The news that Georgina Downs won her landmark High Court battle against the UK Government, regarding its assessment of risk in exposure to agricultural pesticide spraying, gives hope to those trying to improve the ecological impacts of today’s farming.

Here’s the news article from the Guardian -

An environmental campaigner yesterday won a landmark victory against the government in a long-running legal battle over the use of pesticides. The high court ruled that Georgina Downs, who runs the UK Pesticides Campaign, had produced “solid evidence” that people exposed to chemicals used to spray crops had suffered harm.

The court said the government had failed to comply with a European directive designed to protect rural communities from exposure to the toxins. It said the environment department, Defra, must reassess its policy and investigate the risks to people who are exposed. Defra had argued that its approach to the regulation and control of pesticides was “reasonable, logical and lawful”.

Downs, who lives on the edge of farmland near Chichester, West Sussex, launched her campaign in 2001. The judge described how she was first exposed to pesticide spraying at the age of 11 “and began to suffer from ill health, in particular flu-like symptoms, a sore throat, blistering and other problems”.

Downs said the government had failed to address the concerns of people living in the countryside “who are repeatedly exposed to mixtures of pesticides and other chemicals throughout every year, and in many cases, like mine, for decades”. People were not given prior notification about what was to be sprayed near their homes and gardens, she said.

In his ruling, Mr Justice Collins highlighted that the 1986 Control of Pesticides Regulations states that beekeepers must be given 48 hours notice if pesticides harmful to bees are to be used. The judge said: “It is difficult to see why residents should be in a worse position.”

Speaking after the ruling, Downs said her seven-year battle was over “one of the biggest public health scandals of our time”. She called on Gordon Brown to block any Defra appeal. “The government “should now just admit that it got it wrong, apologise and actually get on with protecting the health and citizens of this country”.

The case centred on the way the government assesses the risk posed by pesticides. The current method is based on occasional, short-term exposure to a “bystander” and assumes that individuals would be exposed to an individual pesticide during a single pass.

Downs said: “The judge has agreed with my long-standing charge that this bystander model does not and cannot address residents who are repeatedly exposed.” The model does not account for rural residents exposed to mixtures of pesticides and other chemicals “throughout every year and, in many cases like my own, for decades”.

She said: “The fact that there has never been any assessment of the risk to health for the long-term exposure for those who live, work or go to school near pesticide-sprayed fields is an absolute scandal, considering that crop-spraying has been a predominant feature of agriculture for over 50 years.”

Downs’ campaign has collected evidence from other residents who report health problems including cancer, Parkinson’s disease, ME and asthma, which they claim could be linked to crop-spraying.

The judge said “defects” in Defra’s approach to pesticide safety contravened a 1991 EC directive. He said Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, “must think again and consider what needs to be done”.

A Defra spokesman said: “The protection of human health is paramount. Pesticides used in this country are rigorously assessed to the same standards as the rest of the EU and use is only ever authorised after internationally approved tests … We will look at this judgment in detail to see whether there are ways in which we can strengthen our system further and also to consider whether it could put us out of step with the rest of Europe and have implications for other member states.”

The European parliament’s environment committee last week approved new ways of assessing the risk of potentially hazardous sprays to protect crops and plants. The new criteria are part of an attempt to halve the use of toxic products in European farming by 2013. A final vote on the proposals is due next month or in January.

Backstory

Georgina Downs was first exposed to pesticide spray in the garden of her parents’ house near Chichester, West Sussex, in 1984 when she was 11. She suffered several years of ill health, and after years of study into the possible causes, she founded the UK Pesticide Campaign in 2001. A hard-hitting video of a mannequin picnic in her garden, regularly drenched in pesticide spray, helped make her case. She has won many plaudits and awards, and was joint winner of the Andrew Lees Memorial Award at the 2006 British Environment and Media Awards.

Here is the statement Georgina Downs gave outside the High Court after her victory, published on her UK Pesticdes Campaign website -

I would like to start by confirming that I have won my High Court action against the Government. Therefore I am obviously very pleased with today’s result, and have been fully vindicated, as this case was based on a set of core arguments that I identified and have been presenting to the Government over the last 7 years.

The Judgment from Mr. Justice Collins is very clear in that the Government has been acting unlawfully in its policy and approach in relation to the use of pesticides in crop spraying, and that public health, in particular rural residents and communities exposed to pesticides from living in the locality to regularly sprayed fields, is not being protected (and this applies to both acute effects and chronic long term adverse health effects).

This is obviously a very significant and landmark ruling for the potentially millions of residents throughout the country who, like myself, live in the locality to pesticide sprayed fields.

The Government’s method of assessing the risks to public health from crop-spraying is based on the model of a ‘bystander’, in which it assumes that there will only be occasional, short-term exposure to the spray cloud at the time of the application only, from a single pass of a sprayer and to only one individual pesticide at any time.

