A Place for the Heathlands

It may seem odd that in the early 2010s I found myself doing fieldwork in the Lake District, in the northwest coastal corner of England, bordering Scotland, in order to better understand the origin, subsequent longevity, and now near-extinction of Denmark's Jutland heaths.^{1 ( 1 )}
Responding to this publication's call for contributions in a format that will allow contributors "to explore alternative or experimental formats in addition to traditional academic essays e.g., interviews, field notes, fiction, poetry, art, and video/photo essays, etc.," my non-traditional, autobiographical chapter traces a lifelong scholarly journey taken in the company of a Jutland heathland literary ghost. The short explanation is that I was seeking to realize a fervent, but unfulfilled, wish on the part of a long-dead Jutland author, topographer, cultural-political activist and parish pastor named Steen Steensen Blicher (1782-1848). Blicher explained this wish in an application to the Danish king for a travel grant, dated 30 December 1845.^{2 ( 2 )}
Blicher 1933 (orig. 1845). My translation.

Blicher's application to the king was to no avail, and a year later Blicher appealed to the general public for what today would be called crowdfunding, again without success. Cleasby (1797-1847) died a year later in Copenhagen, where he was compiling what became the standard English/Icelandic dictionary; Blicher died the following year. This left it to me to make the journey in the company of Blicher's literary ghost.

I realize that this explanation raises more questions than it answers, so I will backtrack. When I first became dimly aware of their historical significance, the Jutland heathlands barely existed any more. This was in 1965. As a 19-year-old exchange student from New York, I was cycling through the regional landscape of northern Jutland's Himmerland, where I was staying with a family. It was in August, a time when the heather, in the otherwise dark heath, is in massive, resplendent purple bloom. What I later learned was that I had discovered the spectral remnants of former vast heathlands that covered much of central and western Jutland. But now the heath just peeked out from under regimented rows of dark coniferous forest, or manifested itself as purple patches within the otherwise neat rectangular fields of a modern agricultural landscape. Spookiest of all was the purple cast the heather gave to the misty dark gloomy bogs in the glow of sundown. It was not until my later reading of Blicher's literary and geographical writings, from a time when the heaths were still part of a working landscape, that I gained a sense of the heathlands' previous significance.^{3 ( 3 )}
Olwig 1974. Thus inspired, I researched and wrote a PhD dissertation in geography at the University of Minnesota,^{4 ( 4 )}
Olwig 1977. which was afterwards rewritten, published, then republished in England under the title Nature's ideological landscape: A literary and geographic perspective on its development and preservation on Denmark's Jutland heath.^{5 ( 5 )}
Olwig 2021 (orig. 1984). It was subsequently revised, translated, and published in Danish as Hedens natur: Om natursyn og naturanvendelse gennem tiderne (The Heath's Nature: On the view and use of nature through the ages).^{6 ( 6 )}
Olwig 1986.

Despite all my field and textual research in Denmark that followed, I had not been able to study a living, working heathland landscape. Blicher’s funding application, however, suggested that this might still be possible in an area of northwest England which, according to Cleasby, was noted for the remarkable perseverance of ancient Danish-derived customs and ways of life that were otherwise disappearing. If this was still the case, then perhaps one could both experience a working heathland landscape there and simultaneously learn why this cultural landscape persisted there, but not in Denmark.

As Cleasby may have told Blicher, the meaning of the Saxon name of the ancient Westmorland County was “the land of the western moors,” moor being another word for heath, especially upland heath. But moor can also refer to lowland heath, and to a heath when it is submerged and becomes a peaty bog. Looking further into the matter, I learned that within Westmorland County, traditional heathland agriculture had persisted particularly in the area of the English Lake District National Park, where much of the land had been donated to the National Trust under the auspices of the Lake District clergyman Canon Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley (1850–1920).^{7 ( 7 )}
The map of the Lake District National Park is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence. Attribution: Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right. Rawnsley was active in the movement for free public access to the landscape as commons, and he understood that this landscape was a product of the culture and customary law framing the shepherding of the Herdwick sheep farmers. He was one of the three founders in 1895 of the National Trust, which he saw as providing a means of preserving this culture and its landscape.^{8 ( 8 )}
Olwig 2018: 1044. Today, the continued existence of this landscape is owed both to custom and customary law, and to the protection originally offered by the Trust and the National Park. As a consequence, the Lake District’s largely heathland commons constitutes one of the greatest concentrations of commons in England, as well as one of England’s most biodiverse areas.^{9 ( 9 )}
Natural England 2008: 33–37. Here, I hoped as I began to plan my fieldwork in 2010, I could not only experience something approaching the Jutland heaths as they were in Blicher’s day, but also answer the question why and how apparently characteristically Jutlandic cultural traits and forms of land use could have come to, and persevered in, this area of northwestern England.

Through my studies in Jutland and subsequently in the Lake District, I have developed three primary theses.^{10 ( 10 )}
I have also done supplementary field research on the Faeroe Islands and in the Sami area of Kautokeino in northern Norway. (1) The first is that, from an "archipelagic" point of view, the heathlands in Jutland and the Lake District can be seen to belong to a socially and economically core region of the North Atlantic running from Atlantic Spain to Northern Norway in which heath vegetation and grazed commons are, or were, ubiquitous. This means that the Jutland heathlands and England's Lake District should not be reduced to simply being peripheral areas within the borders of the Danish or English nation states. (2) The second thesis is that the landscape of the heaths was created and maintained in Jutland and the Lake District – and as a whole across the North Atlantic archipelago – as a habitus, or rather a co-habitus, through a synergy between flocks of grazing animals (deer, geese, cattle, sheep and goats) and pastoralist farmers. Animal grazing, it should be noted, was critical to farming prior to the advent of artificial fertilizers, because the manure produced was key to the maintenance of the arable fields that produced crops for subsistence and exchange, as well as supplemental winter fodder for the animals. This habitus likely developed initially on the basis of the innate habitual grazing practices of animals, then later morphed into a co-habitus with pastoralist farmers. Here one should, furthermore, also include the role of the wolves that eventually became herd dogs under the millennia-long stewardship of human pastoralists. This synergistic co-habitus between animals and pastoralists was regulated by custom rooted in habitual practice, which then became formalized as customary law through local and regional courts that were representative legal assemblies, often known as things or moots. At a "thing" or "moot" (i.e., meeting), people were able to discuss things and thereby iron out differences and formulate shared customary laws. In this way a habitus was constituted through a synergy of non-discursive habits, skills, and knowledge that was formalized as customary law, thereby creating a legally substantive landscape.^{11 ( 11 )}
On the substantive landscape see Olwig 2019b; on practice and habitus see Bourdieu 1977. (3) Finally, the third thesis is that the standard narrative that the heaths were the outcome of the human clearance of primordial dense forests needs to be re-examined in the light of the hypothesis that their creation and maintenance was the result of a long prehistorical and historical process in which the heaths developed as an archipelagic co-habitus co-created by animals and people.

