Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [36]
On the hill overlooking the river Krona’s farm now consisted of a stout wooden building thirty feet long and fifteen deep with a sloping thatch roof and a large doorway to let in light and air. Around it were grouped several small outhouses. Beside the hill, on the slopes, where the soil was light and well-drained, small plots of various shapes had been laid out, their borders marked with stones. He had sown them with wheat, barley and flax, after cross ploughing them with a light ard – a small hoe with a flint head – which he could handle, if necessary, without even the aid of an animal. This process of ploughing fields first one way, and then at right angles, was the most efficient way of breaking up the soil with so light an implement. Near the huts were two pits, six feet deep and four across, lined with plaited straw; in these, and in their pots, they would store the grain. Beside the river, pigs and cattle wandered, and on the high ground above the fields, a few sheep cropped the coarse grass that grew in patches cleared among the scattered trees. All the way up the little northern valley, the pattern was the same, as the trees were destroyed and the land taken up instead by crops and livestock.
The hunters gazed at it all with increasing wonder.
It was a tiny beginning – the clearing of the slopes of a small, obscure valley in the midst of an immense forest that covered most of the island: an almost invisible scratch on the surface of the landscape.
And yet for the landscape of much of Britain, such early clearings were to have profound significance.
For when Krona and his men started to cut down trees on the edge of the high ground, they began a process whose result would be a permanent change in the composition of the soil. Previous ages had created the rich topsoil which covered the chalk downlands of Britain, and the trees which covered the ridges held this topsoil, often only inches thick, in place. When men cut down the trees, this fragile covering was exposed at once to wind and rain, and in many places it would be washed downhill, leaving behind only a harsh chalky soil full of flints. Sometimes trees would grow again in such places before the topsoil was gone; often man or his animals destroyed them once more. If the topsoil were displaced, the chalky soil remaining was good enough for growing corn, or grazing sheep on the turf covering that would form when it was not ploughed; indeed, the process brought much new life to the land – cowslips, buttercups, huge quantities of butterflies, all of which found the fields their natural habitat – but the woods did not grow there again.
Once begun, this destructive process had a momentum of its own. The chalky soil was often exhausted by the corn and the land had to be left fallow. Then the farmers would turn sheep on to it to crop the stubble and manure the ground, while more woodland was cut down for sowing. As generations passed, the sheep increased rapidly in number, and the human population increased too, so that the process of land clearance was accelerated still further. The farmers proceeded with a ruthless destructive efficiency: experiments have shown that with their flint axes, three men could clear six hundred square yards of birchwood in three hours. And as the centuries passed and more settlers came, all over southern England, these neolithic farmers cleared the light forest cover from the chalkland soils which they could so easily till.
The bare, sweeping chalk downs of southern England, familiar today, are not a natural feature of the landscape: they were created by prehistoric man.
There was another feature of the settlement which intrigued the hunters.
For in the third year, when the settlers’ precious little herd of cattle was beginning to grow, Krona ordered all the men to come to the hill at the foot of the valley, and there, under his direction, a short distance from the medicine man’s sacred circle, they stripped away the remaining trees and shrubs from the hilltop and