Acknowledgements Much of the fieldwork on which this report is based was carried out by Sarah Harrison, and much of the archive research by Annie Sommazzi. Thanks also to the staff of the Norfolk and Suffolk Record Offices, for their help and advice; and to Gerry Barnes, Peter Holborn, Gilbert Addison, Ian Featherstone and Scott Perkin for their comments on an initial presentation of these results in June 2010. <strong>The</strong> project was made possible with funding support from: the Norfolk <strong>Biodiversity</strong> Partnership; <strong>Breckland</strong> Council; Norfolk County Council; Suffolk County Council; and Forest Heath District Council.
Introduction: <strong>Breckland</strong> and its <strong>Pine</strong> <strong>Rows</strong>. To understand the pine rows of <strong>Breckland</strong>, the subject of this short report, requires a brief discussion of the region’s wider landscape history. <strong>Breckland</strong> is a distinctive area of south west Norfolk and north west Suffolk, distinguished by particularly dry and often acidic soils which are formed in sandy Aeolian drift overlying chalk or, in places, boulder clay. It is the most agriculturally marginal region of East Anglia, idiosyncrasies of climate compounding the problems posed to cultivators by acid and infertile soils: frosts have been recorded in every month of the year (Hodge et al. 1984, 27-34). Even at the end of eighteenth century, to judge from the county maps published by Faden (for Norfolk in 1797) and Hodskinson (for Suffolk in 1783) well over 40 per cent of <strong>Breckland</strong> was still occupied by heathland (Wade Martins and Williamson 1999, 13). From at least the fourteenth century, large areas were used for warrens, and the intensive grazing of the rabbits could lead to the formation of mobile sand dunes: William Gilpin, visiting the area in the 1760s, described ‘sand, and scattered gravel, without the least vegetation; a mere African desert’. <strong>The</strong>re were, nevertheless, numerous settlements, and the more calcareous soils (mainly located within the principal valleys) were, well into the postmedieval period, occupied by arable open fields, in which the strips of farmers were intermingled with varying degrees of regularity. <strong>The</strong> fields were dunged by extensive flocks of sheep, grazed by day on the heaths and close-folded on the arable by night. But in addition to the permanent areas of arable land, and the permanent heaths, large areas were farmed as temporary outfields, or ‘brecks’, the organisation of which may have become more systematic and organised from late medieval times (Bailey 1989; Postgate 1962). By the seventeenth century, regular rotations were imposed on the outfields: they were ploughed for a specified number of years and then allowed to tumble down to heath once more. <strong>The</strong> population of this marginal area declined significantly in post-medieval times, and on the worst soils some settlements experienced severe contraction. Wordwell in Suffolk was, by 1736, little more than a single farm, ‘the chief profits whereof arise from a flock of sheep, the soil being for the most part a barren dry heath, a very bleak place’ (Wade Martins and Williamson 1999, 13). Such places fell under the control of large landowners, and by the eighteenth century the area was peppered with large numbers of country houses and landscape parks. From the eighteenth century, and especially from the end of that century, such individuals engaged in ambitious schemes of improvement and land reclamation: heaths and open fields were enclosed, and replaced by a mesh of rectilinear fields, new roads were often laid out and old ones terminated, tidied up or realigned. On the better soils of the district, where larger communities survived and landholding patterns were more complex, similar schemes of enclosure and reclamation were carried out but often slightly later, in the early years of the nineteenth century, and usually effected using parliamentary enclosure acts. By the 1830s few areas of open field survived, although extensive heaths and warrens remained, on land too poor to be effectively reclaimed. Large landowners in this period also planted belts and plantations, initially around their parks and mansions, later more widely. <strong>The</strong> late eighteenth-century owner of Riddlesworth in Norfolk, the appropriately named Sylvanus Bevan, reputedly planted 996,000 trees in and around the park (Young 1804, 383). Not all ‘improvements’, and in particular the more spectacular reclamation schemes, were motivated solely by
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