Why my historical hero is Gilbert White
Among my many heroes of the British countryside, Gilbert White stands pre-eminent
Who is your historic countryside hero?” someone asked me.
There are so many possible answers. Robin Hood, as a representative of all those who have resisted landlordism and defended commoners’ rights. Beatrix Potter (1866–1943), whose stories and illustrations inspired so many children to love our countryside, and who was herself a farmer and gave most of her land to the National Trust when she died. William Cobbett (1763–1835), whose book Rural Rides (1830) was a passionate appeal on behalf of rural communities in a state of transition and decline. Nan Shepherd (1893–1981), whose writing about the Cairngorms did so much to create the contemporary hiking movement. Benny Rothman (1911–2002), one of the leaders of the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass in 1932, which opened up our rights to walk freely in the countryside.
My list could go on, but in the end I would have to come back to the Reverend Gilbert White FRS (1720–1793), curate of Selborne in Hampshire. His The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789) has never been out of print and which, in the words of his biographer Richard Mabey, “more than any other, has shaped our everyday view of the relations between humans and nature”.
White led a quiet scholarly life, dying in the house he was born in, but his approach to the world around him was radically innovative. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he believed that birds and animals should be studied in their own habitats, rather than dead in the study or laboratory, and this attentiveness made him the first person to realise that the chiffchaff, willow warbler and wood warbler were three separate species, based on genuinely listening to their different songs. He was also the first person to describe accurately the harvest mouse.
Due to this approach, he became perhaps the first ecologist (the branch of biology that studies interactions among organisms and their environment). He wrote of the earthworm: “Earthworms, though in appearance a small and despicable link in the chain of nature, yet, if lost, would make a lamentable chasm... Worms seem to be the great promoters of vegetation, which would proceed but lamely without them.” He was also very modest. Although he doubted the common belief that swallows hibernated, buried in mud or underwater, he could never find a satisfactory proof of migration and felt free to say so. It was not until 1909, when a ringed swallow was found in Natal, South Africa, that we gained any factual knowledge of their long migrations. But his most important work was his detailed, year-by-year observations of phenology (the study of seasonal changes in plants and animals). For 25 years, with his friend William Markwick in Sussex, he kept meticulous records of the dates on which 400 different species of plants, birds and animals appeared, leafed, flowered, bred etc; an extraordinary act of both scientific knowledge and love.
Love. Gilbert White, in all his writing, so clearly loved the place he lived and the world around him. There was little of the sentimental in this love; it was about paying attention, trying to see, understand and teach other people to love what he loved.
His writing is still important, and he opened the way for more recent naturalists to engage with the rest of us. White is my rural hero. Who’s yours?
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