CHANGES IN VEGETATION AND FLORA IN THE LAST 1,000 YEARS

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1000 YEARS OF NATURAL HISTORY

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CHANGES IN VEGETATION AND FLORA IN THE LAST 1,000 YEARS FRANCIS ROSE “1,000 years” takes us back to late Saxon times, before the Norman Conquest. By the year 1000, much had changed in our vegetation and flora, especially in the lowlands of England. The Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages periods had also much modified the original vegetation of the British Isles, and the Roman Occupation of over 400 years did even more to our vegetation. By A.D. 1001, little can have been left of Oliver Rackham’s “Wild Wood” in the British lowlands: Rackham discusses these profound changes in his various lowlands books. I shall confine my remarks largely to the lowlands, with emphasis on eastern and south-eastern England where the landscape had been quite transformed long before A.D. 1001. However, the remaining semi-natural vegetation of most of lowland England, although very different from that of the period before intensive settlements, agriculture and pastoralism, was profoundly different from that of today. Coastal vegetation Until recently, the coastal vegetation of England was the least altered by man: only in the last 100 years have profound changes (due largely to the development of the seaside holiday industry) taken place. Even today, much of the East Anglian coastal vegetation - especially the great shingle beaches of Suffolk and the dune and salt marsh coast of North Norfolk remains remarkably unaltered due to human effects, though natural processes of erosion have produced much change along the East Anglian coast, and locally the coastline has even accreted, forming new land areas (e.g. Dungeness beaches in Kent). However, the south coast from Kent to eastern Dorset, has been profoundly changed by residential and holiday development, especially in its lowland coast areas. The plant communities characteristic of sand dunes and beaches there are now limited (more or less strictly) to nature reserves. Until the 1930s much of our southern coastline was an undisturbed paradise for coastal plants and birds. The chalk cliffs have remained more or less intact (apart from places like Peacehaven in Sussex) because the topography has made it difficult to develop them. Even on the cliffs however, visitor pressure can be a destructive factor, though this can be exaggerated, moderate trampling in the absence of grazing may do more good than harm. Chalk Downs The Chalk Downs, until well into the 19th century, covered large areas of countryside in southern and eastern England, as we can see from the first editions of the Ordinance Survey Maps. From the writings of C. C. Babington (1860), we know that until the middle of the 19th century, most of the chalklands of Cambridgeshire, for example, were open sheep-walks, with fine short turf. Here plants such as the Pasque Flower, Pulsatilla vulgaris, were abundant and widespread. Many other species, characteristic of fescue or

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 36 (2000)


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