Taming the Wild British Isles: A Natural History

If we could travel back in time, 8,000 years,

we'd find woodland almost everywhere in Britain.

People had lived in this forest for millennia, yet never enough of them to make much of a difference.

But the tiny population was growing and a new age was dawning,

as people power began to take over

from the wild wood in the great taming of Wild Britain.

The vast forest that cloaked the British Isles at the end of the last ice age was a true wilderness.

It was a place where nature ruled the roost.

That ancient woodland really was the forest of fairy tale,

a primeval paradise, where the wildlife followed the natural rhythms of life...

and death.

It was Britain's very own Garden of Eden.

How people turned this wild woodland into the gentle countryside we know today

is the most important story in our history.

This is how it all began.

For thousands of years, man had been at the mercy of mother nature.

But these predators were not hunting for man,

they were hunting with him.

Someone else was on the menu.

Working together made for a much more successful hunt.

And this was also a vital first step in taming the wild.

Go on, down there! No, down there! Go on!

Turning wolves from wild enemies into furry friends like Scamp here,

was a pivotal moment in human history.

We used our big brains to control a little bit of nature.

But people didn't begin to change the British landscape until the arrival of a much larger animal.

And we know all about that, thanks to this little chap.

Believe it or not, this beetle can help us look back in time.

MUSIC: "THE GREAT ESCAPE" THEME TUNE

Fossil beetle bits can survive for centuries.

And by counting their remains we know that 6,000 years ago

the population of this particular beetle suddenly took off.

And that's all because of what they eat.

It might be fertilizer to you and me, but it's dinner to a dung beetle.

Phew! Not my idea of nouvelle cuisine, but these fellas love it.

In fact, they only eat dung, so if there was an increase in their numbers 6,000 years ago,

there must also have been an increase in dung.

And the culprit...the cow.

Believe it or not, cows were crucial.

As they arrived, along with sheep and goats, on early trading boats,

the transformation of the British Isles began in earnest.

Forest had to make way for pasture.

Cutting down trees doesn't present a problem nowadays.

One of those machines can have them down and all chopped up in seconds.

Our ancestors had nothing like that.

When they wanted to clear a patch of forestall they had was this... a stone axe.

Made, in this case, from Cornish greenstone. Not exactly razor-sharp!

They tell me it's surprisingly effective.

I may be gone some time!

It's hard to believe that the people who began taming Britain were armed with only simple stone tools.

It may look gentle, but it is pretty strenuous...

and slow!

I wish they'd hurry up and invent the chain saw.

Yes, I could certainly do with more practice. Oh!

But in more expert hands, this was a powerful weapon of destruction.

More and more forest fell to the axe.

Whoa!

That's the way to do it! It's taken me quite a long time,

but two of our ancestors could have cut down three to four acres of woodland in a week.

The assault on the forest had begun.

5,500 years ago, the appearance of the countryside was changing.

Though woodland still covered most of Britain,

sizeable clearings had begun to appear among the trees.

As our countryside opened up, large areas of grassland...

and heath land made their first appearance.

And so did Britain's first fields,

full of newcomers which had arrived here alongside cattle and sheep.

Domesticated plants, like wheat and barley,

were the last essential ingredients in the recipe for human success.

These really were the seeds of a revolution.

With this new package of plants and animals, our ancestors no longer had to rely on the forest for food.

They had become Britain's first farmers

and as their success spread, the woodland shrank.

By 3,000 BC, fields replaced forest across great swathes of Britain.

It wasn't all bad news for nature.

This was when many of our familiar countryside plants and animals first became common.

Wild flowers thrived among the organically grown crops.

And these new fields provided a bounty of insects and seeds -

food for birds.

With such poor eyesight, the mole

couldn't actually see the changes,

but he could certainly sense them...

..along with the tiny harvest mouse.

It's the smallest of all British mammals,

weighing no more than a tuppenny piece.

This abundance of snack-sized animals was also good news for Britain's predators,

including one of our most beautiful birds of prey.

The barn owl likes to hunt along the field edges,

and must have prospered as Britain's countryside became more open.

Watching its graceful flight on a summer's evening

must be one of the most moving sights in the British landscape.

Particularly, with the dying sun on its wings,

it must have looked like a ghost to our ancestors.

