A Residential Power House
Last week we admitted that the opening of two new London underground stations had triggered a long overdue visit to the American Embassy and the Battersea Power Station redevelopment. Neither of the stations featured in the ‘Big House on the Prairie’ story but if you thought you had escaped a nerdy railway blog, we are afraid that you are about to be disappointed. There has been so much fuss and commotion in the press about the ‘Battersea Power Station Station’ that we thought we would take a look on our way to the eponymous new development.
To be honest, one of us was slightly disappointed. As far as we could see, there is not a single name board where the word ‘station’ is actually repeated. From all the media to-do, ‘one of us’ had assumed that this would be the case. On enquiry, ‘one of us’ has been reliably informed that roundel name boards do not normally include the word ‘station’. Nine Elms station roundels just say ‘Nine Elms’. And here is a picture of perfectly legitimate Battersea Power Station Roundel.
But the underground techies will tell you that the names on station portals, for example, do include the word ‘station’. See below for the Nine Elms example. But - and this is the bit that you might just want to stay awake for - close examination of BPS station reveals the complete lack of station portal signs. All we could find on the outside of the building were roundels, and they just said, ‘Underground’. Where are we? Moscow? Colliers Wood? No, there’s a socking great power station looming in the background; it must be Battersea. What a fudge. Embarrassed by having a station sign which says Battersea Power Station Station? Well, let’s just leave it off altogether. One of us is not amused.
Thankfully, a lot of trouble has been taken with the interior of the station (see images below), although one wonders how long it will last in its shiny, new, loved up, state.
And the exterior sets a new trend in underground stations in architecture as well as anonymity. Capped in un-burnished gold, the nameless station is set in a streetscape of grey and silver. Let’s hope it remains memorable once the helpful hoardings come down, or no one will ever find it.
As you emerge from Alexandre da Cunha’s dawn and dusk underground, spare a glance for some of Battersea’s pre-regeneration remnants, tucked between the hoardings and portacabins. Battersea Park Road (aka the A3205) is as unprepossessing as ever, and I wouldn’t want to be sitting on the road side balconies of some of the pre-existing flats, but the Duchess Belle Public House on the corner of Savona Road looks like a welcome - and well used - survivor.
Leave the main road and turn left into Pump House Lane. However cynical you are about the Battersea Power Station development, the wow factor slaps you straight in the face. The clutter falls away unnoticed and, as you walk up between equally bold hoardings, your gaze is held by the eye catcher sculpture at the top of the access ramp (image below).
Now we can understand, if not forgive, the sacrifice of the view of this fabuous building from the London to Brighton railway line which runs to the west of the development. Who cares about shoe-horning modern, residential highrise between the power station and the railway, when you can attract your potential buyers as they arrive at a smart new underground station or, terrible thought, by car.
Reality kicks in though, as Pump House Lane leads you into Circus Road East and around the southern end of the Power Station monolith. Modern high rise fills out the regeneration plot to the south west and west of the power station and light fades as you enter the canyon which is Circus Road West.
There are many details which attempt to make the canyon attractive at a human scale, but there is no denying that it is shady and that lower level apartments on both sides will also share the limited sunlight.
We enjoyed the current retail offer – a bike shop of course, the lettings office, natch and, best of all, the Battersea General Store. What a delight of chocolate, champagne, macarons and harissa mayonnaise. To do it justice, the store also stocked a well-known brand of salad cream and tomato ketchup. We checked the prices against shops in less prestigious locations and suggest Battersea feels it can command a mark up of at least a 45%. We were also surprised to see considerable merchandise aimed at children. Is this really a child-friendly development?
Street details did their best to lift the mood:
But the real delight is completing the journey through the canyon, and falling out onto the riverside. This area suggests a much more inclusive sense of fun - especially if you bring your own sandwiches.
Between the power station and the Thames lies an open space of quite unusual variety. Paving, water, seating, planting, grassland, quirky art work, industrial archaeology, picnic benches, fresh air, views and, of course the mighty river itself, complete with constantly moving water traffic, and the Battersea Pier as a water bus stop.
At the moment, there is plenty of space for all. The renovation and remodelling of the former coal jetties, where boats once delivered vast quantities of solid fuel to the power station, had only just been completed when we visited and this has added significant additional space and an abundance of picnic benches. It will be interesting, however, to see how this ‘play ground’ handles a considerably higher footfall (or ‘bumfall’ on those deckchairs) on a summer Saturday afternoon, when the residential blocks are complete. Maintenance will be crucial, of course, not just horticultural, but all the boring stuff such as litter picking, sweeping and cleaning, to keep it in the fresh and inviting condition which we enjoyed so much.
Want to live here?
Maybe not if you like to hide your dirty dishes and don’t want a view of an office block.
Big House on the Prairie
For many centuries Vauxhall, Nine Elms and Battersea were on the ‘wrong side’ of the river Thames. Today, of course, Nine Elms is home to the American Embassy and Battersea to massive, upmarket residential development areas. What went right?
If you were in the entertainment business, south bank Southwark and Lambeth had long been significant locations, beyond the restrictions and regulations of the City of London on the north bank of the Thames. Shakespeare’s globe theatre came to Southwark in 1599. Vauxhall had its moments in the sun in the 18th and 19th centuries, as the location for one of London’s largest and most spectacular Pleasure Gardens. The first such Garden to open (in 1729), Vauxhall finally closed its gates in 1859. “Simultaneously an art gallery, a restaurant, a brothel, a concert hall and a park, the pleasure garden was the place where Londoners confronted their very best, and very worst, selves.” https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/vauxhall-pleasure-gardens
Nine Elms had a shakier start – as marshland – and effective drainage was not established until the Heathwall river was tamed in the 15th century. Despite the subsequent construction of local roads, significant development seems to have been delayed until the Regent (later Vauxhall) Bridge was constructed in 1816, followed by the big one - the construction of the London and South Western Railway in the 1830s. London’s first - yes, really, first - railway terminus was opened at Nine Elms in 1838. For the next 150 years, the area from Vauxhall to Battersea would be dominated by railways, water works, gas works, industrial works and, finally, from 1929 onwards, the building and operation of Battersea Power Stations A and B.
Ordnance Survey of 1893/94 'Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland' https://maps.nls.uk/index.html
The regeneration of the Nine Elms area has created, “the largest regeneration zone in central London” and will include “new public squares, parks and footpaths created alongside major improvements to local infrastructure” https://nineelmslondon.com/transformation/.
An extension to the Underground’s Northern Line has also been constructed and two new stations opened last month, namely Nine Elms and Battersea Power Station. This event finally triggered a visit from Team Terroir.
Designed by American architects Kieran Timberlake, the embassy brief required the establishment of “a new paradigm in embassy design by representing the ideals of the American government—giving priority to transparency, openness, and equality” (https://kierantimberlake.com/page/embassy-of-the-united-states-of-america) while also creating a core element in the regeneration of Nine Elms.
Approaching the site through the ever increasing canyons of high rise residential development, the first glimpse of the embassy is startling and other worldly.
Three sides of the building are encased in a brise soleil, described as a “crystal-like ethylene-tetrafluroethylene (ETFE) scrim… Its pattern visually fragments the façade while it intercepts unwanted solar gain. The design of this scrim works vertically, horizontally and diagonally to eliminate directionality from the building’s massing.” https://uk.usembassy.gov/new-embassy-design-concept/
Terroir suggests that this last sentence would not win an award for crystal clear English-English or even American-English. One of us also admits to a first impression of a large number of mosquito nets hung out to dry. But there is no escaping the fact that the building is memorable, characterful and entirely unlike anything which has been, or is about to be, built around it. Even the massive gates which accommodate such workaday activities as deliveries and maintenance provide an airy camouflage to the larger access points. Sadly, the machine gun toting police officers who guard all entrances are a grim reminder of the real world; they look totally out of place.
The pediment of the building is encased in gardens and here the designers have created a landscape which is simultaneously legible, restful, encouraging, stimulating, and animated by people, wind and water. The key elements aim to create a reminder of the American prairies and Nine Elms’ wetland origins. Species selection, however, is in no way restricted to the North American prairies or southern English marsh and wetlands. Euphorbias and echinops nestle up to the more American rudbeckias, but are none the worse for that. The extensive use of swamp or bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) in and around the wetlands looks very impressive but this Louisiana native does raise a smile when viewed in the historic context of a Thames south bank location.
A light canopy of trees adds height, variety and contrast to the landscape. Autumn foliage will become Fall colour thanks to a collection of non British oaks and maples, those swamp cypresses plus the occasional gingko to add a Chinese dimension to the planting and colour palette.
Terroir is not the first to consider that the main water body looks suspiciously like a moat, and indeed the open grassland and mounding around the play area, plus the elevation of the building above the gardens, could be construed as a Norman Castle on its motte and within its bailey. Are those mosquito nets actually cunningly disguised arrow slits?
Our morning in the Embassy Garden was a pleasure. Security was obviously an issue but there were some very subtle touches too. We leave you with a boundary hedge, gently disguising a ram raid ring of steel.
Chalking up the Hampshire Downs
Exton to Buriton
We left you last week with a rant about the conservation of the chalk rivers of south and east England. It’s not often that one region of the UK has a majority share holding in a global ecosystem, but even this obligation does not always concentrate minds on the long view. The short term costs of treating threats such as water pollution can appear far more scary than the long term, and less tangible, benefits of a beautiful, clean, biodiverse, trout stream. These chalk rivers are capable of delivering oodles of human physical and mental well being, as well as significant contributions to the longevity of the planet. Conservation work is underway, however, the Meon Valley Partnership is a case in point. http://www.meonvalleypartnership.org.uk
Back at Exton it is Day 2 of our Hampshire Downs trek; the river Meon looks as stunning as it did the evening before, and the village itself amply fulfills the expectation of ridiculously pretty domestic, rural Hampshire. The pub looks just as shut, but that was our fault for arriving at silly times.
Easing our feet back into fresh socks and well-used boots, we now face 14 miles of extraordinary chalkland variety. The map suggests considerably more woodland than Day 1, but only hints at a number of surprises which the walk has in store for us.
Old Winchester Hill was the first climb of the day and delivered bountiful rewards. The National Nature Reserve was stunning in terms of habitat variety - wild flowers, scrub, grassland - and abundant butterflies and other invertebrates. Above us, hang gliders caught and spilled the breeze and the rampart of the iron age hill fort appeared to encircle the hill top with a green choker.
The tapestry of agricultural landscapes which accompanies this section of the South Downs Way is exceptionally varied, but sometimes farming just will not pay the bills. Business diversification may become essential, when attempting to create new revenue sources from the capital land resource.
Below Old Winchester Hill, we found some classic examples of new uses for old buildings, and new incomes for under-earning land - and water.
A farmyard converted to art …
… and an old estate embracing fishing and glamping.
The second climb of the day, from Coombe Cross to the top of Wether Down (234 m), made Old Winchester Hill seem like a stroll in the park. Here the atmosphere was very different. This is Hang Gliding heaven and home to a variety of airborne gadgets and enthusiasts, as well as a trig point and a collection of communication masts and support gear.
The track down is hard and stony, like so many sections of the South Downs Way, and deposits you in an ingongruous mix of former MOD land, redundant razor wire, a small holiday complex and a new estate of sumptuous residences, each set in a garden the size of a couple of paddocks. Time to move on.
The Way now approaches Hyden Wood, a substantial mixed woodland with some spectacular beech stands which give respite to the eyes and a lift to the heart. But once again it is hard on the feet (none of that soft, North Downs mud), and the next couple of miles are all forest track and country lane. Clean for the boots but tough on the joints.
We also know what is coming next - the Queen Elizabeth Country Park, renowned for its gradients. The Way spares us all but the flanks of Butser Hill (remember that top height of 271 m?) but the track surface and the view on the way up that flank, are somewhat unpreposessing. Imagine the relief, therefore when we emerged at the top of a wonderful, grassy slope, which launched itself down the incline, calling out for us to follow. Better on a mountain bike, of course, but wonderful on foot too. Unfortunately, there is a tarmac snake lying in wait for us at the bottom of the valley. Just as we had to negotiate the M3 on our way from Winchester, now we have cross the A3 to attain the final ascent of the day, through the Queen Elizabeth Forest.
