Lonning Cottage.1 In the west end of a Cumbrian village, on the south side of a river valley within a rolling descent. Rolling because glacial action created gentle, undulating terrain, from the English Lake District fells to the Solway's coastal plain (I can see the sea and Scotland's hills beyond without leaving my chair.) The village was a nucleated settlement, clustered around a church2 and green to the east. In time, the settlement grew linear and westward, following a route into market.
Saturday June 14. Today was a day of summer rain and thunder, a break from decorating or packing up boxes. A day to read and to write to my heart's content. This morning, I recorded one minute of rain and thunder and blackbird song for the community archive sound bank before catching up with via an essay from her homestead in Vermont. Stacy is someone who knows that winter's bite will make demands and she writes of stacking firewood.3 The act of chopping and stacking wood was familiar to me once upon a time, though never on the scale Stacy carries out the craft. Still, it is an immersive essay, I'm close enough to smell the wood.
Stacy's essay moves from practical preparations to overwhelming global realities: eight billion people, median home prices approaching half a million dollars, billions spent on warfare. She grapples with incomprehensible scales. "Billion … how is one billion a term understood?" But Stacy recognises her privilege within vast inequities, acknowledges that, despite decades of work and choices, she cannot afford to move, while understanding others face greater struggles through no fault of their own.
I think of global scales dwarfing rural realities, and about my response to the preparations for winter's demands. I think about where M and I could be living, come winter. Reading Stacy's wrestling with incomprehensible scales, I consider how ecologists and naturalists face our own forms of counting. How can we document environmental loss (without falling into sentimentality, or unscientific generalisation?)
Rural Heating and Environmental Compromise
Those questions of measurement and witness intersect with immediate environmental choices in the practical realities of rural heating. How we heat our homes in old buildings reveals the gap between environmental ideals and economic constraints that the non-fiction writer must navigate. The wood burning debate demonstrates how rural voices contribute essential perspective to environmental discourse, but how we might find ourselves caught between policy frameworks, designed for urban contexts, and the lived realities of traditional buildings in remote locations.
Here in the UK, we measure firewood by the trailer load rather than the cord and, in our village, many people use heating oil (kerosene) which arrives by the thousand litres. At Lonning Cottage, oil powers our cooking range, our central heating (radiators) and our hot water. If M and I are still here come winter, we might light the open fire in our living room. But what to burn?
Time was that we'd a wood-burning stove here, tucked into the old hearth, until we discovered the steel flue needed complete replacement: double-skinned, compliant, expensive. The estimate alone made us pause. A few years on from that, George Monbiot's influential Guardian article of December 27 2022, marked a pivotal moment in the wood-burning debate. Monbiot's confession of installing three wood-burning stoves in 2008, that he described in 2022 as a"bad decision,” gave weight to his argument that even modern stoves produce "750 times as many fine particulates as a heavy goods vehicle."4
The Environment Improvement Plan 2023, published just weeks after Monbiot's article, addressed his concerns by announcing tighter emission limits, and enhanced enforcement. "We are not considering a ban on domestic burning in England …. some households are reliant on solid fuel burning as a primary source for heating, hot water and cooking."5
There's strong opposition concerning wood burning stoves for urban use. The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh's president Andrew Elder has called for the government to "reconsider its position on a ban on their installation in urban areas without delay."6
Step into rural Britain, though, into cottages like ours with thick stone walls and the debate shifts.
When the engineers came to assess our heating options, their faces told the story before their estimates did. A building this old, these walls, this exposure to weather. The cottage was built when people and cattle sheltered here, when insulation meant animal warmth. Modern efficiency standards meet 16th-century reality with expensive compromises. Ground source heat pumps, well beyond our financial reach, need outdoor space we don’t have. Air source pumps, also expensive, struggle with old buildings that leak heat through ancient walls. Then, there's the precarity of the self-employed life…
We chose an oil-fired combination boiler, financed over five years, the only way M and I could manage it. Kerosene arrives by the tankerload. Fossil fuel delivered to our door while the UK government promotes clean energy transitions for those who can afford them. The irony isn't lost. We live between a UNESCO World Heritage Site and an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, burning oil to stay warm.
