Norfolk in 100 Species, Number 8: Hawthorn

David North, Head of People and Wildlife

Hawthorn, photo by David North

Mark the fair blooming of the Hawthorn Tree,
Who, finely clothed in a robe of white,
Fills the wanton eye with May’s delight.
Chaucer.

More a shrub than a tree, too spiky and twisted to make decent timber for building with, yet this species, more than any other, is the thread that stitches our countryside together. Viewed from the air much of our Norfolk landscape is laid out as a patchwork tapestry of fields. Fields, that apart from in the flat, wet lands of the Broads and Fens, are most often edged with hedges. Hawthorn is the keystone species of Norfolk hedgerows beyond count. Tens of thousands of miles of hedgerows edging quiet country lanes and busy duel carriage-ways. Spiky lines of closely trimmed, or these days savagely flailed, hawthorns drawing the boundary lines between crops of rape and beet, barley and wheat, horse paddock and cattle pasture.

Lines across our landscape painted in the green of newly- opened hawthorn leaves in April, in the creamy whites of a million sweet-scented flowers in May and splattered with the pointillist reds of billions of ripening haws from September into winter. So commonplace is the hawthorn in Norfolk that perhaps we rarely notice or celebrate its significance. In fact where hawthorns escape from our hedgerows, forming patches of dense thorny growth on commons, or studding a neglected meadow with ‘wannabee’ trees, we give this species, along with its dark relative the blackthorn, the epithet scrub. Scrub, rather than being seen as baby woodland to be nurtured, is most often used as a derogatory term for land seen as unmanaged, neglected, or in need of tidying up. Nature has huge capacity and power to rewild our tamed ploughed lands and meadows in an alchemy that turns grass and furrow back to woodland. Scrub is just an early step in this natural succession.

Norfolk’s most famous hawthorn is the Hethel Old Thorn. Its reputed to be over 700 years old. One of the oldest hawthorns in England, now protected by Norfolk Wildlife Trust on one the world’s smallest nature reserves just 0.025 hectares in extent. To find this venerable thorn you need to first find Hethel Church. It lies on the edge of a peaceful Norfolk South Norfolk village some 7 miles south-west of Norwich and just a few miles from Wymondham. Five minutes walk along the public footpath from the church, past a small sedgey pond, takes you into the cattle-grazed field within which the thorn is protected by a circular fence.

NWT Hethel Old Thorn, photo by Richard Osbourne

Veteran hawthorns do not retain their size as they age. The Hethel Thorn today has shrunk in size and stature with its trunk now split and twisted. Descriptions made by in the eighteenth century measured the trunk at 13 feet around. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century many props supported its larger branches but these are long gone.

Lone hawthorns were once seen as faerie trees. There are tales of meeting the Faerie Queen by a lone hawthorn bush and being led to the Faerie underworld only to emerge after just a few hours to find that many years have passed in our world. So, if you visit the Hethel Thorn, be on your guard. I found plenty of rabbit holes under the Thorn but fortunately didn’t fall down any.

Perhaps surprisingly for what is usually a small shrub the hawthorn is steeped in magical traditions. Some say that of all our native trees the hawthorn is the species most enshrined in myth and legend. Sacred to the White Goddess across Europe its primary association has been with birth and fertility. There is a beautiful legend that the Welsh goddess of the hawthorn, once walked the empty universe and her white track of hawthorn petals became the Milky Way. At Hethel local villagers no may longer erect a maypole each May Day and sadly no Hethel maidens now celebrate the return of nature’s fertile season and the time of growth by dancing around the Thorn. But this tradition is still remembered.

Enough of magic. Here are some hard facts of ecology and landscape history that should more than justify the hawthorn’s place in our list of species that have made, and continue to make, Norfolk. In England during the Parliamentary land enclosures between 1750 and 1850 more than 200,000 miles (320,000 kms) of hedges were planted and almost all were of hawthorn. In Norfolk Gerry Barnes and Tom Williamson record in their recent book Hedgerow History that 97% of hedges in Norfolk contain hawthorn making it by far the most widespread hedgerow shrub. Norfolk Parliamentary enclosure acts most often stipulate the planting of ‘quicks’ or ‘ quicksets’, the quickthorn being the quickest thorn with which to make a good hedge. As elsewhere in England Norfolk enclosure hedges were of ‘quickthorn’, the hawthorn. Don’t however assume that all hawthorn hedges are of recent origins there are probably Norfolk field boundaries, sometimes marking the line of Parish boundaries, that go back millennia and some hawthorn hedged field boundaries in the Broads and West Norfolk may be similar or in parts identical to field boundaries in use during Roman times.