Given the nationalist sentiment of his time, it made sense for Blicher to stress, when applying for a grant from the king, that what made this corner of England interesting was the remarkable persistence here of an otherwise threatened Danish "folk character." But it is questionable whether folk character can actually explain the persistence in England of seemingly Jutlandic cultural traits and forms of land use over many centuries. At the time Blicher met Cleasby, he already had a long-standing interest in the cultural and sociopolitical links between Britain and Jutland, and his language skills were such that he was able to translate and publish several English-language literary works into Danish. Given that Blicher identified with the regionalist, transnational dimension of pan-Scandinavianism, and given the depth of analysis in his scholarly geographical works, it is likely that he himself understood the apparent connection between Jutland and Westmorland to be more complex than the simple endurance of an imagined folk character.

For Blicher, the Jutlanders were a people who were on the move – as pastoralists driving their animals the length of Jutland, or as merchants selling the products of the land. This movement could, naturally, include movement further afield. Blicher's own peripatetic wanderings through Jutland laid the basis for his topography of western Jutland: Vestlige profiler af den Cimbriske halvø (Western profiles of the Cimbrian peninsula).^{12 ( 12 )}
Blicher 1929 (orig. 1839). The title of the book identifies the Jutlanders with a people of whom the Roman author Tacitus wrote:^{13 ( 13 )}
Quoted in Olwig 2021 (orig. 1984): 13. My translation.

The Cimbrians gained their fame when they migrated into and fought with imperial Rome in the second century AD, thereby becoming initiators of the period of the migration of peoples.^{14 ( 14 )}
Like Blicher before him, the Jutland Nobel prize winning author Johannes V. Jensen, who hailed from Himmerland, also depicted the Cimbrian Jutlanders as a people on the move, notably in his multi-volume (1919-1922), imaginative archaeological fantasy, The Long Journey. On the Jutland heathlands as a landscape anchoring people on the move, see: Matthiessen 1939, 1962; Haughton and Løvschal 2023. As a people on the move over vast distances, their presence in Westmorland would not be unthinkable.

A possible explanation for the apparent cultural connection between Jutland and Westmorland among the borderlands following the coast between England and Scotland can be found in the theories of the Welsh archaeologist and historical geographer E. Estyn Evans and his Welsh archaeologist colleague Sir Cyril Fox. Evans's explanation for these ties was that both northwestern England and Jutland are located within an archipelagic area of the North Atlantic. This encompasses, in Evans's words, "the Atlantic ends of Europe." According to Evans, the lands along these Atlantic ends of Europe have the following characteristics:^{15 ( 15 )}
Quoted from Evans 1958a: 581-82.

Heathland vegetation is particularly well adapted to a region like western Jutland which experiences the mild winters characteristic of a North Atlantic line of coast and islands, the climate made temperate by the Gulf Stream. The tiny leaves of the heath's emblematic low-growing heather, their shiny waxy top protecting the stomata for transpiration underneath, thus lie low under the frequent wind-borne rains and the misty underside of fleeting clouds. On the heath, you can both see and feel which way is west from the aerodynamic curve into which the moist west wind blowing off the sea and into your face has shaven the vegetation. At the same time, the rains borne by the wind percolate through soils that have already been washed out and made sandy and mineral-poor by glacial meltwater. The land is thereby made even less fertile by the water seeping down and leaching out minerals, which in turn can form an underlying layer of hardpan blocking the downflow of the water. This blockage leads to the formation of boggy areas where the heath becomes peat, and the water becomes acidic.^{16 ( 16 )}
Olwig 2021 (orig. 1984). It is a flattened landscape, through which people have historically navigated as if the largely open, featureless, outwash glacial plain of the heath were a kind of archipelagic sea. The elevated preglacial remnants of clay soil, termed "hill islands," together with the ancient burial mounds provided landmarks that travellers could use to triangulate their route, much as navigators at sea do.^{17 ( 17 )}
Haughton and Løvschal 2023; Olwig 2019c.

Evans's notion of Atlantic Europe ties in with Fox's classic 1932 study, The personality of Britain.^{18 ( 18 )}
Fox, 1952 (orig. 1932). Fox argued that

In the more elevated and variegated western coast of Britain, on the other hand, "these [cultures] tend to be absorbed." From this, Evans suggested that "There is a greater unity of culture in the Lowland, but greater continuity of culture in the Highland Zone."^{19 ( 19 )}
Fox, 1952: 88. Fox illustrated his thesis with maps showing how western Britain was linked to a pattern of settlement and circulation along the Atlantic fringe, moving from Scandinavia, down along the western coast of Britain, to Scotland and beyond.^{20 ( 20 )}
See also, Rawnsley, 1911b, Walton, 2011: 22; Olwig, 2018.

Blicher mentioned in his application to the Danish king "our forefathers' invasions and occupation" of Britain, referring likely to the period of the Danelaw under a Danish king, beginning with invasion in the late ninth century. This invasion and occupation would fit the pattern of lowland eastern British settlement outlined by Fox. But if one takes into account the archipelagic structure of trade, migration, and political organization originating in the Bronze Age and Viking era – which the archaeologists Johan Ling, Timothy Earle, and Kristian Kristiansen term the "maritime mode of production"^{21 ( 21 )}
Ling, Earle & Kristiansen, 2018. – it is possible to situate the apparent Danish/Jutlandic presence in northwest England within a process of broader seaborne archipelagic movement, settlement, and exchange. This Atlantic area of greater cultural continuity thus reflected a continuum that included a Scandinavian heritage.

Today the term archipelago refers primarily to a group, or string, of islands, but I would suggest a return to the meaning of archipelago in its original ancient Greek sense. In Greek, pelago (πέλαγος) means sea, but it also suggests thereby the original and archetypal. For the Greeks the archipelago was the Aegean Sea and its core of islands linking together polities, and their hinterlands, around the shores of the sea – polities such as Athens, Alexandria, Smyrna, and Arcadia. This broad understanding of the archipelagic applies also to the North Atlantic archipelago's maritime mode of production. From the perspective of such archipelagic maritime circulation, it is not the islands that are peripheral and insular, but rather the landlocked inland continental hinterland of an archipelago's coastal ports.

