I’ve been writing about Bedfordshire as part of my work for CPRE Bedfordshire for the past nine years. Most recently that’s looked like tackling an A-Z of the county using themed posts to explore the places, landscapes and history of the area, including suggestions for walks and places to visit. There’s also been a Discover series which is geographically focused on clusters of villages, towns or individual places. As I prepare to leave that role this month, you might be forgiven for thinking that I’ve had quite enough of the subject, but I find myself with a niggling feeling of unfinished business.
The website features I’ve written have been enjoyable to research and compile but I wanted to find a way to tell a more coherent story about the county, bringing together the many things I’ve learned, and free from the need to to tie pieces to suitable walks or places to visit. Putting the jigsaw pieces in to some sort of chronological order was an appealing idea, but how to give it some focus? Joyce Godber’s 1969 book History of Bedfordshire 1066-1888 provides a comprehensive history of Bedfordshire and has long been my go to volume for research, while the Bedfordshire Archives Community Histories website is an invaluable source of local history information for each settlement in the county. I wanted an option that would allow me to combine a story of continuity and change with the ability to zoom in on details that could illuminate that story.
Why animals and plants?
Bedfordshire understands itself as a rural county made up largely of market towns, villages and countryside. This has certainly been true for most of its history with the rapid growth of Luton coming only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The landscape is geologically varied and a connection to the land is an important part of Bedfordshire’s story.
I’ve always been interested in lives in the landscape. What impact have people had? How have they lived here? There is an enduring myth of an untouched landscape but in reality English landscapes are human landscapes shaped by us throughout history. That relationship between people, animals and plants and land is the thing I hope to unpick through this series.
About the series
Each short post will be focused on a plant or animal as a prism through which to talk about a period. Rather than everything there is to say about it across the sweep of Bedfordshire history, I’ll instead be picking up on a specific theme. These stories will all begin on a small scale but will also be telling bigger stories.
This isn’t going to be a definitive history, these are the stories that have caught my eye, the things that have engaged me. I hope that the variety will be appealing to readers.
Shelly Dennison 
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