Snickets by Nic Wilson

Eight years after I went on maternity leave with my eldest, I kissed my youngest and waved her into reception for her first day at school. She was ready for a new adventure and we were confident she would thrive. Back at home, without the routine of her day to structure mine, I felt unmoored. Most of my local friends still had preschool children, so they continued to meet up at playgroup and music classes. But my life had moved on. I wondered where it was taking me.

While the children were at school, I busied myself with chores and gardening, enrolled on a garden design diploma one day a week at Regent’s Park and walked the local paths around town, enjoying the opportunity to dawdle and daydream. I spent hours getting to know the plants I met along the way, learning about their botany and history. I remembered how, as a child, I’d found back alleys unnerving, especially those lined with crumbling walls or towering evergreen hedges. But they were magical portals too – transporting you from place to place like the secret passages in Cluedo. You could vanish in one street and materialise three streets down; sidle into the park via the back route; take a shortcut to town along footpaths that slipped quietly between the houses.

In the North West, we called these pathways ‘snickets’, one of many regional terms that include Cornwall’s opes, Norfolk’s lokes, Birmingham’s gullies and Scotland’s pends. In different areas of the UK, we might follow the jigger or jog up the shut; cut through ginnel, vennel or gitty; hurry into the wynd; disappear down twitten or twitchell; gain the tenfoot or leg it along the lonnin. We enter these marginal spaces via old words that twist the mouth and lead the mind. Sometimes they had less salubrious meanings too. Liverpool’s jiggers could refer to prison cells and illegal distilleries, and snickets was a slang term for outsiders: misers, saucy lasses, insolent women or naughty children – historically maligned and marginalised figures, their unsavoury characteristics hidden by society until they could be effaced or transformed. Just so with our back passages, our dog shit alleys: unremarkable places of lurking subversion, danger and dirt.

Our daily pursuit of throughways and shortcuts favours destination over journey. Snickets are paths with the end, often quite literally, in sight. Even the ubiquitous ‘alley’ derives from the Old French aler: to go, foregrounding movement over place. When I stop en route to take a photograph of my favourite patch of white violets or identify a new plant, pedestrians pass me by without pausing. Crouched in the verge, barely a metre from the path, I am so far off the beaten track that my presence hardly registers. At times like this, I wonder where our antipathy to lingering comes from. Why such unwillingness to surrender our sense of direction and purpose, if only for a moment? The pace of modern life certainly leaves little space for interludes, but perhaps there is an element of fear too. Of faltering and falling into the unknown. Of waking to a fecund reality where wild couples with cultivated, public enters private, and past roots in present while furtively setting seed for the future.

But I enjoy my encounters with natural history and the history of the natural in these transitional spaces. Exploring narrow alleyways where courtyard ornamentals escape through wall crevices to colonise the pavement edges, slipping through concealed entrances that open only for those who hide and seek, roaming the broad beech paths that edge the town and emerge from the outermost estates into rural rides of generous scope and dappled sunspots. When my movements are constrained by timetables and energy levels, snickets are my escape into the wild. Within their narrow confines, like the mysterious Cole Hawlings in The Box of Delights, I can go small or swift and, best of all, I can travel in time.

Walking through Hitchin’s snickets feels like exploring the footnotes of local history. Many of the paths are old ways, repositories of long-forgotten stories. Overlaying a conjectural map of the nine open fields surrounding Hitchin around the beginning of the sixteenth century onto Google Earth reveals surprisingly few changes to the pathways over the past five centuries. Many of the routes persist today due to the long continuity of the open field system hereabouts. Some areas around Hitchin even remained unenclosed into the early twentieth century, far longer than in many towns and villages, where enclosures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries radically altered the structure and politics of the landscape.

Between 1766 and 1832, the common fields of 22 parishes within 10 miles of Hitchin were enclosed. Similarly, my shepherding ancestors 50 miles north in Helpston, Northamptonshire, lived through enclosure in the early nineteenth century. They rented rooms in the same house as the poet John Clare during this period. My great-great-great-great-grandfather worked in the field gangs during enclosure; his name is listed in the same labour accounts as Clare. Both he and the poet, along with many other villagers, earned money fencing and hedging the fields while also suffering the dispossession that resulted from the loss of common land.

