Woodbury Common and the East Devon Pebblebed Heaths

Woodbury Common

Woodbury Common opposite the end of Castle Lane:
a clear view east towards Peak Hill and High Peak.
Portland Bill was also visible on the horizon that day in early October.

Woodbury Common is part of a low ridge of land known as the East Devon Pebblebed Heaths, which stretches inland from the coast at Budleigh Salterton, and is 12km long and up to 3km wide. Being on our doorstep, it is perhaps easy to take this landscape for granted, but in fact this ridge is absolutely unique in the United Kingdom: consisting existing entirely of pebbles, there is nothing to compare with it.

In addition, the habitat is a lowland heathland which is now one of Britain's rarest and most threatened.  Nationally this type of landscape has faced astonishing decline in the last couple of centuries, due to changing land use practices and loss to commercial agriculture or building development.  It is estimated that since 1800 an incredible 80% of Britain's lowland heathland has been lost.  However, England, in particular, retains the major proportion of heathland in Europe.  It is home to a diverse range of unique flora and fauna, and is now a priority for conservation under the UK Biodiversity Action Plan.  

The East Devon Pebblebed Heaths are one of the most important conservation sites in Europe, and are designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest, a Special Area of Conservation, and a Special Protection Area.  They are managed by the Pebblebed Heaths Conservation Trust, a charity set up by Clinton Devon Estates in 2006. 

How lucky we are to live close to such a particular, extraordinary and valued landscape ...

More information on heathland can be found on the website of the Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) Network, a UK-wide citizen science initiative whose partners include Plymouth University. The book East Devon Pebblebed Heaths, by Andrew Cooper, is a good resource.  Heathland, by James Parry (part of the National Trust Living Landscapes series) is also excellent (out of print but good secondhand copies can be found online).

Origins, history and management 

Heathlands are essentially the result of human activity: what began as woodland cleared for farming is always trying to revert to woodland.  Without continued intervention, heathland would become forest, and the particular vegetation and wildlife that thrive in that habitat would be lost.  However, this is often poorly understood - and locally, as elsewhere, management practices such as the use of cattle to graze areas of the Pebblebed Heaths have caused a lot of debate. 

A very informative and impassioned letter on this topic appeared in the October 2014 issue of Woodbury News, written by Nicky Hewitt.  Although she works for the RSPB on the Commons as a part-time administrator and writes the regular report on the Aylesbeare Common Reserve, this piece is based on her own knowledge and opinions.  We like it so much that Nicky has kindly allowed us to re-publish it here, too:

View south towards Budleigh Salterton

East Devon Pebblebed Heaths

I want to write a "special", alongside my regular newsletter, as judging by some recent comments, I think a few facts need to be clarified about the origins and continuance of the East Devon Pebblebed heaths.  They are perhaps not as old or as permanent as some people seem to believe.  Anyway, my background is in geology and I love any chance to talk about the deep, deep past.

The underlying rocks set the scene for heathland: the Budleigh Salterton Pebblebeds consist of pebbles, set in a lot of sand, as revealed at Blackhill Quarry.  The sands provide an acid soil and the pebbles give the resistance to erosion that has formed the wind and rain-swept ridge as it stands today.

But 240 million years ago, when the Pebblebeds were being created, this was a very different place: in the dry centre of a continent experiencing desert conditions, broken occasionally by storm-runoff floods from the nearby mountains, tearing fragments of rock from the mountains, then bashing and rolling them down into rounded pebbles and spreading them across a harsh, dry plain.  Between storms, the wind dried out the river channels, rolled and eroded the pebbles a bit more and drifted the sand. Imagine the conditions around the edges of the mountains in the Sahara today and you will get the picture – hot, dry and windy, the sandy surface constantly moving, with very little vegetation and almost no animals.

But over the following 240 million years this little patch of the world underwent dramatic changes: moving from the middle of a continent to the edge, from dry desert to deep under the ocean and back to land, tilted and squashed by continents breaking up and colliding to form new mountains far away in southern Europe. And as the land rose up it had layer after layer stripped away by the weather over many millions of years, until all the rocks were exposed as we see them now, striped across the sea-cliffs like a huge geology textbook.  That is the story of the Jurassic Coast and well worth exploring elsewhere.  But my point is that the heaths were not here 240 million years ago.  Indeed, they were not here until humans took a hand.

