2025 Revisited

 Looking back over 2025, it was a good year. 

January - started with the New Year Plant Hunt as usual, with five walks finding 100 different flowering species. The favourite Woodnesborough walk picked up 55 species, setting a challenge for 2026.

February saw the first trip of the year, by sleeper to the Med.  And the blue sky in Nice was .... nice.

Not many flowers around but a first orchids for the year were out, Giant Orchids of course, emerging from an old Roman road..

I was appalled by the lack of snow in the Alps....

In March, our wanderings took us around the local area as usual, generally calling at small churches for a coffee and snack, or maybe even a packed lunch. Churches that are unlocked, have coffee-making facilities and maybe even a toilet give us weary pilgims a welcome haven. 

April saw the start of my my surveying year, which kept me busy through the summer and autumn, visiting Local Wildlife Sites and then writing the reports. It all became a bit of a blur. The surveying took me to unusual places, like the coal tip below where I watched a family of Ravens on a pylon. 

Much of the summer was taken up tramping around the Ash Levels, pushing my identification skills of ditch and water-side plants. I was delighted to find Tubular Water-dropwort (left) to add to another new plant for me, Corky-fruited Water-dropwort (right), that lives in a totally different habitat. 

There's a lot of hot, unshaded walking across the marshes, but when I find beauties like Flowering Rush and Greater Bladderwort it's all worthwhile.   

May saw a survey of a different kind, as we became fascinated by urban flora, thanks to a new book by Trevor Dines. Mel looked down drains to find ferns, and we picked up the occasional rarity like Oak-leaved Goosefoot, here by Deal Castle.

In June, I took the train to Northumberland to catch up with an old school friend. The county did not disappoint, and for a time it was hotter than down south.

A visit to Holy Island was badly timed to coincide with the hottest day (there's no shade there) but I was fortunate to meet Chris Metherall, county recorder, who kindly showed me a small colony of Lindisfarne Helleborines.

 In July, we counted 860 Red Hemp-nettle plants in a field near Adisham, as part of a Plantlife project. They seem to be thriving after we helped sow them about five years ago.  And nearby was our invertebrate find of the year - a Water Stick-insect. 

I had the chance to stay in London for a few days in August, so took in the sights. It was hot and busy but the traffic improvements achieved in the past few years have made the city far more pleasant, with less traffic, fumes and noise.

Using buses was a joy, and free, but borrowing an electric bike opened the place up a treat. Cycling round Buckingham Palace, the City and the East End in a hour was easy, and I also explored the Surrey Docks, now transformed by green corridors.

There were still interesting plants to see between the concrete, like the recent abundance of Jersey Cudweed, and these Nettle-leaved Bellflowers in the lovely Bunhill Cemetery. 

In September we found the Dragonfly Pond near Sandwich Bay Observatory and it quickly became a favourite stop for coffees and occasionally fish and chips. The pond has a flourishing colony of Whorled Water-milfoil, again a first for me.  

October was the month of hay-making at Hawkshill, and we recruited 30+ willing volunteers over four days to scissor-cut, rake, bag and store an extraordinary amount of grass. It's looking good there now and we're hoping for a continued improvement in biodiversity in 2026.

November is a dreary month, but it was saved by searching for flowering plants. It encouraged us out on almost all days, and we found a creditable 247 species. This achievement was, however, eclipsed by the North Downs and Beyond, who recorded a few more despite us having the benefit of seaside habitats. Little joys were found, like a single solitary Autumn Gentian at Lydden and Monkeyflower in the Dour.

In December we joined the Wild Flower Society and started to tackle their Winter Months Flower Hunt. The number of flowering species seen in December was 152, with most becoming scarcer as the cold month wore on, but with a few early spring flowers appearing, like the Green Hellebores in Caen Wood.

But the find of the month was the less showy Argentine Fleabane Erigeron bonariensis, found on a farm track in Marshborough, a second for Kent (the first being in 1978 in Greenhythe). It's an unassuming little plant and it had not yet flowered or set seed; I feel, however, that it will spread rapidly once it gets a hold.