As people were denied access to places they had relied on for foraging, grazing livestock, fuel gathering and communal festivities for generations, their stories were marginalised, their lives edited out of the heart of the landscape. Over the centuries, agriculture and development consumed the remaining margins until, in many places, the old tracks and tales became inaccessible, unreadable, functionally extinct.

Most of my local journeys take place within the area that used to be Purwell Field, one of Hitchin’s largest open fields. In 1883, Frederic Seebohm, the economic historian and banker who lived in the town from 1855 to his death in 1912, published The English Village Community. In this seminal book, Frederic examined the field system, using his local area as a case study. He noted there were 289 strips in Purwell Field around 1770, owned by 48 individuals. This made it impractical to obtain agreement for enclosure, which required consent of the owners of 75 per cent of the land by value. By 1816, the 11 largest landowners in the town owned around 66 per cent of the fields, not enough to secure an enclosure act, and not all landowners were in of enclosure. Consequently, much of Purwell Field remained open into the early twentieth century. As the area around my house was gradually developed, small estates were fitted within the existing furlong framework, and ancient field paths were surrounded by houses, the old ways reborn as suburban snickets.

The maps in Frederic Seebohm’s book show a network of field strips and access paths criss-crossing Purwell Field. He describes the ‘little narrow strips’ on a tithe map from around 1816 as ‘almost the features of a spider’s web’ separated by ‘green balks of unploughed turf’, and explains that ‘the whole arable area of an unenclosed township was usually divided up by turf balks into as many thousands of these strips as its limits would contain’. The strips were grouped into furlongs, often called ‘shots’ or ‘shotts’ in Hertfordshire. Each furlong had a common field way alongside it that gave access to the strips, or a headland within the furlong boundary for the strip owners to walk to their land and turn their ploughs. People owned intermixed strips in different furlongs scattered across the common field, and often across several fields. This created a community of owners who sowed, ploughed and left their strips fallow in conjunction with each other.

The small section of Purwell Field that Frederic Seebohm chose to demonstrate strip and furlong arrangements includes the area around my house. The field path along Long Shadwell Shot’s headland now forms an unmarked snicket where I found an abandoned wasps’ nest last autumn, fallen from a bramble patch. Over the road, the line of the old field way becomes Benslow Path and crosses the railway, leading between houses (on what was once Benchley Hill Shot) and a school (on what was Beggarly Shot). As the snicket turns left, cutting the corner as it has for centuries, it meets a narrow rectangular plot of three houses which looks like an afterthought backing onto a larger estate. On Frederic’s map, this strip marks out the headland for Wymondley Highway Shot. Looking over the hedge today, I see only paving and houses, but for hundreds of years the headland would have given locals access to their field strips and would have been the last strip to be ploughed. Where parents now stand chatting, waiting for their kids to come out of school, centuries of conversations have taken place. Different topics, different times, but the same gathering of local people.

Some furlong names give an insight into the nature of the land itself. Short Shadwell Shot (the shallow springs), Riddy Shot (the small stream) and, on the margins of Purwell Field, Ninesprings and Rushmead (the meadow where the rushes grow) highlight the prevalence of upwellings from the chalk bedrock, forming pools, brooks and marshy areas. Other furlongs read like a found poem:

Welshmans Croft, Cow Common Lammas, Nettle Dell

Sparrow Bush Shot, Hag Dell Shot, Duck Land

Manley Highway Shot, Furson Hedges

Purwell Grove, Moor Mead Bottom, Crow Furlong

These names send me back through the centuries, their references to wildlife, livestock, people and place hinting at old lives and stories. Landscape history is so often forgotten, but remembering is important, even if all that remains of meads, hedges, bushes and animals are their names. They act as signposts indicating where we’ve come from and, more evocatively – disturbingly – where we’re going.

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This is an extract from Nic Wilson’s new book, Land Beneath the Waves, published by Summersdale.

Nic Wilson is a writer, editor and Guardian country diarist. She works for BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine, specialising in wildlife, wild plants and environmental issues. Her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Going to Ground.  Her website with book tour dates may be found here. Nic can also be found on Bluesky at @nicwilson.bsky.social .

Photo courtesy of the author.