Over the large area
of East Anglia called 'High' Suffolk, one is impressed by the
flatness of the large intensively cropped arable fields and the
twistiness of its minor roads that meander between small scattered
settlements.
Occasionally the
traveller enters upon a wide expanse of open grassland or scrub
with cottages and older farmsteads set back from the road. Splendid
isolated churches are never entirely out of sight. Where they
survive, open greens and commons interconnect with one another,
making it difficult to tell where one begins and another ends. The
impression is of an antique landscape, but one much mutilated by
the effects of nineteenth-century enclosure and more modern
'agri-business'.
Geographers have
speculated about the origins of these distinctive economic features
of a settlement pattern spread over many hundreds, or indeed
thousands, of years. The reasons behind the survival of common land
in north Suffolk and south Norfolk have never been firmly
established, but a groundswell of opposition by smallholders to
parliamentary enclosure, and the lack of powerful landlords at a
local level, may have been contributing factors.
