Stevington is a little village in Bedfordshire. It's name is Anglo-Saxon and means "Styfa's Farm"; I am not sure who Styfa was, but it is a distinctly rural and agricultural name still appropriate for the village today. The hands of workers in the fields have played their part in shaping Stevington's landscape. But, before human endeavours left a mark on the land, it was the forces of nature which scraped and sculpted stone and soil.
The river Great Ouse runs through the Parish, flowing southeast between two other villages. The river cannot be compared to what it was thousands and thousands of years ago, when it was a more powerful beast. It gouged out a steep-sided little valley which it left behind, found today between Stevington and Pavenham, the next village over to the north. This mark on the landscape evidence of its past greatness as a major river, one that drained great ice-sheets.
The village lies 135 feet above sea level on a geological base of oolitic limestone. This was laid down 165 million years ago, when the land which today makes up the county of Bedfordshire was beneath a coral sea.
Clear bands of Oxford clay are also in evidence. These formed 150 million years ago by rivers heavy with silt. The blue-green and sticky Oxford clay forms a heavy soil which made arable farming very difficult before mechanisation.
From prehistoric rivers and seas, and all that they laid down, a small English village did emerge. Like many rural English villages, Stevington has been defined by the agricultural, the Church, and its community.
The small English village is free from the noisy and luminous stimulations of the more urban environments. There is less for the people of small villages to be distracted by, and so they turn to each other. They know the names of their neighbours and they greet each other when meeting on the paths they walk. Groups form, based on particular passions, pursuits, and interests, and meetings are had.
As well as these human endeavours, the wild and the natural has been a great influence on countryside life. From the way that the seasons have dictated the agricultural year, to how aspects of the natural world have found their way into English folklore.
We have even bestowed names upon our homes and lanes that have been inspired by the wildlife around us -- Foxbrook, Skylark Cottage, Duck End . . . wild names plucked from the rural landscape and given to those warmly lit places we call home.
Stevington has nurtured and been home to an array of wild animals synonymous with the English countryside. Fox, deer, hedgehogs, rabbits, birds of various sorts, and so on. Today, Red kite fly over the fields of the village; a graceful raptor which was once common throughout Britain but which suffered persecution throughout the 18th and 19th Century and was brought close to extinction. One hundred years of careful conservation saw this bird make something of a comeback in a few pockets of south Britain. To look up and see them glide overhead is a privilege.
This though is no paradise, no Garden of Eden unaffected by the outside world, and this little village has been witness to some of the declines which are unfortunately part of a national trend. It has been quite a number of years since I last saw a hedgehog in the garden, for example.
In spring, various flowers bloom, and butterflies, moths, bees, and other insects are drawn to them. Compelled by instinct and nature. Again, some of these little lives, vitally important to the ecological landscape, are in decline and not seen in the numbers anything like what they once were.
But there are efforts being made to preserve what we have, to accommodate the wild and the natural which can still have a home in the little English village. Groups are forming in the village concerned with nurturing the natural and the wild. Remembering, with humble respect, the forces that sculpted the land out of which this small English village sprang.
If we can remember those forces, the respect that we have had for nature in the past, when it dictated our agricultural pursuits, working with the land rather than against it, we might just save something for ourselves, and for the wild lives that have fired our imaginations. The wild lives which we now know are of great importance, each and every one of them, as part of a rich and diverse tapestry in our countryside.
And those wild lives really are a great part of what makes living in a small English village such an awesome experience. They have had such tremendous influence on village life in the past, and it would be great to be able to pass that on, to protect it for future generations.
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