It flies almost silently,

using sound to detect its prey, and stealth to creep up on it.

That wide face is like a radio receiver, listening and listening.

No matter how many times you see it it's always magical.

Perfect hunter - talons, beak and radar.

An unforgettable sight.

Wildlife certainly thrived in these fields, but it was humans who gained the most.

More fields meant more food, to feed more people.

We were becoming an ever more powerful force in the landscape,

and signs of that new-found strength can still be seen today.

West Kennet Long Barrow is one of the oldest man-made structures in Britain.

Some stones are very heavy. They were moved here from miles away.

The barrow behind is comprised of thousands of tonnes of rubble,

so why did our ancestors go to all this effort?

The first clues to answering that question were found inside West Kennet.

When first excavated, these chambers contained pottery, axe and arrowheads

and most importantly...bones, from dozens of different people.

So, all in all, it's pretty safe to assume that this was a tomb of some sort.

The local community may have come here to worship or just to remember their dead.

It's clearly a place that had great, spiritual significance to our ancestors.

But its importance doesn't end there.

The land around me was, and is, good farmland, well worth hanging on to.

And so our ancestors used tombs like this to prove their family ties to the land,

and claim ownership of it.

Monuments were beacons in the landscape, saying, "This land is taken".

These symbols of ownership appeared wherever fields replaced forest.

Over a few hundred years, thousands of monuments were constructed all across the British Isles.

A clear signal of growing human control in the countryside.

Many are aligned with the movements of the sun and the stars,

as people learned more about the natural world around them

and began to attach significance to the pattern of the heavens.

Most remarkable of all are the great stone circles.

Stonehenge stills draws almost a million visitors each year.

To our ancestors, it must have been awe-inspiring.

To build such a magnificent monument must have taken extraordinary organisation and co-operation,

clear evidence of a thriving human population.

The thousands of monuments, scattered all over our islands,

shows just how widespread farming had become.

Those early farmers even made it up here, to Dartmoor.

Here, they had a far more drastic effect -

the first environmental disaster in British history.

The bleak moors we know today are very different from how Dartmoor originally looked.

Even here it was once woodland.

But just as they had elsewhere, our ancestors felled that forest to make way for farmland.

Dartmoor is absolutely littered with ancient settlements,

built during the Bronze Age, about 3,000 years ago.

Here at Grimspound, they're well preserved.

You can make out these circles of the stone huts set within this enormous perimeter wall.

This was clearly once a much nicer place to live.

But up here, turning forest to fields upset a delicate balance.

Dartmoor was primed for disaster.

Britain's climate suddenly became colder and wetter.

And here on Dartmoor, more and more rain fell.

With no trees to hold together the fragile soil, the nutrients were washed away.

Crops failed,

livestock died

and Dartmoor became a wet desert.

Yet what these moorlands have lost in fertility,

they've gained in rugged beauty.

Dartmoor isn't the only upland in Britain to be, at least partly, man-made.

From Exmoor to the North York Moors, these remote and windy landscapes,

though created by fire and ice, have all been sculpted by the hand of man.

Forest had made way for moorland, heath land, grassland and above all farmland...

and as Britain BC became Britain AD,

the landscape was taking on a much more familiar feel.

It's extraordinary to think that much of today's countryside

isn't so very different from Roman soldiers found, when they landed on our shores in 43 AD.

But there were still big changes to come. Changes that involved not so much cutting down forests,

as controlling mother nature, imposing ever more order on the landscape.

And no-one loved order more than those Romans.

It was the Emperor Claudius who successfully invaded Britain, with an army of 50,000 men.

It wasn't long before the Romans were doing their bit to change the face of the British Isles.

The first... and most obvious legacy...

the Romans left us...

were these...

roads!

Efficient roads were crucial to Roman rule,

allowing soldiers and goods to move quickly around Britain.

Their direct routes sliced through the natural curves of the landscape.

This vital infrastructure remains just as important today,

and many of our modern roads trace routes laid down by the Romans.

"Street" was the Anglo-Saxon word for a Roman road,

so you could say that every street in Britain began with the Romans, even some of the most famous!

These new roads led to new towns and cities -

London, Chester, York, Lincoln, Bath, and many others were all founded by the Romans.

