1688 Breckland shifting-sands disaster

The 1688 Breckland shifting-sands disaster was a major landscape catastrophe caused by the interaction of intensive grazing and strong winds. Rabbits farmed for meat and felt, alongside sheep, stripped the sandy ground until little remained to hold it in place; in 1688, south-westerly winds carried vast quantities of sand across the region. The resulting dunes altered settlements, waterways, travel and the character of the country for generations.

Causes and conditions

The disaster followed a long period in which rabbits were raised in large, enclosed warrens across the sandy landscape. Thornbanks marked warrens whose names survived in places such as Wangford Warren and Lakenheath Warren. Close grazing by rabbits, together with sheep, reduced the short grass to a thin crust of roots over sand. Where grazing was most severe, the exposed ground began to drift, leaving the land vulnerable to wind.

The event belongs to a landscape with a much longer history of human use. The region had been a centre of flint working in Neolithic times, and fragments from flint cores could still be found there. The later rabbit economy was another layer in that history: an industry that altered vegetation and helped prepare the ground for a sudden, far-reaching change.

The shifting sands

In 1688, strong south-westerly winds lifted the broken ground into the air. A vast yellow cloud obscured the sun as tonnes of sand shifted and fell across the countryside. Brandon was surrounded by sand, while Santon Downham was engulfed and its river choked. When the winds subsided, dunes extended for miles between Brandon and Barton Mills.

John Evelyn described the moving sands as a force that rolled from place to place and overwhelmed entire estates. His account gives the disaster a scale beyond an isolated storm: the land itself seemed to move, swallowing familiar boundaries and transforming the terrain over a wide area.

Consequences and landscape legacy

The dunes made travel through the area notoriously difficult. The loose sand could scorch in summer, while journeys after dark carried the danger of highwaymen. The disaster therefore reshaped not only the ground but also the conditions under which people moved through it.

By the time Macdonald walks the area, most of the dunes are concealed beneath pines planted in the 1920s to provide timber for future wars. The forest partly hides the effects of the shifting sands, but the country still feels damaged and precarious. A pond among the dunes, far from the sea, marks a separate human intervention: it is a bomb crater left by a German bomber over Lakenheath during the war. Together, such features make the landscape a record of successive human and historical forces rather than an untouched wilderness.

Historical and ecological significance

Macdonald’s recollection of the disaster helps explain why she finds the Brecklands an especially fitting place to search for goshawks. Its wildness is not pristine; it is a ramshackle condition produced through the entanglement of land, work, industry and catastrophe. The shifting sands show how an economic practice could change the ground on a vast scale, while the later pine planting concealed rather than erased that history.

The surrounding account also links this human-shaped landscape to the return of goshawks. After British goshawks had become extinct, falconers in the 1960s and 1970s imported birds for falconry and released additional birds into forests; their descendants later bred successfully. The contrast complicates any simple opposition between human influence and wild nature: people contributed to the conditions behind the disaster, but human action could also help create the conditions for a species’ return. The 1688 event thus stands within a longer ecological history in which landscapes and wildlife bear the consequences of human choices, sometimes long after the original causes have passed.