The word continent, by contrast, comes from the Latin terra continens, meaning "continuous land." The continental thus forms a continuous and contiguous space within which polities are spatially enclosed, fixed, absorbed, and unified culturally. The archipelagic realm, on the other hand, is that of a discontinuous, segmented topography of differing places. The ancient Greek word for place or country/land, chora (χώρα), is thus identified with an island's main polis and its hinterland (endochora, ενδοχώρα, in modern Greek); it is movement between these emplaced island polities on a shared, (un)bounding sea that generates a shared hydro-commons. This hydro-commons linked the politically and socially differing islands and coastal cities that were characteristic of an ancient Greece that shared a language and culture embodied in the iconic Homeric Odyssey from the eighth or seventh century BC. Whereas terra continens referred to a "continuous land" forming an enclosing unifying space, chora (χώρα), in contrast, has the related meaning of choris (χωρίς) which refers to the separation, differentiation or independence between places, or, metaphorically, to “being of a different quality or kind” (Beekes, 2009: χώρα 6b^{22 ( 22 )}
Beekes, 2009. ). This separation, thus implies "being of a different quality or kind" (Liddell and Scott: χωρίς^{23 ( 23 )}
Liddell and Scott 1940. ). The required movement between such independent places over a common sea, necessitated by a shared need for differing human and material resources, thus generates an archipelagic cultural continuity facilitating this movement.

The distinction between the notion of terra continens and that of the archipelagic can be seen by comparing ancient Roman and ancient Greek approaches to law. Whereas the Romans sought to promulgate a uniform legal system based on universal principles applicable equally across the empire, as exemplified spatially by the use of a grid system to demarcate property in Euclidean space, the Greeks based their notion of law on the concept of nómos (νόμος), which means substantive "custom, convention, law." As is common for customary law, nómos varied according to place. Aristotle described the distinction in this way:

The Greek notion of law was thus not fixed and uniform; rather, as customary law it promoted an evolving cultural continuum, as opposed to the unity of a single culture promoted by Roman law.

Much like the links between the hefting practices of pastoralism and the use of heft in Scandinavian customary law, a connection to grazing practices is also found in the ancient Greek concept of law as nómos, which is a noun derived from némein "to pasture [animals], rule, direct, distribute, apportion," and némesthai "to feed on, occupy, inhabit" (Liddell and Scott: νόμος,^{25 ( 25 )}
Liddell and Scott: νόμος Merriam-Webster: nomothetic^{26 ( 26 )}
Merriam-Webster 2024. ). A related term nomόs (vομός) means "place of pasturage," "a woodland pasture," "habitation," and "district" (Liddell and Scott:vομός^{27 ( 27 )}
Liddell and Scott 1940. ). To complete the link between law and the natural world of people and grazing animals, the word nomάs (νομάς) means: "roaming about for pasture," and "pastoral" (Liddell and Scott: νομάς.^{28 ( 28 )}
Liddell and Scott 1940. ) This connection between ancient Greek law and the movement of grazing animals led Michel Foucault to conclude: "The shepherd's power is not exercised over a territory but, by definition over a flock, and more exactly, over the flock in its movement from one place to another." This means that "in contrast with the power exercised on the fixed unity of territory, pastoral power is exercised on a multiplicity on the move."^{29 ( 29 )}
Foucault 2007: 171. This argument is quite relevant to understanding the difference between, on the one hand, the practice of shepherding a moving flock down the length of Jutland (or on a heathland commons in the Lake District) to market according to the rules of custom and, on the other, the raising of sheep in lowland fields fenced as private property through statutory (i.e. parliamentary) enclosure. In this context it is easy to imagine why Blicher, a critic of enclosure, who as a theologist knew both Greek and Latin and was also well versed in English and Scandinavian philology, described the communal festivities celebrated at hestehavenas upholding "an old custom, perhaps as old as the forest itself."

As with the Greek archipelago, movement and exchange between the islands and coasts of the Atlantic archipelago would have brought an amalgam of Nordic settlers, including their grazing animals, to places like the Lake District seaboard. The "continuity of culture" that Fox refers to is thus likely not due to a uniform national folk character, but rather due to the circulation of shared practices and knowledge, much of it by people with a shared Nordic linguistic background. Such circulation works to foster continuity and resilience – for example by spreading both animals and place-based representative legal institutions, like the thing.

The practices preserving a heathland commons over time are habitual in the sense of habit as "a settled or regular tendency or practice."^{30 ( 30 )}
New Oxford American Dictionary 2005. The practices thus constitute an inherited habitus which people and animals co-inhabit as a complex way of life woven together through common practice. When grazing animals, herding dogs, and people share a given physical landscape and work in synergy to hold it in usable condition,^{31 ( 31 )}
Habit and habitus derive from the Latin habere, meaning to hold. These rights are held by groups, rather than owned by individuals as property. a pastoral co-habitus like the heath can emerge in the form of a commons. Use rights to such commons, as noted, have traditionally been formally regulated by customary law, instantiated as substantive law by a local or regional court, such as a thing (ting in Scandinavia, Ding in German).^{32 ( 32 )}
The complexity of rights to the commons is detailed in Rodgers et. al., 2011; see also, Winchester 2002.

Based as it is on long-standing habitual practices, common law gives practitioners common use rights (rights of usufruct) to particular resources. These rights are based upon "time out of mind" custom, which in point of departure is based on practice and is unwritten (and thus forgettable). This means that if the commoners can show that they have exercised a right as long as anyone can remember, they have the collective right to continue to do so.^{33 ( 33 )}
Olwig 2002. This usage is critical to the heathlands, because the heath will most likely cease to be a heath if it is not used in the customary way. The heather, for example, will die out after about thirty years if it is not tended and refreshed by (for example) swidden or slash-and-burn agricultural practices such as burning, cultivating, and grazing. If the heath ceases to exist, the ability to use the resources of the heath will also naturally disappear, and with this the memory and existence of the right to use the heath eventually also disappears. Thus if you do not use a right, you eventually lose it in practice. A commons is thereby fundamentally defined not as a bounded and designated area of fixed property, but in and through its use in practice. It is a bundle of differing use rights, generated through the collective use of an organic accumulation of resources, one that involves animals as well as people. So if people, acting as a working community, do not make sure these rights are used, they will disappear. Customary law is thus not static, and it can change over time according to need. Garret Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" comes about, as he eventually recognized himself, only when people act competitively as individuals according to the precepts of economic liberalism, rather than as a working community legally sharing the use of resources.^{34 ( 34 )}
Harden 1968, 1998; Harden and Baden 1977.

The role of time-out-of-mind custom in the sustainability and preservation of the heath as a co-habitus suggests that the origin of the heaths lay in the origins of the co-habitus. It will be argued below that this was probably due initially to the "hefting" practices, first of grazing animals and then, following the animals' example, those of people. This approach thus suggests that the standard narrative that the heaths originated through the clearance of dense primordial forests by human beings needs to be re-examined.