After the heady environment of the grassy slope, the search for the A3 underpass is a real anti-climax. Downland turf turns to urban concrete and the noise levels are rising all the time. We hurry through the underpass and enter the thickness of the forest, expecting an enveloping peace to fall at any moment. But the Way lies parallel to the dual carriageway and the constant, yammering roar of massed internal combustion engines follows us for nearly a mile.
Finally the clamour fades as we begin the long plod up the tree-encrusted chalk of War Down, tired now and tripping on the flint and tree root track. Cresting the last rise, we tip over the edge of the down and into the welcoming arms of a car park, complete with waiting back-up vehicle. We don’t even have to walk off piste to reach Buriton village but are driven straight to the pub.
We have completed the 1987 extension of the South Downs, from Winchester to Buriton. The next stage will take us to West Harting Down and into Sussex. But we will keep that for another time.
After a long draft of St Clements, even the main occupant of the pub car park can raise a smile.
South Downs Way - the Hampshire Downs
Southdown thyme: “ ’You don’t get nothing like that in the Weald. Watercress, maybe?’ said Mr Dudeney.”
Rudyard Kipling, Rewards and Fairies
Last winter, Terroir relatives, while battling with Covid Cabin Fever, announced that they were going to walk the South Downs Way, from west to east in September 2021. Would we like to join them? We said we would.
Given that a lot of us think we know what to expect of the South Downs Way, it is surprisingly unpredictable and idiosyncratic. Is it similar to the North Downs Way? No. Well, that’s that one out of the way. You want detail? The South Downs Way has less mud and a whole lot more easy-to-reach seaside.
But both chalk ridges share some basic characteristics which are significant in the development of the ancient network of tracks and paths which underpin the modern long distance trails. Chalk drains freely and is easier to clear of woodland than the heavy soils of the clay Weald lands and a pastoral economy, based on sheep, is feasible. The chalk ridges also provide height (North Downs top height is 294 m/963 ft on Leith Hill and South Downs 271 m/889 ft on Butser Hill). This provides great visibility if you feel threatened, need to build a fort or just want a great view of the Isle of Wight or London.
Kipling’s 1910 story, ‘Rewards and Fairies’, illustrates the ancient tensions between the “messy trees in the Weald” and Shepherd Dudeney’s “bare, windy chalk Downs”. If you want a feel for the contrasting magic of the chalk lands and the clay Weald, ‘listen in’, as the children Una and Dan do, to the discourse between Puck and the ‘half naked man’ (The Knife and the Naked Chalk).
By the latter part of the 20th century, the need was felt to understand and conserve landscapes, resulting in the National Parks movement and creation of Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The development of the Sussex Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) and the South Downs Way (SDW) were understandably interwoven. The trail was approved in principle in 1963, the South Downs AONB established in 1966 and the SDW finally opened in 1972, linking ‘chalk’s end’ Eastbourne, in East Sussex, to the village of Buriton in – shock horror – not West Sussex, but just over the border in Hampshire.
With the increasing rumble and ground swell to turn the Sussex Downs and neighbouring Hampshire Downs AONB into a National Park, the two Natural Beauties transformed into Conservation Boards and Joint Committees until they finally metamorphosed into a single South Downs National Park butterfly in 2010. The South Downs Way was already there; it had been extended from Buriton to Winchester as early as 1987.
Apart from the dry walking conditions (of which more anon), the South Downs Way is also unusual amongst National Trails for being largely bridleway. It is hugely popular with cyclists to the extent that alternative routes and walker-only sections have had to be invented. The Way is extraordinarily well signed but anyone who is poor on pictograms or colour blind could find navigation a nightmare.
Terroir had been pottering around the Sussex end of the SDW for decades, either section-walking or incorporating lengths into stunning, downland circular rambles. Access can be surprisingly sustainable, with careful use of trains and – the increasingly infrequent - buses. We seldom go the extra mile(s) to the western, Hampshire end, however, so we elected to join the walking party at the beginning of the expedition and hike from Winchester to Exton, and then Buriton. Here is the expedition story.
Winchester to Exton
The support team dropped us in Bridge Street, central Winchester, where the starting point, a silvered wooden block, buried in Salvia ‘Hot Lips’, lies outside the City Mill and, possibly more importantly, a cafe (both closed when we were there!). Illustrated at the top of the Blog, the block’s spiky, orange ‘hair cut’ actually represents the alarmingly exaggerated path gradients which await us.
By necessity, the first mile is urban, but no one can argue with a stroll along the River Itchen, before a short amble through some embarrassingly mixed, Winchester-fringe, architecture. The initiation ceremony continues with a hellish crossing of the M3, but despite feeling like prisoners, we survive and emerge, relatively unscathed, onto gently undulating chalk farmland. A classic, chalkland, fruiting hedgrow completes the PTSD healing process (despite a certain urban fringe unmanaged look), with massed privet, hawthorn, blackthorn sloes and rose hips.
Two things struck us about the day’s walk. The defined chalk ridge which characterises the Sussex section of the Way, is lacking here and reminded me more of a domesticated Salisbury Plain, than the South Downs. The northern-based members of the party also commented on this rolling plateau/valley combination rather than the chalk scarp-and-dip slope with which we are all more familiar.
The second factor which particularly struck the south easterners is the large scale of the agricultural landscape and its accompanying architecture, in comparison with the far smaller and more vernacular domestic buildings of the villages and outlying cottages. To us, it read as though the villages had retained their pre 20th century quaintness, while new infrastructure (piped water, drains, electricity etc) had eliminated draughts, leaky roofs, smokey kitchens and outside privies, and 21st century maintenance techniques had retained and enhanced the charm and beauty of a former era. Meanwhile, agriculture had, with a few exceptions, moved forward to embrace much larger scale operations, with vast fields of wheat, barley and oilseed, plus massive investment in machinery, in additives to keep the thin chalk soils producing, and in massive, functional buildings to support the whole operation.
Upper row: the domestic and vernacular. Lower row: the changing scale of agriculture
As we moved eastward we did re-discover grassland as the slopes steepened around Beacon Hill. Some was ranch-style improved pasture, bright green with fertiliser, but other areas supported the dull greens and browns of more diverse meadow, and verges fulll of wild flowers.
The final walk, down Beacon Hill towards the village of Exton, was enhanced by the anticipation of a pint well-earned (even across all that improved grassland - above, far right). Earned, maybe, but delivered? Nope! The pub had just shut! But here was the River Meon, flowing through the heart of Exton as the Itchen flows through the heart of Winchester. These crystal clear, chalk rivers are not only beautiful, but extremely vulnerable to pollution including chemical runoff from agricultural land. Of the 200 or so such rivers known of globally, 85% are found in southern and eastern England. That is one heck of a responsibility which we are currently not addressing as well as we should. https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/habitats/freshwater/chalk-rivers
Below: Exton and the River Meon
Next week: Exton to Buriton
A Landscape of Ill health
I never thought I would write a blog like this.
This one is very personal, although the landscape of ill health must be an environment which has been familiar to many of us at one time or another. Whether it’s man ‘flu, measles , or malaria, the landscape of ill health is the context in which you start feeling ill, seek help, sweat it and, hopefully, start to recuperate and/or adapt your lifestyle to make management easier.
I can understand if you don’t want to read this blog - it’s a strange and sensitive topic - but I felt I needed to record where I had been, during a recent bout of ‘ill health’ and what, if anything, had helped me along the way.
The journey started in the floriferous garden of a friend. Already strange pains were running around my insides and I didn’t have the energy to wander around the abundant and colourful beds, but sat in the sun soaking up the ambience. We left after an hour and went home. By 8pm, we were in A&E.
The entrance to this particular A&E isn’t easy to find but the hospital has painted the most visible outside wall a bright, bright shade of red with the word ‘EMERGENCY’ painted across it in white. It works. It is cheerful, simple, informative and actually makes you feel rather important.
Inside, the waiting area is high-ceilinged, a cross between a modern church and a barn, with serried ranks of chairs drawn up below. I could see no pictures on the wall, or few helpful notices, apart from an electronic information board presenting ghastly statistics on how long your wait was likely to be. Hell probaby has boards like that (‘five hours to the boiling oil cauldron’) and the uplift from the red wall outside vanished immediately.
The waiting area chairs are unappealing, too, with their straight lines, which does nothing to make the intermittent scatter of uncomfortable people look more homely. There are as many, sometimes more, healthy companions as would-be patients, so it’s difficult to gauge the actual numbers. The worst aspect of the chairs is the occasional armrests which make it impossible to lie down. I assessed the floor. No, I would just fidget, moan and wander around.
Across the floor lies reception and the nurses’ station, with security guard sitting at the back. The nurses are efficient, competent and understanding. It looks professional and, most of the time, unintimidating. A real boost to the patient. Every time I took a pain relief amble, I was immediately asked if I was ‘all right’ (I knew what they meant) and then they reassured me that I was first on the list for triage. I appreciated this, of course, but there is no information on how long the patient in front of you will take to pass through the exit doors of triage heaven.
Just as I was thinking that I could stand the wait no longer, my name was called. As I stood, I noticed another couple had also got up and would get to the Triage door before me. They slipped through and the door slammed in my face. Pathetically I knocked and hoped for reinforcements, but finally the door reopened and the ‘other’ couple were politely ushered out. We were in!
The triage room was large and clinical, which was fine, although I felt as if I were being auditioned rather than assessed. Next call was a blood test and we passed into the medical back-of-house to start on another, and hopefully therapeutic, journey. This area reminded me of an Arab Souk or a medieval market, with small booths for particular specialists or purposes and other areas where people, desks and equipment spilled out into the main market place. This layout seems to have served humanity well for hundreds of years.
We progressed further to ‘find me a bed’, which turned out to be a consulting room couch in a small space with a glass front wall. Here I was put on a drip and plugged into a bag of painkiller. A sensible doctor arrived and so, eventually, did a couple of boxes of useful looking pills.
We were discharged around midnight and struggled to find our way out of the medical souk, locate an exit door and, finally, find the car. The car park cost us £5; this would have been free in Wales or Scotland. We could afford to pay, but even in my befuddled state I felt that others might consider this a real hardship. Yet without that car park revenue stream, the Welsh Health Service seems to be doing as well, if not better than the English. Has England missed something?
Just before 2 am, we were back. Sadly, nothing had changed - for me or the hospital - except that there were fewer patients by then and a shorter triage queue. There was a wrangle about whether I needed another blood test. No-one took a decision so we carried on anyway, to find a ‘bed’. This cublicle was even smaller - like a very down-sized version of a French Formula 1 hotel (or, possibly, a cell). Space for just a ‘bed’ and a chair, with toilet ‘across the hall’.
Between fitful bouts of sleep, we made room for another drip (water - thank godness - and an anti-sickness drug) plus a couple of codeine pills for good measure. By 5 am nothing much seemed to be happening so we decided it was time to get out. It was mentioned that this might not be a good idea. ‘You haven’t been formally discharged’. We looked at each other. An Anglo Saxon expletive hovered, unspoken, in the air. A form was signed. We were going home. And, once we found a ‘way out’ sign, we were going in the car, parked in an ‘unofficial’ but free space.
Once home, the landscape becomes comfortably familar, but limited. From my bed, I can’t see out of any of the windows. The ceiling is less than stimulating and not even the geraniums on the wall can inspire any kind of emotion. Rumpled bed sheets aren’t attractive either but for the first twenty four hours I am mostly asleep and don’t care. From then on it’s the solace of home which matters.
The bathroom is still ‘across the hall’ but there are only two of us in the house. The bed gets made, the floors are hoovered.
Although I may not have cared about the bedsheets, I was disturbed by a new landscape, which now accompanied me, created entirely within my slightly delirious head. If I closed my eyes, a collage of beautifully formed images emerged - buildings, views, people, letter boxes, cats - there was no end to the show. As I lapsed slowly into sleep my brain told me stories so real that I raised a hand to take a pen or open a box. Only to find the images were not there. Then to find that my hand never actually moved either. What had triggered in my brain to take this extraordinary action? Although not threatening, I was glad to wake today with only an external landscape to navigate.
Finally, I was booked for a scan at the local surgery. The ambience in the waiting room feels much more communal. The ceiling is lower but not claustrophic. The chairs break ranks and curve around and across the room. There are lots of relevant and friendly notices and posters which creates a positive vibe. People come and go, creating life and movement. Looking at an annoucement that three practices are now working in a group, we were struck by how this reflects wooded Surrey; the key words in each surgery’s name are ‘Woodlands’, ‘Hawthorns’ and ‘Holmhurst’. But best of all, the large plate glass window lets in the sun and I can see the nodding heads of ornamental grasses, blowing in the wind, just outside.