Their occupation gave a clear and very human structure to much of Britain's landscape.

And the very ultimate symbol of Roman power?

Hadrian's Wall, marking the north-west frontier of the Roman Empire.

It took six years to build, and used more than a million cubic metres of stone.

It remains one of the most ambitious building projects ever undertaken in the world!

Originally it would have been twice my height at around four metres, and about three metres thick.

Today, it's a shadow of its former self, but it remains one of our most spectacular landmarks.

The wall stretched right across Britain, from the Solway Firth on the west coast

to Newcastle on the east,

controlling the movement of people and trade in and out of the Roman Empire.

And it's easy to see why it was built here,

using the natural crags to make the frontier invincible.

The best place to see the wall is in Northumberland National Park,

where you can get still get some sense of its huge scale

and some idea of what life must have been like for a Roman soldier,

stationed in this bleak landscape.

They were billeted in these mile castles,

which are spaced at intervals of one Roman mile along the wall.

A Roman mile is a little bit less than our mile. These walls were even taller than the main wall.

Inside the area, a long barracks... You can see the foundations. ..would have slept about 16 men.

It must have been fairly cosy!

It must have been draughty, with wind and rain blowing across the ridge.

This curved wall here is probably a porch to keep out the worst of the weather.

It may also have kept out the smell of the horses,

which could have been stabled over here, along with stores, and weaponry to keep out the barbarians!

The ruins of Hadrian's Wall, and our network of roads,

are reminders of the hard edges the Romans created as they tamed our landscape,

but they also made subtle changes.

To find those, I'm heading south.

The Yorkshire Dales might seem an unlikely place to look for Roman remains,

but I'm not looking for crumbling ruins or ancient coins, I'm after flowers.

Back in May, the livestock were shut out of this field

to let the grass to grow good and tall for hay. And it has done, along with the buttercups and the clover.

Now it's ready for cutting, but with what?

These days the hay is cut by machine, then dried and stored for the winter,

but they didn't have tractors back then.

It needed a bit of Roman innovation.

That's where this comes in.

Before the mower, scythes were at the cutting edge of cutting technology,

and it was the Romans that brought them to Britain.

Without such an efficient cutting tool, we couldn't have cut hay

and so it's the Romans we owe our hay meadows.

And what a wonderful spectacle they make,

packed with colour from more than 40 different wild flowers.

A botanist's dream!

This one, yellow rattle, is particularly useful because it feeds on the roots of grass,

weakening it and allowing the other flowers in.

Why yellow rattle?

Well, when the seeds are ripe, they shake and rattle in those pods just like a rattlesnake.

The glorious sight of a hay meadow in full flower is surely something to thank the Romans for,

but they had one more contribution

for which I, along with every gardener in the country, owe them nothing but curses.

The Romans gave us snails!

There have always been snails in Britain,

but it was the Romans who brought over the all too familiar garden snail.

It was introduced as a gourmet delicacy, but these days the snails do most of the eating!

A single snail can have 430 babies in a year.

They really are eating us out of house and home.

How ironic that the humble snail lasted longer than the mighty Romans.

Their armies left Britain behind in 410 AD.

Released from their strict control mother nature had a chance to bounce back.

Britain's wildlife began to reclaim the countryside.

For 600 years the taming of Britain slowed almost to a standstill.

But it was only a temporary reprieve.

In 1066 the conquest continued...

in came the Normans.

Before the Normans arrived, castles like this one at Chepstow

simply didn't exist in Britain.

But within a few decades, they built hundreds of them

from Dover to Dublin.

Chepstow was the very first castle to be built in stone, but many others quickly followed.

In fact so many buildings went up in the century after the conquest

that Britain must have been like one huge construction site.

More stone was quarried for all this building work, than for the great pyramids of Egypt.

These majestic buildings were solid statements of Norman strength and power.

But this was just the beginning.

In the decades which followed, castles became more and more impressive.

Many of the most imposing of all are here in Wales,

a legacy of the centuries of struggle between the Welsh lords, and the Kings of England.

In a world where most buildings were modest timber affairs, castles would have towered over the landscape.

For the lords of the land,

these were symbols of their growing control over Britain's countryside.

