The role of commons and greens in village life

Why the green still matters

Almost every Hertfordshire village has one: a triangle of grass at a crossroads, a long strip of common running beside the road, or a proper open expanse with a cricket square at its heart. These places are easy to take for granted, but they are the oldest piece of shared infrastructure in the parish. Long before the village hall or the recreation ground existed, the common was where people met, traded, grazed stock and marked the turning points of the year.

For anyone out walking, they are also genuinely useful landmarks. Greens tend to sit at the meeting point of footpaths, and commons often preserve the rougher, wetter, more awkward ground that farming left alone — which is precisely why they are so good for wildlife. A morning spent hopping between two or three of them will show you more of a parish's character than any amount of main-road driving.

How a common came to look the way it does

Most commons you walk across today were once working land. Villagers held rights attached to particular properties: pasture for grazing a set number of animals, estovers for collecting firewood, turbary for cutting turf, and sometimes piscary for fishing. Those rights were not free-for-alls. They were limited, recorded and argued over, often for centuries.

The great wave of enclosure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took in most of the open fields, but pockets of common survived because they were too wet, too steep, too sandy or too useful to fence. Grazing largely stopped during the twentieth century, and without animals the scrub moved in. Many commons were then mown and tidied by parish councils, which is why so many now look like a cross between a park and a field. Since the Commons Registration Act 1965 and the Commons Act 2006, registered common land has real legal protection — and a right of access on foot for you and me.

Five greens and commons worth building a walk around

• Aldbury — a proper picture-postcard green with a pond and a set of old stocks. Start here and climb towards the Ashridge estate for beech woods and wide ridge views.
• Chipperfield Common — cricket pitch, war memorial and woodland in one compact space, with footpaths threading out towards King's Langley and the Chess Valley.
• Chorleywood Common — sandy, gorse-flecked and surprisingly wild, with acid grassland that supports rare plants. Good underfoot in winter when clay paths elsewhere are a swamp.
• Redbourn Common — two ponds, a fine cricket square and a straight run down to the River Ver. Ideal as the start of a valley walk towards St Albans.
• Norton Common, Letchworth — fifty-odd acres of meadow and woodland a short step from the town centre, with the River Pix winding through it.

If you want one more, Nomansland Common between Wheathampstead and Sandridge is worth the detour: gorse, heather, a cricket pitch and a network of bridleways that link up with the newer native woodland nearby.

Practical walking: linking greens into routes

The trick with commons is to treat them as junctions rather than destinations. Three-quarters of an hour on a green is pleasant; three hours of linking them is a proper day out.

From Redbourn Common, follow the River Ver south on the waymarked valley path towards St Albans — flat, well drained and easy to shorten using the lanes at Redbournbury. From Chorleywood Common, drop down into the Chess Valley for a circular route through pasture and water meadows. From Aldbury, head up onto the Ridgeway and Ashridge for a longer circuit with real climbing and real views. Around Chipperfield, the paths are gentler and muddier; boots rather than trainers from October onwards.

Timing matters. Village greens are at their best early, before the dog walkers and the footballers arrive, and commons with livestock grazing are best avoided in the first hour after the gate opens in spring. Most Hertfordshire commons have a small car park or generous roadside parking nearby, but check for yellow lines and resident permits before you leave the car.

Green etiquette: dogs, livestock and litter

These are shared spaces with a lot of competing users, and the unwritten rules are mostly common sense.

• Lead your dog around grazing animals, nesting birds between March and July, and any cricket match in progress. A ball to the face is nobody's idea of a good afternoon.
• Pick up after your dog and take it home. Bins on commons fill fast and are emptied on a rota, not on demand.
• Do not feed the ducks, geese or ponies on the pond. Bread fouls the water and can make grazing animals genuinely ill.
• Leave the mown edges alone. Those rough strips of longer grass are deliberate — they are what keeps the insects, and therefore the birds, on the common.
• Take litter with you, including fruit peel and sandwich crusts, which attract rats and foxes.

Keeping the common in common

Commons survive because somebody is paying attention. In Hertfordshire that somebody is usually a parish council, a district council, a conservation charity or a group of volunteers who turn out on a Saturday morning with loppers and a flask. If you walk a common regularly, it is worth knowing who manages it — a quick look at the noticeboard at the entrance will usually tell you, along with any grazing or mowing schedule.

Volunteer work days are advertised on those same boards, and most groups are glad of an extra pair of hands for an hour or two. Failing that, simply using the green well is a form of stewardship: shutting gates, sticking to paths where the ground is fragile, and buying a round in the pub that faces the green. Village life has always worked that way, and it still does.