After a preliminary visit to the Lake District in 2010, with two Swedish colleagues, Marie Stenseke, a geographer, and Ingrid Sarlöv-Herlin, a landscape ecologist, I undertook, in the following year, a field trip with Graham Bathe, a recently retired expert on commoning at the English environmental agency, Natural England. He put me in contact with Andrew Humphries, a Lake District educator and scholar with extensive knowledge of shepherding in the area. Together they opened doors to the Lake District National Park and the National Trust – to which the ownership and responsibility for managing much of the traditional pastoral landscape had been given. They also helped me contact farming organizations, local community leaders, and working shepherd farmers. I also undertook a field trip in 2014 with my wife Karen Fog Olwig, an anthropologist, who had long before introduced me to the methodology of participant observation.

I rented a cottage adjacent to Tilberthwaite Farm on the outskirts of Coniston village, where I stayed first with Graham and later with Karen. Here we had an overview of the farm and easy access to the shepherd farmers Dorothy and Glen Wilkinson. They were very helpful in explaining the terminology of shepherding, much of which was similar to that used in Scandinavia (e.g. the term "gimmer" for a young female sheep before her first lamb), and the complex workings of the farm. They raised sheep and fodder to feed the flock when it wintered downward in the valley and in the riverine meadows adjacent to the farm, but they also drew upon resources much further afield, as when young sheep, were sent to graze as far away as the Scottish border lands. The "-thwait" in Tilberthwaite is a very common suffix in this part of England. It means "clearing" or "meadow" in Old Norse and Old Danish, and the area is still characterized by a clearing in the wood within which there is meadowland.^{35 ( 35 )}
Watts 2010: xlviii; thwaite. Staying in a cottage on the farm meant that there was opportunity for informal conversations with the Wilkinsons concerning their family heritage as shepherds – and concerning its future. We could also easily tag along when they were herding the sheep up or down the fell. Through the Wilkinsons, it was furthermore possible to get to know the neighboring farmers and learn about their perspectives on the shepherding of the land and its conflicts, especially with the Lake District National Park and the National Trust, which were founded to protect the natural and cultural heritage of the landscape. The Park and the Trust, however, now seemed to be bent on either enclosing and intensifying the agricultural use of the land, or rewilding this ancient pastoral landscape.^{36 ( 36 )}
Olwig 2016.

Later, with Karen, I also stayed at a farm in Borrowdale leased by the National Trust to Joseph Relph, a leading spokesperson among the shepherds, a national champion sheep herder, and well versed in the land use and conflicts of the area. We stayed in the farm's bed and breakfast, run by Joe's wife Hazel. The same farm turned out to be a favourite hideaway of the then crown prince Charles, who was a supporter of this shepherded landscape's cultural and natural heritage. Such support was needed, because the heritage of pastoralists was under threat from the wilderness recreation and the rewilding movements, and from a government-supported attempt to liberalize the area's economy. This involved bringing in more entrepreneurial forms of agribusiness by weakening the rights of members of the existent farm community to inherit land leases over multiple generations.

With Graham, I located the Cleasby family's home. But the Cleasbys had long since moved on, and there was no trace of Richard Cleasby's legacy. I had become aware, however, that the landscape still harbored much of the knowledge that Cleasby had promised to impart to Blicher.

With my academic background in Nordic philology and historical landscape geography, and having taught at Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian universities, I felt almost at home in a landscape with place names like Langdale (dale from the Old Norse dalr, and lang, meaning long, pronounced like the Scandinavian lang) and a myriad of water bodies named "water," rather than "lake." The name of the lake Ullswater thus appends water to the name of a person or god bearing the Old Norse name of Ull, to whom the water body belonged. This usage recalls the Norwegian use of vatnet to mean lake that I encountered living in Trondheim, vatnet being the definite singular of the Old Norse vatn, meaning water. I also found remnants of Old Norse in the terminology and topographical names used in shepherding on the fells (meaning hills), from Old Norse fjallr (on Old Norse terminology)^{37 ( 37 )}
See: Rawnsley 1911. . I was particularly struck when I asked a shepherd for directions outside his village farm and he told me to follow the sheep-gang up the fell, pronouncing gang the way a Dane would today. This wasn't just an ancient place name on a dusty map; it was like meeting the place, in person and in context. The original meaning of the Old English gang, derived from the Old Norse gangr, refers to both path and "set of things or people which go together" (New Oxford American Dictionary: gang)^{38 ( 38 )}
New Oxford American Dictionary2005. . This meaning of path has largely died out in English, except in words such as "gangway" or "gangplank," but it lives on in the sense of beings going together as a group – as in itinerant workmen, but also gangsters. In this case the gang (gangsti in Danish) had been formed by flocks of sheep walking together up from the valley settlements to graze their pastures on the fells above – to which, I was told, they had a "hefted" bond. The practice of "hefting," as engaged in by grazing animals together with human pastoralists, was, I discovered, key to pastoralism in the Lake District.^{39 ( 39 )}
Hart 2004; ADAS 2008; Burton and Schwarz 2008.

Heft has origins in the Old Norse hefð (in which the letter ð, called an edh in Old Danish and Old English,is a combination of d and t), meaning to have and to hold by, for example, keeping up the maintenance of a pasture through grazing, pruning, and mowing, or by beating a path by walking, or being driven, as a flock of animals. By upholding a time-out-of-mind custom one is thus allowed to raise a claim to a prescriptive use right to graze, and thereby maintain, an area (holde i hævd in Danish). It also means to be connected, associated, or, literally, bound to something for which one is legally duty-bound and responsible. This suggests that the sheep themselves are also somehow responsible for the upkeep of their sheep-gang by walking it and thereby maintaining their hefted right to use it, much as English hikers retain their right to roam by walking and re-walking paths in an area (Ordbog over det danske sprog: hæfte^{40 ( 40 )}
Ordbog over det danske sprog 1931. ). Hefð also has a hidden presence in the place names of the Lake District's landscape. An important topographical feature is thus the howe, meaning hill, knoll, or mound, which is from the Old Norse haugr. Haugr is related in meaning to haggi, an elevated grazing area linked again to hagfest, which is the attachment of a flock to a particular pasture. Hagfest is thus cognate with heft.^{41 ( 41 )}
My sources for these definitions are: Rawnsley 1911; ODS 1931; Vinterberg and Bodelsen 1966; Scottish National Dictionary 1960; Falk, H. and A. Torp 1996 (orig. 1903-1906).