Without our Norfolk thorn hedgerows our wildlife would undoubtedly be poorer. The majority of county’s small songbirds, our chaffinches, dunnocks ( or in old money hedge sparrows), blackbirds and song thrushes, are hedge nesters. And what better hedge than a thorn hedge to protect your nest and eggs? Our hedges are corridors for wildlife to move along, and not just our birds, for without our thousands of miles of road and field-side hedgerows our small mammals from hedgehogs to bank voles and from shrews to stoats would be much rarer. In May hawthorn in flower nectars not just bees but an almost unimaginable diversity of small flying insects from hoverflies, to flower beetles. In autumn the hawthorn’s red berries provide food during autumn and winter months for resident blackbirds and song thrushes but also for hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of winter migrants that arrive on tired wings having crossed the North Sea. From fieldfares and redwings, chaffinches and brambling to rarer migrants such as waxwings the haws are vital food for survival. It was a tragedy on unimaginable scale that stripped so much of Norfolk’s and England’s landscape of its hedges in the year between the 1960s and the 1980s. Taking with them not just so much wildlife but also so much meaning and so much history written in lines of hawthorn from our countryside.

We have much to thank the hawthorn for. A species that links the cultural and farmed landscape to the truly wild. A species steeped in history and tradition. A species too often denigrated as mere scrub that is key to the future on declining birds such as nightingale and turtle dove. A species that in its primary role in Norfolk’s hedges defines ownership and maps the landscape history of so much of our County. A species that has played, and continues to play, a key role in so many of the stories that have shaped our land.

100 Species, Number 7: Coccoliths

David North, Head of People and Wildlife

I don’t suppose many readers will have heard of coccoliths or coccolithophores to give them their full name, let alone the species Emiliana huxleyi. Yet this species, and its coccolithophore friends and relatives, might even deserve first place amongst the species that have made Norfolk. 

I have never seen a living E. hux. Though both you and I have probably swum amongst them and have certainly walked miles over their dead remains. So how can this be? One of the commonest species in the world, very beautiful (try googling E hux images), yet almost unknown. Well E hux suffers two problems for any species wanting a high profile, its marine and its tiny – so doesn’t rank highly in the cute and cuddly stakes. 

Thomas Huxley, friend of Charles Darwin, gave a lecture to working men in Norwich in 1868 titled ‘On a piece of chalk’. The lecture starts, ‘If a well were sunk at our feet in the midst of the city of Norwich, the diggers would very soon find themselves at work in that white substance almost too soft to be called rock, with which we are all familiar as ‘chalk’. Huxley goes on to describe how a friend of his Captain Dayman, had been ordered by the Admiralty to take samples of the sea-bed bottom between England and America as part of the work to lay the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable in 1853. Thomas Huxley was sent these samples and examining them with a microscope realised that the structures he saw, were clearly the remains of living creatures, and identical to those beautiful spherical structures, coccoliths, that he had also seen in chalk rock. His Norwich lecture, still available on the internet, is a highly readable work of genius which explains how chalk is actually the remains of once living marine creatures which still roam our seas today. As Huxley said, ‘A great chapter of the history of the world is written in chalk’.

The chalk, probably more than one thousand feet thick, which lies under the North Norfolk house where I am writing this, is composed of uncountable billions of small white globules which have been described as like snowballs made from brittle paper plates. A description which of course fails to capture the beautiful, geometrical complexity of these structures.

So E hux and other coccolithophores are actually forms of single celled marine algae which build their tiny skeletons from plates of calcite. These calcite plates, coccoliths, sink to the bottom of the sea, not just when the organisms die, but are also shed as they multiply asexually or simply grow. This process, which has formed the chalk beneath our feet in Norfolk, continues today and it’s estimated that more than 1.5 million tons of calcite a year fall to the ocean bottoms from their activity each year.

