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| New cycle path under construction near Diddington. |
The Reserve is growing in size and now effectively runs all the way from Little Paxton to Stirtloe, on the edge of Buckden. This is nature conservation at the landscape scale and we have given this a lot of thought in our updated management plan.
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| Working together to build a new landscape. |
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” they say, and that applies to landscape as well as to people. The way we appreciate landscape has changed a lot through history. The Georgian period re-created the extremely formal estates, parks and gardens of the Greeks and Romans but then the Romantics like Wordsworth and Turner turned the Victorians’ attention to the seeming chaos of the wilderness, with ruins, cataracts and stormy skies. More recently “scenery” has become something that we look at from a car window and that has changed the way we appreciate it and so some modern landscapes are designed to look best from the road, or the roads are placed to give the most scenic ride.
In our flat, big-skied, East Anglian landscape it is hard to get a “good view” from the ground and the eye concentrates more on nearby detail. We might think of a Constable landscape when looking for inspiration, though the elms and black poplars of his paintings have almost all gone now. I still like to look at a nice hedge full of blossom, rows of poplars shivering in the wind, winding paths with secrets around in each bend and reed-lined river banks. All of these features are planned into our design as well as 17 miles of footpath.
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| Even these islands were designed into the restoration. |
Our objectives in terms of scenery or landscape are mixed. Along the river we have tried to restore the agricultural landscape that was there before quarrying, partly for nostalgic reasons but also in an effort to bring back lost arable weeds like corn-flower, corncockle and corn marigold as well as the summer songs of skylarks, turtle doves and yellowhammers. The rest of the Reserve is a mix of open gravels, quarry-ponds and patches of scrub, each with their own interest. We even try to preserve some of the features left behind by the quarry, in honour of all the people who worked here in the gravel industry over the last 80 years.
The next big design project is for our reedbed which will be excavated west of the Haul Road next to the quarry. This will take several years to establish but work could start in 2021.
The only place you can get a really good overview of the Reserve is from the top of Paxton Hill.
