Another day, another nature photography expedition with the missus. This time to Hambledon Hill, an iron age hill fort near Blandford.
This is classic calcareous grassland. Chalky soil, so alkaline, free draining and with a very thin soil layer. This makes it good wildflower habitat, as we can demonstrate:
This is Bird's Foot Trefoil. Also known as 'bacon and eggs' for some inexplicable reason. Although bird's foot trefoil is hardly the most obvious name either. Also 'granny's toenails', although I'm seriously wondering at this point whether whoever wrote my wildflower ident book was taking the mickey.
This is classic grassland. As mentioned above, due to the thin soil and chalk beneath, it's not very fertile. Basically, if you are grazing cattle and sheep on these hills, there is a limit to how much it can be grazed, as the grass will have to recover. It's all about how many animals you can have on how large a patch of land.
Then some time around the early twentieth century, artificial nitrate fertilisers were invented and suddenly, you could take a patch of thin soil such as this, plough it up and seed it with rye grass or something similar, fertilise it regularly and graze cattle much more intensively. This was called 'improved grassland' and was great for farmers, great for cheap lamb and beef but not so great for wildflowers.
The flowers and plants that had traditionally grown on this sort of soil had adapted to a marginal, very frugal, environment. So, if you then suddenly made that environment less marginal and invited an extremely virulent grass onto the scene, those marginal plants found themselves crowded out.
And so now we roll onto grassland restoration, which attempts to return these areas to their previous species-rich status. It mostly involves not fertilising the soil and maintaining grazing on the land but at a much less intense level. On this evidence, it seems to be working.
Read more about calcareous grassland restoration HERE
Have a look yourself sometime if you're in the area. It's a beautiful place and has some fine views of the county. Reminds me of a song, in fact.
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