Shall I go back to bed? No, I think I feel strong enough to watch a little television and look out of the window.
A Contested Landscape
Part 2 - Enclosure
by Keren Jones PhD, CMLI, Dip LA (Glos)
The next great milestone in the Shropshire story of conflict over land and property was the Tudor dissolution of the monasteries. The first parish records of 1536 record there were around 800 religious buildings in England and Wales, yet four years later there were none. For those of us with an interest in all things landscape, the dissolution was to ultimately be a mixed blessing as it also marked the birth of the English Garden, and with it, the birth of what was to become, much later, the landscape profession. As demolition made land available for large, new country houses with large parks and deer enclosures, the new landowners were often absent or did not need to earn a living off the land. This meant that adjacent land was often put to aesthetic uses, rather than being cultivated. These changes proved to be a mixed blessing for my Shropshire family. Those wedded to the old ways lost out as their rights to common land were eroded, but other members of the family gained new employment on the grand estates.
Various branches of my family lived on the summit of Brown Clee and became known as out-commoners. In exchange for the rights to grazing, cutting turf and collecting wood, they would have been subject to a modified form of Forest Law, which meant that they were not allowed to disturb deer that ate their crops.
They had to follow very precise routes, known as Straker Ways, from their homes to the grazing areas on the Clee. Many can still be traced as sunken or hollow ways. This was the way of life that was now at risk.
What began with the Tudors and Dissolution, escalated after the Civil War. Although the war had impacted on and divided communities and families across England, it was the subsequent fight between rich and poor over land enclosure that was to have a lasting and permanent impact on people, place and nature. Initially Shropshire was less affected by the Land Enclosure Acts, because of its pastoral nature. Since the 1600s any enclosure of arable fields had been mainly achieved by stealth, as a farmer bought out rights. Matters became contentious, however, when the remaining stretches of moor and marshes started to be enclosed. These areas were subject to over 70 different acts, and as a result many landless squatters became homeless.
My Brown Clee ancestors were amongst those who had to fight for their rights when, in 1809, a local enclosure act was focused on the common land around nearby Stoke St Milborough. The Lord of Earnstrey, tried to obtain extensive allotments on the west flank of Brown Clee, including rights to a Royal Forest.
Earnstrey’s actions had an impact on many small holders and landless labourers, but the commoners’ resistance meant that common land on the Clee Hills still remains today, even though it is not as extensive as it once had been.
On the other side of Brown Clee and the Earnstrey Estate, lies the Burwarton Estate, still one of the county's largest private estates not open to the public. In the 18th century it passed to Viscount Boyne who created an Italianate House, formal gardens, pleasure grounds and an extensive landscape park, all sited to take advantage of the rugged upland scenery. At the time, my great, great grandfather was a young boy living in Burwarton, and very likely became part of the gardening and construction force. He was the first known gardener in our family.
His eldest son, my great grandfather, also learnt to work the land from a very young age, developing skills as a gardener at the Dudmaston Estate, near the River Severn south of Bridgnorth, and within the remnants of the ancient Royal ‘Forest of Morfe”.
But the world was changing. Industrialisation was spreading its tentacles from what was to become the Birmingham and the Black Country conurbation. My great grandfather would have seen the first steam trains hurtling past Dudmaston making their way down to Bewdley.
Then in the 1880s - having lost his wife to tuberculosis – the struggle of making a living in the place that had been our family’s home for generation became too much. He left his two children with family relatives, and broke the pattern of living off the land to start a new life in Middlesex.
Nick Haye’s ‘Book of Trespass – Crossing the Lines that Divide Us’ looks at all the contemporary issues which have developed around land and boundaries over time. He finishes as I will, by dwelling on what he calls the alternative stories that threaten the established land histories. These alternative stories are “the stories of the commons, folk stories, the stories that come not from the castle but the plains, the collective voice of the people … these are the stories, that consecrate an alternative story of the land”. (Nick Nayes, 2020).
In this spirit, I want to finish by touching on an extra layer of richness in this local landscape and community narrative that my family would have shared and passed down through the generations. For Shropshire hill country is the land of giants, fairies and witches. Folklore is rooted in the landscape. Here is just a couple of the many myths and legends:
Long, long ago when the earth was new there were two giants looking to make a home. When they found Shropshire they decided to create a large mound where they could live and see for miles around. However, the giants that lived here fell out and threw stones at each other across the Clee Hills.
Later, when the young Saint Milburgh from Wenlock Priory, fleeing from a pursuer, fell from her horse on Brown Clee, a new holy spring appeared on a site where she fell. It gushes with water to this day.
These stories that combine historical fact and community myth and legend shape how we relate to the landscape, as well as what we see when we visit. By studying the past we can gain a better understanding of why it is as it is, what is important about the landscape for local people and also perhaps better appreciate that what we see is not as idyllic, equitable or sustainable as it might seem at first glance. In so many ways the landscape I have learnt to love epitomizes the view of Anne Whiston Spirn, in her book ‘The Language of Landscape (1998): “Landscape is not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for not only does it have a new story to tell everyday, but it has many stories.” This blog captures a mere few of those stories which I have had the pleasure of discovering.
What next: My journey of discovery started over ten years ago with collecting and archiving information, records, letters, photographs and any other snippets of material I could get my hands on. Some argue that this act of archiving is akin to the folk art of quilting:
"Like quilting, archiving employs the obsessive stitching together of many found pieces into a larger vision". Goldsmith K, 2011, Archiving is the New Folk Art, Poetry Foundation, 19 April, 2011.
I feel that now is the time to tell the stories which I have discovered. I am immersed in the process of creating a book series, entitled ‘Archives to Art’. It has become six stories, one for each of my grandparents, and a fifth which is about their relationship with land and landscape. There is also sixth story which is intertwined through all of these, and has emerged, unexpectedly. It is the narrative about my own journey - exploring the details in the archives, visiting places and talking to people - and turning archives into art.
A Contested Landscape
Part 1 - Invasion
by Keren Jones PhD, CMLI, Dip LA (Glos)
I am delighted to be asked by Terroir to contribute a guest blog – one that draws on my passion for both landscape and family history.
Over the years, as I collected my many family stories, I increasingly wanted to better understand the context in which they were made. My own personal journey into the past has also made me think a better understanding of the past can help us have a better understanding about some of the big issues we face today. Inequalities in access to land and nature is one of those hot topics that has been very much in the spotlight as a result of COVID lockdowns. To explore this issue further, I have chosen to talk about the story of land and landscape of the Welsh borders, and how, as ownership changed overtime, so did the fortunes of ordinary people depended on the land for their livelihoods.
Through dedicated genealogical sleuthing I have confidently traced my ancestral line in Shropshire through nine generations, and also found that my family name goes back to the beginning of the local parish records in the 16th century.
My forebears lived in, and around, Farlow, a small hamlet on the north-side of Titterstone Clee, whose name originates from the Saxon word for “ferny bank”. Farlow sits within a beautiful mixed landscape made up of upland pasture and lowland fields, which are peppered with farms, cottages and small holdings that originate from between the 16th to 19th centuries.
Where the slopes get steeper pasture turns into woodland, whilst lower down, near the old water courses, there is arable land and hay meadows.
It sounds idyllic, but the backstory of the Clee Hills is one of contested land ownership, privatisation and the erosion of common ownership. This is Border Country in every sense of the word. For those who were poor and living on the margin, the loss of their rights to access common land had a big, and irreversible, impact on their ability to make a living and put food on the table.
As my research became more extensive and involved frequent visits and walks in this beautiful countryside, I began to feel deeply connected to the Clee Hills and surrounding areas. Terroir explains why. Although Terrroir’s own origins stem from the word terra, the Latin for land, it doesn’t just mean the physical site or the visual landscape, but all the nuances that go with it. In South Shropshire I was discovering a terroir that wakens all your senses, especially a sense of being and a sense of place. Through the lens of family history, I had found a landscape narrative comprised of many rich layers, laid down in a line that stretched back to ancient times. To understand why this landscape is contested, I needed to look beyond the family story itself.
The first humans to arrive in Border country were ice age refugees, who had hidden in the caves of the Pyrenees. As it got warmer, the animals they hunted migrated north and, in pursuit, so did their hunters - now nomads in transit. Encountering the Great Wild Wood that cloaked much of Britain, they gradually carved out regular hunting and trading routes. Farlow sits on one of these ancient roots, known as the Clun Clee Ridgeway, that eventually terminates on the banks of the River Severn and the wider world.
After these nomads, came the first settlers and the first significant human land grab. These Celtic, Iron Age people, built a swathe of hilltop forts across the upland of South Shropshire, including several in the Clee Hills, of which one is Nordy Bank sitting at a natural vantage point and still intact. One of the imprints on the landscape that has lasted through time. It is a large, circular, enclosed area with stunning views, and thousands of years after it was built, was repurposed as a location for the open air gatherings of primitive Methodists. These were often long, all-day camp meetings of public praying and preaching, activities which my Wesleyan great, great aunts and uncles probably participated in with fervour.
From the Iron Age onwards, invasion after invasion continued to impact on the land. 55BC marked the arrival of the Roman’s in Britain, and though slow to conquer the Welsh Borders, a century later they were well established. Despite the aggressive land take, there were certain natural resources that the Romans believed couldn’t be privatised: air, sea, rivers, roads, parks, wasteland, cattle pastures, woodland and wild animals. Despite showing some respect for aspects for the natural world the Roman Empire proved to be unsustainable and eventually crumbled, as well all know.
The way of life of the newcomers, the Anglo-Saxons was very different, including how they farmed. My history lessons as a child told me that Anglo-Saxon settlement was more organic and less impactful than that of the Roman Empire. Although we now know that the transition from a nomadic to a settled way of life was one of the biggest historical milestones in climate change caused by the human race, there are lessons to be learnt from the Anglo Saxon approach. Their farming was a collective endeavour, which was localised, rather than centralised. Boundaries constructed were for protecting animals, not restricting the movement of people.
It was the Norman invasion of 1066 that marked one of the most dramatic changes on the relationship between people and the land in our country. William the Conqueror was adamant that all land, including all natural resources, belonged to the Crown. Much of South Shropshire became designated as Royal Forest, which overtime transitioned into Deer Parks with ditches, pales and stone walls to keep the landless out.
As a result the landless in South Shropshire were pushed into the marginal upland areas of the Clee Hills. On the southerly slopes of Brown Clee, at Heath, there is a small Norman Church, surrounded by lumps and bumps of a deserted village (one of many such villages). This is where the indigenous people migrated to, in order to survive.
As the climate deteriorated in late Medieval times, however, these higher marginal areas were abandoned, or turned to pasture – a process accelerated by the Black Death and resultant dramatic reduction in the overall population.
For many, the transition to pastoral farming did not result in better living and working conditions. During my research I found an academic paper studying the records made in 1524 about the people in Farlow and Stottesdon, and whether they made enough money to pay a lay subsidy to the King. Only a handful in Farlow, were able to do so: “nearly all the people of the area were in a state of wretched poverty, and the rest very close to that state”.
The roots of inequality in access to the land and to natural resources were now firmly established.
Part 2 - Enclosure next week
Imberbus
Way back in the 70s, I can recall a geography field course in Dorset. Our lecturer stood on the edge of a muddy track (it was probably in the Lulworth Ranges), reading out excerpts from Thomas Hardy. Behind him, on the MOD equivalent of a field course, rumbled assorted tanks. None of us was listening to Hardy; all of us were glued to the tank manoeuvres and the sheer incongruity of the situation. I have harboured an ambivalence to both Hardy and the MOD ever since.