Thomas Huxley didn’t know the age of the chalk in Norfolk, or how long it took to produce it, though he pioneered the research and thinking on how these geological processes work and are connected to living systems. We now know that the chalk that is the bedrock of Norfolk was laid down between 100 million years ago and 60 million years ago when as Huxley rightly deduced in his Norwich working men’s lecture the county and much of what is now England was a shallow tropical sea. We call this period the Cretaceous ( Creta means chalk and also give its name to the island of Crete) and it was a time of runaway greenhouse gases, no ice at either pole, and seas as warm as hot baths. This runaway greenhouse world, with massive amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere, was eventually brought back into balance by the billions of tonnes of atmospheric carbon locked away by coccolithophores. Their skeletal plates form Norfolk, England’s and the world’s chalk deposits. Coccolithophores make their coccoliths (skeletal plates) out of one part carbon, one part calcium and three parts oxygen (CaCO3). So each time a molecule of coccolith is made, one less carbon atom is allowed to roam freely in the world to form greenhouse gases and contribute to global warming.

We don’t perhaps appreciate the influence of this chalk in Norfolk. We only really notice it in the cliffs at Hunstanton where white chalk overlies the iron rich red chalk. I don’t know how tall those cliffs are but I do know each cm took about 1,000 years of deposition of the calcite skeletons of the coccolithospheres to create. Without the chalk there would be no flint nodules ( the remains of silica rich marine species and subject of a future post) and without the flint no hand axes from Grimes Graves and perhaps no homo sapiens. For surely we as a species would be very different if we hadn’t had millennia of flint tool usage to hone our hunting skills during our Stone Age evolution.

No coccolithosphores, no chalk deposits, no Norfolk and perhaps no modern human beings.

Simple really! So perhaps Emilania huxleyi, and its marine relatives, deserve to be appreciated and celebrated. They continue of course, unthanked, unrecognised and largely unknown to this day to regulate our climate by mopping up humanities carbon dioxide pollution from the air, continuing to lock it away in ‘carbon sinks’ on the world’s sea floors in deposits of grey ooze that Thomas Huxley first investigated. They are one of the planets keystone species, the base of ocean foodchains with zooplankton and small fish feeding directly on them. They produce dimethyl sulphide which released into the atmosphere from the ocean surface is thought to have a global impact on rainfall through ‘cloud seeding’. Their tiny bodies are rich in long chain poly-unsaturated lipids and are now being investigated as a possible future source of bio-fuels.

It took a great mind like Thomas Huxley’s to begin to see what an important part this species has played in the history of the world. The name Emaliania huxleyi of course recognises his discoveries. I hope if you have got this far that you too will recognise they deserve their place in the 100 species that made Norfolk.

100 Species, Number 6: Herring

Red herrings and silver darlings

David North, Head of People and Wildlife

The herring is only a small fish, usually not more than 10 inches long, shaped for speed and with shining silver scales on its sides and belly. Out of the water its scales reflect a subtle rainbow of colours and like many fish its beautiful colouration deserves recognition but rarely gets a mention.

This is a species that has changed not just the history of Norfolk but possibly the world! Don’t believe it? Well read on! It’s a story of war, of global trading, of kings, queens and slaves and of course of human greed and folly, and all centred on the humble herring. The herring is a births, deaths and marriages fish – it has changed human and family history both through love and through tragedy. There are many families today whose parents or grandparents met only because of our obsession with this species. ‘No herring, no wedding’ was once a common saying in fishing communities.

Let’s start with Norfolk. Three of Norfolk’s four largest towns all have links with the former trade in herrings, but few would argue that Great Yarmouth owes both its origins and its growth to the North Sea herring. The town’s origins go back to the tenth century when this coastal sand-bank was first settled by herring fishermen. The fishing was good and Yarmouth gets a mention in the Domesday Book (1086) as the centre of the herring industry. At this time over the border in Suffolk the Manor of Beccles paid an annual tribute of 30,000 herring to the Abbey of St Edmund which was increased to 60,000 after the Norman Conquest. Henry 1 declared Yarmouth a burgh in 1108 for an annual payment of ‘ten milliards herring’.

Yarmouth’s medieval herring fair, described as the ‘noblest fishery for herring in Europe’, ran from Michaelmas (29 September) to Martinmas (10 November) and attracted merchants from across Europe. Statutes of Herring passed in 1357 meant that herring had to be landed at Yarmouth before they could be traded.