The Judge has agreed with my long-standing charge that this bystander model does not and cannot address residents who are repeatedly exposed from various exposure factors and routes to mixtures of pesticides and other chemicals, throughout every year, and in many cases, like my own situation, for decades. Obviously those living near pesticide sprayed fields will include vulnerable groups, such as babies, children, pregnant women, the elderly, people who are already ill and who may be taking medication, amongst other vulnerable groups where the health risks are increased.

The fact that there has never been any assessment of the risks to health for the long-term exposure for those who live, work or go to school near pesticide sprayed fields is an absolute scandal considering that crop-spraying has been a predominant feature of agriculture for over 50 years. Under EU and UK law the absence of any risk assessment means that pesticides should never have been approved for use in the first place for spraying near homes, schools, children’s playgrounds and other public areas.

Reports of adverse health effects in rural areas have gone on for decades. In 2003, I produced a DVD that I presented to the Government, its regulators, (the Pesticides Safety Directorate) and main advisors, (the Advisory Committee on Pesticides) that featured individuals and families from all over the country reporting acute and chronic long-term illnesses and diseases in rural communities surrounded by sprayed fields.

It is important to note that the acute effects reported by people on the DVD are the same acute effects recorded in the Government’s very own monitoring system, such as rashes, itching, sore throats, burning eyes, nose, blistering, headaches, nausea, stomach pains, burnt vocal chords, amongst other effects. Government officials and advisors have therefore been fully aware for years of the adverse effects that are being confirmed by its own monitoring system, but the Government has continued to accept such effects as not being serious. Today’s Judgment again recognizes that it is unlawful for the Government to have added in a qualification to the standard of the European Directive which requires that pesticides are not approved for use until it has been established that there will be “no harmful effect” at all on human health.
Also by the Government allowing acute effects to be considered acceptable it is then also allowing the risk of chronic illnesses and diseases, because the risk of chronic effects developing can increase when acute effects repeatedly occur as a result of long-term cumulative exposures. This has been recognised previously by the European Commission that acknowledged that “Long term exposure to pesticides can lead to serious disturbances to the immune system, sexual disorders, cancers, sterility, birth defects, damage to the nervous system and genetic damage.”

The most common chronic long-term illnesses and diseases reported to me by rural residents include various cancers, leukaemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, neurological conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, ME, asthma and many other medical conditions.

The Judge has concluded that the DVD contained solid evidence that residents have suffered harm to their health, particularly in relation to acute effects, and that a different approach should have been adopted and accordingly there has been a failure to have regard to material considerations and a failure to apply the European Directive properly.

The crucial evidence I produced for my case in 3 very detailed Witness Statements, shows quite clearly that the Government has knowingly failed to act, has continued to shift the goalposts, cherry picked the science to suit the desired outcome, and has continued to issue grossly inaccurate information and mislead residents and the wider public by continuing to assert that the current regulatory controls in the UK are robust and fully protective and that pesticide spraying is safe. The Government’s response to this issue has been of the utmost complacency, is completely irresponsible and is definitely not “evidence-based policy-making,” and has now been ruled by a High Court Judge to be in breach of European (and UK equivalent) legislation. As I have always maintained from the outset of my campaign this is definitely one of biggest public health scandals of our time. In fact the UK Government’s relentless and extraordinary attempts to protect the industry as opposed to people’s health has been one of the most outrageous things to behold in the last 7 years of my fight. This is especially apparent at the moment as not content with not protecting its own citizens the UK Government has been trying to scupper new European pesticide proposals from having the primary focus on health protection of citizens across Europe, to one of primarily protecting the industry.

Therefore today’s judgment is extremely damaging to the Government, all the Government departments, officials and scientific advisors, responsible for pesticides, as it clearly confirms what I have always said from the outset of presenting my arguments in 2001, that the Government has fundamentally failed to protect people in the countryside from pesticides and has also knowingly allowed residents to continue to suffer from adverse health effects without taking any action to prevent the exposure, risks and adverse impacts occurring.

Of course whilst it is right that the Government as a whole is held responsible and accountable for its unlawful policy and approach, there is no doubt that there are a number of people within Government who have a very key responsibility for presiding over this fundamental failure in duty to protect the public from pesticides and those people should now be sacked with immediate effect. I would like to name just a few of these people. First of all David Milliband who previously held the position as the Secretary of State for DEFRA and who did not see it as necessary to meet with me to even hear the case and arguments presented in relation to residents exposure to pesticides and reported ill-health and neither did Hilary Benn the current DEFRA Secretary of State. Paul Hamey who has been in charge of the exposure assessment at the Pesticides Safey Directorate, since 2001 and has had direct responsibility for the exposure model that has been ruled unlawful in the Judgement today. Kerr Wilson Chief Executive of the PSD, Sue Popple the former director of policy at PSD, and now an official working within DEFRA, Richard Davis, Director of Approvals at PSD and Jon Battershill, the secretariat for the Government’s Committee on Toxicity. And last but by no means least Professor David Coggon who featured heavily in this case as he was the Chairman of the Government’s Advisory Committee on Pesticides between 2000 and 2005 and is now a chairman of another advisory committee, the Committee on Toxicity. Professor Coggon was responsible for introducing the adjective serious to describe the standard of the legislation which has been found to be an error in law in today’s Judgement. He also previously informed me that he only saw 15 minutes out of my 2 hour DVD (the one that the Judge has called solid evidence, and that should have led to the ACP adopting a different approach), as Prof Coggon said it was not good use of his time to watch any more. He has continued to maintain that this is merely a social issue, when the reality is that this is obviously a very serious public health issue.

