The progress of reclamation on the Bagshot Series between the Loddon and the Wey

Abstract

An examination has been made, from a geographer's standpoint, of the progress of the reclamation of rough wasteland on the Bagshot Series (between the Loddon and Wey) for farming, horticulture and forestry. Soil and groundwater conditions on the Bagshots outcrop present problems for both cultivation and afforestation. Difficulties have been accentuated by the deterioration of the surface of the wastes due to interference with the vegetation, this resulting in damaging erosion and podsolisation. The region when first occupied by man was one of deciduous woodland. Degradation to heath and bog began in pre-historic times. Many parts of the outcrop were being cultivated by the late eleventh century; and considerable expansion occurred up to the mid-fourteenth century, much woodland still remaining during this phase. The distribution of the settlement and farmland of that time can be correlated with surface conditions; and the sporadic reclamation that followed until the mid-eighteenth century was largely confined within the same geographical framework. Meanwhile the wastes continued to deteriorate, degraded conditions reaching their maximum extent during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the unenclosed ground on the outcrop was virtually all heath and bog. Between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries progress was accelerated and great advances were made outside the earlier framework in response to powerful economic and social stimuli, circumstances then favouring afforestation with conifers. Since then the emerging pattern of farmland and plantations has been disturbed by military interests and much obliterated by residential development, these meeting little opposition owing to the low agricultural potential of the area. The wastes meanwhile have become in places recolonised with trees, both deciduous hardwoods and conifers. Those not reserved to the War Department are now mostly being retained in their "wild" state as public open spaces. Further reclamation seems unlikely in the foreseeable future.