Very little of the landscape of Britain is unchanged by human activity: we’ve been here permanently since soon after the last ice sheets retreated about 11,500 years ago.  But initially we would have been hunter-gatherers, living off the heavily wooded landscape.  The farming lifestyle arrived in the Neolithic, probably starting with pastoralism before moving onto settled arable farming around 4-5,000 years ago.  Fire would have been the first tool used to clear trees, and thin sandy soils would have been much easier to work with hand tools than heavy silts and clays. But the meagre nutrients would also be quickly exhausted and the high land abandoned to grazing animals, as agricultural tools and techniques improved and allowed the farmers to move onto richer, deeper soils in the valleys.  

But that constant grazing, by cattle, sheep, goats and even geese would have kept the trees and scrub at bay, allowing the heathland fauna and flora to develop and spread.  By the Bronze Age great swathes of the country had been cleared of trees and settled by farming communities.  Almost no traces of Bronze Age peoples’ day-to-day lives exist on the ridge tops, but their ritual sites and burial mounds are everywhere, looking down over the sheltered valleys where we live today, probably in much the same places as our ancient ancestors lived.

Then agricultural life continued pretty much the same up until the end of the 19th century when mechanisation really started to take off.  We are about to lose the generation who can still remember when commoners rights were regularly exercised, which was the last connection to a lost form of land-use.   And probably a good thing too, because the heaths were born out of poverty and need. Down the centuries the heaths have always been pretty marginal agriculturally, and only exploited when better options failed.  At a recent local history conference, a retired farmer from Woodbury described the last time he exercised commoners rights: to cut bracken for animal bedding when the hay crop failed – a desperate stop-gap as the bracken would not compost down after use.

The Furze Cutter: an engraving of 1799,
from a painting by Joseph Barney

But go back two or three centuries and the heaths were the only free resource for the common people.  There they could pasture animals, harvest gorse and peat for firing, cut heather for thatch, dig pebbles and sand for building – in fact provide themselves with the basic needs of life.  Controlled burning was used to rejuvenate the vegetation and provide a short-lived pulse of nutrients to encourage the grass.  The few resources were generally heavily exploited, and when agriculture hit a depression and work was harder to come by, over-exploited.  This had been going on for hundreds, if not thousands of years, but was worsened by the enclosure of more and more land into private ownership, driving the villagers to try to extract more from their last few acres of available land.

It is this continuous over-use that has impoverished the thin pebbly soils and allowed the specially adapted flora and fauna to flourish, without any competition from more vigorous species, giving us the unique habitat we see today.

Since the turn of the 20^th century people’s lives have simply improved, so that they no longer needed the meagre resources that the heaths supplied.  And that can only be a good thing.  But for the heathland habitat it is a disaster.  Trees very quickly start to invade, bracken spreads un-controlled and grass starts to build up fertile and nutrient-enriched soil, quickly shading and out-competing the dwarf shrubs.  Without continuous management the heaths would soon cease to exist.  Powerful modern ploughs can even cope with the pebbly soils and, with constant chemical inputs, turn heathland into ordinary pasture and arable land.

Today pasturing animals solely fed on the sparse grasses and soft herbs of the heath can only be done at very low stocking rates, to avoid what we would now consider cruelty.  Bracken can no longer be used for anything much as we now know about its carcinogenic properties.   We still sell firewood derived from the scrub and small trees and gorse taken from the heath, but this would hardly cover our management costs.  The heaths cost time and effort to maintain: mowing, grazing and burning to mimic the old usages, but we also have new cares and considerations, such as no new areas for digging or soil removal in case we damage the archaeology.

So all those people out there who think the heaths are some kind of perpetual, natural system that was there before anyone managed them and will continue if we do nothing – you couldn’t be more wrong.  We constantly get told that the heaths shouldn’t be grazed as it hasn’t happened within living memory.  But living memory is only for the last two or three generations, not the hundreds of generations that have created these unique landscapes.  And we now have to use fences to contain the stock as we cannot exploit the village children to herd and control the animals as our ancestors would (though I’m sure they would much prefer it to being in school on a nice sunny day).

The past is another country, and sometimes we struggle to understand how our ancestors lived, but this bit of the past can remain to remind us.  So please help us to maintain these habitats into the future, so our children and grandchildren can experience the special birds, reptiles, insects, flowers and everything else that needs these special places to survive.  Don’t let a few more vulnerable species die out of this world through our inaction.

Nicky Hewitt