ABSTRACT
Two memories suggest themselves to me. In the first, I am standing on the slope of a rounded limestone hill in southern England, looking south across a huge vista of woods and fields, the rolling lowlands of the Kentish Weald. Near at hand there is thin grass with the little bumps of ant hills, and on the hilltop the remains of a Bronze Age earthwork approximately 3500 years’ old. One or two of my fellow students are on their hands and knees, peering excitedly through hand lenses at grasses and flowers, and uttering the shrill squeaks of the conservationist at play. To our right lies what looks like a battlefield, a sea of hawthorn stumps and the ash mounds that marked the sites of small, hot fires. We are on a National Nature Reserve (NNR), a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), and this was the result of careful scientific conservation management.1
