The Hertfordshire/Bedfordshire countryside around Hitchin is largely unchanged since my childhood. I don't mean by that it's a rural idyll. What I mean is that modernity had already changed the landscape by the time I came to know it as a child. For example the field patterns are much the same because the patchwork of small fields divided by hedgerows had already been transformed into huge swathes of arable.

 Then as now there remained pockets and fragments of a much older landscape. I'm thinking of places like Knocking Hoe and Oughtonhead Common. They survived modernity because there was no point investing time and money in them. The Hoe for example is too steep to plough, the common too marshy to plant. Latterly they have come to be appreciated as nature reserves and amenities.