mardi 20 septembre 2005

More Scenes from Wiltshire... "Strip lynchets" near Bishopstone The connection is tenuous... but this afternoon was quite beautiful for late September. I was returning en velo from a rendezvous with a friend, and passed several farmers who were ploughing, harrowing and raking their rolling acres of rich, undulating landscape on both sides of the country lane I was peddling along. It was warm work, for both of us, and reminded me of similar days many years ago in Wiltshire when I lived there. The département of Indre-et-Loire is similar to Wiltshire in that the landscape is gently rolling and ideal for farming (and cycling). There are also notable deposits of flint which were traded throughout much of Europe in ancient times... which makes me wonder if by chance a flint fragment I may have picked up in the Avebury area could have originated in central France in nearby Abilly - a village between Descartes and Le Grand Pressigny where archaeologists have worked for several years on a rich site of finds and now have a very fine museum in the Chateau - just a few kilometres from where I now live... as I said, a tenuous link! Whilst the physical landscapes of both Wiltshire and the southern Touraine have changed little, the speed of my two-wheeled progress and the farmers' tractor-drawn machines have certainly accelerated since ancient times... then the Great Ridgeway was the main route, by foot, across southern England, and farming was slow, hard toil with primitive tools. But the peoples of those times were clever as you can still see today. By taking a short walk up the umetalled road from the village of Bishopstone, a few miles east of Swindon, and up the side of Charlbury Hill towards the Great Ridgeway which enters Berkshire's Vale of White Horse... a short distance further on, one comes across a giant staircase cut into the hillside. A late autumn or winter day is ideal for this excursion because the sun, low above the horizon at this time of the year, will cast long shadows across the stepped terraces accentuating their line, shape and contour against the downland slopes. These steps or "strip lynchets" are an ancient field system made by man in order to grow his crops around four thousand or more years ago. Fashioned out of the sloping hillside with picks and shovels made from the shoulder blades of hunted deer, those early farmers partly cut away a strip of an upper slope and moved the earth across a few yards to make a raised bank upon a lower one. This digging and filling formed a series of level, stepped terraces which were aligned in such a way as to offer both shelter from the prevailing winds and openness to the sun from the east and south. These farmers who quite literally scratched the soil for their subsistence grew wheat for bread and barley for fermented drink. The land was hard-won and has survived many centuries of cultivation and erosion... and from the seasonal workings by machinery of modern man as well as the eternal prevailing wind and weather. These and other strip lynchets survive today probably much as they appeared in Neolithic times (or the Middle Ages) begging an answer to the question as to why they were so open to the elements in the first place. In those long-ago ages the valleys of southern England were heavily wooded with oak, elm, hazel and alder with dense undergrowth and swampy ground between. However, on the higher downs, where the trees thinned out and gave way to scrubby grassland, groups of families found it easier to live, grow crops and settle in comparative safety from wolves, wild ox, boar - and other marauding tribes. It was a hard life then... no tractors, cycles or wonderful friends! 11:32:32 PM    comment []