Around that time there was a tendency to diss the MOD for negative impacts on its huge estate, particularly with regard to access, nature conservation and heritage. I was not overly surprised, therefore, to find that a committee had been set up in 1971, chaired by Lord Nugent of Guildford, ’to carry out a review of land in the United Kingdom held by the Armed Forces for training areas, airfields and ranges wherever situation [sic], and land used for any purpose in national parks and areas of outstanding beauty and along the coastline, except for dockyards and port installations’. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1975/jan/17/defence-lands-and-national-parks
The Nugent Report was published in 1973, and is credited with a recommendation to appoint a MOD conservation officer. I suspect they also appointed a conservation savvy PR officer as, from memory, it was soon after, that we became increasingly aware of the extraordinary biodiversity which the MOD’s restricted access requirements was harbouring - although it was not until 2017 that the BBC’s Springwatch gave it the final seal of public awareness and approval by filming at Porton Down! https://www.gov.uk/guidance/defence-infrastructure-organisation-estate-and-sustainable-development#history
I was pondering this history while travelling on bus route 23A. The 23A used to connect various parts of east London with various parts of central London, but now has a much reduced timetable. Currently operated by the Bath Bus Company, the 23A runs a very frequent service but only on one day of the year. Welcome to the IMBERBUS.
This extraordinary day out is a bizarre partnership between transport fanatics and the MOD, who own the deserted village of Imber, in Wiltshire. According to the excellent Imberbus website – do take a look, particularly if you like history and/or buses (https://imberbus.org/introduction/) – the idea was concocted ‘On a cold winter’s evening back in 2009, over a few pints in a Bath pub, [when] four transport professionals discussed where the most unlikely place would be to run a bus service. The answer was a place that the public were not normally allowed access to and so the idea of running a bus service to the village of Imber on Salisbury Plain was born’.
Imber was once an isolated, rural village on Salisbury Plain, dependent on agriculture and supporting trades. Recorded in Domesday Book, by the latter part of the 19th century (see extract from 1899 Ordnance Survey below) it included various farms, a windmill, a school, an inn, a smithy, a Manor House (Imber Court), the parish church of St Giles with substantial vicarage, a Baptist Church and a shop. The ordnance survey map of 1922 records remarkably little change over the previous decades apart from, sadly, the inevitable addition of a war memorial, plus a wind pump and allotments. A rich store of old Imber photographs can be found at http://www.imbervillage.co.uk/imber-then.html
Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland' https://maps.nls.uk/index.html
Significant changes were afoot, however. The War Office had been buying land to the east of Imber, for military training manoeuvres, since the late 19th century and physical damage to the village was recorded as a result of expanding activity prior to the First World War. By the late 1920s, the War Office was purchasing a number of farms around Imber, and bought most of the village, finding ready sellers at a time of agricultural depression.
The shadow of WWII caused another significant hike in training activity in the area, with a similar increase in damage to the village. On the 1st November, 1943, at a crucial point in the war itself, Imber’s landlords held a meeting in the village schoolroom and gave the villagers 47 days’ notice to quit, prior to using the village itself to train troops for street fighting. An interesting exhibition in the Church records that villagers assumed, or were told, that they would be allowed to return after hostilities ended, but no written records of such a promise could be found.
Today, Imber is a very different place. The church remains as a haven for wet visitors on open days and opens every year to celebrate St Giles’ day. Some other original buildings still remain and many others have been added to provide training facilities for warfare in built environments. The Baptist church was demolished in the late 1970s, but the grave yard with its yew trees remains.
Other original buidings are identifiable by their brick construction. The pub, below left, and the blocks known as the ‘Council Houses’, below right, are obvious, if now very sad, examples.
The original Manor House, Imber Court, still retains some of its grandeur, despite a few interesting additions (below right) but must look very different on military training days. We felt that the list of instructions had been followed meticulously.
Other former village buildings now mingle with the more recent MOD structures (below).
The village-scape has changed drastically too. The annual bus invasion is a delight but other signs are a constant reminder of the new Imber ‘inhabitants’.
And the village setting must also be very different. Gone are the open views, the occasional orchards, and the village gardens. Some grassland (one could hardly call it pasture or meadow) and hederows remain, but trees and shrubs have taken root in other areas and the village stream, known as the Imber Dock, is invisible, in summer at any rate.
It could be said that the MOD has destroyed one Salisbury Plain heritage and replaced it with another. Bus enthusiasts flock to Warminster to travel on the buses of their youth or, to a lesser extent, their parents’ youth. Many also come ‘for the ride’ and to take advantage of one of the few days per year when Imber village is open. It is also a rare occasion to take a trip across areas of the Plain usually closed to civilian traffic, and to partake of the glorious tea-and-cake-fest provided by the villages such as Market Lavington and Chitterne which lie beyond the Military ‘Danger Area’. So, perhaps one could construe this to be a very, very modest nod to providing some public access and, if not Salisbury Plain heritage conservation, at least military heritage interest and interpretation.
But please don’t come on Imberbus day if you want to find out about, or rate, the MOD’s contribution to nature conservation! The view from a rain swept London RT bus window is extremely limited; we spotted a great deal of ragwort and common yarrow (at least I think that is what it was) and some road side disturbance and enrichment (giveaway patches of stinging nettles), presumably resulting from tank tracks kicking up the dirt. The acres of Salisbury Plain’s ancient chalk grassland or juniper scrub were safely tucked away, out of reach of the likes of us.
We did however, take a quick look at the digital records for the Salisbury Plain Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) units. Please note that we did NOT check the ownership records. We will merely report that no units were classified as being in unfavourable condition and about 60% were classified as in favourable condition. That left around 40% classified as ‘unfavourable recovering’. So perhaps a way to go yet, Salisbury Plain?
We leave you with two iconic images from Imberbus Day.
Can it be a fair COP?
This blog premiered last year with a visit to ‘The Moors’, and we make no apology for having re-visited on a roughly quarterly basis. A wetland, urban nature reserve in north east Surrey, the Moors is a marvellous example of what humans and the planet need, to remain healthy and low carbon.
With the recent publication of the latest International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report one hopes that the whole world is reading and thinking about just that - climate change. One also hopes that the contents of the report will be fed into national government policies around the planet, with lots of trickle down impacts to deliver action right at the roots of local communities. Hope is cheap. Action is not. Riches are unequally distributed.
The IPCC was set up in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme. ‘The objective of the IPCC is to provide governments at all levels with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies. IPCC reports are also a key input into international climate change negotiations.’ (https://www.ipcc.ch/about/).
The Panel’s latest report, published earlier this month, is entitled ‘Climate Change 2021, The Physical Science Basis’. The title sounds a bit like an advertisement for hair products, but just skimming through makes for a heavy and uncomfortable read, although it is not totally without hope. Below are a few key headlines, although you have probably already heard them via the press and media.
“It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land.
Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere
have occurred.”
“Human-induced climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes
in every region across the globe. Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as
heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their
attribution to human influence, has strengthened.”
“Many changes due to past and future greenhouse gas emissions are irreversible for
centuries to millennia, especially changes in the ocean, ice sheets and global sea level.”
But
“Scenarios with very low or low GHG emissions … lead within years to discernible effects on greenhouse gas and aerosol concentrations, and air quality …”
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM.pdf
Looking at the Moors, trying to think globally and act locally, it is depressing how very obvious climate extremes have become. In 2020, we had a prolonged spell of very warm and dry weather. The wildflowers bloomed profusely and provided massed stands of vibrant colour.
This year, as noted in Blog 31 (The Darling Buds), spring was late and, apart from a brief dry spell, rain has been exceptionally plentiful. Growth has been lush and massive - huge leaves, oversized trees - and the overwhelming palette of The Moors has been very, very green. Now, in August, as we shiver in our pullovers while drying sodden umbrellas, the greens are still the dominant hue. Spring’s hint of white has been replaced by over-tones of yellow, blue and red, but the contrast with last year is still remarkable.
2020’s vibrant stands of tufted vetch are now battered and tired, the common agrimony and willow herbs are isolated and low key, and the latter (below right) weighed down by a flourishing growth of black bryony.
The ragwort continues to flourish but its normally ubiquitous companion, the cinnebar moth caterpillar, is notable by its absence. By this time last year the teasels had strutted their stuff and where dry and brown. This year they are only just getting to their peak.
Climate change does not necessarily mean plant extinction but may mean plant migration. At somewhere like The Moors, species which have not done well in 2021, may have a chance to return next year. Meanwhile other species, such as buddelia and water mint, have done better in the wet weather, and species which are much more unusual may appear, such as marsh woundwort (in this case, struggling with another vigorous black bryony) and chicory.
The sheer mass of growth has also changed the character of The Moors this year. Where paths are lined by trees, the canopy is thick and has already developed the dark green foliage of late summer. Shading has kept the cycle path remarkably open. Enchanters’ Nightshade has crept to enjoy the shadows and stinging nettles are thriving on the now damp areas of richer soils. Nearer the brook, and on a windy day, the vastly expanded willows do an excellent imitation of a William Morris wall paper. Between the lakes, where no tree has much of a roothold, the path is virtually hidden by the explosion of vegetation. The craft skill of last year’s hedgelaying exercise is now obliterated by substantial new growth.
Summer downpours have proved to be a heady mix at The Moors. The water levels thoughout the wetland are at winter levels, yet the vegetation is responding to summer temperatures and light levels. Although not currently flooded, the wetter areas of the cycle path are as muddy as in winter. All water bodies are full yet the eruption of vegetation growth has hidden the smaller seasonal ponds from view. Woe betide anyone who tries to take a walk through this apparent meadow of purple loosestrife, below right.
The Brook has vanished completely, except for one point where somebody has cleared a narrow track to the bank, as though checking that the stream still exists.
What will COP 26 and climate change 2022 bring?
History Hurts
Sugar and Slate, but some still hate…
If you are lucky enough to be celebrating a wedding in the lush countryside immediately to the east of the university city of Bangor, North Wales, the chances are that you will also be able to see the eccentric towers of Penrhyn Castle peeping over the tree tops of the extensive estate which surrounds it.
The Penrhyn Estate has a long and complex history. It starts with the early 13th century Prince of Gwynedd rewarding loyal supporters (Ednyfed Fychan and his sons) with large tracts of land throughout North Wales. Son Goronwy ab Edyfed received the promontory (or penrhyn in Welsh) east of Bangor and, capitalising on political opportunities and judicious marriages, his early 15th century decendants found themselves in possession of a large estate and fortified manor house.
Fortunes ebbed and flowed but in the second half of the 18th century part of the estate was purchased by John and Henry Pennant, sons of Edward Pennant of Clarenden, in Jamaica. As you can imagine, cash flow improved dramatically on the back of the Pennant’s sugar plantations and their slaves, and the remainder of the estate was rapidly acquired as well. The manor house was remodelled and farming practices, including tree planting and new buidlings to provide shelter, plus drainage and manuring, revolutionised the estate farms. Terroir has yet to find any details of the capital expenditure required to undertake this work, or what impact the improvements had on the tennants’ rent. The Pennants also invested heavily in what came to be known as the enormous Bethesda slate quarry, a few miles south of the Castle. Again, considerable capital investment in infrastructure is recorded but nothing on rates of pay for the quarrymen.
The early 19th century and the financial crisis created by the war with France had not been kind to Caernarfonshire. Pennant money, however, was still plentiful. By now the estate was owned by George Hay Dawkins-Pennant who went on a massive spending spree to create the fantastic, mock Norman castle which dominates the area today. It appears to have been unbelievably splendid.
The fairy tale castle on the outside:
And on the inside:
The death knell was post war (WWII this time) death duties, which saw the Castle and estate pass to the Inland Revenue who transferred it to the National Trust.
But as you may have gathered, this blog isn’t really about the architecture and landscape of Penrhyn Castle, but about the society which the Castle represented over the centuries and what it says to us today.
Along with many other guardians of our heritage, the National Trust is engaging with communities and individuals to acknowledge, understand and interpret the heritage and history of the enslaved communities who created so much wealth for the British Empire and who, unwittingly, contributed to the creation of so many buildings and landscapes which were once the homes and preserves of the few but which are now visited by the many. The panels in the Penrhyn Castle dining room (see photograph above right) are part of one such project and in this example, the English panel reads:
Let’s think beyond the box.
Lock it. Hide it. Shelve it.
Darkness conceals the light which exposes
Questions flowing through the cracks in the corners.
But should we not also be asking about the plight of the working communities of Britain who were also used to create wealth for the very heart of the British Empire? These were not enslaved people, but these were British workers who had few choices or means of embracing an alternative lifestyle.
Looking through the National Trust Guide to Penrhyn Castle, we canot help asking who made the hand knotted Axminster ‘Turkey’ runner which adorned the Keep Passage? Whose skills were honed in Asia and then transferred to Devon and under what circumstances? Could the workers afford fuel for heating or shoes for their children? The original carpet was replaced by a machine woven Axminster in 1987. Was the machinist paid the equivalent of what is now known as the minimum or the living wage?
