Cambridgeshire Countryfile

These days, it seems like everyone

wants a part of the British countryside.

Last year alone,

there were nearly 1.5 billion visits to our natural landscape.

For more and more of us, our countryside is a playground.

A beautiful space, where we can satisfy our need for peace

and relaxation.

Or our hunger for adventure.

But as it gets more popular,

are we in danger of ruining the natural world we love so much?

With one in ten holidays in the UK now involving adventure sports,

gone are the days when people only went to the countryside

for a leisurely stroll.

Now we cave, climb, or for the more adventurous amongst you,

there are things like power kiting.

And then something I'm trying for the first time today -

gorge walking.

So, you realise we're standing in snow-melt water at this point?

Snow melt?

-It's not a hot tub, then?

-It's not the warmest water in the world.

In the search for new ways to explore the countryside,

thrill-seekers are now wading up rivers

and challenging mountain streams to satisfy their thirst for adventure.

OK, Tom. Whoo-hoo! There you go.

But the sport has come under attack for its impact on delicate

parts of the landscape.

-I love it coming straight down the sleeve.

-And out the bottom.

Yeah.

I'm joining Nottinghamshire County Council worker Phil Baker

at Hagg Farm Outdoor Education Centre

to find out what the issues are.

-Oh!

-Very good.

Clearly, in an area like this, there's things like bank-side erosion,

there's where you get in, where you get out, footpath erosion.

There's very vulnerable ferns and bushes around that you can see.

But this here is one of the side cloughs

that we deliberately instruct groups not to go up.

Because it's a small, narrow kind of cascade,

-there's lots of sensitive things around you could easily tear off?

-Yeah, yeah.

And you can see where the moss is very close to the stream.

If you climbed up there, you'd just wear that away straightaway.

And there's kind of no need.

-Then there's noise, of course, and disturbing nesting birds.

-Right.

Does that mean there are certain times of year

-when you avoid it, or...?

-Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Basically, we work very hard with the National Trust

to set up some operation procedures.

That means we only do it on a seasonal basis,

um...that we have restricted numbers, restricted use.

There's a bunch of control measures in place the Trust are happy with.

Let's give it a go!

You only live once!

-Whoo-hoo! Well done!

-That is bracing! Hoo!

Well, it's not just gorge walking that makes a few people uneasy,

there are loads of new adventure sports, fads, if you like.

And many people have concerns about those, too. Whoo!

There have been complaints about the new craze of coasteering -

a combination of swimming,

climbing and diving around our coastline, causing rock falls.

Some fell runners have upset farmers by leaving gates open

and disrupting livestock.

Even something apparently as benign as flying a kite can be damaging.

The shadow can disturb ground-nesting birds

and there's a risk of me trampling on them.

Most of these activities are fairly niche, though.

But there's another extreme sport that attracts thousands of us

into the countryside each week.

It feels a bit perilous, so nice and tight, please.

Climbing is on the up.

In the last 20 years, the British Mountaineering Council

has seen its membership triple, from 25,000 to 75,000.

Ooh, it's slippery.

The sport, pioneered in the 19th century,

was once only the pastime of the upper classes.

Now it has mass appeal

and people are flocking to the crags in their thousands,

as local climbing instructor Ed Chard knows only too well.

-Well done.

-So, you've been climbing around here for a few years.

What changes have you seen in that time?

Well, the increase of climbers.

You know, the sport is radically changing over the last few years.

More and more people are coming to areas like this

and it's just very, very accessible.

And I think people are recognising the value of climbing,

that they can come and they can have excitement

on the sort of short edges, like this,

but be in this fantastic environment, as well.

What about birds nesting in the cliffs?

-Do you have to be careful about them?

-Absolutely.

I think climbers are very, very aware

to out environmental surroundings.

Ringed ouzels are the sort of mountain blackbird, if you like,

and will nest on edges very much like this.

So, you know, we'll get together and we'll say,

"Let's stay away from that area, let's do that ourselves.

"There's lots of other rock to climb,

"let's let those birds fledge."

And we'll share that information with RSPB

and all those other folks, you know.

Of course, not everyone sticks to the rules, but

if we act responsibly, the impact of these sports should be minimal.

Yet, as I'll be finding out later,

there are more mainstream activities that can be cause for concern.

I'm in north Cambridgeshire, in the village of Helpston.

It's here that a man described as one of the poorest and most troubled

of the great English romantic poets found inspiration.

John Clare was born in 1793

and spent most of his life in this cottage.

He was a son of a humble labouring family.

And though he had little education,

he had no trouble in finding the words

to write about the countryside that he loved.

Up this green woodland ride let's softly rove

And list the nightingale, she dwells just here.

Hush! Let the wood-gate softly clap

For fear the noise might drive her from her home of love.

At one point, John Clare, who was known as the Peasant Poet,

even outsold Keats.

His family home is now dedicated to his life and his rich imagination.

And I'm meeting the curator, David Dykes, to learn more.

David, can you set the scene for me?

Apart from John Clare,

who else would have been living in this quite small cottage?

We had six children, his wife, his sister, his mother and father.

So you've got three generations of Clare family in this small cottage.

And he was writing his poetry while all the mayhem was going on.

That's why he'd walk out into the fields and write his poetry,

where he got his inspiration.

All nature has a feeling.

Woods, fields, brooks are life eternal.

And in silence they speak happiness beyond the reach of books.