I would now suggest that the Prime Minister himself sees the evidence I have presented in my case first hand without being told by his advisors that there is nothing wrong as that has been shown today to not be the case and I would urge the Prime Minister to step in and stop his Government from appealing this decision, as the Government should now just admit that it got it wrong, apologise and actually get on with protecting the health of the citizens in this country.

The most important action that must be taken, based on the evidence that adverse effects are occurring, is to prevent exposure for residents and communities by banning crop-spraying around homes, schools, children’s playgrounds and other public areas. Considering studies have shown that pesticides can travel in the air for miles then the distance of the no-spray area would need to be substantial.

I hope this Judgment now puts to rest any attempts by various parties to criticize me for what I am doing. I have worked to the highest professional standard in the campaign I have run and have been meticulous with accuracy and attention to detail. With all the unarguable scientific evidence I have amassed over the last 7 years, I would be acting completely irresponsibly if I didn’t do what I do. I should not have had to have spent the last 7 years of my life fighting to get the Government to do something on this when the evidence and arguments I identified were very clear from the outset and the Government should have acted when I first started to present the case in 2001.

Finally, I would like to thank my legal representatives, Michael Fordham QC, Emma Dixon, Derek Sutton and others at Blackstone Chambers, as well as all those at Foresters Solicitors, especially Joe Mensah and Robbie Manson, for all the work and support in this case and for agreeing to work in my very unique way, as I have been directly and fully involved in all preparations relating to this case and its overall management.

I would also like to thank all those who have supported the campaign over the last 7 years, all that support has been invaluable and is what has kept me going in this battle on behalf of all those who have had their health and lives destroyed due to the government’s very own policy.

Some might say that this event presents ‘a new hope’ -

From Comment is Free -

Brithdir Mawr, according to Wikipedia, means ‘Great Speckled Land’. You can find out more about the story of the roundhouse from its dedicated website.  In the mean time, below is the latest news from the Times -

Tony Wrench was toasting victory over the planners yesterday with a glass of wine made from the vines that grow on the turf roof of his wooden roundhouse.

After ten years of planning battles, during which he and his partner, Jane Faith, faced having to demolish the home they had built themselves, they have finally won the right to stay.

The roundhouse, known officially as “That Roundhouse”, was built in a hidden corner of a farm in the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park. It has a grass roof and walls built from cob – a combination of mud, straw, sand and water – and 16in (40cm) logs. A skylight was salvaged from an old coach and a milk churn is used as a stove.

For years no one knew it was there until a pilot carrying out an aerial survey spotted the glint of Perpex and the planners went in to investigate.

What they found was a community in which Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit from The Lord of the Rings, would have felt at home. Smoke curled from the chimney of the grass-roofed roundhouse. Mr Wrench, who was once a council official, was scraping a living from music-making and woodturning.

The roundhouse is part of the self-sustaining Brithdir Mawr Community, which had built several other environmentally friendly buildings, including a geodesic dome and a house made from straw bales.

Unfortunately, none had planning permission and the National Park authority took immediate action to have their occupants evicted. In 2004 Mr Wrench, who spent £3,000 building his 34ft diameter house, was about to start demolition when local people rallied to his support. The issue was raised in the Welsh Assembly but the application was rejected time and again by the park authority.

But then the wind changed and the environment suddenly became a fashionable issue. Mr Wrench, 62, who has been pioneering the concept of “permaculture” for decades, found his lifestyle being hailed as a model for sustainable living. The park authority amended its rules to allow “low-impact” housing, and yesterday he was told that the roundhouse is no longer condemned.

“The planners did everything they could to get rid of us, but we have been able to prove to them that it is possible to have a sustainable and low-impact community in the countryside,” Mr Wrench said.

“It’s great that our efforts to build a community using renewable resources have now been supported. We had to prove that we were improving the bio-diversity of the area and conserving the woodland – and we did that.

“I would urge other councils and national park planners to take the same view as Pembrokeshire National Park. The planners have worked miracles in making a new policy, which enables communities that are self-sufficient to exist.”

Mr Wrench and his partner generate their own power, have a compost lavatory and burn wood they coppice themselves for heat and cooking. He admits that living sustainably can be hard work, especially in the depths of winter when his wind turbine and solar panels struggle to power a single light bulb.

Emma Orbach, 52, who founded the community, said: “It’s a milestone in a free society that a minority of people who wish to live simply on the Earth are now being given this opportunity. The villagers are pioneering a new lifestyle.”

Planning approval has been given for eight roundhouses, along with lavatories, agricultural buildings and workshops on the land. Power is generated on-site, water is collected locally and three quarters of the villagers’ income comes from working the land and from craft industries.