The shepherds explained to me that many of the Lake District's hills and mountains, the highest in England, have a conical shape with narrow valleys cut by streams flowing down from the top, creating the appearance, when seen from above, of wagon-wheel spokes. On a rainy day, holding on for dear life to the back of Joe's seat on his quad motorcycle and soaked to the skin despite my raingear, I rode with Joe up a sheep-gang through a narrow valley that was grazed in common. The right side of the stream, Joe explained, was the heft of his sheep (marked with red), whereas the left side was his neighbor's heft (marked with blue). The sheep flocks, he went on, behaved like magnets with electrical fields whose poles could either attract (thus forming a flock) or repel (thus dividing different flocks) – but not by a sharp boundary. If conditions warranted, one flock might wander into the heft of another flock, for example during a snowstorm, but by and large they were repulsed by the other flock and attracted to their own heft. The core of each flock's heft was the stream, and its meadows on one or the other side in this case. The flock grazed in the bottom of the valley during the winter, but moved upstream as the weather warmed, both drawn by the improved grazing and propelled by a desire to escape the myriads of insect pests that would be attracted if the flocks didn't keep moving. At the same time, the upper reaches of the slopes on either valley side also became more or less attractive for grazing according to the season. But at the top of the hill and the slopes bordering the valley, the sheep flocks would normally meet neighboring flocks coming up the other side that would push them back to their own heft. Hefting in an area with no serious danger from predators, as in the Lake District, means that the sheep did not need to be continuously tended by shepherds or enclosed by fencing, since the sheep tend to themselves.

Fencing is neither needed, nor advisable, nor generally allowed according to English customary law, because it interferes with the flexibility of movement of the flocks. In a snowstorm, for example, the flocks will move up the sides of the valleys to avoid being buried in the snow accumulating on the valley bottom. If they move away from the windblown drifting snow up a valley side, they may cross into a different heft in the adjacent valley to avoid drifting snow, as noted. If this move were hindered by a fence, they would be trapped in the snow drifting up against the fence and might well die. Without fencing, however, there must be hefted flocks in the adjacent valley on the other side, which can repel the encroachment of different flocks after the snow has retreated. It is particularly a problem if a flock goes over the top of a mountain and down into a valley on the opposite side, because it is a long way around the mountain if the neighbor must return the wayward sheep to their rightful owner. This is one reason why the shepherds hold festive shepherds' meets where they can gather, prove their skills in competition, and exchange sheep, thereby reinforcing the "neighborliness" that is vital to shepherding under this system.

For the system to work in a biologically, socially, and economically sustainable and balanced way, it is important to maintain an even hefting balance in every valley. It was therefore a problem that a National Park biologist who declared in an interview a lack of belief in the viability of hefting insisted on putting up fences near the top of a valley side to protect a sparse grove of stunted trees that the biologist believed to be the remnants of an ancient forest. It also was a problem that a large water company that owns huge areas for water catchment, in association with a major British ornithological charity, erected fences to hinder the movement of sheep into a valley owned by that company.

Commoning here works according to a system with ancient roots, under which the farmers lease the land, often for generations, from a manor (nowadays often the National Trust) that has stewardship over the land and therefore has a central duty to ensure the maintenance of customary law. Maintaining good stewardship benefits the manor (or the Trust), because it benefits the working of the entire common grazing system and increases both the rents attainable and the attractiveness of the land to visitors. The importance of keeping up the heft is apparent when farmers elect to sell their farm, or leave a tenancy and move to another farm. As Joe explained, customary law requires that a farmer doing this can keep only three-quarters of the flock: the remainder, called "the landlord's flock," must remain on the herd's ancestral heft to ensure the continuity of the heft and thus of the system as a whole. The quarter of the flock that remains thus maintains the hefted sharing of the land among the flocks, and thereby the continued hefting of the shepherds who take over the farm of the former owner. Such a flock theoretically could have a centuries-long local ancestry, thus providing a metaphor for place identity, as when the farmers, who may have inheritable tenancies, speak of feeling hefted to the land as part of a Lakeland shepherd community well known for its close-knit solidarity.^{42 ( 42 )}
Rawnsley 1911: 69, Gray 1999.

The lambs are hefted to the land by tagging along with their mother; the flock itself is formed through the mother ewes' fostering of the lambs. The heft is thus effectively created by, and figuratively belongs to, the sheep. Historically, rams or castrated rams (wethers) led the flock and maintained the heft, but today this role has been largely taken over by ewes alone, while the rams are sold for breeding purposes or for their meat. Whereas older flocks can have been hefted to the land since time immemorial, new flocks have to be shepherded into the area to be hefted by the pastoralists, which is why the slaughtering of entire flocks due to an epidemic creates especially difficult problems for many shepherds. This apart, the shepherds largely leave the flocks to fend for themselves on the fells. They do, however, shepherd the periodic movement of the flock down to the farm, in partnership with their dogs. If the sheep did not have a pre-existing ability to create the habitude of the heft, the farmers arguably could not co-create, together with the sheep, a landscape like that of the Lake District. This suggests that the long-term stability of hefting is innate to sheep and many other animals that graze in flocks.^{43 ( 43 )}
For example, the reindeer herded by the Sami, which are not intensively bred and thus resemble a wild animal, exhibit a behaviour similar to hefting called siida (Olwig 2017). Thus, in the Lake District, Jutland, and elsewhere, other grazing animals exhibiting similar flock behaviour are, or have been, grazed along with sheep. These include horses and cattle, which are enjoying a resurgence in the Lake District in part because the hooves of heavy beasts trample noxious weeds.

The apparently innate tendency to heft by the sheep and other grazing animals is central to the animal-human co-creation of the heathland pastures. One should, however, remember the dogs whose ancestors, the predatory wolves, likely played a role in incentivizing grazing animals to bind together in defensive flocks. The dogs, in turn, have long worked with humans in hunting and assisting in herding such flocks. The Wilkinsons were grazing the hardy iconic Herdwick sheep characteristic of their upland area. The Herdwicks are a smaller, wilier, hardier and older type of sheep than the lowland breeds, and they are herded by collies that are necessarily more assertive and prone to bark than the wily border collies in the lowlands, who must be careful not to spook their tame charges. The suffix wick derives from the Old English wīcmeaning dwelling place, so the name Herdwick literally means herd dwelling place, pasture ground or heft, and the Herdwick sheep are noted for their ability to heft on wild upland pastures.^{44 ( 44 )}
Brown 2009. It thus takes a wilder breed of dogs than the lowland border collies to drive the rambunctious, independent-minded Herdwick sheep. Dorothy was a respected breeder of such dogs, which are noted for their loyalty to a particular shepherd and refuse to work for others. Despite the bonds between shepherd and dog, however, the dogs are not pets. They are kept in outdoor kennels, not in the home, and their relationship to the shepherds is more professional than affectionate. When I asked Glen about this, he asked me pointedly: "Would you have such a musclebound creature in your home?" If the shepherds had pets, they were dogs bred to be pets.

