1688

1688 is the year in which overgrazing and strong winds combined to transform the Brecklands, sending dunes across settlements and choking a river. In Helen Macdonald’s account, the disaster is both a specific historical rupture and one layer in a landscape whose ecology has repeatedly been remade by human use.

Causes and the shifting sands

Before the disaster, rabbits were raised for meat and felt in large enclosed warrens edged by thornbanks. Warrens such as Wangford Warren and Lakenheath Warren marked their presence across the sandy landscape. Rabbits, grazing alongside sheep, cropped the land so closely that the short grass was reduced to a thin crust of roots over sand. Where grazing was most intense, the exposed sand began to move. In 1688, strong south-westerly winds lifted the loosened ground into a vast yellow cloud that obscured the sun. Large quantities of land shifted and fell elsewhere. The account makes the causal chain explicit: a commercial landscape shaped by livestock and rabbit farming left the soil vulnerable, and wind turned that vulnerability into a regional disaster.

Settlements, waterways, and aftermath

The moving sand encircled Brandon and engulfed Santon Downham, choking its river entirely. When the winds subsided, dunes extended for miles between Brandon and Barton Mills. The damage did not end with the storm: the transformed terrain acquired a reputation for difficult travel, with soft dunes that were scorching in summer and made night journeys hazardous because of highwaymen. John Evelyn’s name for the area, the Travelling Sands, preserves the sense of a landscape still in motion. The phrase also catches the scale of the change: land that people had used and settled could shift beyond familiar boundaries, overwhelming estates and altering routes through the region.

A landscape made by successive histories

The 1688 upheaval belongs to a longer record of human and ecological change. The Brecklands had been a centre of flint working in Neolithic times; later, rabbit farming and intensive grazing reshaped its sandy ground. In the twentieth century, much of the dune landscape was hidden beneath pines planted in the 1920s to provide timber for future wars. Elsewhere in the forest, a pond formed in a bomb crater from a German bomber’s wartime attack provides another visible trace of historical disturbance. These layers complicate any idea of the Brecklands as untouched nature. Its strangeness and wildness coexist with evidence of industry, forestry, agriculture, warfare, and disaster. The 1688 event is decisive not because it left the land outside human history, but because it shows how human land use could set a landscape-changing process in motion.

Later ecological change and the meaning of 1688

The history of rabbits continued to alter the countryside. Myxomatosis arrived in Britain in 1952; within two years, the virus had killed 95 percent of the rabbit population. The disappearance of so many grazing animals allowed grasslands to grow thick with scrub and contributed to declines in predator populations. Rabbits later recovered, though not to the numbers once considered normal, and outbreaks continued. This later crisis differs from the 1688 disaster, but both histories connect changes in animal populations and land use to consequences extending well beyond their immediate causes. The narrative also sets those histories against later human interventions in wildlife. In the 1960s and 1970s, falconers began bringing goshawks back to Britain, and their descendants eventually established a population of around 450 pairs. At the same time, other landscapes could appear familiar while losing plants, insects, and birds under chemically intensive farming. Against these contrasts, 1688 becomes part of a larger history in which the countryside is neither timeless nor simply natural: its condition records accumulated human choices, and its capacity for wildness may itself emerge from that history.