A man with two dogs spilled out of Home Wood and we fell into the kind of good-humoured conversation that runs on wagging tails and eager snouts – this deaf 15-year-old jack russell with everlasting batteries; that young brown mongrel nursing a damaged spine. Five minutes later we parted, ending my sole encounter with another human being in a whole afternoon of walking through woods and fields.
Were it not for dog walkers the deserted countryside of our crowded islands would be even emptier. Yet those two terriers had just sniffed their way around the humps and ditches of a once industrialised area. Here was ground that had been filled with people at a time when the population was less than a 10th of what it is today.
Home Wood was one of six ancient woodlands within three miles that probably were worked all winter by coppicers, thatchers, hurdle-makers and others earning a livelihood from the trees. The wood has also grown over and half-obscured a sizeable medieval factory-farming unit, one of the best-preserved of 2,000 or more that operated within the clay-capped counties of England.
I came to the factory perimeter, a thicket of splayed sedges sprouting pendulous heads that fronted a still channel of water three metres wide. An algae-coated Forestry Commission sign facing the ditch declared “Fish stew and rabbit pie”, a succinct summary of the 13th-century earthwork’s purpose as a fish farm and rabbit warren.
I looked into the moat, a western boundary only a little less than two football pitches in length. The sign spoke of a dozen fish stews beyond the moat, a series of ever deeper breeding ponds that housed all sizes from fry to full adults. But the stews (from the French estuier – to keep or enclose) were lost from sight over the far bank within a tangle of brambles and alder trees.
Above the dry stretch of the moat that marked the eastern boundary was an agricultural motte, a raised bank of spoil from the ponds that archaeologists believe housed a rabbit warren. The moat penned the conies in and kept the peasantry out – lords of Northill manor guarded their winter stocks of fish and flesh.