Glen did not use a sophisticated system of whistles to direct the dogs, but rather talked to them in much the same blunt way he spoke to people. When I asked Glen what he thought about the use of whistles and the like to direct well-trained dogs in the sheep trials that were popular with the tourists, he replied that the dogs pretty much knew what to do without being trained, and that they responded well to normal human speech. Later I grasped what he meant as Graham and I watched Glen, who was standing at the bottom of a long, narrow semicircular valley, verbally direct the dogs a long way off that were bringing the sheep down to the farm from pasture. The dogs were doing their work enthusiastically, more or less on their own, as if they knew nothing better in this world than herding sheep, even though this was exhausting work lasting days. Glen directed the dogs over a distance so great that I, with my inexperienced eye, could barely see the sheep - but neither could the dogs, for that matter, because the sheep could be hidden from the dogs by the relatively high heathland through which they were navigating. It was clear that there was important complementarity between the bodies of the sharp-eyed people walking high on two legs and the bodies of the low-slung quadruped dogs, dogs that were well equipped to smell scent on the ground and hear the sheep (and Glen). Glen, standing upright, was able to give the dogs a general idea of where the sheep were, after which the dogs tracked them down.

The co-habitus developed through a synergy between flocks of grazing animals and pastoralists, it could be argued, involves breeding both in the biological sense that animals are bred and in the cultural sense. As Glen and Dorothy explained to me, there were dogs that were good at helping the shepherd divide a flock into separate groups, and some that were better at keeping flocks together. Another example is the border collies used to herd lowland breeds of sheep, who need to be born with sharp, piercing eyes if they are to be able to intimidate these timid animals without panicking them. It was likewise suggested that even shepherds needed to develop, in the cultural sense, an eye enabling them to differentiate and identify sheep within and between flocks one from the other. We are thus dealing with a habitus where the culture of neighborliness, the periodic shepherds' meets, and the sheep breeding and herding competitions are necessary to the functioning of grazing in an area characterized by commons.

My journeys to northwestern England following in Blicher's imagined footsteps raised issues leading to the three theses I have listed above. The first thesis contends that the persistence of Danish and Scandinavian traits in the shaping of the Lake District's landscape is a consequence of a larger archipelagic landscape of movement, exchange, and settlement that encompassed the Jutland heathlands, those of the Lake District, archipelagic Scandinavia, and other regions on the Atlantic ends of Europe. The second thesis is that both the habitude-generating customs involving people and animals and the more formalized legal workings of common law were key to the complex of cultural and physical factors that went into the co-creation of this fluid landscape. The third thesis, to be broached in what follows, is that the standard narrative that the heathlands were the outcome of human clearance of the primordial dense forests needs to be re-examined in the light of the first two.

The modernist understanding of landscape, which derives largely from the English usage, conceptualizes it as a form of scenery, where human culture is layered above the natural physical landscape below, as on a stage in which the progressive stages of the drama's plot are marked by changes in scenery.^{45 ( 45 )}
Olwig 2002: 53, 54). In the standard narrative by which the heaths are the outcome of human forest clearance, the plot is one of anthropocentric, human responsibility. Here the moral of the story is that the forest should be restored to its natural state by replanting or rewilding. However, the above discussion of my theses (1) and (2) based on my fieldwork in the Lake District suggests that landscape is the substantive result of the synergistic co-habitus of animals and people, and that animals played an initiatory role in the case of the generation of heaths and other grazing lands within a mosaic of open and wooded lands. My argument is that it was indigenous herds or flocks of grazing animals, such as reindeer, including the now extinct aurochs - and even fowl, such as geese - that initially shaped the vegetation of the post-glacial landscape. They thereby created a mosaic of areas of open pastureland, surrounded by the forest vegetation that appeared after the last Ice Age. It is therefore not unlikely that it was in these already open clearings that humans settled, after which they further developed and expanded this landscape structure for pastoral and agricultural use, as in the structure of the thwaites of northwest England. This approach calls to mind the theory of the Dutch forest ecologist Franz Vera.^{46 ( 46 )}
Vera 2000.

According to Vera, the primordial Northern European forests were not dense and unbroken, as conventionally thought, and the heaths, in turn, were not necessarily a consequence of the clearing and subsequent ecological degeneration of this supposed prototypical forest. Open tundra, heath, or grasslands that were the outcome of post-glacial conditions as well as lightning-set fires and windstorms (for example) could have been kept open by the animals grazing and trampling the open areas, thereby maintaining them as pastures in the face of encroaching tree growth. Eventually, according to Vera, thorny vegetation like the hawthorn would grow up on the edges of the meadow and protect young trees from the grazing animals until they developed into woodlands. The thorny vegetation would then act as a hedge-like border between woodland and open areas of grazed land.

Vera's theory is controversial because it flies in the face of the accepted narrative. It has been criticized, for example, on the ground that pollen analysis apparently does not show the amount of grass pollen vis-à-vis tree pollen that Vera's theory of the ancient open forests would predict.^{47 ( 47 )}
Wright 2016: 12-13. But in the post-glacial period, would one not expect a climate and soil more like that of northernmost Europe today - a landscape not dominated by grass, but rather characterized by sparse tree growth and vegetation such as tundra, taiga, heath, or moor, as is the case with the landscape of Arctic Europe or the North Atlantic archipelago today? And would this not explain the dearth of grass pollen? In such a case, the grazing animals would be more like deer and reindeer, which can survive well without grass.^{48 ( 48 )}
Olwig 2017. Recent work using quantitative methods to model vegetative change has shown that trees tend to be over-represented in standard pollen analyses. This inexact representation may in turn be a factor contributing to the discrepancy between the low percentage of open areas found in continental Northern Europe and the relatively large amount of open mixed vegetation grazeable land (e.g. heath, and not necessarily grass) found historically in the British Isles of the North Atlantic.^{49 ( 49 )}
Fyfe et. al. 2013. I would thus conclude that the heathlands were not necessarily degraded forest resulting from human clearance, as often assumed, but might rather be a primary form of post-glacial vegetation that was later encroached upon by woodland as the climate warmed. There is, in fact, evidence that this is the case within the archipelagic North Atlantic fringe.^{50 ( 50 )}
See: Birks and Madsen 1979; Peglar, 1979; Bunting, 1996. For a review of the literature on the origins of the heaths that emphasizes the standard narrative focusing on man's forest clearance rather than a co-habitus synergy between grazing animals, dogs, and pastoralists, see: Webb 1986: 25-35. Forest clearance, of course, could arguably have played a role in eras when there were large increases in the amount of heathland, but this does not mean that clearance per se would have created the co-habitus that was necessary to maintain the heath landscape. This habitus, as will be argued, would likely have begun to develop in the post-glacial era, prior to the imagined existence of the dense forests that were a prerequisite to their clearance - as opposed to open grazed woodlands, which were arguably already opened by a combination of lightning fires, windstorms, and grazing. An increase in their openness could arguably be due to clearance, but also to other factors such as grazing intensity, climate change, and wildfires.

