SUFFOLK SANDLINGS 1020-2020
1
LAND USE AND BIOTA OF THE HEATHLANDS OF THE SUFFOLK SANDLINGS, 1020-2020 PATRICK ARMSTRONG Introduction Between about 1966 and 1984 I conducted systematic field and archival research on the ecology and land use history of the East Suffolk Sandlings (Armstrong, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1984). Most of my time since mid-1974 has been spent outside the UK, and only very occasional brief field visits to Suffolk have been possible. This paper seeks to provide something of an update to my earlier work, some of which is briefly summarised here. It thus brings to an end a programme of field and archival research I commenced on my first visit to the region in April 1946. A landscape mosaic The Sandlings (sometimes Sandlands) region is defined as the strip of land, approximately 15 km wide, from the River Orwell, northward to just north of Lowestoft, and underlain by Plio-Pleistocene Crag deposits. Soils are predominantly sandy, podzolic and acid, and relief seldom exceeds 25m. For centuries it has comprised a mosaic of open heathland, arable and with drained marshland in the valleys. Undrained marshes, including saltmarsh, locally provide a coastal fringe. The heathland-sheep system in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries John Kirby (1735) emphasised the landscape’s mosaic-like nature: The Sandland ... may be divided into the marsh, arable and heathland. The marshland is naturally fruitful, fatting great numbers of oxen and sheep … The part which is arable is in some places good for tillage and produces excellent crops of all sorts of corn, and where it is in a manner barren it is found fit for improvement by chalk rubbish, and a late discovered cragg or shell ... the heathy part may contain about one third of the Sandlands and is used for sheep walks.
A few decades later, in 1810 poet George Crabbe (in The Borough) emphasised the intermixture of drained and undrained marshland, and heath, and the possibilities of enrichment of the soil through the use of crag: Fen, marshes, bog and heath all intervene Here pits of crag, with spongy, plashy base, To enrich th‘ uncultivated place.
An estimate of the different land use types in two typical Sandlings parishes is found in the Tithe Apportionment documents – files in the Public Record Office compiled during the Tithe Apportionment Surveys of the 1830s. Even more important, each individual agricultural estate or holding would comprise a similar suite of different land-types: heathland (and sometimes dunes), undrained marsh (reedswamp or saltings), drained marsh (usually good quality pasture) and arable. (Evidence of piecemeal drainage of marshes along the Suffolk coast exists from about 1500.) At the estate at Westwood, for example, in 1767, of approximately 2550 acres (1032ha), 402 acres were marsh, 622 arable and 1550 heath or ‘sheepwalk’.
Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 58 (2022)