The herring industry was the basis for the growth of the whole community in Yarmouth. It provided work not just for fishermen but for sail makers, rope makers, net makers, coopers (barrel makers), fishmongers, curers, shipwrights, gutters and by the 19^th century for tug crews, railwaymen, dock workers and engineers. The scale of the industry is almost impossible to imagine today. In 1722 Daniel Defoe visiting Yarmouth writes of 40,000 herring barrels being prepared and by the start of the 19^th century Yarmouth was the largest herring port in the world. The peak was in the early 20^th century with 900 million herring landed in 1913 and the average catch in the early 1900s being 530 million herring in the 14 week season from September to November. The record came in 1907 when 90 million herring were caught off Yarmouth in a single day with only space for 60 million to be landed the other 30 million were diverted to Grimsby. Scottish coopers in 1906 were making 2,009,014 barrels and 422,080 half barrels for the herring industry. 1,163 Scottish drifters (the herring boats) moved south to Yarmouth in the 1913 season and 1,359,213 cran of herring were landed. (1000 to 1,300 fish make up a cran) These were the days when you could walk from one side of Yarmouth harbour to the other on the decks of the drifters, and 10,000 seasonal workers, fishermen, fishergirls and curers swelled the population of Yarmouth for the autumn herring season.

So herring was big business and led to the growth of one of Norfolk’s four most populous towns but what of wars, weddings and changing world history? Surely too much to claim for a 10 inch silver marine fish. Well here are just a few ways that herrings have changed the course of our history.

Lets’ start with the Romans and the Vikings – they both fished for herring in Norfolk waters. So maybe the healthy diet of herring was in part responsible for all that conquest, raping and pillaging. More seriously the origins of the Hanseatic League originated in the regulation of the herring trade. Lynn of course grew before it became Kings Lynn as a Hansa port and both Norwich and Kings Lynn had medieval Hanseatic League warehouses from where herring were traded for wool, hides and beer, and even with Russia for timber. So important was the herring trade that the Hansa took control of the salt mines at Luneburg to dominate the herring industry through control of salt.

The herring has been described as ‘the potato of the middle ages’. It was the staple diet of both rich and poor. Yarmouth had to provide herring pies for Royalty. When the English army were besieging Orleans in 1429 500 cartloads of salted herring were despatched but the French got wind of this (maybe literally!) which led to the ‘Battle of the Herrings’. The English army at the battle of Agincourt was fed on salt herring. In more recent times you could equally argue that the British Empire relied on salt herring. There were exports to the West Indies of Yarmouth herring to feed slaves and keep them working and healthy: all part of the herring story.

Did herring enable us to win the First World War? Well they certainly played a part. Steam drifters from Yarmouth were requisitioned as mine-sweepers but more vital than that as in wars through the centuries it was fishermen who enlisted in the navy (49% of UK fishermen enlisted in the First World War). With their knowledge of the sea they played a crucial part, many dying to keep trade routes open and Britain a free country.

Through the centuries many fishermen have died in pursuit of the herring but equally many weddings, love-matches and births have also been the herring’s legacy. The annual migration of fisher-lassies from Scotland following the herring south to Yarmouth for the autumn fishing season took place for nearly a century. In 1913 6,000 women gutted 854 million herring in 14 weeks in Yarmouth. They worked long hours gutting 30 herrings a minute with their hands wrapped in cloth to protect them for salt getting in the cuts they sustained. A good fishing year swelled the marriage register and not all these girls returned to Scotland. The end of the fishing season in November was a peak time for marriages in Yarmouth.

The story of Norfolk’s herring industry is one which we all still have lessons to learn from. For many centuries the practice of small wooden sailing boats setting nets at sunset to catch the herring as they rose from the depths to feed near the surface at night, though dangerous and a hard life, was also sustainable. Steam drifters from the early 1900s worked in much the same way heading out to work the seas up to 40 miles off Yarmouth – the most abundant seas were north-west of Cromer at Smith’s Knoll. However better technology and bigger ships meant that a great industry died through greed and the silver darlings no longer swam is single shoals more than two miles long. A change to trawling and purse-seining meant the herring could be hoovered out the sea at any depth and a combination of more engine power, bigger boats and electronic equipment to find the fish meant there were no refuge areas for herring in the North Sea. In the 1960s the Norwegians alone had 259 purse-seiners each capable of taking 1,000 tons in a night operating in the North Sea. By the early 1970s it is estimated that 75% of the entire North Sea stock could be taken in a single year and a combination of the British, Danes, Dutch, and Norwegians emptied the North Sea of herring. In 1977 the EU closed the North Sea herring fishery which led to a partial recovery but on nothing like the scale once sustained. Issues including illegal fishing, by catch, and a lack of will by politicians remain an issue though the welcome news just this month (Feb 2013) that the EU may ban discards and regulate North Sea fisheries on a more sustainable basis is decades overdue.