The Firewood Poem and Traditional Knowledge
Arguably, the traditional "Firewood Poem7" demonstrates how generations developed reliable environmental knowledge through embodied engagement with landscape, rather than detached measurement:
Beechwood fires are bright and clear
If the logs are kept a year
Chestnut's only good they say
If for logs 'tis laid away
Make a fire of Elder tree
Death within your house will be
But ash new or ash old,
Is fit for a queen with a crown of gold
Birch and fir logs burn too fast
Blaze up bright and do not last
It is by the Irish said
Hawthorn bakes the sweetest bread.
Elm wood burns like churchyard mould
E'en the flames are cold
But ash green or ash brown
Is fit for a queen with a golden crown
Poplar gives a bitter smoke
Fills your eyes and makes you choke
Apple wood will scent your room
Pear wood smells like flowers in bloom
Oaken logs, if dry and old
keep away the winter's cold
But ash wet or ash dry
a king shall warm his slippers by
Each couplet records lived experience with materials, encoding not just functional data but qualitative understanding that emerges from sustained interaction with place.
Counting What Changes
I'd like to think my practice of hedgerow counting follows similar patterns, building understanding through engagement with this place before we leave. Writers like Paul Lamb, in Of Thorn & Briar,8 demonstrate how this approach guides today's nature writing, documenting environmental change through close attention to landscape, traditional practices and ecological relationships - rather than numbers alone.
Along the way from Lonning Cottage some of the village hedgerow, once 'layed' and maintained by farmers years ago, is on the way to becoming zombified. Zombie hedgerows9 are living hedgerows that have lost their ecological vitality through poor management. Excessive trimming, where repeated cutting at identical heights creates thin, gappy structures mimicking "bottomless mushrooms." Annual flailing prevents flowering and fruiting, eliminating food sources essential for wildlife survival. Research shows that 41% of UK hedgerows suffer from poor condition due to nutrient enrichment, structural gaps and chemical contamination that destroys invertebrate populations.10
Over the years I've counted the hedgerow species up the lonning by the side of our cottage: blackthorn, crab apple, dog rose, field maple, guelder rose, holly, hawthorn, hazel, wild privet. Woodbine and ivy climb through ash11 and sycamore that tower above. At the base of the hedgerow, a living record of the year's cycle: dandelion, lesser celandine, dog violet, primrose, hedge mustard, greater celandine, cleavers, red campion, cow parsley, water avens, lady's bedstraw, herb robert, meadowsweet. Not to mention a community of ferns such as hart's tongue and male fern, and lichens, mosses, liverworts.
To write about such an environment, one must recognise how humankind, in building the road (lonning,) and the stone walls, and planting the hedgerow, have helped create ecological niches that support distinctive communities shaped by generations of human stewardship.
This diversity is precarious. Sixteen new houses will rise in the village in the months to come. Not entirely unwelcome, villages need new life, but their gardens will be neat lawns and ornamental shrubs, their boundaries close-board fencing. Hedgerow, old stone walls and trees disappear, replaced by sterile lines that connect to nothing. Across the valley, silage production demands large fields, hedgerows gapped and weakened to accommodate machinery that seems to grow wider each year.
This isn't about nostalgia but function. Those diverse habitats provide what zombie boundaries cannot. Corridors for wildlife movement, nesting sites for declining birds, winter food sources, flood mitigation, carbon storage. Ecological connections that took centuries to establish.
There's an uncomfortable parallel here to Stacy's observations about economic fairness. Environmental costs, like economic ones, fall on those with fewest choices. Farmers need silage to survive, families need affordable housing, villages need growth to remain viable. Yet the cumulative effect, hedgerow by hedgerow, field by field, is landscape simplification that none of us intended.
It is hard to see the working countryside around us lose complexity with each passing year, sitting as it does between a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
What I Count
So what do I count, here in this hinterland between heritage sites? The number of times I've heard a curlew, seen a lapwing. Above the cottage I count seven swifts and fewer swallows, five house sparrows in our garden, two blackbirds, one starling. I count oil deliveries, each thousand-litre delivery a reminder of pragmatic compromise. Like Stacy, I cannot count to one billion, and the scale of environmental crisis exceeds my comprehension. But I can count what I see changing, what I'm losing, what demands attention within the reach of my own witness.