So that's it for 2025.... living the dream in retirement, by avoiding shops, aeroplanes and the harsher things of life, and embracing family and friends. Here's to 2026 🥂🌼

Many Flowers hath November

We set up a challenge this year to list flowering species seen in November, and readily admit that this is not an "average season". The Met Office anomaly maps confirm that the month was warmer than normal (no surprise I suppose) with the expected amount of rainfall.

We are also aware that we are fortunate to have a varied locality to call upon, giving up a good range of habitat-specific species. Competition was provided by Steve Gale on his Uber-patch on the Surrey Downs who coincidentally decided to tally his own findings this November.

And further impetus was provided by the Wild Flower Society's Autumn Week Hunt which is for plants found in flower during the last seven days of October. 

Our tally in the first sixteen days was an astonishing 229 flowering species, and it slowed up in thes second half to a grand total of 246. Habitats covered includes sandy arable at Woodnesborough, chalk grassland at Dover and Hawkshill, the ditches of Sandwich and Worth, and the beach, streets and allotments of Kingsdown and Walmer. 

Such is the enthusiasm for the hunt, dusk falls without us noting it, picking up Meadowsweet reflowering after a verge has been cut.

The list is:

Most of the species were late flowering, but towards the end of the month we started to see early-flowerers like Primrose and Winter Heliotrope (both at Hawkshill).

Anne Pratt considered November and December to be dead months for flowers, and devoted just a few lines to them in her book Wild Flowers or the Year.

Jocelyn Brooke wrote in The Flower in Season (1953) "November, I think, is the only month without a flower of its own..... It would be interesting to keep a record of how many plants one could find actually in flower this month; I have never done so, but I would hazard a guess that I could, in my own district, and given an average season, gather the following...."  and proceeded to list 28 species.

Intro & Summary

 It's tricky to provide a splash page in Blogger so for new readers I'll try to keep this to the fore (welcome).

This is a blog that I started way back when I first became (seriously) interested in birds and local wildlife, in the early 2000s. I was watching my son play football in Ramsgate and was distracted by some bright green, noisy birds. A little research told me that :

• they are rose-ringed parakeets, and
• the internet held a thriving birding community hosted by a forum known as Planet Thanet.

Living just south of Thanet, I was able to piggy-back their sightings, views and arguments and quickly learned a lot about birds to complement what I had learned in my youth. I also learned to steer clear of obsessions about loafing larids and autumn leaf warblers.

I directed my interest at my local area, and specifically the Kingsdown rifle range which appears occasionally in the blog. On the downs and cliffs between Kingsdown and St. Margaret's I met a loose team of locals named the Bockhill Birders who took bird identification to new heights, literally in the case of confidently naming passerines flying high above our heads.

This area is bird-rich during migration periods but not so good in summer, so time was spent with butterflies and later with plants, which subsequently became my main fascination. As can be seen in the blog. 

So from about 2010 I spent more time looking down instead of up, and realised that where we live is a great place of many habitats - cliffs, chalk downland, arable (yes, an arable weed hotspot), dunes, marshes and woodlands. 

Contact with the vice-county botanical recorders has dragged me into plant recording, learning a huge amount very quickly, mostly about what I still don't know, and retirement has brought volunteer work with KWT and a local conservation group. 

The local area is rich in history, and when it rains or is cold my thoughts turn to the archives where I started my first, short-lived career. Alan Everitt's books on Change and Continuity in Kent had a strong influence on my university work and it's good to pick up the subject again now I have time to concentrate on it.  Living where we do, the impact of coastline changes is clear especially around the East Kent marshes, and these are forming an increasing amount of my time, in the library poring over tithe maps, and in ditches looking for wetland plants. 

Living the dream. With many thanks to those who have helped me along the way.

Eastry, Ham and Finglesham historical thoughts

I am fascinated by the low-lands between Deal and Sandwich, with marshes fed by streams which rise at Eastry, Northbourne and Great Mongeham. These chalk streams make their way to the Stour and thence to the sea, via a maze of dikes (correct local spelling), sewers and gutters through Ham Fen and Worth Marshes. The water from Northbourne's North Stream was drawn along Roaring Gutter, the Pinnock Wall and the Delf Stream to supply Sandwich (1).