If you have followed this story I hope you will agree that the herring, Yarmouth’s silver darling, deserves its place in the hundred species that have changed Norfolk’s history. It’s a story of greed and the end of a Norfolk industry that once employed thousands. A story that we still need to learn from if we are to create sustainable seas and much needed Marine Conservation Zones. Let’s remember the silver darling, campaign for sustainable seas and hope one day the great shoals of herring will return to the North Sea.

P.S. And finally a red herring! The red herring was smoked whole and smoked long. So long that a single red herring could be used to lay down a false trail that would mislead a whole pack of hounds. They would literally be following a red herring.

100 Species, Number 5: Earthworm

David North, Head of People and Wildlife       

He thought of all the infinitesimal motions of the world, the obstinate, heartbreaking progress of an earthworm, eating its own route forward.

(Carrie Brown, Rose’s Garden)

The power of earthworms comes not from their individual strength but from their collective strength – something we in the conservation movement could perhaps learn from!

Earthworm, photo by Richard Burkmarr

Out of sight and out of mind. In your garden, in the fields and woods of Norfolk, and across Britain, from our Cley Marshes reserve on the Norfolk coast to the Cors Dyfi nature reserve on the Welsh coast (run by Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust), uncountable numbers of worms are doing what worms do best, eating and tunnelling, and in the process building our Living Landscapes.

How often do we wonder about what lives under our feet – the life in the soil. Millions – no billions - of living creatures inhabit every garden, living their lives unnoticed in the soil. None are more important than earthworms. There are worlds within worlds under our feet – soil is a habitat that supports a myriad life forms, from the microscopic to the massive, including the earthworms most feared enemy, the mole. (A species for a later post perhaps!)

Worms are blind, deaf, have no spine, no bones, no teeth, a length of just a few inches and their bodies are 80% water. So why include them in my list of 100 species that make Norfolk? 

Well Charles Darwin said of the earthworm, ‘It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organised creatures.’ The power of earthworms of course comes not from their individual strength but from their collective impact – something it took the genius of Darwin to recognise. 

Charles Darwin, one of my naturalist heroes, was the first person to take earthworms seriously. Though perhaps seriously is the wrong term, as his research included getting his wife to spend many hours singing and playing music to worms to discover if they could hear! However from his observations of worms Darwin drew remarkable and profound conclusions. This interest in earthworms was encouraged by an observation made by his uncle Josiah Wedgewood (of Wedgewood pottery fame) who observed that pieces of brick he had spread in a field had slowly become buried. Darwin immediately thought from his studies that earthworms were a likely cause.

His great insight was to realise that the small changes made by the individual earthworms he observed , when multiplied by billions for all the worms in England, and across thousands of years, could bring ‘geological’ scale change.

As he modestly records, 'The subject may appear an insignificant one but we shall see it possesses some interest’. The results of his 35 years of observations on earthworms were published in his final book, ‘The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, With Observations on Their Habits’ published in 1881. A book which surprisingly sold more copies in its first year of publication than ‘Origin of the Species’ achieved!

So how are earthworms landscape builders? Darwin estimated that an acre of grassland might support 50,000 worms and that the weight of their casts (posh term for earthworm poo) would amount to 18 tons a year. We now know that Darwin’s estimates were on the low side – indeed if you count worms of all species then an acre of good land could support perhaps a million worms!

To understand the importance of earthworm poo, sorry casts, it’s necessary to know a little about their lifestyle. Earthworms are a bit like archaeological JCB diggers. They tunnel through the soil, eating as they travel, passing the earth through their muscular guts and rising to the soil surface to leave their casts. In this way Darwin estimated they increase the depth of the soil by 0.2 of an inch each year. That might not sound much but try multiplying it up through time! In ten years an object on the soil surface will be buried 2 inches deep and after 1,000 years by 200 inches. So Darwin had cracked Josiah Wedgewood’s puzzle of his vanishing bricks. Earthworms are great survivors. Worms (though not our lumbricus terristris) have been around for at least 500 million years and survived at least five great extinction events. 

But worms of course provide far greater services to us than gently burying former cities and civilizations for today’s archaeologists to unearth. Earthworms have been described as ecosystem engineers. They change the structure of their environments. Their burrows allow both air and water to penetrate soils but also help prevent water-logging. It’s estimated the tunnelling or worms each year on an acre of grassland creates a drainage system equivalent to installing 2,000 feet of 6 inch pipe!