This issue is particularly relevant to Penrhyn. Remember the Penrhyn Quarry? In 1865, the local quarrymen attempted to form a Union but the movement was quickly nipped in the bud by Lord Penrhyn. By 1874, however, the North Wales Quarrymen’s Union was officially established and, after a short strike, was recognised at Penrhyn Quarry. Relationships deteriorated, however, with a major strike in 1896-7 and a calamitous strike/lock out from 1900 to 1903. As usual, the issues appear to be complex and included falling production, reduced profits, paternalistic attitudes hardening to ‘taking a firm line’ (National Trust Guide Book), Union rights, and workers pay and working conditions. The results were disastrous, ripped the community apart, and created all the ills which only poverty can bring (for further details see https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/penrhyn-castle/features/penrhyn-castle-and-the-great-penrhyn-quarry-strike-1900-03 and many other websites).
No one who was involved in the strike is left today, but that has not eliminated the impact on the local community. Terroir visited the Castle but, despite the change of ownership, our Welsh companions would not enter a property which represented such terrible damage to the local community. Following further enquiries, we realise that this attitude is still widespread.
‘Hate’ is a strong word, but so is the damage which has so often been inflicted on local communities by landlords and employers and which continues to hurt some 120 years later. Hence Terroir’s reworking of the old ‘sugar and spice’ rhyme.
Sugar and Slate, but some still hate…
How do we heal the wounds?
Designed in Dundee
Watching the re-run of the BBC crime drama ‘Traces’, set in Dundee, sparked an urgent desire in Team Terroir to visit this remarkable city. We had heard about the Dundonian three Js, of course - Jute, Jam and Journalism - but ‘Traces’ also resurrected half-forgotten conversations with English friends who had studied various aspects of design at Dundee University. Dundee and design seemed to have a synergy which warranted exploration.
We were not disappointed. A five day stay in the heart of Dundee left us enthralled, surprised, enlightened, shocked, amused and warmed. A history of fishing, whaling, ship building, linen and jute weaving, marmalade making, polar exploration and journalism seems to have created a community which was tough, adaptable, robust, diverse and responsive both to need and opportunity. We found a city with wide streets, little traffic, busy buses, a tolerant attitude, two universities and a spectacular approach to heritage conservation. Not a bad set of lists for just 120 hours. Every city has its problems of course and we saw some evidence of social issues and, of course, the legacy of making money off the back of the British Empire. But none of that is specific to Dundee.
What follows is a very personal tour of the city, with particular reference to design and quirkiness. Five days is not enough to be objective, thorough or searching, but it is enough to know an enjoyable city break when you see one.
We started at the Dundee V&A. Following an international competition, the building was designed by the Japanese architects Kengo Kuma & Associates. I’m sure Mr Kuma will be delighted to know that Terroir thinks his design works well for its context and location - right on the water front next to Scott’s Antarctic exploration vessel, the Discovery. The ensemble creates a number of open spaces, one infested with penguins, which are perfect for a sunny Covid afternoon, if rather too close to one of Dundee’s few busy roads.
Inside, the ground floor is light and airy but so uncluttered by exhibits that you feel a bit cheated. Upstairs, the design gallery is wide ranging in materials, eras and purposes, and though it’s great eye candy, there just isn’t enough of it. One of the main reasons we came to Dundee leaves us disappointed and hungry for more.
The McManus, ‘Dundee’s Art Gallery and Museum’ is a completely different kettle of marmelade. Housed in its Gothic Revival building, with a statue of Burns outside, clutching the now obligatory traffic cone, you can be forgiven for thinking the 154 year old gallery will be as fusty and Victorian as the V&A is minimalist and 21st century. But this museum is dedicated to Dundee as a whole and encased (literally) in its old-fashioned dark wood cabinets is a fascinating and varied picture of Dundee which brilliantly reflects the complexity of the city itself. Every industry, every era, every entertainment and every local character, is held up for inspection, instruction and enjoyment. You can search Dundee shops in vain for a pot of its ‘ane’ marmelade but you can be sure The McManus has both the story and the requisite artefact. It even gives house room to a small portrait of Dundee’s Victorian ‘bard’, William McGonagall (below right), notorious for his ‘extremely bad’ poetry, and for his (in)famous poem entitled ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’.
Other indoor adventures consisted of trips to the Verdant Works (a former jute mill), and to the Discovery Centre to explore the Antarctic through the eyes of Captain Scott and his companions. Both are managed with imagination and professionalism by the Dundee Heritage Trust. The RRS Discovery was built in the city and the ship’s design was heavily influenced by the experience of the Dundee whaling industry. We were particularly struck by the enthusiasm and knowledge of the staff. How else would we know that Shackleton’s early departure from Scott’s 1901 expedition may not have been just for health reasons, but also because the pair didn’t always see eye to eye.
Thanks to the Verdant Works, we now know what jute looks like, where it grows and how to spin it into a fibre to make sacks, sails and gardening twine. And we also have a feel for how jute changed both Dundee, the Indian subcontinent, and the whaling industry. The Empire allowed Dundee to flourish - for a while and after a fashion, at any rate. Jute was grown in south Asia and exported to Europe for processing and selling on as a finished project. The factory owners (the ‘Jute Barons’) became very wealthy while the business lasted. In comparison, the Dundee mill workers’ wages were pretty meagre, but the wages of a jute farmer in India were absolutely pathetic. Finally, of course, the balance changed and increasigly jute was retained in Asia to supply the local mills and factories. Jute in Dundee was given a shot in the arm by two world wars - you need a lot of canvas to fight a war - but the heart had gone out of the European business by the latter part of the 20th century and even the Jute Barons had to look to other businesses to maintain their life styles.
Talking of pay, the Dundee mill wage for women and boys under 18 was lower than that for the men. Textile work was often undertaken by women (after all, linen weaving had started out as a home-based industry for women), and it became the norm to lay off the boys as soon as they became 18. During the jute era, therefore, Dundee became a city of working women and it was not unusual for men to become house husbands, raising the bairns at home. Unless you were working in the whaling industry, of course. The discovery that whale oil made processing jute a whole lot easier, meant expansion for the city’s whaling fleet and did no harm to the ship building industry either. The same can’t be said for the whales.
The jute mills were often beautifully constructed. Cox’s stack (above, top left) is the last, spectacular remant of the massive Camperdown Works. The Verdant Works (top right) was constructed with particularly elegant iron work. Dundee has lost much of it's industrial architectural heritage but increasingly these buildings are being converted to other uses, including residential. The main Verdant mill building currently houses mill technology including a steam engine, and an exhibition space. We were lucky to see the last day of a display of embroidered textiles illustrating the Scottish diaspora (above, lower row).
So now to explore Dundee’s cityscape. Many of the buildings are grand and Scottish…
… with beautiful detailed decoration …
… or are quirky and modern.
Walk up Dundee Law for views…
… or turn around to see the war memorial sitting slightly uncomfortably alongside some modern infrastructure, thankfully humanised with some typical Dundee murals.
But what of Dundee’s third ‘J’ - Journalism?
D C Thompson’s was a relatively late comer to the Dundee scene, setting up shop in 1905, but the Thompson family were not new to the city, and started converting their business interests from fishing to publishing in the late 19th century, finally purchasing the Dundee Courier in 1886. In 1905 they merged with the city’s other publishing house, (yes two in one city) and became one of the leading British publishers of the 20th century. Today, they are a significant employer in Dundee, with a stable of publications which includes a number of regional dailies plus many UK wide publications including, of course, the Beano, the Dandy, and the Commando comics. The company’s impact on the city’s design heritage is tangible, and we don’t just mean the courses on offer at the local Universities.
Dundee has a lot going for it. Although many Dundonians must have left for pastures new, surely it is significant that it never made it into the Proclaimers song ‘Letter From America’, itself harking back to the memorable line (‘Lochaber no more’) from an 18th century Jacobite air entitled simply ‘Lochaber’.
The Proclaimers sang:
Lochaber no more, Sutherland no more
Lewis no more, Skye no more …
Bathgate no more, Linwood no more
Methil no more, Irvine no more
So glad that they agreed with us, that Dundee didn’t fit the message.
Because, Dundee is easy to leave. The habour doesn’t feature so much these days, but it has an excellent train service, good road network and even its own airport. Which brings us to two of Dundee’s icons which don’t begin with ‘J’.
These are the Tay Road Bridge (right) and the Tay Rail Bridge, below.
This last image is probably my favourite from the whole trip. You can even see the bases of the original bridge piers (the bridge which failed so catastrophically in 1879) lined up as a memorial, below the girders of the 1887 replacement.
The curse of the wheelie bin
Why has urban design never got to grips with the issue of waste disposal from domestic properties?
© Trefor Thompson
The modern wheelie bin - the current domestic waste container of municipal choice – is cumbersome, ugly, made of plastics, voluminous and ubiquitous. It disfigures the highways and byways of cities, towns and villages throughout the UK. On ‘bin day’, this negative impact is vastly magnified, as we all lug our bins out from wherever we have been trying to hide them, onto the street for collection. At this point, they not only look hideous but block our pavements as well. We gather that even Georgian Bath is now littered with them, despite massive public protest.
So what is the history of the waste disposal container?
Let us step back a few centuries and talk of Pompeii, Paris - and Slough. Most histories of the wheelie bin like to start with a mention of a fossilised, wooden ‘wheelie bin’ found in the ruins of Pompeii (79AD). There are also dark hints of prehistoric bin-like cave paintings in the Himalayas. Terroir is not altogether convinced by these references.
So let’s fast-forward to better documented 19th century Paris and Monsieur Eugène Poubelle, academic, politician and a man ahead of his time (no, this isn’t a joke). Here is an extract of an article published in the ‘French Facts’ section of the ‘The Connexion French News and Views’ (https://www.connexionfrance.com/Mag/French-Facts/Dustbins-are-named-after-French-recycling-innovator):
“The [French] word [for] dustbin – poubelle – comes from the man who invented them in France, Eugène Poubelle.
He was the Préfet of the Seine from 1883 to 1896 and responsible for much of the day-to-day running of Paris.
Collecting and getting rid of refuse was a problem and often people simply left it on the streets.
On November 24 1883, he decreed that owners of buildings had to provide not just one, but three wooden containers, lined with metal and with a lid.
One was for compostable material, one for papers and cloth, and one for crockery, glass and oyster shells.
Not only did he come up with the idea of a dustbin, but also recycling.
However, like most innovative ideas, it was not welcomed by Parisians and there was a huge campaign in the press to discredit Poubelle’s scheme.
Firstly, owners did not want to pay for the containers; secondly, the concierges did not want the extra job of taking them onto the street and thirdly, the rag and bone men saw it as a threat to their job.
Rumours were spread that Mr Poubelle was working in collaboration with the container manufacturers and likely to make money out of their sales.”
Nothing new there, then. The article continues:
“On March 7, 1884 Eugène Poubelle issued a second decree ordering the first ever municipal rubbish collections in the city, which were carried out daily by horse and cart.
He also authorised rag and bone men to continue their trade. He had won with his dustbin idea, but accepted defeat on selective sorting and replaced the obligatory three containers by one bin for everything. That idea had to wait until the 1990s to be re-introduced in France.”
What an unsung hero. If you want to see Poubelle and his poubelles, have a look at https://www.lefigaro.fr/histoire/archives/2017/07/12/26010-20170712ARTFIG00265-quand-le-prefet-poubelle-donnait-son-nom-a-la-boite-a-ordures.php
Laying these historic exceptions aside, it seems as though British rubbish was tolerated in the street, the back yard, the outhouse and the privy until well into the 18th century. The population was relatively small and ‘recycle, re-use and repair’ wasn’t a novel concept, it was just what you did. This situation was excellent for scavenging wildlife such as red kites, which thrived in rubbish strewn London, and for pigs, who recycled much of the food waste, before they became food themselves. Scavenging other people’s rubbish heaps was also popular. One family’s waste may well be another family’s economically viable scrap (rags, bones, metal) or fuel (nuggets of coal lurking in the ash).
All this changed with the Public Health Acts of 1848 and 1875, the requirement for each home to have a moveable rubbish bin, and regular collections.