A National Park spokesman said: “It is pleasing that support can be given at this stage in a longstanding and complicated case.”

Ecological alternatives

— Grass roofs are a coveted must-have for any eco-conscious homeowner, but alternatives include insulating lofts or wall cavities with sheep’s wool – renewable, durable and naturally resistant to fire

— Fill your home with potted plants, which remove harmful chemicals such as benzene and carbon monoxide. Bamboo palm and gerbera daisy are particularly good

— Don’t rely on mains electricity to pump harvested rainwater. One alternative is a solar fountain, which powers a low-voltage pump using a small panel. A complete fountain will cost upwards of £100

— Have a go at ground-source heating, a way of drawing heat from the ground using either a borehole or pipes laid a few metres below the surface. It must be boosted to the level needed for heating a home using a heat pump. In a well-installed system, every unit of electrical energy put in will yield three or more units of heat energy Invest in a condensing boiler, which increases efficiency by recovering heat normally wasted in the hot flue gases given off by a conventional boiler. It may cost a little more (between £100 and £300) to install, but will use less fuel

— Don’t be bashful about more radical steps. Composting of human waste is as old as the hills. The right amount of “soakage” – typically using sawdust, straw and earth – gives good decomposition. Keeping urine separate is the key to avoiding a bad smell

Source: Centre for Alternative Technology

On the day that a home property deal in the UK (in London – read the article in the Evening Standard) was done for just under £1billion (which equals just under $2trillion US), one visitor who lives elsewhere in England got the train to work… just like many others who prefer, need, or can only afford, to live outside the capital -

Up at 5.45am. I have a breakfast meeting in London: good for those who live there, not so good for the rest of us. House dark and a bit chilly: central heating hasn’t kicked in yet. Children sleeping. Greeted by yawning cats, surprised that any human is sentient at this time of day. Pack laptop and 3G modem and start car. Journey to station takes ten minutes — later in the morning it will take 50. Astonishing spectacle at station car park — vacant spaces. Park car and wait for idiotic meter to dispense ticket while making loud buzzing noises after swallowing coins to the value of the Gross National Product of Ecuador. Join throng of furtive, hurrying figures, coat-collars turned up against the biting East Anglian wind. I have entered, albeit temporarily, the world of The Commuter.

Day return to London costs £29. We’re flying to Derry at half term and tickets for all the family have cost less. Buy papers and board train, which is populated mainly by ashen-faced folks clutching cardboard cups of Costa coffee and newspapers. One or two have paperback books. One person opens a laptop (a Dell) and starts work on a document. After a time I notice that he is stabbing angrily at his keyboard and recognise the characteristic symptoms of system crash. That’s right — he’s a Windows user. Nothing I can do for him. Blue screen of death. Leave him to his fate. I’m sure he saved the document. Or not.

We speed through darkened countryside, stopping at small stations to pick up commuters. Affluent ones get on at Audley End, in leafy Essex countryside. Mostly work in the City, I’d say. Better suits anyway.

Dawn breaks, revealing a lowering, grey sky. We pass through towns and settlements, seeing only untidy back gardens and the rear ends of industrial estates. Interesting that we turn our backs on the railway and present our best face to the road. So a rail trip always reveals the dark underbelly of urbanisation.

With each stop, the train fills. There’s a seat for everyone — just. Past the urban waste that is Tottenham Hale and slipping into the City, heading for Liverpool Street station where, the driver announces over the public-address system, “this train will terminate”. “No, you silly bugger”, I reply under my breath, “the service terminates, not the train”. Pedantic, you see. Comes from being an academic.

Onto the platform and join the lemmings heading into the City, where they will sit at multi-screen desks and buy and sell sub-prime mortgages wrapped up in pink tape and made to look like assets. Outside the station there’s a line of Mercedes and Lexuses and Audi A8s with smoked glass, waiting to whisk corporate bosses to their places of work. I walk through the throng to my meeting remembering the advice of a former colleague (a lawyer who turned down a lucrative City career to become an academic). “Making money is easy”, he used to say, “provided you are prepared to work with the stuff”. These people have made that choice. For years they’ve lived high off the hog, earning the colossal bonuses which have had such a distorting impact on our economy (as John Lanchester dryly observed recently). 2007/08 will be a lean year for some of them; there are forecasts of 20,000 redundancies looming in the Square Mile. Last in, first out. Easy come, easy go. Not my problem. Now where is that bloody venue?

Says their website -

Ouse Washes was the name originally given to the area deliberately allowed to flood between the two great canals, dug by thousands of prisoners of war under the direction of Cornelius Vermuyden, in the 17th century. This flooding enabled the remainder of the fenland to be drained and turned into the best farmland in Europe. The Washes, therefore, is the only area that resembles the great watery wilderness that the fenland once was. There the customs, superstitions and ways of life lingered longest. In winter the flooded land is home to one of the largest gatherings of wildfowl in Europe, with ducks, geese and swans travelling from as far as Siberia and Iceland. In the summer the waters recede, the grass grows incredibly long and the Washes are home to many breeding species as well as birds and animals.