The type of Northern European landscape that Vera described - a matrix of open pasture and woodland - appears in Blicher's literary and geographical characterization of Jutland's historical landscape. In Blicher's case, a meadow in such a forest clearing is termed a hestehave in his novella The robber's den. This hestehave also bears similarity to the thwaitethat gives its name to Tilberthwaite and Rosthwaite, the site of the Lake District shepherds' meets. As at Rosthwaite, Blicher's hestehave is a place where festivity creates a naturalized sense of community:^{51 ( 51 )}
Blicher 1945 (orig. 1827): 120.

The hestehave Blicher describes is also similar, both physically and linguistically, to a type of landscape known in Sweden as hagmark, a term consisting of the prefix hag (hæk in Danish and hedge in English) and the suffix mark, which means an uncultivated field of pasture of apparent natural origin (NE Ordbok: hage^{53 ( 53 )}
NE Ordbok 2021. ). The hagmark is defined by the Swedish Forest Agency (Skogsstyrelsen) as:

along with grazing land of grass or heather. Hagmark also goes under names such as hage (cognate with the Danish have), kohage (cow hage), björkhage (beech hage) and ekhage (oak hage).^{54 ( 54 )}
Skogsstyrelsen 2023. The physical geographers Margareta Ihse and Helle Skånes define the hagmark similarly as:

These grazing lands, they continue,

As was seen earlier, the term hagfest is also cognate with heft, thus linguistically linking the hagmark to the hefting of grazing animals. Like the Lake District, but unlike Denmark, Sweden still has large areas of legally recognized village commons, and these often take the form of forests within which – again unlike Denmark – grazing is allowed.

Blicher’s suggestion that the feast in the hestehave “is surely an old custom, perhaps as old as the forest itself“ chimes with Ihse and Skånes’ perception of the hagmark as part of a landscape settlement pattern that “existed for more than a thousand years.”^{57 ( 57 )}
Ihse and Skånes 2008: 274. Today the Swedish hagmark is still valued both ecologically and culturally, also as a site for festivities. Because it is judged to be a “key biotope,” areas with a hagmark are legally eligible for a state subsidy for the protection of the hagmark, but only if it is hefted. The hagmark, they write: “…is hefted (hävdas) today through grazing or the impact of grazing which must be relatively recent, no longer than ten years.”^{58 ( 58 )}
Skogsstyrelsen 2023, my  translation . Sweden (like Finland), it might be added, also has a swidden agricultural tradition in areas within forests, which also would have the effect of hefting grazing land like that of the hagmark (Bladh 2008). The Swedish government is thus supporting the protection of a grazing system that is a natural component of a working agrarian area, rather than effectively enclosing it by forbidding grazing in forest land or creating a protected, inviolable natural area, as is the case in Denmark. Despite the Swedes’ ecological and cultural support for the hagmark, it is nevertheless still threatened in much the same way as the Danish heaths. As Ihse and Skånes write:

This development has been a major threat to the hagmark, according to Ihse and Skånes, largely because of the way modern Swedish silviculture has focused on the dense managed planting of large regular areas of fast-growing coniferous trees. “Today,” they write, “the arable land adjoins managed forest to a greater extent,” with the result that the heterogeneity provided by the grazing lands within the deciduous woods encompassing the hagmark is lost.^{60 ( 60 )}
Ihse and Skånes 2008: 264, Fig. 10.3. This threat is quite similar to what occurred on the Jutland heaths, whereby massive, non-native commercial coniferous forests, planted in regimented rows, create a relatively barren understory that does not allow for the diverse mixed flora, including heather and grass, that is characteristic of the hagmark and the hestehaven. This is the explanation behind the bedraggled relict of the heathlands peeking out from under the margins of dark conifer forests that piqued my curiosity when I first cycled in Himmerland. These forests, furthermore, lack the resilience of the heath they replaced, and have been subject to serious die-off (skovdød in Danish).^{61 ( 61 )}
Olwig 1986: ch 6, Olwig 2021 (orig. 1984): chs 6, 7.

Haga, or have in Danish, directly translates into English as garden. The gard in garden, furthermore, derives from Germanic words like the Old English geard, the Old Norse gerði and the Danish gærde, meaning fence or enclosure, but also dwelling and home. It is also related to gård, the Scandinavian word for farm (Merriam-Webster: garden; Ordbog over det danske sprog: gærd, gård^{62 ( 62 )}
Merriam-Webster 2024; ODS 1931. [I’ve combined these] ). Haga or have can, therefore, be translated as garden because both denote an area enclosed by a hedge or a manmade enclosure like a wall or fence. It might seem strange to call a pasture in a forest enclosed by hedges and grazed by herd animals a garden, but landscapes of the hagmark type were, historically, identified with the Garden of Eden in Old Saxon,^{63 ( 63 )}
Shepard 1967: 75. and Blicher here describes hestehaven as having a paradisiacal pastoral character that is associated with dancing and other seasonal pastimes.^{64 ( 64 )}
See also: Shepard 1967: 75) It is, however, equally appropriate to translate haga, and have, as the more prosaic yard, which also derives from geard (Merriam-Webster: yard^{65 ( 65 )}
Merriam-Webster 2024. ). One might thus translate words like hestehave as horse yard. What is to be noted about words like haga, have, and garden is the fact that the terms emphasize that what makes a garden is that it has been physically enclosed for practical reasons. The emphasis is thus not on what specifically has been enclosed: the content of the garden therefore can be anything from vegetables to animal pasture, and the enclosure anything from a thorny hedge to a drystone wall or wooden fence.

There is, one can conclude, historical geographical and literary evidence of time-out-of-mind customary practices integrating animals and people within a shared co-habitus involving physically enclosed pasture, garden, and field, combined with open grazed commons like the heaths and open forests. Moreover, ecological evidence points to the antiquity of this kind of vegetation. Nevertheless, a powerful counternarrative persists, portraying the heaths as the outcome of the human clearance of dense primordial forest.

The narrative of a primordial, dense Northern European forest in which the nature of the nation is almost literally rooted, like a tree, arguably has much of its origin in classical Roman texts, notably in Tacitus’s Germania.^{66 ( 66 )}
Tacitus 1948 (orig. 98). Tacitus uses the literary tradition of what the historian of ideas Arthur O. Lovejoy calls “primitivism.”^{67 ( 67 )}
Lovejoy and Boas 1935 Tacitus thereby produces an idealized ethnography lionizing the positive qualities of the natural, primitive Germanic-speaking peoples as an indirect means to reflect critically on the negative qualities of an unnatural, civilized Roman society. Much later, with the rise of Protestantism and nationalism in Northern Europe, Tacitus’s text was turned inside out so that it was read both as a direct critique of Rome and as objective, authoritative testimony to the superior character of the Germanic-speaking peoples. Germania and similar texts by other classical authors thereby became a source of nationalist pride in Germanic-speaking areas – including Scandinavia, where the people were often identified as “Goths” – and this inspired an ideology known as Gothicism.^{68 ( 68 )}
Olwig 2021 (orig.. 1984: 11–22). In the Germania, Tacitus describes the Germanic-speaking peoples as living not in cities, like the Romans, but spread out within the forest in single-family dwellings inhabited by freedom-loving and chaste peoples dwelling within protective and impenetrable forests. Here these peoples ostensibly developed a free and relatively egalitarian society.^{69 ( 69 )}
Schama 1995: 75–100, Olwig 2002: 53, 54).

