A sense of place

I've mentioned before how lucky I feel living where we do, blessed to be next to the New Forest, an hour west to the Jurassic Coast and an hour north to Cranborne Chase, all enchanted and magical landscapes. Though last weeks OBOD 'Tea with a Druid no77' on the magic of local places reminded me of how blessed I am with what's on my doorstep in the shape of 'The Common', a local expanse of common land. Well, not just the common itself, although that is the largest tract, but all the smaller pockets of woodland scattered throughout the neighbourhood, which allow us, if we're canny, to move about through a semi rural landscape doing our regular tasks. Always with one foot in and an eye on the nature world. The common is a fascinating tract of land, with an incredible diversity in form and habitats, coniferous woodland, deciduous woodland, heathland and grassland are all represented as are virtually all the trees, and a huge range of flora and fauna too. You can see old boundary ditches crossing it indicating past domestications, though improved land now long neglected. There's plenty of history you can't see too, I've learned that from local elders, of what it was like 70-80 years ago when Highcliffe was still 'The Village', of troops billeted here just before D-Day, of post war prefabs and an baseball field left by the soldiers, of picking shrapnel from a German bomb out of an old oak in the 50's, or of the fondly remembered play park of the 60's-70's now long gone. Those stories are the history of the common land, told by the common people, too often overlooked in history. All those things now disappeared under nature's recolonization. We walk here most days, to some extent or another, I see the seasons change in the common's face, over the last 20 years I've seen the common change too, more trees, less heathland and grassland. I'm not complaining we need more trees. And as you can imagine, it's a packed store of natural resources; a wide range of seasonally available resources which I frequently avail myself of. It's really quite wondrous place, natures magic right on my doorstep.