And -

The Ouse Washes Molly Dancers are a throw back to those halcyon days where the dance glorified the local heroes and reflected the uniquely freezing, windy wilderness where morris dancers dared not tread with their little tinkling bells and handkerchiefs. The Ouse Washes dance kit is itself indescribable but is said to be based on what the traditional dancers would have worn had they had access to today’s local charity shop, in other words colourful stuff.

Out of the murky, legendary depths where boggarts and the o’the wykes weave reedy dangers come the Ouse Washes Molly Dancers, where echoes of Fenland heroes, vagabonds and ne’er- do-wells are expressed in their unique brand of Norfolk Dance. Molly Dancing.

Ploughboys traditionally performed there own distinctive East Anglian dance when they were unable to work during the frosts, and on plough Monday (the second Monday in January) they would drag a plough round the villages, and dance whilst collecting money for beer and food. Some ploughboys even blackened their face so that they wouldn’t be recognised afterwards, particularly if they had just ploughed up some poor unfortunate’s garden who had refused to put money in the collecting tin (you are warned!). The dances they performed were either country-dances or a stylised interpretation of then, and became the forerunner of molly dancing, as we know it today.

We took the name of the area for our dance group as no one could object as no one lives there. We hope that we keep true to the traditions of the place, which is wild, dark, frightening and teeming with life – just like our dances.

I don’t know the name of the dance that they’re doing – and it’s not Morris Dancing! I find their looks, rhythm and moves mesmerising…

Their history is fascinating -

Lynn Advertiser, Tuesday 16th January 1844
The town of Downham, according to general custom, was visited this week by six or eight individuals, miserably decorated with ribbons, accompanied by a wretched tormentor of cat gut, designated a fiddler, styling themselves ploughboys, extracting alms of the inhabitants.

The police are generally alert in suppressing vagrancy, and were they to exert themselves to prevent cases similar to the above, the suppression would be a boon to the community.

The principal portion of the public in this neighbourhood are zealous advocates for and supporters of the plough, and would willingly give a trifle to the honest plough lad, when solicited to do so; but when the scum of the village, as in this instance, palm themselves upon the public as plough-boys (the principal portion of whom, it is doubtful, whether they know how to manage a plough, if they were ever engaged in such employment) it must be admitted the imposition is unbearable and ought to be put down- to say nothing about the gross insults generally given to those who refuse money when solicited.

Folklore, vol. 72 (December 1961) pp. 584-598 – Folk Life and Traditions of the Fens

‘The seasonal festivals of the year brought to the Fens, as elsewhere, their customs and traditions, most of them not surviving beyond the First World War.

Plough Monday saw the traditional procession of the plough and the demands for money made by the men and boys, many dressed as women or as horses. In the Southery and Littleport Fens, any woman refusing to give money would have her long drawers dragged from her and hung round her neck.

In the evening, at the Molly dancing, the money would be counted, and next day groceries would be purchased and delivered to needy old women. On this day too, teamsmen were initiated by having their noses rubbed against the horse’s tail.’

This dance is called the ‘Strange’ -

This dance came about because some of us liked the tune and thought that it felt right. It took six months to develop the figures and has become one of our core dances. The contrast between the darkness of the sound and the wildness of some moments in the dance comes from the heart of The Ouse Washes and reflects the environment from which the dancing comes. The fenland is the ultimate bland countryside, or so it seems from the horrible roads that cross it. Mile after mile of corn and sugar beet, roads that infuriatingly won’t go straight, drivers in cloth caps who won’t go more than 35, tractors which swing in front of you and stay there forever. But, get off the main roads, get out of your car and the sky towers above you. Ancient stories about Will o’ the Wisps and malevolent spirits seem very real. No wonder when they got together, fenlanders could be a little wild… the tune fits the place.

The group created a dance to the story of Mucky Porter, for which this is the music.

From wikipedia, about the English statesman, Charles Townshend (1674-1738), Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk and descendant of the legal advisor to the Paston family -

Born at Raynham Hall, Norfolk, Townshend succeeded to the peerages in December 1687, and was educated at Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge. He had Tory sympathies when he took his seat in the House of Lords, but his views changed, and he began to take an active part in politics as a Whig. For a few years after the accession of Queen Anne he remained without office, but in November 1708 he was appointed Captain of the Yeomen of the Guard, having in the previous year been summoned to the Privy Council. He was ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to the States-General from 1709 to 1711, taking part during these years in the negotiations which preceded the conclusion of the Treaty of Utrecht.

After his recall to England he was busily occupied in attacking the proceedings of the new Tory ministry. Townshend quickly won the favour of George I, and in September 1714, the new king selected him as Secretary of State for the Northern Department. The policy of Townshend and his colleagues, after they had crushed the Jacobite rising of 1715, both at home and abroad, was one of peace. The secretary disliked the interference of England in the war between Sweden and Denmark, and he promoted the conclusion of defensive alliances between England and the emperor and England and France.