As well as their love for castles, the Norman lords had one other great passion - hunting.

Ironically, their addiction to the thrill of the chase

made the Normans into Britain's first conservationists.

That'll do!

The Norman's favourite prey was the fallow deer.

But while they were common back home in France, these particular deer were entirely absent from Britain.

So the Normans brought some over and left them to settle in.

The stag's roars still echo round our woodlands

as he gathers up his girls each autumn.

To protect their prized deer the Normans set aside great areas of land, much of it forest.

With 80% of Britain's trees already cut down...

these woodlands became a vital refuge.

Many, from Sherwood to the New Forest...

have remained protected to this day...

and now contain some of our oldest trees.

Here in Windsor Great Park are some of the most ancient of all.

Massive great oaks, some of them more than 1,000 years old, and that makes them

amongst the oldest living things in Europe.

It's amazing to think William the Conqueror

may have ridden under the branches of these trees.

But these forests were a far cry from Britain's ancient woodland.

These woods were ruled by people...

carefully managed to provide a ready supply of timber, fencing, firewood and charcoal.

They may have had to serve people first, but they did provide a refuge for some of our richest woodland.

And the creation of these forests was not the only way in which the Normans helped out our wildlife.

I'm on me way to Skomer, a little island off the South West coast of Wales...

It would seem an unlikely place to find a link between Norman rule and Britain's natural heritage,

but you'd be surprised.

In fact it's actually because Skomer is so remote that it was chosen

as the perfect place to hide a very important animal.

The rabbit!

It might be a common sight today, but there were no rabbits in Britain

until the Normans brought them here.

When they were first introduced, rabbits were a prized delicacy.

A bit like caviar is today.

They were kept on islands to stop peasants nicking them for the pot.

Remarkably, when they first arrived they were rather delicate creatures, and needed quite a lot of TLC.

But eventually, they toughened up to the British weather and began to breed...

well, like rabbits.

It wasn't long before they were all over the place.

But here on Skomer, at least, they've helped out some of our native wildlife.

For the puffins which come here to breed each year,

these rabbit burrows are the perfect place to make a nest.

They are amazing, aren't they?

One of our most endearing birds on account of the fact the face is painted a bit like a clown.

Every one perfectly made-up -

lipstick, silver-grey cheek, dash of eyeliner!

Every last one of them's watching what I do.

Skomer's the perfect hotel for them,

full of these rabbit holes, five-star residences for raising a family.

The puffins just boot the rabbits out.

Well, you wouldn't want to argue with a beak like that, would you?!

For brilliance the puffin is hard to beat, but there is an even more remarkable bird here on Skomer

and it only comes out at night.

It's half past nine, the sun's set and it's getting incredibly dark.

Too dark now to use this camera, so we need to change...

to infra-red. And for me to get out image-intensifying binoculars.

pure James Bond this, you know.

But to begin with it's more what you hear than what you see.

BIRDS SQUAWK

Can you hear that?

It's been likened to the voices of cackling witches. I can believe that!

Someone said it was the ghosts of long-dead pirates.

It's neither, actually.

It's the sound of Skomer's greatest treasure.

And before long, they start to appear.

it's a Manx shearwater, a truly remarkable bird.

They're not the most elegant birds on land - their legs are too near their bodies to stand upright.

But they're designed for a life at sea.

They've just come back from fishing for sardines off the coast of Spain,

eaten its fill, relieved its mate on the nest,

who will go off and fish in turn.

They come home at night to avoid being attacked by gulls.

I can just make them out when your eyes get accustomed to the dark.

The place is alive with them!

It's not remotely scary, it's... quite wonderful.

Just like the puffins, they're here because of the rabbits,

whose burrows attract 102,000 pairs of shearwater each year...

that's a third of the world's population on this one island.

With so many neighbours in close proximity, the odd squabble is inevitable!

These delightful birds pair up for life

and may return to Skomer for anything up to 50 years.

Well, it's been an amazing evening.

Who'd have thought that the invasion of the Normans and their rabbits

would have meant that islands like Skomer

were rich in birdlife today?

One o'clock.

Time for bed!

Under the efficient rule of the Normans, Britain's people flourished

and farmland swept across even more of the countryside.