The Northern European forests did indeed provide protection against Roman conquest, because they were impenetrable to a southern military used to fighting in open terrain where the enemy was not able to hide in ambush – a word derived ultimately from a late Latin term meaning to hide in “place in a wood” (New Oxford American Dictionary: ambush^{70 ( 70 )}
New Oxford American Dictionary 2005. ). This did not necessarily mean, however, that Germania’s forests were perceived as dense and impenetrable by the local residents who dwelt between and within these areas. They, unlike the Romans, would have known how to orient themselves and navigate in lands that were a mosaic of wood and open grazed or cultivated land. Accounts like that of Tacitus nevertheless appealed to Germanic nationalists because they provided an authoritative classical source for a national narrative in which the nation was seen to be born out of, and thereby, almost literally, rooted in, the wild nature of a dense forest.

The ideology of “Gothicism” provides an explanation for why the 1819 Danish national song by Adam Oehlenschläger claimed that:

Though the song was written at a time when anyone could see that Denmark was hardly tree-covered (but the sea was still blue), it nevertheless begins with the line:

This sort of Gothicism also helps explain why and how the afforestation and agricultural “reclamation” of the Jutland heaths could become a national cause in the years following the Danish loss of Schleswig-Holstein to the Germans in 1864.^{72 ( 72 )}
Olwig 1986, Olwig 2021 (orig. 1984). Against this patriotic background, Blicher must have seemed positively anti-Danish when he, in an 1814 poem called Hjemve (homesickness), celebrated the largely treeless landscape of his native home. As he wrote:^{73 ( 73 )}
Blicher 1920, my translation.

In this rather untraditional, auto-intellectual biographical academic essay, I have reconsidered various and sundry of my writings, created over a scholarly lifetime, on issues raised initially by my first explorations of the Jutland heath and Blicher’s authorship. In so doing, I have sought to reassemble this disparate collection of texts and ideas into what is intended to be a coherent argument for the three interlocking theses propounded above.

They are: (1) Jutland’s heathlands and the heathlands of the Lake District belong to a core archipelagic region of the North Atlantic in which heath vegetation grazed as commons is, or has been, ubiquitous; (2) the landscape of the heaths was created and maintained in the Lake District and Jutland as a habitus, or co-habitus, through the synergistic practices of flocks of grazing animals, dogs, and pastoralists; (3) acceptance of the first two theses suggests that the standard narrative that the heaths were the outcome of the human clearance of primordial dense forests needs to be re-examined. This led me to further examine the foundation of this narrative in light of the nationalist ideological power of the belief in the existence of a dense primordial Northern European forest. Together, I believe, these three theses can help explain the more than five-thousand-year-long tenacity of the heathlands – but also, why they are now threatened.

The reasons the heathlands, despite their remarkable persistence, are now poised at the precipice of extinction are tied to these three interlocking theses. Thus, based on the idea that the area of the heathlands has its natural origin in largely dense forests, and that it was from this environment that the original founders of the nation emerged, it was argued that it was necessary to “restore” the Danish forests in order to restore the nation.^{74 ( 74 )}
See Olwig 1986 and 2021 (orig. 1984). It thereby became a national cause to “reinstate” the forests that were believed to have existed on the heaths, but which had become degraded through misuse by the pastoralists. This degradation is what the national liberal economists considered to be, as Garrett Hardin later put it, a “tragedy of the commons.” The enclosure of commonly used lands for grazing in order to “reforest” the land also provided a means by which one could exclude grazing from forests and thereby assure a dense monocrop of trees, rather than the open, species-diverse forest landscape created by grazing.

The archipelagic thesis, by contrast, suggests that the reason there are heathlands, or similar types of plant assemblages (such as tundra), throughout the North Atlantic archipelago is simply that heath is particularly well suited to the climate of this archipelago. This does not mean there have not been open woodlands of the type described by Blicher under the name of hestehaven, or by the Swedes as hagmark, in the archipelago. It does, however, suggest that the reason why areas where forest plantations were established on the heath have subsequently not thrived, or have even experienced skovdød (forest death), is that the region is basically not well suited to intense, dense commercial forestry. If one furthermore considers the argument that the heath was generated as a co-habitus through a synergy of grazing animals, dogs, and pastoralists, one becomes aware of the irony of the, in my opinion, problematic enclosure of heathlands as inviolable nature reserves, from which traditional heathland agriculture has been excluded. This exclusion is arguably a cause of the present-day deterioration of heathland into bushland, because the grazing and controlled burning of the heaths under traditional heathland agriculture rejuvenates the heaths so that they continue to thrive, while preventing the severe damage caused by uncontrolled burning. A contemporary variant of the threat of enclosing heathland in order to preserve it is rewilding. Rewilding, especially when accompanied by the re-wolfing of the landscape, creates a threat to pastoralism on open land.^{75 ( 75 )}
Olwig 2019a; Woestenburg, 2018. The growth of bush, often a consequence of rewilding and of the abandonment of grazing land, also leads to threats of fireburns that are a danger to the landscape more generally.^{76 ( 76 )}
For an unusually in-depth analysis of the social and political causes and burning consequence of the abandonment of grazing and the growth of bush in contemporary Grecian Arcadia see (Markaki 2024).

A common denominator running through all the present-day threats to the heathlands’ existence, the above suggests, is spatial enclosure as the property of individual people, nations, or even nature itself.^{77 ( 77 )}
On enclosure see, Byer 2023. The effect of enclosure has been well captured by the anthropologist Tim Ingold in a text where he argues:^{78 ( 78 )}
Ingold 2009: 29.

This inversion, I would argue, transforms archipelagic place, a hefted nexus of seaways and paths of movement generating the cultural continuity still found in the Lake District of England, into a spatially enclosed, fixed, and frozen territory and property. In this way it generates the uniformity of culture and agriculture that is characteristic of more easily enclosed lowland heaths, like those of Jutland. This explains why today it is necessary to travel to places like the Lake District if one wants to experience something approaching what was once the living heathland landscapes of Jutland.