OUR CHANGING RURAL LANDSCAPE
Did you know that the oldest rocks in this country are over three billion years old and our land mass originally started life as two separate areas of land near the South Pole 520 million years ago?
Since then the British Isles as we know it has moved more than halfway across the face of the earth and has been desert, rainforest, at the bottom of a tropical sea and then pushed up to mountains as high as the Himalyas.
When we look round the countryside now the red sandy soils and sandstone from which we build our houses was originally desert sand. Clay soils were created by glaciers sweeping across this country and grinding up the stones and rocks in their path.
 | Only 15,000 years ago a lot of the country was covered by several miles of ice cap during the last glacial phase and as this melted the ice and water created the valleys as we see them now. Only 8,000 years ago Britain was part of the European landmass and as the ice melted the Channel filled up with water and we became an island. |
It was during the Victorian times that the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire generated incredible wealth and these industrialists liked to own land. By 1874 estates of more than 10,000 acres accounted for a quarter of Britain. The main pursuit of these new owners was foxhunting and shooting. Fox coverts were often planted a mile or two apart whereas the game shoots planted smaller areas of woodland strategically placed and improved the habitat of game birds, which has also greatly enhanced the countryside for all forms of wildlife. The Game Conservancy has led the way for farmers to have conservation headlands round their fields, beetle banks and in the last 15 years, 55,000 miles of hedgerows have been planted or renovated.
At the end of the First World War only 5% of the land was forested and the country was desperately short of timber. The government set up the Forestry Commission and large tracks of upland have been planted with foreign softwoods and wealthy people were encouraged to invest in tree planting with large tax breaks. In World War II 1.4m cubic metres of wood were felled. A lot of the softwood plantations are no longer viable due to cheap foreign imports and transport costs. In the north of Scotland the RSPB is actually felling woodland that was only planted 20 years ago, damming up ditches to recreate the “flow” country that had been lost due to tree planting.
 | Under the new Single Farm Payment Scheme that is coming in farmers no longer receive a direct subsidy for their livestock and corn but they will only receive payments per hectare. Farmers who do not comply with new environmental conditions could see their payments reduce. No longer are high levels of production required from farmers but the British public want to see farms managed to the benefit of conservation and wildlife, farmers are responding in making their farms much more conservation friendly. |
We recommend that all landowners should be professionally advised before submitting an Entry Level Scheme (ELS) and you should contact Richard Sanders or Mark Newton at Fisher German, Market Harborough, telephone number 01858 411234. |
- Ashby de la Zouch
- 01530 412821
- Banbury
- 01295 271 555
- Knutsford
- 01565 757970
- Market Harborough
- 01858 410 200
- Newark
- 01949 851815
- Southampton
- 02380 883150
- Stafford
- 01785 220 044
- Worcester
- 01905 453275