When team Terroir was in its childhood, inside waste disposal containers were still called ‘waste paper baskets’ and outside containers were ‘dustbins’. Such revealing names. Waste paper was still a minor waste issue, which could be easily contained by decorative containers, some of which were made of woven cane or willow. We can also remember that items such as sweet wrappers or screwed up balls of paper, were often just tossed into the open coal grate. Remember those when they were functional and unfashionable?
Dustbins were kept outside, in the back yard or garden if there was one, and were made out of galvanised metal, with two handles and a lid. They made a wonderful noise if you thwacked them with a football, especially if the lid was loose. This aptly named bin contained an awful lot of ashes and dust as well as anything else which had accumulated in the WPB or the kitchen bin. Keen gardeners also ran a compost heap which took all the vegetable kitchen waste. Rural areas might still have a pig. The dustmen called on a weekly basis and came round the back to collect the bin, hefted it onto their shoulders (protected by those iconic donkey jackets) emptied the bin into the dust cart and returned, sometimes, to sling the bin back where it came from.
The move from metal dustbin and donkey jacket, to plastic wheelie bin, high-vis PPE and hydraulic, bin-lifting lorries is really not hard to fathom. As domestic heating changed from coal to electricity, gas and oil, the need for metal bins to cope with the hot ashes, faded away and lighter, plastic dustbins (remember the labelling of ‘no hot ashes’?) were introduced. There was that tricky period when two bins were needed (a foretaste of the future) but finally coal fires were marginalised and the plastic bin reigned supreme.
With an increase in waste volumes (a move to increased consumption, the throw-away society, more packaging, more plastics, less recycling, built in obsolescence, etc etc), bins on shoulders were less attractive and the donkey jacket became history. Residents were expected to bring their bins to kerbside and experiments with lighter black bin bags failed as they regularly ripped and spilled their contents to the delight of rats, gulls and foxes.
It’s the late 1960s and – drum roll – here comes the wheelie bin. Most ‘bin histories’ credit its invention to a Slough based company called Frank Rotherham Mouldings who created the wheelies to move waste from one end of the factory to the other. A waste talent scout (sometimes identified as a Health and Safety Inspector) spotted the potential as a regular replacement for the dustbin and, with the invention of the automated pick-up waste lorry, our urban landscape changed forever.
If only that were the end of it. As we know, the wheelie bin has proliferated, changed shape, got bigger, got smaller, changed colour, lost its wheels, become stackable, acquired a trolley, lost a trolley, is ridiculously noisy where bottles are concerned, is impossible to clean and can only go out on certain days and on certain weeks. You need a computer to run one efficiently and/or a memory for detail which would win you Master Mind. No wonder they are unloved by house holders and residents.
What are the key issues?
Increase in domestic waste: more waste per person and more people; bigger bins seem to encourage more waste, or maybe smaller bins just make us more careful.
Redefining waste: recycling is largely to blame for the proliferation of bins per household. Terroir currently gives garden space to two wheelies (one for general recycling and one for ‘black bin-bag’ waste) and a food caddy; we give house space to a smaller food caddy and a recycled paper box. That’s five different sorts of plastics based bin, differentiated by shape, colour and wheelie-ness. We also have a compost bucket, but that is self-inflicted.
Some households add on one or two bins for gardening arisings such as prunings and grass cuttings. What is waste? What can be recycled? What goes where? What constitutes ‘rigid plastic’ or ‘clean cardboard’ (those wretched pizza boxes)?
Budgets: some bins go weekly, some only fortnightly to save money. Most of us rely on our neighbours to remember which week it is, and just put out what everybody else has lined up. One of these days, it will all go horribly wrong.
Image © Trefor Thompson
Inequality: not everyone has the space for all these contraptions, inside or out. Not everyone feels up to hauling these so called ‘easy-to-manoeuvre’ wheelie bins up and down the steps which may bedevil access to older houses.
Residents in multi occupancy buildings also have to rely on their neighbours to understand and abide by the rules. Bin lid won’t shut? Bin won’t be collected! Everyone suffers for one person’s infringement.
So why do we put up with it? Why hasn’t ‘someone’ designed an effective waste container which shouts of good design, sustainable materials, and smug satisfaction of recycling well managed? My favourite academic paper on this subject, (Bins and the history of waste relations, Heather Chappells & Elizabeth Shove, (https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/esf/bins.htm), argues that ‘the bin is shaped by and shapes contemporary meanings of waste and management strategies’. Definitely time for a change of bin shape.
Terroir is still at the Allotment
We’re coping with the rhubarb. The crowns are young but obliging.
Terroir’s cookery section thinks that Rhubarb is so sublime that there is nothing to beat a bowl of the stuff lightly cooked and served with a thick, low fat yoghurt (one of the major suermarkets does an excellent organic yoghurt which fits the bill).
Here’s our approach for really fresh, home grown rhubarb:
Chop into regular sized chunks.
Place in a microwaveable bowl with ground ginger to taste, or use crystallised stem ginger for a bit of luxury. Terroir tends not to add sugar: is this the quality of our rhubarb or a taste for masochism? Whatever, it usually works if you picked the best stems in the first place.
Microwave on high for the minimum time you can get away with and still have all chunks just beginning to soften. By the time it’s been left to stand, every chunk should be soft and juicy with many holding their shape.
Serve warm, or cold from the fridge with the aforementioned yoghurt.
Of course, if you don’t like rhubarb as much as we do, you may prefer this recent recommendation from some of Terroir’s friends: chop rhubarb into very thin slices and then throw in the bin.
Please send us your preferred rhubarb recipes.
Terroir has gone to the allotment
We’ll be back soon.
Please send us your favourite gooseberry recipes.
Here is ours:
Gooseberry and elderflower frozen yoghurt
Tip 400 gm of gooseberries into a saucepan with 200 gm of sugar (we use golden granulated but any sugar will do) and 2 tablespoons of water. Heat gently until the sugar has dissolved and the gooseberries are soft; beat them to a puree.
Add 3 or 4 tablespoons of elderflower cordial, to taste.
Mix 500 gms of low fat Greek yoghurt with 150 ml of milk and mix into the gooseberries.
Pour into a freezer proof container and freeze for a couple of hours. Beat the mixture to a smooth consistency, put the lid on the continer and return to the freezer until fully frozen.
Remove from the freezer for about 10 mintes prior to serving.
The History Hedge
It was a typical Summer ‘21 lockdown afternoon: sunny and warm, a few clouds and an obvious weather ‘window’ for an outing. By the time we got to Nonsuch Park it was overcast. By the time we gave up and left, it was raining. So, here is a very small blog on a very large topic.
Nonsuch Park, located in Surrey but conveniently close to the capital, is just teeming with history: Iron Age remains, Roman occupation (Stane Street now defines the Park’s north western boundary) and an entry in Domesday Book (the village of Codintone, later Cuddington), all predate the creation of the actual Park.
Life changed forever when Henry VIII rocked up, demolished Cuddington (including the manor house, great barn and 12th-century church) and commissioned the building of a Royal Palace with Park to match. The Palace seems to have been a bit of a slow burn. Henry died before it was finished (and the whole thing was pulled down again in the 1680s to be replaced later by a variety of strctures), but the Park had become a fixture and seems to have featured in every subsequent major event in English history. Today, teetering on the border between Surrey and London, the remnants of the Park are on the English Heritage Parks and Gardens Register (Grade II), and include ancient woodland, extensive grasslands and a biodiverse range of flora and fauna. The current early 19th century building (below) is listed grade II*. Epsom & Ewell History Explorer does a useful website (https://eehe.org.uk/?p=25296) or try https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/visiting-woods/woods/warren-farm/
And Terroir? We just went to look at a hedge.
We first noticed this hedge when walking the London Loop between Banstead and Ewell, via Nonsuch Park. After leaving Banstead Downs, London loopers skirt Cuddington Golf Course on quiet suburban roads, and take in a short section on the busier A232 Cheam Road, before turning back into residential side roads to cross the London Brighton and South Coast Railway line to access Nonsuch Park.
It was the A232 section which caught our attention. The road is bordered on both sides by substantial hedges which separate and protect quiet, suburban, service roads from the bustling ‘A’ road. These hedges have the ‘feel’ of old country hedgerows – until you stumble over an ornamental cherry or a Norway maple. So what’s going on?
Both on the ground and on the map, the A232 south of the railway line, looks suspiciously modern. It forms an unnatural, sweeping, semicircle and is ornamented by an ambiguous roundabout at the fullness of the arc. It feels like either a low key bypass or an over engineered suburban road, constructed as part of a 20th century residential estate.
As it turns out that we were right, about 400 years out (with the exception of the roundabout, of course). It seems that James I (first Stuart king of England from 1603 to 1625) extended the Park well beyond its Tudor boundaries, such that Stane Street divided the park into two - the Great Park to the north west and the Little Park to the south east. “Originally the road from Ewell to Cheam had run across the Little Park, but this was diverted around its southern boundary, which is why the present Cheam Road (the A232) describes a long curve. This was the only part of the park pale that was laid out from fresh, instead of following an existing property boundary.” (https://eehe.org.uk/?p=25296)
We couldn’t find 17th century map evidence but this extract from an 1896 edition of the Ordnance Survey, clearly supports the 17th century ‘bypass’ theory.
We were right about the 20th century housing estate, though. This 1953 edition Ordnance Survey extract illustrates both the 1930s new build, the roundabout and a section of substantial road widening.
Both maps reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland' https://maps.nls.uk/index.html
So back to the hedges themselves. They are massive and overgrown but the number of different species attests to their age and the species mix is perfectly appropriate to their lowland, clay soil location. The hedge on the south side of the road appears thicker and more substantial, while the one on the north appears to have suffered more disturbance, is thinner and gappier.
Our attention was caught first by the preponderance of elms, which was a delight. Elms sucker easily along a hedgerow, but if allowed to grow too big, the larger diameter trunks provide a breeding ground for the elm bark beetle, and subsequent death of the elm via the fungus (which the beetles carry) blocking their vascular system which transports water throughout the tree. Coppicing and hedge trimming keeps elms below the critical size and allows the species - and its gene pool - to survive. There was plenty of healthy, vigorous ash, too, although Surrey is heavily impacted by ash dieback and this situation may change fairly rapidly.
Scattered along the length of hedgerow, we also found sycamore, field maple, horse chestnut, yew, evergreen oak, hazel, blackthorn, hawthorn and elder.
Elm - the good and the bad
Field maple, sycamore, ash and hazel
The overall effect
But how are the mighty fallen. The housing construction, and the number of new side roads, must have punched holes in this hedgerow bastion and someone saw fit to plant ‘ornamental trees’ (as if these natives weren’t ornamental enough) to ‘beautify’ the urban area. We found cherry, ornamental crab apples, limes, Norway maples, a walnut, horse chestnuts we couldn’t identify, and an acacia to name but a few, all in various stages of growth, some singly, some in clumps, some even attempting to fill hedgerow gaps, particularly in the thinner northern hedgerow.
To be honest, we found the effect bizarre and unattractive, accentuating and exposing the less attractive elements of the urban area, and totally destroying the beauty and history of the, admittedly overgrown, hedgerows. If the new planting had been well designed, well executed and well maintained, enhancement of this section of the urban area might have been acheived. But these areas seem inconsistent, uncordinated, unmaintained, unplanned and, in terms of creating a decent bit of townscape, incomprehensible and sad. I hesitate to make a joke of it, but it did seem, literally, beyond the pale.
Midsummer
Last week we received an email from a friend who can always be counted on to send beautifully illustrated digital Christmas greetings. This recent email, date-lined June 24th, contained the following message: ‘Christmas Greetings are conventional; Midsummer ones less so but in such a strange year when we have seen few people I thought I would send best wishes and hope that you are well and immunised’.
What a delightful message. No illustration this time, but a mouth-watering description of summer in Provence, with phrases such as, ‘long periods of reliably sunny weather’, ‘eat[ing] asparagus and early strawberries by Easter’ and a warning/promise that ‘summer in Provence is not just about sitting in the shade drinking pastis and playing boules (although those are very important); there are a wide variety of celebrations and events which show a different aspect of local culture from that of winter’. You can read the full version on his website at https://sites.google.com/site/peterdtoon/
Current circumstances ensure that any midsummer greetings from Terroir cannot compete with life in Avignon. We have, however, looked back as far as 2017 and can record that we seem to prefer to spend our mid summers in Great Britain, enjoying the long, often sunny, days on home territory, with children still in school (well, normally) and holiday accommodation relatively easy to find.