The counting has become more urgent as we prepare to leave Cumbria. The 'Before We Leave' community archive originated as simple documentation: photographing hedgerow species, measuring biodiversity, recording village stories, creating an archive of this place we've called home. But it has become a different kind of counting too, cataloguing what matters before it's gone, measuring loss against memory, weighing what we can take with us against what we leave behind.
I read Stacy's essay again, think about observations, about fairness and impossible choices. How do we balance the luxury of environmental concern against the necessity of economic survival? How do we count what we're losing fast enough to matter? I end this essay with uncertainty. What will I count in Cornwall? What will mark the seasons for me there? Will I learn to measure different losses, or might I count recovery, restoration, species returning rather than departing?
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It goes by a different name these days, but I recently discovered our cottage was once called Lonning Cottage. This makes sense considering its location at the foot of an ancient lonning and because, at one time, it was a dwelling for animals and people and part of a farm (now demolished) complex. “One of the more charming routes for walkers to take is down a lonning – a Cumbrian term for a short path, often ending at a farmhouse. One suggested origin for the term ‘lonning’ is from loan – an old word for the quiet place by the farm where milk and eggs would be sold to villagers.” Cleaver, A. (2015) 'Cumbria's lonnings', Caught by the River, June 11 2015. Available at: https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2015/06/cumbrias-lonnings/ (Accessed: Sunday June 15 2025).
The village church is on Historic England’s Heritage at Risk Register. Available at: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/heritage-at-risk/types/ (Accessed: Monday June 16 2025)
Monbiot, G. 'My burning shame: I fitted my house with three wood-burning stoves', The Guardian, December 27 2022. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/27/wood-burning-stove-environment-home-toxins (Accessed: Saturday June 15 2025).
UK Government Environmental Improvement Plan 2023. London: UK Government, January 31 2023. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/environmental-improvement-plan (Accessed: Saturday June 15 2025).
Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 'Doctors call on Scottish Government to reconsider its decision to drop ban on wood burners in homes', Medical News, November 12 2024. Available at: https://www.rcpe.ac.uk/news/doctors-call-scottish-government-reconsider-its-decision-drop-ban-wood-burners-homes (Accessed: Saturday June 15 2025).
Congreve, C. (1930) 'The Firewood Poem.’ Available at: https://allpoetry.com/The-Firewood-Poem (Accessed: Sunday June 15 2025).
Lamb, P. (2025) Of Thorn & Briar: A Year with the West Country Hedgelayer. London: Simon & Schuster.
Dead hedges, by contrast, are intentionally constructed barriers made from cut branches, saplings, and woody debris woven between vertical stakes. RSPB (no date) 'Build a dead hedge for wildlife', RSPB. Available at: https://www.rspb.org.uk/helping-nature/what-you-can-do/activities/build-a-dead-hedge-for-wildlife/ (Accessed Saturday June 14 2025).
Hedgelink (no date) 'Hedgerow Management Advice' Hedgelink. Available at: https://hedgelink.org.uk/guidance/hedgerow-management-advice/;
Woodland Trust (no date) 'Hedgerows', Woodland Trust. Available at: https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/trees-woods-and-wildlife/habitats/hedgerows/;
UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (no date) 'Hedgerow management and rejuvenation', UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. Available at: https://www.ceh.ac.uk/our-science/projects/hedgerow-management-and-rejuvenation
The Wildlife Trusts (no date) 'How to manage a hedgerow for wildlife', The Wildlife Trusts. Available at: https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife/managing-land-wildlife/how-manage-hedgerow-wildlife
(All accessed: Sunday June 15 2025).
“Ash dieback will kill up to 80% of ash trees across the UK. At a cost of billions, the effects will be staggering. It will change the landscape forever and threaten many species which rely on ash.” Available at: https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/trees-woods-and-wildlife/tree-pests-and-diseases/key-tree-pests-and-diseases/ash-dieback/; Woodland Trust (no date). (Accessed: Monday June 16 2025).
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If you’ve got this far, thank you so much for reading. I'm only scratching the surface of many complex subjects, and not pretending I know the answers. But I'm beginning to understand that the real work might start with paying attention - reading and writing about what we love. And perhaps small acts of documentation, like making a community archive with stories of villagers from centuries past, are how we begin to take responsibility for what we're losing, one hedgerow, one curlew call, one forgotten life story at a time.
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