How we have lost 200,000 miles of hedge in 60 years

Enough British hedgerow to circle the globe eight times has been destroyed over the past 60 years, official figures revealed.

And the loss of a staggering 200,000 miles of hedges - the nation's richest wildlife habitats - is just part of the wholescale devastation of the traditional countryside. Only tiny fractions of some of its most distinctive and best-loved features have survived the relentless advance of intensive agriculture.

Yet environmentalists say that the best chance yet of halting and reversing the destruction to the landscape are being frustrated by savage government cuts designed to compensate for Whitehall bungling.

Environment ministers last week launched what they call a "powerful champion for the natural environment", entitled Natural England. But they have cut its fighting funds by more than a quarter to make up for overspending by their own civil servants, leading the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England to warn of "a starved and toothless watchdog".

Britain is thought to have been a country of hedges even when the Romans came. Nearly half the country's lowland butterflies, more than two-thirds of its lowland birds, and three-quarters of its lowland mammals breed in them, and they are home to 250 species of plants.

They increased until around 1870, and then remained about the same until the end of the Second World War, when the destruction began - mainly to create larger fields for modern farm machinery.

Over the past decade their total length has remained the same, thanks to new regulations and a recession in agriculture, but this disguises the fact that old, wildlife-rich hedgerows are being destroyed, while less valuable ones are being planted. Ministers are now reviewing the regulations to see if they need to be tightened up.

Over the past 60 years too, England has lost nearly all of its flower-rich meadows, limestone pavements, lowland raised bogs and lowland heathland.

Wildlife has disappeared with its habitat. One in five of all Britain's wildflower species are on the brink of extinction, while in the past decade alone a third of Britain's butterflies have disappeared.

Natural England will, for the first time, bring together the jobs of protecting the country's wildlife, previously done by English Nature, and looking after its landscape, the task so far of the Countryside Agency. Even more important it will, in a new departure, be responsible for awarding some £300m in conservation grants to farmers to encourage them to operate in a more environmentally friendly way.

But both its ability to protect what is left, and its power to finance good practice are under threat. Ministers have carried forward £8m of cuts to English Nature's budget and have imposed further cuts of £12.9m to help make up for overspending by its officials on preparations for bird flu and on bungled payments to farmers. Together, these make up over a quarter of the new body's £70m budgets for programmes to protect wildlife and the countryside. At the same time, wrangles in the European Union are threatening the £300m in payments made to farmers to practise conservation.

Tony Juniper, executive director of Friends of the Earth, says that Natural England was being "crippled at birth" to pay for a "bureaucratic cock-up". But Barry Gardiner, the rural affairs minister, retorts that he is "confident that the new body will be fully fit for purpose".

Vanishing Britain: What's gone since 1945

LOST: Flower-rich meadows. Once a glory of the land, now grass wastelands - thanks to fertilisers.

DAMAGED: Limestone pavements. Rare wildflowers in crevices of these formations killed by overgrazing.

DESTROYED: Lowland raised bogs. Home to plants, birds and butterflies, now planted with woods and used for peat.

GONE: Lowland heathland. Once full of heather and gorse, now lost to burning, fields, overgrazing, houses and roads.