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puddleshark
Took another walk through that area of small secretive valleys around East and West Chaldon.
Left the car in the small National Trust car park above Ringstead Bay, once again. Followed the chalk track along the high ground again, with my hat jammed down on my head and my hands in my pockets against the cold easterly wind.
Past Sea Barn. Where, on my last visit, I cut down towards the sea and the little wooden church on the cliffs, this time I carried straight on parallel to the coast.
A green and desolate landscape. Acres and acres of silage fields. No hedges, no dry stone walls. No wild flowers, not so much as a dandelion: the fields fertilized and weedkillered into bright green uniformity. Ryegrass, and more ryegrass. Here and there a small patch of nettles along the path (nettles like nitrogen!)
A few poor foolish skylarks singing. But they're doomed: the silage will be cut long before they raise their brood of young.
But there is one small island of nature in this desert of industrial agriculture:
The nameless-on-the-map valley below Down Barn, with sides too steep for tractors: where the rough grass and the gorse and the elder flourish.
Following the snaking valley.
Chiffchaffs singing from the gorse. A hare loping along the slopes. But even here, the farmer has not been able to resist using fertilizer and herbicide on the flat valley bottom. This should be a magical landscape, secretive curving valleys full of wild flowers and butterflies... But there's not a cowslip to be seen.
Where the valley widens and the slopes become less steep and more accessible to tractors, nature recedes, and we're back into the ryegrass desert. On the skyline, gappy hedges of blackthorn, all planted with some grant, never properly laid, and massacred annually with a chain flail.
The way to West Chaldon.
The village of West Chaldon, which is really just a very large farm, with some rundown-looking cottages and a scattering of mobile homes for agricultural workers (mostly eastern European these days).
From West Chaldon, onto a footpath through a horse paddock, where a woman was feeding an elderly chestnut throroughbred and removing his rug so he could enjoy the sunshine. Down in the valley bottom the day was warm. I followed suit: removed my coat and tied it round my waist.
Across yet more bright green silage fields. A Small Tortoiseshell butterfly fluttered by through a landscape without a single flower for it to nectar on.
A strange lumpy field: the site of the Deserted Medieval Village at Holworth. Platforms in the grass where houses once stood, and channels in the grass where the roads once ran. Archaeological exploration has revealed occupation from the Saxon era through to the 15th century. Although we were always taught in school that these villages were deserted due to depopulation and the Black Death, it's just as likely that the village was deserted when sheep became more profitable than tenant farmers.
Holworth. The footpath used to run between the houses, but the landowners had it diverted through a field. I guess they can afford lawyers.
From Holworth, onto the bridleway that climbs back towards the coast. Fields of sheep with new born lambs on one side of the track, and a huge herd of dairy cattle on the other.
Northground Dairy, with Lord's Barrow, a Bronze Age burial mound on the skyline behind. This is the shape of modern dairy farming. Most of the small local dairy herds have vanished. Dairy farmers only make a profit by practising economies of scale - huge herds, kept in rows of barns, fed on silage. It's an unsustainable model, with the price of fertilizer and tractor fuel soaring. And turning over huge swathes of the landscape to silage production is to turn Dorset into a desert.
Though I understand why farmers switch to silage. Making hay is always a gamble with the weather, and there are bad years when no-one gets the hay in, and hay prices rocket.
More silage fields, newly harrowed and rolled. On the Ordnance Survey map, this valley has the charming name of Brimstone Bottom.
Nature hiding in an old chalk pit, where the sides are too steep for tractors, while the tractors circle restlessly around.
On the chalk bridleway back to the coast. And back into the cold March wind.
The Isle of Portland appearing on the horizon.
Back to the now-full car park, where some were sitting in cars drinking coffee from thermos flasks, and enjoying the sunshine and the view, and hardier folks were braving the bitter east wind to fly kites.
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Date: 2022-03-26 07:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-27 10:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-27 01:42 pm (UTC)