Chapter 25 Natural History - Flora and Fauna of the Parishes
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Chapter 25 Natural History - Flora and Fauna of the Parishes Introduction In a legend of St Kyneburgha, the saint miraculously escapes three ruffians. She is able to run away along a path strewn with wildflowers, whilst they are caught up in scrub and brambles. In the church named after her, there is a fine banner, embroidered by the late Elsie Sismey. The flowery carpet at the saint’s feet is clearly shown, as are a few bushes to thwart her assailant. To our modern eyes, a carpet of wildflowers is rare and special. But in Kyneburgha’s time, such displays would have been commonplace. The miracle was not the flowers that grew up in front of her, but the rough brambles that stopped her assailants. It is a measure of how the countryside has changed since Kyneburgha’s days that we are surprised by the wildflowers. The Benefice is a mixture of different wildlife habitats. To the South is the River Nene with its associated wet meadows. Rising above the valley is the drier land, with fields and pastures on clay or limestone, and then woodlands on the clay, often on the higher ground. In this chapter we describe the natural history of the Benefice in relation to the historical landscape and particularly the landscape St Kyneburgha might have known. We give examples of the wildlife you can still see. As we can only scratch the surface, there are references to sources of further information at the end of the chapter. Meadows and pastures If you wanted to find somewhere with a ‘flowery carpet’ today, the meadows by the Nene would be a good place to Fig 25a. St Kyneburgha Banner. This hangs at the foot of the start. There are records from Domesday of haymaking in tower in Castor Church and is taken in procession on feast the Nene Valley. We know that in 1086 there were 15 acres days. (Photo: J Tovey) of meadows in Castor and 15 acres in Ailsworth too (Appendix 1). Saxon hay meadows would have been very different from most meadows we see now. The meadows were not uniform grass fields, but would have been filled with flowers that grow well in damp soil. However, you can still see meadows with many of the plant species that were probably there in St Kyneburgha’s day. Down by the Nene at Castor, and on the North side of the railway embankment, there are meadows that look different from the grassland around them. Look there in June and you will see dark crimson heads of great burnet, shocking pink shaggy flowers of ragged robin, fleshy pink spikes of marsh orchids and bright yellow buttercups. Look even closer and you will see that instead of plain rye grass, there are Fig 25b. Great burnet many different grasses, including creeping bent, meadow foxtail and crested dog’s-tail. (Drawing: English Nature) Later in the summer, the air is full of the scent of the creamy flowers of meadowsweet. 255 In 1985 Roger Banks, author and illustrator of Living in a Wild Garden [1] who has painted for the National Trust for Scotland and for many Wildlife Trusts, painted a watercolour he entitled Waternewton Meadow. This was actually of the Castor Flood Meadows and it is reproduced in the colour plate section. This picture captures the floristic richness of these remnants of the once-extensive grasslands that lay along the River Nene. It would be very wrong to think that the meadows and fields which Kyneburgha knew were a wilderness. This was farming country even in Saxon days. The meadows were grazed by the villagers’ beasts and cut for hay. The flowery carpet that Kyneburgha would have known was not the rare, special and unusual thing it now is: it would have been a normal pasture or meadow. Meadows like these did not survive by themselves: we can enjoy the sight only because of the way in which they have been farmed. Comparisons between Castor Enclosure maps (1898) and today show that only fragments of the flowery grassland now remain [2]. This loss has been due, by and large, to changes in agriculture, particularly in the mid-20th century, especially through the use of fertilisers and pesticides, and the drainage and conversion of pastures to arable land. There are other sorts of fields where one could imagine a flowery carpet. These are just as rare now as the wetter flowery meadows, for much the same reasons. Climb up from the valley and you get onto the limestone. It is much drier and has a very different flora. At its best, the flowers you can find on the limestone around Peterborough have few rivals. There is still flowery limestone grassland to the North of the old railway station at Sutton Heath, and also at Ailsworth