How did heathland come about?

Although heathland may appear wild and natural, it is an ancient landscape that has been influenced by people over thousands of years. It is thought that many large areas of heathland came about and spread at least 4,000 years ago in the Late Stone Age and Bronze Age. Our ancestors had recently become farmers, and as they cleared the original vegetation and trees to grow crops, nutrients were washed out of some soils by the rain, leaving them poor and acidic. Heathland plants were well suited to these poor acid conditions, and while some open areas may have been heathland already, much of the exhausted farmland gradually became heath too.

Over the following centuries local people used the heaths as part of their everyday lives. They grazed their animals for meat, milk, wool and hides and used the dung and urine for fertiliser. They cut firewood, collected gorse and turf for fuel, and made besom brooms from heather and birch. The heather was also cut for thatching, and bracken for animal bedding, soap and glass making. The rights of local people to use the heaths in this way became known as commoners’ rights. Regular cutting and grazing by animals kept the landscapes open.

History of heathland in Surrey

This way of life continued for many centuries but by the 1800s it had begun to decline. As people stopped cutting and grazing the heaths, they began to revert to scrub and poor woodland. In Surrey as in other parts of the country, large areas of heathland were lost to development in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Advances in agriculture meant that even poor soils could be planted with crops or plantations of trees for timber. Heaths were viewed as wastelands, roads were built across them and towns such as Woking expanded over them. The military used the heaths extensively during this time for training troops, and today own about 60% of Surrey’s remaining heathland.

In Surrey 85% of the heathland has been lost in just 200 years, leading to a severe drop in biodiversity. Lately, heathland has been recognised for its wildlife value and its historical and cultural interest, and much is now protected from development. However it has continued to disappear, and since the last war much of the loss has been due to natural succession. Today apart from military training, Surrey's heaths are mostly used for recreation. Heathland is now almost entirely disconnected from the farming communities that created it, and which it helped to sustain, but it still has an important role to play. With its wild looking landscape and distinct wildlife, heathland adds great variety to Surrey. By managing heaths through clearing scrub and bringing back grazing, we can keep areas open for people to enjoy and maintain links to our past.