When onservation is a fine art

A muntjac stalk through Constable Country is a stark reminder that we are all just stewards of an ever-changing landscape

- MILES MALONE

Skirting the River Stour, which divides the counties of Essex and Suffolk, lies lush countryside that was made famous the world over by John Constable. Perhaps the greatest-ever English landscape artist, he was born in Suffolk, and this quintessential English rural idyll that he painted is of course known as ‘Constable Country’. Once voted Britain’s favourite painting, The Hay Wain depicts a now much changed but still recognisable rural landscape. However, it is a lesser-known work that has particular resonance for me. It shows a river scene of tranquil pastures meeting a distant verdant tree line and onwards to a seemingly endless East Anglian sky; it is here that I stepped out in pursuit of deer in the dark, awaiting the arrival of a spring morning.

As I moved softly through the predawn gloom, the landscape murky with lowlying mist, I contemplated what would soon be revealed in the coming light. Much has changed since Constable surveyed this landscape for his sketches. The elms, so prominent in his famous works, are now a rare sight, their decline accelerated with the import of a fungus, the cause of Dutch elm disease. The oaks that largely replaced them, now symbolic of English broadleaved woodland, were actually rarer in this area at that time.

A rich ecosystem