Not so Vile

Husband saw a report on the television news about sunflowers at Rhossili, part of an initiative of the National Trust. The agricultural landscape of Britain used to be very different with land divided into small strips with boundaries. (Strip farming - I'm sure I learned about that many moons ago in school.) Modern farming with its great big machines and the need to get the best financial rewards from the land meant that huge fields were more economically viable so much of the old landscape was lost.

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.

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.)