Thursday 17 August 2017

The old and the new

Last week was a bit of a mix of visiting new places and revisiting old haunts.

I managed a quick walk after work along part of the Clarendon Way at the Winchester end - the views are spectacular, even with a storm front coming in. Much of the land is in Environmental Stewardship, with wildflowers, birds and insects abounding.

We then headed off to Langford Lakes Nature Reserve - this is owned by Wiltshire Wildlife Trust, and is a small group of flooded gravel pits, now home to a variety of interesting birdlife, insects and plants. I had my best view of a kingfisher - normally I'm too busy walking and talking to notice, and they're usually a blue blur! This one perched obligingly in front of the hide before flitting off along the lake margin. It's a great place for this protected and declining species to live - they need banks to burrow in for their nests, and a good abundance of small fish. Often, our banksides are modified so they don't have access. We also saw tufted duck, gadwall, the obligatory cormorants, swans and mallards, and great crested grebe. It's a work in progress too - they took on some more land in 2011, and they're attempting to return it to its former glory of a flooded watermeadow, grazed with cattle. A very interesting corner of Wiltshire (just off the A36 heading out of Salisbury) and we didn't encounter anyone at all on our walk!





Finally, last weekend we had a good long walk in the South Downs National Park. We started at Beacon Hill NNR - owned and managed by Natural England, it's an area of steep chalk grassland, scrub and ancient woodland, great for butterflies and wildflowers. Our route skirted the reserve, before heading out along the South Downs Way down into the Meon valley, before crossing the old dismantled railway line and heading towards Old Winchester Hill NNR. We then headed north along the Monarch's Way, stopping for refreshment at the pub in Warnford - the perfect spot, as their beer garden has the Meon flowing along one side. This is one of our very rare chalk streams, but notable in that it isn't legally protected as it's a much shorter river and doesn't have some of the species found on the Test and Itchen. It's therefore often not in a great way - over abstracted, receiving agricultural runoff and modified in parts. However, recently, as part of a partnership project with the South Downs National Park Authority, water voles were reintroduced to the river after years of absence. Fingers crossed this marks a new beginning for this beautiful little river.










Saturday 5 August 2017

In our ancestors' footsteps

I've been lucky enough to explore some ancient landscapes in the last week, together with a project all about returning to a wilder landscape hundreds if not thousands of years ago.

Last Sunday we headed off to Avebury World Heritage Site for a walk among the ancient earthworks, burial mounds and standing stones. Our route took us passed the mysterious Silbury Hill (man-made but for no apparent reason), up to the West Kennet longbarrow, and along part of the Wessex Ridgeway before turning back to the village. Although it's now a relatively-intensive agricultural landscape, it's scattered with numerous signs of a much more culturally-important use for the land, with fragments of remnant chalk grassland clining on to slopes, such as on the Avebury stone circle.
The Hill dominates the landscape, and the longbarrow sits high on a hilltop, visible for a great distance. Notably, you can actually go inside part of the longbarrow, and it was made even more special by the presence of a swallow nest, full of chicks. The parents weren't put off by people walking by, as they swept in to feed them.



During the week, as part of a work trip, I was lucky enough to go glamping on the Knepp Estate in West Sussex. here, they've given up intensive agriculture and left 3500 acres to return to wilderness, grazed by enormous herds of free-roaming (no fences!) long-horn cattle, red and fallow deer, Tamworth pigs and Exmoor ponies. It's on its way to becoming a landscape more typical of the Bronze Age. What's interesting is not the botanical interest (relatively poor in parts) but the scale of the mosaic of habitat - ideal for a great wealth of invertebrates and birds, including purple emperor butterflies and rare arable plants found in the rotavated earth left by the pigs. Can we take some of this practice back to other areas in the country? Food for thought.

Finally, yesterday we headed off to Stonehenge, for the free walk I've talked about before. The old dismantled railway was looking beautiful in a kaleidoscope of chalk-loving plants such as wild parsnip, knapweed, field scabious, wild carrot, self-heal and red clover. Although there weren't any skylarks to accompany us (I'm pretty sure they've now finished breeding), it's usually a cacophony when you come earlier. We walked the whole length of the Cursus in the end - 1.7 miles of earthwork, possibly built for a ceremonial purpose. as with everything this old (4500 years in some cases), it's hard to tell exactly what some of the features were for, but I feel this mystery makes it even more amazing to walk in their presence.