Heath. The latter was common land which for several hundred years was grazed by sheep and cattle belonging to villagers from Ailsworth. This traditional management allowed numerous grasses and wildflowers to flourish, on ground that has never been chemically sprayed or re-seeded [3]. You can see yellow rock-rose, and purple milk-vetch. In some places, if you look closely, you can see the small green adder’s tongue fern. Go a little to the North into a neighbouring parish and you can see an even better example. At Barnack Hills and Holes National Nature Reserve, the grassland is a reminder of what the limestone grassland would have been like in St Kyneburgha’s time. Over 300 different species of plants have been found there [4]. The most striking is the pasque flower, so- named because its rich purple flowers with their bright yellow centres open around Easter- tide. Castor Church was built of Barnack stone from those quarries, so the flower must have been familiar to the medieval inhabitants of the Benefice. Indeed, John Clare wrote of pasque flowers growing at Swordy Well, also called Swaddiwell, off King Street, just North of Ailsworth Heath. Heathlands Fig 25c. Pasque flower (Drawing: English Nature) One habitat that Kyneburgha, and indeed all our predecessors up to the early 20th century would have known well, has almost entirely disappeared from the Benefice, due to 19th century enclosures and 20th century agriculture. We have lost the extensive heathland described by John Morton in the early 18th century and later by John Clare [5]. These heaths stretched Eastwards from Wittering and had their own special plants. Indeed, they were noted for a special type of small sheep particularly associated with this district. All that remains is a solitary clump of heather and some patches of gorse and bracken at Castor Hanglands National Nature Reserve. Woodlands We must remember that the landscape around the villages is a working landscape. In some respects it was more of a working landscape in Kyneburgha’s time than it is now. We heat our homes and cook with oil or gas or electricity: our predecessors used wood. Wood was used for tools, for building and for fuel. This wood came from actively-worked woodland. Woods were not the quiet refuges that we sometimes imagine. They were a busy and essential part of the village landscape. But they would not have looked as they do now. The woods would have been more open, with much more frequent coppicing. There would have been tall oaks and ashes, but probably many trees would have been ‘stools’, stumps from which grew the thin poles that the villagers needed for handles and for fuel. There are still thatched cottages in the villages. The thatching spars that hold down the thatch come from woods managed in much the same way as St Kyneburgha would have known. Indeed, as an active Abbess, running the monastery and its lands, perhaps it is not too far fetched to think that Kyneburgha would have had a good knowledge of woodland management. 256 If you want to see pictures of medieval woodland, the charming Flemish book illustrations by Simon Bening, especially that entitled ‘December’ (which is in the British Library), show what it must have looked like. A study of land-use changes by R V Collier showed that, between 1919 and 1977, the distribution and area of woodland changed very little, although some broadleaved woodland had been replaced by conifers. The main reason for the lack of change was that most of the land of the Soke is crossed by the two large estates of Burghley and Milton. These estates have a long tradition of hunting and game shooting, with the result that the woodland has been retained [6]. The extent of ‘ancient woodland’ (that is, woods for which there is evidence that woodland has existed on the same land since 1600) has been estimated. The map in the colour plates section shows the woods still existing in the Benefice that are ‘ancient’. You can reasonably infer that these areas were probably wooded at Domesday and even in St Kyneburgha’s time. We know from Domesday that Castor had woodland six furlongs long by four furlongs wide and Ailsworth had woodland three furlongs long by two furlongs wide (Appendix 1). Castor Hanglands The most famous woodland in the Benefice is Castor Hanglands, which has been managed as a National Nature Reserve for 50 years. It is leased from the Milton Estate and the Forestry Commission, and managed by English Nature. It is one of only about 200 National Nature Reserves in England. It is the Benefice’s wildlife ‘jewel in the crown’. The Reserve includes the woods at Castor Hanglands and the grassland and scrub at Ailsworth Heath [7].