Here is our record of our last five midsummers.
Midsummer 2017
We are on Offa’s Dyke working our way between Knighton and Clun. We blogged last year about our long distance ramble along the Marches, but here are some previously unposted pictures of pastoral, patchwork, bosky borderlands. The weather is rather changeable and, one night, it turns really ugly, while we are in the pub. The tent was shredded but thank goodness for a flexible farmer and empty farmyard holiday lets. We return every evening to live in the lap of luxury for the rest of the trek. The views from those dormer windows are stunning.
Midsummer 2018
Now we are in the fens, visiting a friend in Ely. We have set up our tent in an eco campsite (https://www.fenendfarm.co.uk/eco-campsite/), carved out of an orchard and replete with a yurt, a tepee, a travellers’ caravan and ‘pitch your own’ plots, set deep in clearings in a sumptuous wild flower meadow. It was HOT, so part of team Terroir sleeps out under the stars.
Left to right: a tepee in the apple trees; a wonderful display of chicory (Cichorium intybus); the caravan; a flat fenland farm makes your own air strip easy, but possibly less eco
Midsummer 2019
Back on Offa’s Dyke, walking from Clun to Oswestry. The trail crosses the old Oswestry race course. The grandstand, pictured on the information board (left), is now a shadow of its former self (below centre) and the area no longer rings to the buzz and bustle of race meetings, but perhaps the two headed horse sculpture hints of past ‘suspect behaviour’! Two way bet, anyone?
Midsummer 2020
Unsurprisingly, we are based at home. Sign havoc keeps us amused.
Over the midsummer week, we make a couple of socially distanced excursions.
Nonsuch Park on the south east edge of London is the remnant of Henry VIII’s royal palace and deer park. The gardens are great for chilling and weddings (shame about the all-over shaved grass), the wider and shaggier park is wonderful for wildlife.
Collard Hill in Somerset is the midsummer must-go-to place to find the large blue butterfly. Sadly, they appear to be practising social distancing. There are other compensations, however: St Mary the Virgin, Charlton Mackrell, a thatched cottage in Winterbourne Stoke and the greatest midsummer location of them all, dramatically snapped from a moving car on the A303; the photographer was not driving.
Midsummer 2021
We’re still at home! Our midsummer trip is to the Brockham Lime Works, a stunning open space rich in wildlife, industrial heritage and extraordinary walking opportunites. This chalk-based and surprisingly varied landscape is rich in plants, birds, butterflies, bats, reptiles - we could go on. The lime kilns are listed grade II and, in our view, the scenery can compete with the best Europe can offer, albeit on a smaller, man made, scale. We will be blogging about this Surrey Wldlife Trust/Surrey County Council managed reserve in a later post. https://www.surreywildlifetrust.org/nature-reserves/brockham-limeworks
Left to right: meadow brown butterfly on privet flower; quarry cliff now peregrine falcon habitat; former industrial heartland; fragrant orchid (Gymnadenia conopsea)
Belated midsummer greetings to all.
Bute-ified
Serendipity flourishes in a downpour, these days. Our impulse trip to the Dyfi Osprey Project was, literally, a shoo-in as we dodged rain showers, ran into the visitor centre and bought tickets without a thought to advance booking.
A day later, the sun shone and the situation was very different. No matter how earnestly the Cadw staff at Caerphilly Castle studied their daily booking list, whichever way they looked at it, they were fully booked. We were pleased for them and not really disappointed for us, as a do-it-yourself tour around the outside also looked like a very attractive option.
There are plenty of websites detailing the history, construction and development of Caerphilly Castle. It’s an interesting read, but for now we will just record a few key facts selected according to the Terroir view of the world. The castle is of course a significant player in Welsh/English border history, built in the 13th century by Marcher lord Gilbert de Clare (a good Norman name) to protect his domain from Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (a good Welsh name, and self-proclaimed Prince of Wales) who was marching steadily southwards from his North Wales stronghold.
According to various histories, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llywelyn_ap_Gruffudd and John Davies’ ‘A History of Wales’ Llywelyn routed Roger Mortimer’s army in 1266, took control of a largish chunk of South Wales, opened negotiations with Henry III and, via the Treaty of Montgomery, became formally recognised as Prince of Wales, for a cost of 25,000 marks (5,000 marks extra if he wanted the homage of Maredudd ap Rhys of Deheubarth) in 1267.
Understandably, de Clare was somewhat rattled by developments and started building Caerphilly Castle in 1268. Davies comments, ‘one of the most remarkable buildings of the Middle Ages was constructed in order to frustrate [Llywelyn’s ambition]. That building was Caerphilly Castle, a symbol of the pride of the house of Clare and an abiding reminder of the strength of Llywelyn’s appeal to the Welsh of northern Glamorgan.’ Negotiations and armed attack on the castle failed, however, both with de Clare at Caerphilly and elsewhere in south Wales. Llywelyn had peaked and his tide of success was on the ebb. He defaulted on his annual tribute payments, his family turned on him, and, after a messy decade of fighting and feuding, Llywelyn finally met his end in December 1277. Caerphilly Castle was promptly transformed into a massive mansion with hunting lodge.
In 2021, it is still outstanding (literally) for both its size and its waterscapes, and skirting all of this pleasurably extends our walk. In terms of size, it is one of the largest castles in Britain, second only to Windsor Castle. Sorry Wales! There is a cunning little Cadw CGI video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNIvZl_K45M) which gives a curious raven’s eye view of the castle’s construction. The number of gates, portcullises and draw bridges is positively dizzying, presumably a reaction which was shared by the 13th century Welsh.
Caerphilly Castle doesn’t just have a moat, it has massive ‘water defences’, which seem to have been extended in peace time with the addition of a northern lake. Mown grass and large bodies of water are goose heaven, of course, and a huge flock of Canada geese mingles with a smaller gathering of greylags. There is a great gaggle of adolescent goslings piled up on a grassy slope like a teenage duvet which has come loose from its covering.
Follow the goose footprints around the castle and over a bridge (why swim when you can walk?) and you come to Canada goose suburbia, on the edge of the northern lake. Not a greylag in site but some of those fanciful Indian runner duck/mallard crosses are sprinting up a nearby slope. Should we be calling them delta runner ducks, these days…?
You can see why geese become so unpopular in many parks. Lush and varied grass/wildflower areas can go from this (below left) to this (below centre), when a hungry colony of Canada geese move in. With few predators, control can be tricky and unpopular with the human community. An integrated management system is often used including licensed control of adult numbers and eggs, fencing of banks and grazing areas (below right), and bank barrier planting. We assume this is what is happening here.
Turning a corner, a public walk opened up before us, sandwiched between walls of disproportionate heights - one to keep us out (on our left) and one to keep us in, or rather on, dry land (to our right). The view of the Castle was spectacular and duly appreciated, but the real eye catcher was the wall-and-mortar habitat which accompanied us all the way down our stony promenade.
This apparently inhospitable environment is home to an array of tenacious plants which can thrive in man-made structures like stone and brick walls. Drought resistence, a love of lime (mortar is lime based, of course) and a natural habitat in rocky areas are, understandably, an advantage, writes Terroir’s botanist. At this time of year, ivy-leaved toadflax (Cymbalaria muralis) is a real scene stealer (left) but the clumps of Pellitory of the Wall (Parietaria judaica), with their spikes of tiny flowers (right), are also putting on a brave show. For audacity, however, it’s hard to beat maidenhair spleenwort (Asplenium trichomanes) (centre). It was years before one member of Team Terroir realised this was a real fern, after receiving a sprig of it attached to a childhood Easter egg. Looking back, we hope it was a clever imitation but, regretably, we doubt it.
My favourite, navelwort (Umbilicus rupestris) aka pennywort, penny-pies or wall pennywort for obvious reasons, grows prolifically on the tall, shady, castle wall to our left.
Many of the other plants we encounter are less obviously linked with rocky or wall habitats, but are well known for their invasive qualities, able to gain a foothold at the base of the wall, where something akin to soil is starting to accumulate, and away from the destructive pressure of passing feet.
From left to right: a generous growth of ragwort (potentially poisonous to live stock which is not an issue in this location)
herb robert (Geranium robertianum), hunkered down with a dock and some pellitory of the wall
spear leaved willow herb (Epilobium lanceolatum)
and a sow thistle (Sonchus sp)
Grasses include, from left to right:
Yorkshire fog grass (Holcus lanatus), Smooth Meadow Grass (Filipendula ulmaria) and a rather blurry picture of sweet vernal grass (anthoxanthum odoratum), an important contributor to the equally sweet scent of hay
Llywelyn didn’t manage to do much damage to Caerphilly Castle but anno domini did. Enter the Marquesses of Bute: Marquess 1 bought the ruins in 1776, complete with leaning tower and, no doubt, plenty of dodgy masonry. Marquesses 3 and 4 were passionate about architecture and heritage and had also acquired an immense fortune from the south Wales coalfield. No. 3 set about clearing the urban sprawl which was encroaching on the site (Terroir has yet to find out what the inhabitants thought of this) but No. 4 may have become Caerphhilly’s hero with a massive restoration project from 1928 (Great Depression time) to the start of WWII, employing significant numbers of locals in both skilled and labouring activities. The perceived wisdom at the time was ‘keep as found’, but that was a mantra which the Butes had no intention of following! Finally, Marquess No. 5 gave the Castle to the State and further conservation work was carried out by the public purse in the 1950s and 60s. Now, Cadw has stepped into the shoes of some pretty impressive former owners. Thanks to Wikipedia and Cadw for help with this section. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caerphilly_Castle and https://cadw.gov.wales/more-about-caerphilly-castle)
Finally, we are pleased to report that Cadw and Caerphilly have a sense of style, and a sense of humour. Here are:
Artist Rubin Eynon’s story telling gates (we were allowed to sneak in to get a better view of these functional, flowing, metal and glass structures)
Sculptor John Merrill’s figure of the fourth Marquess of Bute, propping up the leaning tower
and medieval fire power - as street furniture and as a rather dark health warning - and an easily recognisable local hero.
Tan y tro nesaf/Until next time.
A Flying Visit
Live streaming wildlife webcams have never dominated Terroir’s leisure time. We’ve always enjoyed, indeed marvelled at, BBC’s Spring and Autumn Watch and many other programmes and websites which use them, but we’ve never been hooked. All that changed last week.
On a characteristically damp and misty journey through Wales, we passed the Dyfi Osprey Project located off the A487 near Machynlleth. ‘Not the day for a visit’ we cried, ‘terrible visibility’ we exclaimed, as we slammed on the brakes, turned the car and headed for the car park.
Thankfully the project’s new visitor centre is welcoming, light, airy and, on a wet June day, warm and dry. The seating features recycled church pews and the staircase is enclosed by curved, polished timbers, reminiscent of a whale’s rib cage.
But the big question is, are we going to see any ospreys? On one side of the visitor centre, partially hidden but still very eye catching, are four enormous screens showing the intimate details of ‘Idris’ and ‘Telyn’’s family life, perched high on a nesting platform, somewhere out in the mist. We’re hooked immediately. The quality is excellent, the action live, the volunteer on duty informative, cheerful and enthusiastic. To hell with the weather! The view is much better inside.
The male, Idris, has already swung past with a fish, and the two chicks have been fed and have hunkered down. We are told that ‘Telyn is doing her umbrella imitation’, and has spread herself over her sleepy offspring to protect them from the rain. It doesn’t matter that we’ve missed the male, that the chicks are invisible, that the nesting platform is artificial and that we are far away in the warm and dry. It is nature in the raw and is utterly compelling.
Osprey’s have long been a conservation icon. I can remember as a child, having an RSPB jigsaw puzzle featuring an osprey (Pandion haliaetus) speeding across a watery surface, a fish firmly clamped in its claws. Today, Wikipedia and most wildlife conservation organisations have website pages devoted to these raptors, although amounts of detail vary.
As with many raptors, their extinction from the UK was probably complex. The Victorian hunting/fishing/collecting fixation must have taken a huge toll, including egg collecting, shooting for taxidermy (not just antlered stag heads on castle walls) and probably to prevent osprey predation on sport fishing.