Wild Britain was squeezed into ever tighter corners,

but mother nature was about to fight back.

Fields, towns and villages were a perfect breeding ground for rats...

the rats carried fleas...

and in the belly of the fleas was plague.

The Black Death arrived on Britain's shores in 1348, and it spread like wildfire.

Some towns lost 70% of their inhabitants...

and in just 18 months, one in every three people in Britain was dead.

The drastic effect of the Black Death on the people of Britain was clear,

but did it change our countryside?

Well, many villages were abandoned in medieval times,

but was that because of the plague?

This is Wharram Percy...

one of the most important archaeological sites in Britain.

Before the Black Death, it was a thriving community,

but today it's a ghost town.

This church dates back around 1,000 years, serving local villagers since Saxon times.

But it's been a long time since anyone sang hymns or prayers were said within these walls.

The village of Wharram Percy has all but vanished.

All that remains today are lumps and bumps in the ground.

It was these lumps and bumps that first attracted the interest of archaeologists.

Every summer for 40 years, they came with their buckets and spades, trowels and brushes and dug away

to reveal the foundations of the houses, now laid out in gravel for everyone to see.

That square would have been a hearth.

These houses had animals and people under one roof.

We know the people were very tidy

because the chalk underneath the grass is in the form of a dish

from being regularly swept. Good Yorkshire values even then.

So was it the Black Death that finished off Wharram Percy?

Well, no.

We now know that many of these houses were still in use for generations after the plague.

Disease may have weakened the village, but it couldn't destroy its spirit.

It wasn't until almost 200 years after the Black Death that Wharram Percy was finally deserted. Why?

Well, it fell victim to a very different kind of plague.

SHEEP BLEAT

A plague of sheep.

There was a huge increase in sheep farming

in the years after the Black Death, and it was sheep, not disease, which drove people from their villages.

There was a booming market for wool,

and landlords, in pursuit of a quick profit,

evicted villagers, to make way for these huge flocks.

They may seem like timid scatty creatures to us,

but back then, sheep really were a curse. Just listen to this.

Sir Thomas Moore, writing in his Utopia, in 1515,

"Sheep become so great devourers and so wild

"that they eat up and swallow the very men themselves.

"They consume, destroy and devour whole fields, houses and cities."

It might sound a little over dramatic, but there's no doubt

that it was sheep who finally polished off Wharram Percy.

Thousands of other villages suffered the same fate.

But even as many people were driven from the land, the population was on the rise once again.

Towns and cities prospered and by the beginning of the 17th century

there were more than six million people in the British Isles.

But that amount of mouths to feed put a huge pressure

on the British countryside.

This was to be the final push in the taming of Britain.

But there was still one corner of Britain where nature remained in charge.

Across many of England's eastern counties the landscape was dominated by marsh and fen -

too wet to farm, but a haven for wildlife.

It was the last refuge of wild Britain.

But with ever more mouths to feed, the pressure grew to dry out these great wetlands.

At first with ditches and drains

and then with a new technology.

The windmill.

This one at Thurne Dyke, was one of the last to be built

and it's absolutely beautiful.

It would have been running 24 hours a day, and there's a fire to keep the operator warm at night.

His job was to keep the sails turned to the wind,

and keep everything well lubricated with horse fat,

which was apparently just the right consistency!

Up close, these really are magical machines.

The sails outside

turn this main shaft, which drives the pump on the other side of this wall.

It can shift 30 tonnes of water a minute,

with hardly any noise and no pollution.

It seems ironic that these new machines used the natural force

of the wind to help transform this last wild corner of Britain,

The wetland was dried up to create some of the most profitable farmland in our islands,

the random patterns of nature replaced by a neat ordered man-made landscape.

And all across the British Isles a patchwork of fields enclosed what had once been wilderness,

lines of hedgerows and stone walls marking out a very human geometry.

The wild woodland had been replaced by a very different green and pleasant land.

By the early 19th century Britain had changed forever.

We had transformed ourselves from a few thousand hunter gatherers,

to many millions of farmers, traders and townspeople.

To feed ourselves, we'd created a countryside dominated by farming.

The great forest had been cut down, the wetlands drained,

and the landscape parcelled up into fields

and wild Britain had been well and truly tamed.