In spite of these successes the influence of the Whigs was gradually undermined by the intrigues of Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland, and by the discontent of the Hanoverian favourites. In October 1716, Townshend’s colleague, James Stanhope afterwards 1st Earl Stanhope, accompanied the king on his visit to Hanover, and while there he was seduced from his allegiance to his fellow ministers by Sunderland, George being led to believe that Townshend and his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Walpole, were caballing with the Prince of Wales, their intention being that the prince should supplant his father on the throne. Consequently in December 1716 the secretary was dismissed and was made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, but he only retained this post until the following April.

Early in 1720 a partial reconciliation took place between the parties of Stanhope and Townshend, and in June of this year the latter became Lord President of the Council, a post which he held until February 1721, when, after the death of Stanhope and the forced retirement of Sunderland, a result of the South Sea Bubble, he was again appointed secretary of state for the northern department, with Walpole as First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. The two remained in power during the remainder of the reign of George I the chief domestic events of the time being the impeachment of Bishop Atterbury, the pardon and partial restoration of Lord Bolingbroke, and the troubles in Ireland caused by the patent permitting Wood to coin halfpence.

Townshend secured the dismissal of his rival, Lord Carteret, afterwards Earl Granville, but soon differences arose between himself and Walpole, and he had some difficulty in steering a course through the troubled sea of European politics. Although disliking him, George II retained him in office, but the predominance in the ministry passed gradually but surely from him to Walpole. Townshend could not brook this. So long, to use Walpole’s witty remark, as the firm was Townshend and Walpole all went well with it, but when the positions were reversed jealousies arose between the partners. Serious differences of opinion concerning the policy to be adopted towards Prussia and in foreign politics generally led to a final rupture in 1730. Failing, owing to Walpole’s interference, in his efforts to procure the dismissal of a colleague and his replacement by a personal friend, Townshend retired on 15 May 1730. His remaining years were passed at Raynham, where he interested himself in agriculture and was responsible for introducing into England the cultivation of turnips on a large scale and for other improvements of the kind. He died at Raynham on 21 June 1738.

Townshend introduced to England the four-field crop rotation pioneered by farmers in the Waasland region in the early 16th century. The system (wheat, barley, turnips and clover), opened up a fodder crop and grazing crop allowing livestock to be bred year-round, and increased productivity by avoiding leaving the soil uncultivated every third year. Previously, a three-year rotation was practiced by farmers in Europe with a rotation of rye or winter wheat, followed by spring oats or barley, then letting the soil rest (leaving it fallow) during the third stage. Crop rotation is necessary in order to avoid the build-up of crop-specific soil pests and diseases, and because different families of plant have varying nutritional requirements. The four-field crop rotation was a key development in the British Agricultural Revolution.

As a result of this, and other agricultural experiments at Raynham, he became known as Turnip Townshend. Although a figure of some fun, his agricultural reforms were extremely important. However, Alexander Pope mentions him in Imitations of Horace, Epistle II, as a turnip obsessed person and says, in a note, that “that kind of rural improvement which arises from turnips” was Townshend’s favorite conversational topic.

See previous post for innovations in four-field crop rotation.

Such foresight was greatly appreciated; the fictional character of Isabella in Jane Austen’s book, Emma, judged Brunswick Square and its surroundings to be superior to other parts of London on account of their ‘airiness’. Open space also gives people the opportunity to be themselves: as always, people prefer to shun the dedicated, tarmac-ed paths when there’s a more direct route.

The adjoining square is called Coram Fields, the site of the Foundling Hospital for unloved children. The sound of lots of children playing, in the Spring sunshine in Coram Fields, stood out even against the waves of traffic, which I took to be reflective of the place’s genius loci.

‘Adults may only enter if accompanied by a child’. This stance on gatekeeping contrasts markedly with the mood at the much grander Russell Square. There the noticeboard at the entrance commands visitors not to feed the birds and to be wary of thieves operating in the area; all the same, Russell Square is a breath of fresh air. Note the classic design, lush planting and fountain in the middle.

In 1968, Roger Deakin bought the ruined remains of an Elizabethan house, and 12 acres of surrounding meadow, on the edge of Mellis Common in Suffolk. Little survived of the original 16th-century dwelling except its spring-fed moat, overhung by hazels, and its vast inglenook fireplace. So Roger put a sleeping-bag down in the fireplace, and lived there while he rebuilt the house around himself.

Walnut Tree Farm, the house he eventually completed, and in which he died a month ago, is made largely of wood. It is as close to a living thing as a building can be. When big easterlies blow, its timbers creak and groan “like a ship in a storm”, as Deakin put it, “or a whale on the move”. He kept the doors and the windows open, in order to let air and animals circulate. Leaves gusted in through one door and out of another. Swallows flew to and from their nest in the main chimney. It was a house which breathed. Spiders slung swags and trusses of silk in every corner. As I sat with Deakin, 10 days before his death, a brown cricket with long spindly antennae clicked along the edge of an old biscuit tin.