The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ospreys_in_Britain) suggests extinction as a breeding bird in England by 1840, and absence from Scotland from 1916 to 1954, when a Scandinavian breeding pair rocked up at Loch Garten, in the Cairngorms, north east of Aviemore. The RSPB’s Operation Osprey opened to public viewing in 1959, and ten years later the Scottish Wildlife Trust reserve at Loch of Lowes (further south, near Dunkeld) was also supporting breeding pairs.
Other conservation projects have followed. The ground breaking project at Rutland Water (Leicester and Rutland Wildlife Trust) produced Terroir’s first off-jigsaw viewing of an English osprey. Pairs have been successfully breeding here since 2001. Other Wildlife Trusts’ osprey havens include Kielder Forest in Northumberland, (first breeding pair in 2009), the Dyfi project in Montgomeryshire (a breeding pair since 2011), the Lake District (Foulshaw Moss – first breeding pair in 2014) and Llyn Brenig (North Wales Wildlife Trust, first breeding pair 2018).
Life is still tough for opsreys however and it’s not just about rain and wind. The Llyn Brenig centre suffered a horrific act of vandalism in May this year when their nest platform was felled with a chainsaw. Other threats include contamination of birds with mercury and organochlorine pesticides, entanglement in fishing line and being shot while migrating across southern Europe – the birds winter in Senegal.
Which brings us neatly back to Dyfi and the need to debunk the romantic myth that these birds mate for ‘life’. The birds live independently through their Senegalese winters; if one doesn’t make it back to Northern Europe, then the pair bond is broken and another mate has to be found; this may happen quite frequently in any one bird’s lifetime.
When Nora failed to return in 2013 (see time line above, right), the Dyfi website (https://www.dyfiospreyproject.com/) tells extraordinary stories of violent, aerial, all female, ‘cat’ fights taking place over the lonely Monty. The winning ‘gal’, christened Glesni, had to fight again, the following year, to retain her pair bond. Would Monty have accepted a new mate, if Glesni had lost the battle? It all sounds so Thorn Birds, so Foresyte Saga.
As it had stopped raining we ventured out to tackle the board walk from the osprey visitor centre through the Cors Dyfi nature reserve, to the viewing tower. No ospreys visible of course, but plenty of surprises. The centre is located in the lush, damp, Dyfi valley, formerly a peat bog, then planted with conifers and now being returned to bog again. There is plenty of open water to provide provender for a nest of hungry osprey chicks, but wet scrubland, rushes, and water loving wildflowers also abound.
Wet scrub
Wild flowers, left to right: ragged robin, yellow flag, water dropwort and cotton grass
As we climbed the viewing tower steps we were caught by a tangible buzz of excitement and joined the - socially distanced – row of assorted bird enthusiasts watching a couple of young long-eared owls perched in the willows below. ‘That’s a real ‘tick’ for round here’, one said. The Reserve’s dense scrub seems to suit them well.
The other, big, surprise for us were the beavers. The reserve has started a - licensed and heavily fenced - beaver colony to help manage all that willow scrub which is holding back re-conversion to peat bog. Two beavers – father and son - arrived in March and recently the mother was added to complete their domestic bliss. We gathered that, as the colony grows, it is hoped to create further enclosures to spread the impact of these ‘ecosystem engineers’.
Beavers have been extinct in Britain for around 400 years, thanks to the fashion for beaver fur hats, for beaver meat, for a secretion they produce called castoreum and probably because they were also regarded as pests. The recent re-introductions of beavers have not been universally popular. As far as Terroir is aware, there are no intentional, free-roaming beaver trials in England and Wales (please correct us if we are wrong) although the River Otter beavers in Devon have, we understand, been given leave to stay after the results of a five year montoring period (again, updates appreciated).
We didn’t see the Dyfi beavers (obviously - see below, right), but we did discuss project security with one of the duty volunteers. It is important that they don’t escape and the Dyfi beaver fence is, we gathered, inspected very regularly. We were particularly intrigued by a complicated device which seems to involve apples and carrots and a web cam (Dyfi Project, please forgive us if we haven’t got this quite right!); apparently the beavers can be relied on to visit this free food source daily, thus providing an easy head count on a very regular basis!
The beavers deserve a blog in their own right. And, in comparison, it sounds as though ospreys have had it relatively easy.
Now, back to that webcam….
© Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust, reproduced with permission Image captured 16/6/21
The Brylcreem Girls
‘Last chance to see herd of elephants in Chelsea’ read the headline on the Southwest Londoner webpage (https://www.swlondoner.co.uk/news/04062021-last-chance-to-see-herd-of-elephants-in-chelsea/). We had been watching the progress of this particular migration with curiosity and, as we had missed the elephants' crossing of the Mall, we decided to try our luck in London’s latest wildlife park on the Cadogan Estate, in Duke of York Square.
The great Mall migration © CoExistence
You have probably guessed by now that this Band of Mothers (elephants are strongly matriarchal) is not a trumpeting, earth-stomping, tree-rubbing, flesh and blood herd. But neither are they purely an artistic venture; they are part of an educational and ecological endeavour to raise awareness of wildlife conservation and problems of co-habitation between elephants and humans, all courtesy of ‘Coexistence’ (https://coexistence.org/about-coexistence/):
‘As the herd make their way around the globe, they will tell the story of our over-populated planet, the effect of human encroachment on wild spaces and the inspiring ways we can coexist with all the other living beings that make our world magical – from tigers and orangutans to nightingales and elephants.’
These elephants are made from a plant called Lantana camara, a native of Central and South America. It’s a member of the Verbena family, has numerous local names, including yellow sage, and is offered to British gardeners by a number of well-known commercial nurseries. It is highly toxic and has spread, not just to UK patios and conservatories, but throughout the world, where it
‘can outcompete native species, leading to a reduction in biodiversity. It can also cause problems if it invades agricultural areas as a result of its toxicity to livestock, as well as its ability to form dense thickets which, if left unchecked, can greatly reduce the productivity of farmland’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lantana_camara So this not just about elephants, it is about habitat and humans, as well.
Below: the deceptively pretty flowers of Lantana camara
We had puzzled over the construction of these full size sculptures. In their press photos they look sleek, polished, and reminiscent of the wooden carvings which used to adorn so many side tables and mantelpieces. Close to, you immediately understand how verbena can create a tusker: basically they are just a herd of enormous wicker chairs. And, from the middle distance, the strands of plant material, stretched over a metal skeleton create an impression of carefully slicked back hair, held in place by vast quantities of gel – like elephantine Brylcreem Boys.
This is not to demean the elephants’ impact, however, and the sight of a full herd marching across Duke of York Square, or small groups loitering in corners of pedestrianised Chelsea shopping precincts, is certainly arresting and memorable.
On the other hand, their basket case construction and their location adjacent to high end market stalls and restaurants, renders them friendly, endearing and almost cute. Their press team may not have helped either: ‘experience them in all their glory and bask in the ambiance of Xerjoff perfumes made with ingredients taken from the jungles of India’. The air of Chelsea was warm and pleasant but, thankfully, we could detect not a sniff of either elephant dung or jungle perfume.
In their natural habitat, however, elephants are seldom described as ‘cute’. They are large, loud, and scary, and it is not surprising that the problem of integrating human and elephant needs is one of the big issues which Coexistence seeks to address. But ‘these majectic cratures’ are much more fragile that they look.
So, is this the best way to highlight the plight of these wild beasts?
London has already hosted a herd of Bronze elephant orphans, and there are other elephant focussed campaigns such as the Elephant Collective (https://www.therealelephant.com/) or the Elephant Family (http://elephant-family.org/). This blog has, however, already touched on the difficulties associated with single specie conservation, and the need for holistic habitat management to sustainably improve biodiversity (Blog 19, Walking the Line, 4th March 2021, butterflies as conservation emblems). Using large, furry or cute wildlife as figure heads for wider conversation initiatives may be very effective in the short term. Let’s hope it can also deliver on a long term and habitat wide basis.
In the meantime, however, if you fancy a gentle afternoon out with a herd of benign and creative elephants, then these Indian pachyderms are for you - enjoyable, soothing and a lot easier to get on with than the originals. If you decide to buy one, of course, it could be very painful on the wallet, but let’s hope, it will be in a thoroughly good cause.
And, by the way, the Chelsea pensioners seem to get younger everyday.
I Spy
Pre Covid, Terroir defined four criteria for determining where we wanted to live. These criteria were, in no particular order:
· Good transport links to make leaving (and coming back) easy! Tick
· Access to a lively city with plenty going on. Tick (in fact 2 cities within easy reach)
· Great countryside. Tick (lovely, long linear belts of the stuff)
· Near the sea – it takes about an hour to reach the coast from the current chez Terroir, so seaside is technically null points but not an impossibility.
Three out of four suits us pretty well for the time being.
With regard to our local countryside, familiarity has not bred contempt. A couple of days ago, we trialled anther local Slow Way (see Blog 29, on 13th May) and were embarrassed but also delighted to find that here was another walk which we had never tried before. We climbed the scarp face of the North Downs, turned round and admired the view.
Here are a couple of samples, the distant haze showing just how hot a day it was turning out to be.
As we contemplated the panorama, we started that conversation which is usually spawned by looking down on a familiar landscape from an unfamiliar view point. It went something like this: ‘Oh look, there is St John’s Church tower. Can you see that tower block? Where is the new school? Why can’t we see the railway?’
Here is a list of all the things we spotted. Can you find them?
13th century church tower, Victorian church tower
A Capability Brown landscape
Two motorways and a lot of railway,
Telecomms tower
Sand quarry and a landfill site
A high pressure gas pipeline (trick question)
1930s housing
1960s block of flats
21st century housing estate on former minerals site
20th century industrial estate, 20th century commercial ‘sheds’
21st century primary school
Answers below!
It is amazing what you can hide in a summer landscape. We will go back in the winter to see just how much a visual impact assessment is influenced by seasonality.
So here are the ‘answers’. This second set of photographs has zoomed in on sections of the view, panning from east to west. Terroir is standing on the crest of the North Downs chalk ridge, looking south across the gault clay below, to the Greensand ridge on the other side of the valley.
This is, pretty obiously, one of the two mortorways, in this case the M23 heading towards Gatwick Airport. For once we were unable to see the airport buildings from our viewoint and, as the aiport is pretty much closed, there was no flight traffic to indicate its whereabouts.
Next up is the sand quarry, tucked in at the foot of the greensand ridge. A hint of the 1930s housing can be seen at the western extent of the picture.
Picking up again on the tile roofs of the 1930s housing estate, we have moved west to the landfill site. At gound level, this seems like a veritable mountain, especially as it is so obvious now, in its white shroud, waiting for final restoration. From our viewpoint above it looks more like a water body. The fields rising behind the white mound are older reclamation works, from the area’s long history of Fullers’ earth excavation.
Now we move on the to the industrial estate - the collection of light coloured roofs to the right of the image - which is a suprisingly extensive affair of light engineering, car show rooms, vehicle repairs, interior and exterior building trades etc - bounded by one of the railway lines (so hard to see). The 21st century housing estate, just off picture, comes snugly up to its boundary.
Moving ever westward into increasing haze, we can just pick out the spire of the Victorian church on its wooded knoll, just under the skyline to the left of the picture. Here is also the paraphnelia of the local town looking, from this height, as though it lies in a woodland clearing. The block of flats (right of photo) looses its dominance when seen against the wooded hillside, but the 20th century commercial ‘sheds’ are very visible below. These latter lie adjacent to the main railway line, which is entirely hidden by the early summer foliage.
Moving form the 20th century sheds, you can just make out the blocky shape of the 21st century primary school just to the left of centre of the photo. The wedge of green sace to the right is an outlier of the Capability Brown landscape!
The North Downs are back in the picture now. Another railway line runs parallel to the chalk escarpement, but is impossible to see. Once renowned for its views of the Downs, the trackside scrub and tree growth is rapidly expanding, reducing vistas of the Downs to just quick glimpses - and hiding the railway itself from the views above.
And there is the telecomms tower, exploiting the North Downs ridge to provide signals to north and south. Less obvious, but there if you look carefully, is the spire of the 13th century church; a dark grey cone piercing the tree canopy, just right of centre on the photgraph.
Finally, we have swung full semi-circle to watch (and sadly listen to) the M25 carving its way up the North Downs escarpment to its highest point at 213 m above sea level.
And the gas pipeline? Well it goes under the view somewhere. When we had finished admiring the vista, we turned round to continue our walk and spotted the tell tale red topped marker over to our left.