And this humble boy from this little cottage

-found himself in London as a literary star.

-Absolutely.

That's where he got the name, the Peasant Poet.

Because he didn't fit in there, nor did he fit in here.

And when he came back here, fame came at a cost.

People didn't believe he'd written the poems.

They thought somebody else had written them for him.

And this is a diary that he kept in 1825.

And in it he records some of the people who came and looked at him

and said, "Are you actually the person who wrote the poem?"

And so he became almost like a sideshow.

-So, he didn't cope well with celebrity?

-Absolutely not, no.

And nor did he make money out of it.

He was always just a labourer who wrote poetry.

It's as if there were two John Clares.

One placed by the literary elite alongside Wordsworth and Byron,

and the other scraping a living

alongside his illiterate fellow farm workers.

One of his modern local admirers is Penny Stevens.

Penny, with what is it that makes Clare's poetry

so special to you today?

It's because he looked at the world around him

all the time, every bit of nature, every hour of the day,

every animal, every species, all the insects and birds,

and he described them so beautifully.

In a way, then, he was one of the very first environmentalists.

He was, and he wrote very personally and very, very beautifully.

And in his poetry, he used an awful lot of local dialect, didn't he?

Yes, he did. My favourite

is the word he uses for the long-tailed tit, the little birds.

And he calls them bumbarrels.

THEY LAUGH

And for the haw round fields and closen rove

And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove

Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain

And hang on little twigs and start again.

Clare loved the woods and the flatlands.

They represented freedom.

But that joy was to be short-lived because the common land,

the open fields where his family had toiled for centuries,

was taken away from them.

During the 19th century, right across the country,

Enclosure Acts, approved by Parliament,

put much of that land into private hands.

This denied Clare the right to explore the countryside

that defined his writing.

He had long struggled with his mental health

and, in his early 40s, was sectioned and sent to an asylum in Essex.

He continued to write poetry, but after a few years, absconded,

walking for four days back to his beloved village of Helpston.

A few steps from his cottage, perhaps a little too close,

there's the Bluebell Inn.

And, what with his love of ale

and his increasingly-fragile mental state,

things started to go downhill for John Clare.

To cope with his black moods,

he spent a bit too much time in the pub, drinking and playing

folk songs that he'd picked up from gypsies who lived in the woods.

JAUNTY TUNE

He was admitted again to an asylum and, eventually,

the words stopped flowing.

Someone wrote to him at the asylum, saying, "Why no more poems?"

He writes, "Dear sir, I am in a madhouse. I quite forget your name.

"You must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate,

"I have nothing to say."

A tragic end for a man who'd found so many wonderful words to say.

Our appetite for adventure sports seems insatiable.

Adrenaline junkies flock from far and wide

to bag the perfect crag and shred the toughest trail.

But as the countryside gets more popular

and we get more adventurous,

questions are being asked about the impact on our natural world.

Nearly one in four of British households now own a mountain bike.

And the sport has never been so popular.

But not everyone I've met in the Peak District is happy about it.

If it got much busier with the bikes, it would be tricky.

Especially in the very popular weekend tourist areas.

It's great that mountain bikers use the countryside

and use paths like this, but I do think that they have to be

more aware of people walking, and with their animals, especially.

It's clear there's some concern about the increasing

number of mountain bikers in our countryside,

but are they as bad for the paths and landscape as some people think?

So, why is it you like it so much?

It's the places it takes you to, Tom!

John Horscroft is a local mountain biker

here in the Peak District.

He's all too aware of the bad press.

What do you think most people out here think about mountain bikers?

The culture, perhaps it's built up over the years,

that mountain bikers are just adrenaline junkies

with their brains switched off when they're riding through

a majestic landscape like this, is just wrong.

I'd like to think we were beginning to be viewed as much

a part of the country scene as everyone is, but, yeah,

inevitably, there is some friction between different user groups.

Certainly here at Wimbleholm Hill, mountain bikers have joined forces

with other users to fix paths and maintain the landscape.

According to John,

mountain biking is far less destructive than many people think.

It's now widely suggested that something rather pedestrian

is actually causing more damage.

The Peak District National Park

is smack-bang in the centre of England,

and it's home to the start of the Pennine Way.

It's visited by 10 million people each year.

The majority come to walk.

One of the people who deals with this

is the National Trust Countryside manager, Simon Wright.

So, which activity causes more damage - mountain biking or walking?

In terms of overall numbers, walking.

But it's a different sort of damage you get from a bike

and we're increasingly seeing more damage on bridleways

and off bridleways, as well, from bikes.

But the bulk of our work so far

has gone into alleviating the pressure from walking.

Just because that many footfalls are, you know,

you can even see it here, cause erosion.

It's just pressure on very, very vulnerable soils in some cases.

Because a lot of our ground is peat.

And it's just sheer numbers in quite often a tightly-controlled area.

They walk the same routes all the time.

Nobody wants to walk on long heather if they can walk on short grass.

Overall, what is your attitude to people

having an appetite to get out here?

It's something we would actively encourage.

We want people to come out, enjoy our countryside.

That's one reason why the Trust have been given land,

to look after it for the nation.

So maybe it's not what we're doing in the countryside

that threatens its future, but the sheer volume of us who are using it.

Some come to our natural world for nerve-jangling thrills,

others for calm and communion with nature.

Both are legitimate and, if done sensitively and responsibly,

this landscape will be preserved for us all to enjoy.