpected body of water among dunes and sand sedge. Reindeer moss evokes an Arctic environment out of place, while flint flakes recall the region’s Neolithic flint industry. Such features resist the idea that the landscape can be reduced to a single, stable national past: industrial activity, war, ancient craft, and ecological strangeness are all present in the same terrain.

The sandy country also records the consequences of human land use. Rabbits were farmed for meat and felt in extensive warrens, including Wangford Warren and Lakenheath Warren. Their close grazing, together with that of sheep, reduced the vegetation to a thin layer over sand. In 1688, strong south-westerly winds lifted the exposed ground into a vast cloud; sand engulfed Santon Downham, choked its river, and spread in dunes between Brandon and Barton Mills. The landscape’s later reputation for difficult travel followed from this upheaval. Pines planted in the 1920s for timber intended for future wars further altered the country. What can appear to be an enduring rural scene is therefore a record of repeated use, damage, and change.

The myth as a politics of belonging

The myth becomes explicitly political when a man walking with Macdonald speaks hopefully of a remaining piece of Old England and associates its survival with resistance to immigrants. She cannot answer him at the time; the encounter ends in silence and an awkward farewell. On the walk home, she regrets not having spoken, and considers how the language of an authentic, inherited countryside can turn complicated histories into a simpler story about who belongs.

Her thoughts connect that exchange to the chalk-cult, national myths of blood and belonging, and the history of Göring’s plans to exclude Jews from German forests. The contrast is pointed: the landscapes presented as naturally and exclusively national have themselves been shaped by movement across borders and by political acts of exclusion. Macdonald also recalls Finnish goshawks that made the Brecklands their home, her grandfather, who spoke only Gaelic until he was ten, and a Lithuanian builder who collected mushrooms in an English wood. These examples make national identity less like an unbroken inheritance than a history of movement, memory, and local knowledge. The account does not treat every history as equivalent; rather, it shows how readily a comforting national narrative can erase the histories that complicate it.

Ecological loss beneath the picturesque

The myth also conceals change by treating a familiar-looking scene as a healthy one. The fields where Macdonald flies Mabel are organically farmed and teem with life. The fields in the landscape under discussion may appear similar, with familiar trees and large animals, but close attention reveals few plants beyond crops and few bees or butterflies. Chemical treatment of the soil is part of that contrast. The outward appearance of countryside, by itself, cannot establish ecological continuity.

Macdonald makes the scale of loss visible through a sequence of historical comparisons. Turtle doves were present there ten years earlier; corn buntings and large flocks of lapwings, thirty years earlier; red-backed shrikes, wrynecks, and snipe, seventy years earlier; and ravens and black grouse, two centuries earlier. Those absences challenge the idea that the present landscape is a faithful version of an old rural world. The imagined past is not only selective about human history; it can also make ecological decline difficult to notice by presenting what remains as representative of what has always been there.

The history of rabbits provides another measure of how human action changes what seems natural. Myxomatosis arrived in Britain in 1952, and within two years the virus had killed 95 percent of the rabbit population. Rabbit-grazed grasslands grew thick with scrub, and predator populations fell. Rabbit numbers later recovered, though not to what people had come to regard as normal, and outbreaks continued. A small, sick rabbit encountered beside a road brings that broad history into the present: its condition recalls a countryside crisis that reached beyond rabbits to other wildlife and habitats. The episode complicates any pastoral picture in which animals merely decorate an enduring scene.

History, memory, and responsibility

The Brecklands’ goshawks offer a counterexample to the claim that wildness must be untouched by people. Goshawks had once bred across the British Isles, but enclosure, the rise of firearms, persecution by gamekeepers, and habitat loss contributed to their disappearance; by the late nineteenth century, British goshawks were extinct. In the 1960s and 1970s, falconers began an unofficial scheme to restore them. The British Falconers’ Club reasoned that the cost of importing a bird for falconry could also cover the importation and release of another. Birds from Sweden, Germany, and Finland were released or lost, survived, and bred. Their descendants eventually numbered around 450 pairs. The result makes the boundary between human action and wild nature less simple: human intervention helped restore a self-reliant population, just as other interventions had contributed to ecological damage.

Macdonald’s conclusion is that Old England is an imaginary place, constructed from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, and picturesque engravings. Such images give the past a deceptively stable appearance, while human lives are short and attention is limited. People struggle to register what is too small to see, to imagine changes operating at the scale of climate, or to remember what lived in a place before their own time. In this account, the myth offers comfort partly by narrowing the historical view; the real landscape is longer, more mobile, and less intact than the picture allows.

That recognition changes the meaning of landscape attachment. Macdonald acknowledges her own wish to escape history by turning to the hawk, as though proximity to wildness could set aside death and the past. She rejects that escape as dangerous forgetting. Her alternative is not to abandon care for place, but to defend landscapes for their varied life rather than for their resemblance to an idea of national identity. The myth of Old England matters because it can turn memory into exclusion and familiarity into a false measure of ecological health; confronting it means attending instead to the histories, arrivals, losses, and recoveries that actually make a landscape.