The fields, well tended but unfarmed, were also busy with life. Sparrow-hawks busked for custom overhead, deer picked their way through the hornbeam wood and tawny owls hooted from big ash trees. The land was separated into fields by a mile of massive old hedgerow, in places five metres high and five wide. Deakin had a habit of driving his cars until they were about to give out, then backing them into a particularly deep area of hedge and abandoning them, to be grown through by the briars and nested in by birds. Walking the fields with him, you would come across old Citroëns with their frog-eye headlights, peeping from the brambles. “All that needs is a new engine, and we could drive it to France,” he said, hopefully, as we passed one of these.Deakin wrote as idiosyncratically as he did everything. Thinking my way through his house now, I can count at least five different desks, between which he would migrate according to his different moods. His sleeping-places changed, too. Over the years he had established in his meadows a variety of outlying structures, including two shepherd’s huts, an old wooden caravan with a cracked window and a railway wagon that he had painted Pullman-purple. He once emailed me happily about having been out in the wagon with the rain whacking on the roof. “An amazing thunderstorm last night as I lay listening. Like being inside a kettledrum with a whole symphony going on out there and with thunder in wraparound quadraphonic!” When he wasn’t writing, he was usually swimming, most often in his moat, or wallowing in the massive cast-iron bath that lived at the back of the house.

In his relaxed contrarianism, his environmentalism (he was a founder member of Friends of the Earth, and co-founded Common Ground, the organisation which has campaigned so significantly for “local distinctiveness”) and his enthusiasm, Deakin was a latter-day Thoreau. Except that where Thoreau lived by his pond for a total of several months over several years, Deakin lived by his moat for nearly four decades, watching and noting the habits of the trees, creatures, wind, sun and water around him. Walnut Tree Farm was a settlement in three senses: a habitation, an agreement with the land, and a slow subsidence into intimacy with a chosen place.

It was while doing lengths in his moat that Deakin had the idea for what would become Waterlog. Published in 1999 in a small print run, the book quickly became a word-of-mouth bestseller. Starting from the moat, Deakin set out to swim through the rivers, lakes, streams and seas of Britain, and thus to acquire what he called “a frog’s-eye view” of the country. The result was a masterpiece: a funny, lyrical, wise travelogue which was at once a defence of the wild water that was left and an elegy for that which had gone. Here is a section from his exploration of the streams and lakes of the Rhinogs, a remote mountain group in North Wales:

Searching the map, I had seen some promising upland streams, a waterfall, and a tarn, so I hiked off uphill through the bracken. There is so much of it in the Rhinogs that the sheep all carry it around on their coats like camouflaged soldiers. I watched a ewe standing between two rocks the shape of goats’ cheeses. They were just far enough apart to allow the animal in, and I began to understand the relationship Henry Moore perceived between sheep and stones. He saw sheep as animate stones, the makers of their own landscape. By grazing the moors and mountains they keep the contours – the light and shade – clear, sharp and well-defined, like balding picture-restorers constantly at work on every detail. The black oblongs of their pupils set deep in eyes the colour and texture of frog skin are like the enormous slate coffin-baths you see in the farmyards here; seven-foot slabs of slate hollowed into baths.

Sheep like soldiers, stones like cheeses, stones like sheep, sheep like picture-restorers, sheep’s eyes like frog skin, sheep’s pupils like slate baths … this joyful promiscuity of comparison is characteristic of Deakin’s prose. It was a function of his immense enthusiasm and curiosity, but it was also, in its way, a literary playing out of the first principle of ecology: that everything is connected to everything else, or as John Muir put it, that “when one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world”.

But Deakin was capable of lyrical precision as well as paper-clip-chain metaphors. When he wrote that “Redstarts flew from tree to tree, taking the line a slack rope would take slung between them; economy in flight is what makes it graceful”, it is the economy of the prose which makes the observation graceful. His description of a kingfisher “streaking by in an afterburn of blue” catches exactly the experience of one’s eyes not being quick enough to follow the flying bird.

In its poetry, its ecological conscience, and its visionary quality, Waterlog should be understood as belonging to a tradition of English land-art which includes the sculptors David Nash and Peter Randall-Page, as well as writers such as Ronald Blythe, Richard Jefferies and John Clare. But another type of Englishness runs strong in Deakin’s work, and that is his gently silly comedy – the humour of Kenneth Grahame, Jerome K Jerome, AA Milne, PG Wodehouse and even Enid Blyton.

The result of this mixture is that you finish reading Waterlog invigorated, and with a changed relationship to water and to nature. It is a book, as Heathcote Williams nicely punned, which leaves you with a spring in your step.

The influence of Waterlog was immense. Despite its thoroughgoing Englishness, it won admirers in Australia, Canada and Europe. It prompted a revival of the lido culture in Britain, and even the founding of a wild-swimming company (a commercialisation of which Roger quietly disapproved). It also inspired untold numbers of readers to take to the open water.