Darwin described earthworms as nature’s ploughs, 'The plough is one of the most ancient and most valuable of man’s inventions; but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly ploughed, and still continues to be thus ploughed by earth-worms.’ Darwin. 

Earthworms, including Lumbricus terrestris, by the way they feed, are very effective at increasing the organic matter in the soil. They pull leaves and decaying vegetation from the soil surface down into the soil. This method of feeding releases the nutrients locked up in dead plants, making it available to living plants. As they tunnel and feed they break dead organic matter into tiny crumbs with a large surface area that bacteria and fungi can then break down releasing plant nutrients.

Darwin’s observations on the importance of earthworms have more than been confirmed by scientists today. Indeed we are still discovering new benefits that earth worms provide. Recent studies have shown that worm casts contain strange structures of calcium carbonate but in the form of amorphous calcium carbonate which is a very strange and special structure. A single earthworm may produce between 0.2 and 4.3 milligrams of calcite a day. That doesn’t sound much but earth worm produced calcite could lock up 564kg of carbon per hectare per year. That’s as much carbon as would be locked up by tree growth if a hectare was planted up. Pretty amazing. Maybe it’s the earthworm that holds the answer to climate change. Its already busy working to protect us from sea level rise of course by raising the land surface.

It has even been suggested that the origins of human civilization and farming can be linked to earthworms. For the last 11,000 years of human history, ever since we first became farmers, people have benefited from earthworms tilling the soil and providing nutrients to our crops. It may be no coincidence that the first great civilizations, first cities, and perhaps even the invention of agriculture, occurred in areas rich in earth worms. The Nile, Indus and Eurphrates valleys, where our first great civilizations prospered, were exceptionally rich in earthworms. Earthworms in the Nile Valley have been shown to deposit up to a thousand tons of castings per acre per year, explaining the astonishing fertility of the valley. The rise and fall of civilizations may be as strongly linked to soil fertility as it is to emperors and kings, or human wars and battling philosophies. As Andre Voisin suggested, ‘One often reads of the thousands of slaves that built the Pyramids of the Pharaoh. In actual fact, these enormous edifices owe their existence in the main to the thousands of slaves inhabiting the sub-soil of Egypt.’ (Andre Voisin Better Grassland Sward 1960)

Darwin may not have used the term ecosystem service but he certainly discovered, and understood, the principle that people benefit from nature’s services. His pioneering studies on earthworms are still to my mind the best on an ecosystem service. He recognised the great truth about soil, which he refers to as vegetable mould, ‘‘All the vegetable mould over the whole country has passed many times through, and will again pass many times through, the intestinal canals of worms.’ (Darwin). 

Of course its not just people who benefit from earthworms. They are vital in the food chains of many other species. And it’s not just early birds that catch the worms, a whole host of wildlife, from shrews and voles to moles and badgers, rely on earthworms in their diets. This key role in food chains was understood by another great natural observer, Rachel Carson. She also recognised that worms ingesting soil would mop up and concentrate in their bodies chemical poisons such as DDT being used by farmers. She found that worms were able to take up huge quantities of persistent DDT from the soil without it killing them, but a small bird would be killed, or rendered infertile, by eating just 11 worms. Her studies led to the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, A book which did change the world and eventually led to the banning of these poisons. Even more recently it’s been shown that other poisons, such as PCBs, are broken down much faster in soils with healthy worm populations. Today worms are used both for pollution control and waste disposal.

So next time you stand in your Norfolk garden, or walk through a Norfolk wood or meadow, think about the worms under your feet. There is a whole world down there in the soil – a world as full of mysteries, dramas and magic; of predators and prey, food-chains and habitats, parasites and symbiants, as in our world. The hidden depths under our feet are as strange and biodiverse as any of the ecosystems in the superficial world of the surface. I wonder, when we own a nature reserve how deep does our ownership go? Do we own the world up to a metre down? 10 metres? 100 metres? Life penetrates deep – is that life part of our nature reserves? 

I don’t have an answer to that question, but I do know, if I had to choose one species that puts the life in our Living Landscapes, it would be the earthworm. They were once known as ‘angels of the soil’. That seems a pretty good name to me too.

 ‘I would not enter on my list of friends the man who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.’ (William Cowper)