Southern England loves its chalky ridges.  In very simplistic terms (we’re not geologists) the chalk was formed by layers of marine creatures who lived and died in shallow seas.  Unsurprisingly, this geological period became known as the Cretaceous period (creta is Latin for chalk), although the dinosaurs, who were knocking around in the shallows and on dry land at the time, probably just thought of it as home.  As it happened, they became extinct ‘shortly’ afterwards; theories about why this happened are numerous. 

After a lot of post Cretaceous upheavals and erosion, chalk ridges and plateaus appeared all over southern England.  The locals loved them and put them to lots of good uses, not all of which we fully understand.  It seems that the Romans then brought reading and writing to the British Isles and kick started British history (as oppose to prehistory).  Now we began to have records of some of our activities.   Literacy, however, also laid the foundations for one of our greatest achievements: bureaucracy.  And with bureaucracy came the absorbing occupation of trying to work out what the records actually mean.  Progress? 

This year, Terroir South spent a happy few days walking sections of the Ridgeway National Trail.  The Ridgeway “rides the back of one of the six great ridges that radiate from the central hub of Salisbury Plain.  It sails the undulating waves of chalk downland through Wiltshire and Oxfordshire (until recently they were in Berkshire) [see how bureaucracy can ruin a lyrical phrase] to the Thames Valley at Goring”. This extract comes from the 1981 publication entitled ‘The Ridgeway Path’ by Alan Charles and perfectly illustrates our love of chalky uplands.  After Goring, and assuming you are walking west to east, with the wind at your back, the path turns north east to clamber through the Chilterns, culminating at Ivinghoe Beacon five miles north east of Tring. 

Today’s blog, however, will concentrate on the 23 mile section of the Ridgeway which runs from south of the village of Ashbury (a victim of the Berkshire to Oxfordshire hiatus) to the small town of Goring, picturesquely situated on the left bank of the Thames. This distance will be quite long enough to illustrate some of the quirks relating to our love affair with chalk ridges.  

The Ridgeway as communication and trade route:  

Above - which would you take - the ridge or the vale?

But what did our Neolithic forebears actually experience when they travelled along this elevated pathway.  Could they see the view?  Was the route easy to navigate?  Terroir buys into the theory of chalk ridges being easier to navigate than clay-and-woodland lowlands, but I sometimes wonder how much work was really required to keep these passage ways open to travellers.  In southern England, we have a romantic attachment to species-rich, springy downland turf, kept open by grazing sheep, so surely, we hear you cry, these were obvious places through which to create long distance routes for trade or pilgrimage?  But modern agricultural changes caused by the removal of sheep has shown just how quickly these light, free draining soils scrub over and mature into woodland.  A few ‘grazing animals’ and some ‘primitive cultivation’ may not have been enough to keep the tracks open in the way that 21st century walking boots, bicycles, horses and off road vehicles do. 

Maybe all this business about prehistoric people enjoying wide views and easy walking (have you tried chalk when it’s wet?) is just a cultural myth.  Maybe they chose the chalk routes (complete with encroaching hawthorn) as merely the lesser of two evils.  

The Ridgeway and Wildflowers:

Where is the Ridgeway’s species rich chalk grassland today?  Surprisingly, it is fairly limited.  The verges on either side of the track from the Ridgeway’s Ashbury staging post (aka a car park) is a delight.  We found wild thyme, Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon, hogweed bursting out all over, orchids (pyramidal and spotted), broomrape, horse shoe vetch, red campion, wild mignonette, sainfoin, meadow cranesbill and many more.    

We also looked up and saw buzzards and red kites, skylarks, whitethroats and yellow hammers. We looked around and saw butterflies including meadow brown, small heath, and speckled woods, a few common and small blues and a couple of passing red admirals.

But after a while, it suddenly dawned on us that we had stopped stopping, so to speak, to look at the flowers, as the verges were now solidly dominated by a range of grasses and peppered with stinging nettles.  On either side of the track were acres of wheat and barley - dense, silent and menacing ranks of cereal soldiers, surfing the chalk waves in monotonous shades of dark green.  Coincidence?

It was a relief to see that we weren’t the only ones to notice the lack of wayside flowers. This sign (below left) informed us of an Oxford University outdoor laboratory project to encourage more native plants, insects and other wildlife to the area. At the moment oxeye daisies and buttercups seem to be hogging the limelight but we hope there will be further work to diversify the flora.

Construction on the Ridgeway:

Perhaps one of the greatest testimonies to our ancestors’ enthusiasm for the chalk lands is the serious, heavy weight ceremonial and community construction work which makes such dramatic use of the ridge crest.  On this short stretch alone, there are numerous examples of prehistoric building work.

From the slightly hippie notice board (do what you like but do it carefully) to the magic of the stones and earthen long barrow, the site was as eerie, and as evocative of old ghosts, as I could possibly have hoped.  I now also know that Wayland was a smith god whose name was attached to the site in perhaps Saxon times. It did seem that the shape of the barrow was vaguely reminiscent of an anvil.

You will also note that, today, the site is rather cathedral like within it’s curtain wall of trees. Did our prehistic ancestors have to clear the site before they built here? Did they have to manage regenerating woody vegetation to retain clear visibility of the monument from the (?wooded) vale below? Or did those grazing animals do all the work?

Beyond Wayland’s great smithy lies the Uffington Castle and White Horse combination (below).

The huge, hilltop, ditches and ramparts of Uffington Castle are clearly visible from both the Ridgeway and from the Vale below, so it’s not surprising that the Castle was co-opted by 20th century surveyors and cartographers (trig point above right). In both cases (ie fort and map making) technology has rapidly moved on such that both structures are now classed as ‘heritage’. English Heritage retain this monument in an entirely tree-free condition.

The neighbouring Uffington White Horse (probably just BCE) is extremely difficult to see from the Ridgeway or from the Castle. In fact it is quite difficult to see from lower down the hill as it is tucked into an angle in the contours. One assumes that its surrounds were always maintained as grassland and that there was enough tree clearance in the Vale to make it easily visible from a distance.

But prehistoric monument builders were not the only ones to see the advantages of a ridge way location. Moving into the current era, our next discovery was a striking 19th century monument, perched on a bronze age barrow and commemorating local man, Brigadier General Robert James Loyd-Lindsay, 1st Baron Wantage.

One other form of landuse accompanied us throughout this 23 mile hike. It has nothing to do with the chalk ridge as such, but everything to do with the chalk downs behind it and with our nation’s love of horses and racing. We refer, of course, to the gallops which are carefully laid out and managed as an integral part of training race horses. The gallops are wide, sweeping, undulating and homogeneous grassy avenues which currently provide only a subtle contrast to the green of the downland arable crops but which will soon stand out more strongly as the grain ripens, and the harvester and then the plough get to work.

Thus the Vale of the White Horse is also the Vale of the Race Horse and no trees will be allowed to encroach on either of their habitats. We reckon that’s a dead cert.