The Vile clings on to the edge of the Gower peninsula. Its fields are lined up like strips of carpet, together leading to the edge of the cliff that drops into the sea. Each one is tiny, around 1-2 acres. From the sky, they look like airport runways, although this comparison would have seemed nonsensical to those who tended them for most of their existence.
That is because the Vile is special: a working example of how much of Britain would have been farmed during the middle ages. Farmers have most likely been trying to tame this promontory since before the Norman conquest.
The fields have retained their old names, speaking to a long history of struggle against the soil. Stoneyland. Sandyland. Bramble Bush. Mounds of soil known as “baulks” separate one strip from the next. During the summer months, linseed and sweet clover paint the landscape with stripes of bright yellow and cotton-blue, recreating a scene that had occurred here for many of the last thousand summers. On the edge of the promontory were the hay meadows, almost ready to burst with pollen and petals.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Remnants of such farms survive as shadows and undulations across the countryside today, showing the paths of ox-drawn ploughs as they moved up and down the fields, pushing the soil to the side as they went.
The naturalist Colin Tubbs, in a survey of Hampshire, found that only a third of the county’s birds were adapted to woodland, with the rest preferring open, marsh, coastal or riverine habitats.
Hen harriers returned to hunt in the fields left fallow and the predatory larvae of oil beetles lay in wait for bees upon the flowers.
By taking on the role of megafauna and preventing the domination of closed-canopy forest, early farmers carved out space for open-land species that would otherwise have been lost to the darkness.
A kind of culture emerged around such fields: agricultural handbooks from the time show that football games and bull-baiting events were organised to destroy moss, drive away moles and trample seeds into the soil.
This is because the decisions of a hundred individual farmers, tailored to the precise conditions of their land – soil, shelter, wind direction, altitude – create more diverse landscapes than a set of centralised rules.
The original article contains 1,267 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
