Wordsmith
Kev Reynolds
Th e Man with the World’s Best Job
Octavia Hill, Champion of the Countryside
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www.kevreynolds.co.uk
Wimbledon and Woodford, for she believed that recreation and
natural beauty should not be the preserve of wealthy landowners,
but were everyone’s birthright.
She became involved with the UK’s oldest national
conservation body, the Commons Preservation Society (now
the Open Spaces Society), where she met solicitor Sir Robert
Hunter, and later widened her horizon of concern, to fi ght
alongside Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley to save the Lake District
from rampant development. (Hill, Hunter and Rawnsley, of
course, later founded the National Trust.)
In London she helped save Hampstead Heath and Parliament
Hill Fields from being built upon; she campaigned against
the destruction of suburban woodlands, and was
the fi rst to use the term ‘Green Belt’ as a girdle
of protection from urban sprawl. And aft er
she’d built a home on the edge of Crockham
Hill Common among the greensand hills,
she conducted a survey of all footpaths,
commons and rights of way in Kent and
Surrey, and would encourage visitors to
walk the local footpaths equipped with
‘at least a pair of secateurs, probably
an old sword, and a pair of pliers’ to
dispose of any obstacles in their way.
Footpaths, she claimed, were ‘one
of the great common inheritances
to which English citizens are born,’
but were being lost by what she called
‘judicious planting.’
Today I walk the same footpaths
that Octavia Hill walked and fought to
keep open more than a hundred years
ago. I follow her spirit across Mariners Hill,
continue to Toys Hill (‘the fi rst beautiful site
in England dedicated as a memorial’) and on to
Ide Hill which she described as ‘the breezy hill, wide
views, woodland glades, tiny spring.’
Her spirit is in every one of those views that stretch across
the great expanse of the Weald, mistakenly considered to be the
overcrowded south-east, and she has my undying gratitude that
it should be so.
On the west-facing slope of Mariners Hill she placed a stone
seat in memory of her mother; on the crown of the hill there’s
another facing south, a wooden seat this time, weather-stained
and drilled by woodpeckers; it was put there to recall Octavia’s
companion and fellow worker, Harriott Yorke. On Toys Hill she
sank a well for the benefi t of villagers – the view from t he well-
head is as exciting as any I know - while Ide Hill has its very own
Octavia Hill protected sites with vantage points that never cease
to draw an exclamation of wonder.
Th e marble effi gy of this diminutive woman lying next to the
altar in Crockham Hill’s church, gives no clue as to her stature or
status as one of the greatest of all champions of the countryside.
Yet her inspiration lives on in what she referred to as ‘the healing
gift of space’.
Octavia Hill: local saint, national hero, to whose memory we
owe so much.
or nearly half a century I’ve lived within sight of the
Greensand Ridge or, as it’s known in my family, the
Kentish Alps. From where I write these words I can just
see the crown of Mariners Hill which aff ords a three-
county view I’ve gazed on a thousand times or more. Having
spent fi ft een years in a tiny cottage on the south-eastern slope
of that hill, I’d climb it almost daily whenever I was at home. A
few years ago I hung over a fi ve-bar gate near the summit as my
heart was trying to get out of my chest and thought: ‘If this is
the last view I see, it’s a pretty good one.’ An hour later I was in a
hospital bed wired up to heart monitors. Needless to say I didn’t
die, but when I do, my ashes will be scattered up there.
Mariners Hill is accessible to you and me and to
all our grandchildren’s grandchildren thanks to
the vision of Octavia Hill. She loved its view
of ‘unimpeded land and sky giving delicious
sense of space. Imagine the joy of that
hilltop with all its view and air;’ she
wrote; ‘leave it free for those that love
it, and will fi nd joy and peace there for
years to come.’
Octavia Hill is our local saint.
Buried in our parish churchyard
not a mile from Mariners Hill, I
like to think she died with a smile
on her face, for the day before she
drew her last breath in August 1912,
she received a cheque that eff ectively
secured her favourite hill for the
enjoyment of all people for all time.
Perhaps best known as one of the
founders of the National Trust, her life’s
work was social housing and improving the
lives of the inner city poor. But to my mind,
her most important legacy is the free access we
enjoy today to so much of our fi nest countryside. For
this extraordinary Victorian woman, short of stature but
mighty in spirit, was a tireless campaigner on behalf of those
who felt ‘the need of quiet, the need of air, the need of exercise
[and] the sight of sky and of things growing [which] seem
human needs, common to all men.’
Born in the Fenland town of Wisbech in 1838, Octavia was
the eighth daughter of corn merchant and one-time banker,
James Hill, but aft er he was declared bankrupt and suff ered
a nervous breakdown, Octavia’s mother Caroline took her
children to Finchley – then little more than a country village
– where the girls were always ‘up in the hedges, leaping ditches
and climbing trees’ in all weathers. It was the birth of her love of
the countryside. ‘Th ere was always something to see – fi elds full
of fl owers, hedges full of one treasure or another.’
Years later, when managing slum properties and working
hard to improve both the buildings and the lives of those who
lived in them, she remembered the gift s of freedom and fresh
air of her childhood, and turned disused graveyards into public
gardens so that others could have a place in which to fi nd some
form of respite from the joyless drudgery of their everyday lives.
She also arranged outings for her tenants to Hampstead Heath,
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