So it was that, for instance, on a cold grey April day in Sutherland in 2004, I was to be found in the sprawling and remote Loch Sionascaig, in the shadow of Suilven, back-stroking out to an island while the rain fell hard on my face, already looking forward to telling Deakin about the swim. The loch was a mile or so from the road, and the pleasure came at a price: I returned to my car peppered in midge and tick bites. As I reached the road, another car came into view. Its driver stopped and wound down her window. “You’ve been swimming,” she said. Dripping wet, and standing in my trunks, I could not deny it. “A bit early in the year, isn’t it?” she said. The midges were discouraging longhand explanations, so I said that a friend of mine had written a book called Waterlog about wild swimming, and now I couldn’t keep out of the water. She gave a surprised smile, reached down, and picked up the audio-tape of the book, to which she had been listening as she drove that lonely road.

Travel with Deakin was even more unpredictable than travel under his influence. The dark-green Audi in which he journeyed to his last escapades had moss growing in its foot-wells (“three different sorts”, he pointed out, proudly), and a variety of useful knives in the glove-box. Its boot always held a bivouac bag, a trenching tool of some sort and a towel and trunks, in case he passed somewhere interesting to sleep, dig, or swim. When lost while driving, which was most of the time, he had a habit of slowing almost to a halt on roundabouts and squinting up at the road-signs while I assumed the crash position. He was always proposing adventures: a night stake-out of a new badger warren “in a mysterious wooded tumulus in Thornham Woods”, or a joint attempt to traverse an acre of ancient woodland from one side to another without touching the ground, like the hero of Italo Calvino’s beautiful book, The Baron Of The Trees. “He’s over 60,” a friend said to me, “and he’s still got the energy of a fox-cub.”

One July we went to Dorset to explore the system of holloways or ancient drove-roads which seams that soft-stone county. We ended up sleeping in a hillside meadow, and cooking in the bed of the holloway. “A Vlach shepherd in the Pindos once taught me how to make a smokeless fire”, Deakin remarked idly, before creating a tiny and, yes, smokeless fire that was hot enough for us to boil water on. His extraordinary life meant that he often began stories with sentences of this kind. “When I was living in a cave in Southern Greece …” “Did I tell you how a hunter once shot at me because he thought I was a bear?” (the point of the story was how pleased he was to have been mistaken for an animal). We had plans to travel together to Cumbria, and at some point, Australia. He wondered if we could earn our passage out to the Antipodes as oarsmen on a quinquereme. I wasn’t sure that we could.

For the seven years after finishing Waterlog, Deakin was at work on a book about woods. He disapproved of the habit of fetishising single trees – chieftain pines or king oaks. Trees to him were herd creatures, best understood when considered in their relationships with one another (he loved the way that oak trees, for instance, would share nutrients via their root systems when one of their number was under stress). Trees were human to Deakin, and humans tree-like, in hundreds of complicated and deeply felt ways. Researching his book, he travelled to Kyrgyzstan, Australia, Tasmania, America, and throughout Europe and the British Isles. It was a measure of his natural generosity and his devotion to nature that, even when he was near death from cancer, he could still speak without jealousy of the ability of trees to heal themselves.

Over the years the project sprawled, digressing into studies of the hula-hoop craze, his anarchist great-uncle, the architecture of pine-cones. The numbered notebooks containing his research fill a wall of the main study at Mellis. It’s now clear that a brain tumour was trying to scatter his thoughts, stop him finishing the book. But enough was done by the time he died: Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees will be published early next summer, and is another major work.

A month ago, I drove to Mellis to see Deakin for the last time: held his hand, talked a little, until he fell asleep. The next day, I went with two friends, who had also known him, out to the north Norfolk coast. We swam in wild waves at dawn and dusk, and in the evening we read aloud the pages from Waterlog describing that magnificent coastline. We slept in the pine forests which run down almost to the sand at Holkham. I spent half the night in a hammock he had lent me, and half of it down on the needle carpet, where it smelt of sap and resin. Roger died a week later, still in the house that he had built around himself 38 years earlier.

A life lived so joyfully and so uniquely should not only be grieved over. But his death at 63 brought two unignorable losses. The first was to his family and many friends, for he would have grown old, properly old, so superbly. He was an expert in age: in its charisma and its worth; everything he owned was worn, used, reused. If anyone would have known how to age well, it was him.

The second loss was to literature. For his life to the point he wrote Waterlog – years in teaching, in film-making, even briefly in advertising – all fed into that exceptional book, and into Wildwood. But there were many more books to come. One about Essex, he told me, which I knew would also have been about the whole world. Another about aboriginality in the British Isles.

He was a prolific and brilliant correspondent, and his letters were always inset with beautiful field-notes, told for the joy of telling. The spring before his diagnosis, he wrote to me in excitement about new arrivals at Walnut Tree Farm:

Fox-cubs here, under the shed just beyond the shepherd’s hut: the one that’s invisible because under an enormous hedgehog of brambles. They are well-grown now and at dusk or dawn, frisking on the flattened grass, somersaulting, vaulting, tumbling as I watch them from my chair in the hedge. What spring means to a fully wound fox-cub!

Pictures taken in the Ashdown Forest (Winnie the Pooh country) on Friday – where we walked barefoot. The air was fresh, the ground was cold, and the silvery, clay soil was very wet and muddy in places. Lush.