One of the UK's few surviving strip farming systems dating from medieval times exists on the headland at Rhossili but even there thousands of metres of boundaries have been lost and it's these that the NT wants to restore.
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| From NT website Copyright Gordon Howe, Gower Society |
As well as the historic value, the strip farming and its boundaries are important as they provide havens for wildlife. You can read more about the project here.
One of the first stages of the restoration involved planting 400,000 sunflowers and Facebook has been littered with photos of the flowers in their glory. By the time we got there they were past their best but a trip to Rhossili is never a waste of time especially on a day like the one we had.
It turns out that the headland is called the Vile. I'm sure there must be an medieval meaning for that so I'll report back if I find out.
Postscript
It seems that Vile is the old Gower dialect pronunciation of field. (Rhossili is at the end of the Gower Peninsula, the first Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty [AONB] in the UK to be designated as such.)
4 comments:
this is fascinating. not to mention beautiful. did you know you live in paradise?
" Field boundaries themselves play a crucial role for wildlife, they act as corridors across farmland and are important areas for invertebrates and nesting birds, creating a haven for wildlife is an equally important part of the project. " that paragraph right there is enough to get my YES vote if I lived there! plus... it just seems to make more sense.
our own dust bowl was largely caused by farmers not using good land management. well. that and years and YEARS of horrible drought.
About twenty years ago here, the mania to tidy up fields and and copses started to be seen as bad for wildlife. It's still remarkably tidy but now there are more frogs and hares, herons and field mice. Still hardly any hedges though.
So is that what people are talking about when they talk about the loss of hedgerows? I would have thought it stood to reason that the more hedgerows we have, the more places there are for the wildlife who keep the fields healthy, but not everyone seems to see it that way.
I'm amazed that in America they have to resort to literally exporting bees by the million on the backs of huge lorries because there are almost no hedgerows out there at all, thus nowhere for bumblebees to nest, let alone honeybees. And without bees of course there is very poor pollination. I think the whole situation is terrible. I tried to get on a beekeeping course by the way but couldn't find one in time. I asked my GP about getting stung by bees (it's meant to be good for you, stops you getting arthritis) but she hadn't even heard of this!
When I started talking about getting immunity to venom and mentioned the young maidens who used to live in snakepits back in the times of Cleopatra, she looked at me as if I had gone mad again. But it's true, there did used to be young girls who lived in deep pits slithering with asps or vipers. The snakes were milked and the venom applied with thorns using almost the same technique they use today to make antivenom from horses. Eventually these young girls could survive the full strike of an Egyptian cobra without suffering any ill-effects. But my dr hadn't even heard of this (what do they study in medical school? The effects of MDMA on the medical student's mind and body, I expect!)
aha!
It is true! I looked it up on Wikipedia and it's called Mithridatism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithridatism
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