If the sea level were to be say 3m higher than today, these streams would presumably have been navigable towards these villages which, with the good sources of food from the marshes, would have attracted a sizeable population.  The map below illustrates this scenario, with thanks to Jim Dickson for his modelling (2).  Archaeological finds in the area have indicated settlements in the Iron Age and before, on the higher ground around what are now the villages of Worth, Eastry, Ham and Sholden, as well as evidence of Anglo-Saxon occupation in later centuries.  

A strangely-shaped field edge on the map led us to an interesting rabbit hole, on the banks of the streams of Ham Fen. This seems to form part of an embankment system that lines the banks of the North and South Streams between Eastry and the outflow at Hacklinge, presumably protecting settlements on the higher ground; to the south is the hamlet of Ham with a (now damaged) church on a bluff, and to the north-west is the site of a Romano-British temple which seems to have been built over an earlier Celtic(?) shrine. 

Unsurprisingly given the geographic location close to the continent and to bountiful marshes, there have been finds of palaeolithic, Iron Age and Roman artefacts in the area.  When the Eastry by-pass was being built, archaeological work was done at the points where the earthwork crossed the road and found a small number of late Iron Age implements (3).

"A cemetery at Eastry and the objects found at Great Mongeham suggest that each arm of the inlet had its early Anglo-Saxon settlement, and their position gives useful information about the condition of the coast in the fifth and sixth centuries. Clearly the silting had not advanced far enough to cut off the tidal flow in the inlet and this in its turn indicates that there still was water in the outer lagoon, at least at high tide. 

The inlet was, in fact, a perfect natural haven, protected by ridges of high ground on the seaward side and by the down behind. From it, one may suppose, there was access by sea both to the other settlements of the Wantsum channel and the two branches of the River Stour." - Mrs Hawkes

Nearby Finglesham is also well-known for its Anglo-Saxon buckle, found in a cemetery which was used between 525 and 725 CE and discovered when a hill-top chalk pit was dug in 1929 (Hawkes, 4). The buckle was found in grave 95.

The artefacts uncovered by the excavation were divided between the archaeologists and the local landowner, Lord Northbourne, the latter of whom kept the finer jewellery, and the chalk pit is now filled in. 

In a fascinating analysis of grave orientation, Mrs Hawkes identifies the earliest (northernmost) inhumations to be facing north of the mid-summer azimuth, in line with West Street where she suggests the homestead may have been situated at the head of its creek, while the (later) majority of graves lie between the points of the rising sun at mid-summer to mid-winter, with a majority facing due east. The later change may indicate a cultural change brought by conversion to Christianity in the early seventh century.

It seems reasonable to think that the village of Eastry, an important power base in Anglo-Saxon times, would have held an Iron Age settlement as well, but there is little firm evidence of this (5). There are many instances of new locations being established in the Migration Period (6), and a move to Eastry from nearby Iron Age and Romano-British sites may be another example.

A report (7) on the archaeological implications of a planning application in 2024 provides a good summary of the history of Eastry and recommends that "Given the high archaeological potential in the area and that there are many questions remaining to be answered regarding Eastry origins from the Prehistoric period onwards as well as the importance of the PDS as part of a large manorial estate farmstead, it is recommend that there be a programme of archaeological works devised in consultation with the statutory authorities to mitigate any potential impact. Any further groundworks should be monitored." 

1. The Sandwich Delf - Dr Stephen Fuller
2. Ham's Secret Water - Land Elevation Data and Historical Sea Levels near Eastry Kent - Jim Dickson
3. Kent Archaeological Rescue Unit
4. Finglesham cemetery
5. Anglo-Saxon Eastry recent investigations
6. Mongeham Anglo-Saxon cemetery
7. Eastry Court Farm planning application - Archaeology report

Assessing the effects on Kentish landscape of the Roman withdrawal

 The effects of the Roman withdrawal from Britain in 410CE and of the arrival of Germanic peoples a few decades later have long been debated. 

Did the economy and the rule of law collapse or did remaining Romano-Britons continue much as before?

Did the Saxons (and Angles and Jutes) arrive as warriors, clearing out the Britons towards the west and north and taking over their lands to be settled by their kinfolk, or did the new arrivals assimilate with the native population (albeit in a dominant role). Were the remaining Britons enslaved?

Canterbury Museum has an excellent series of model tableaux indicating the grandeur of the city under Roman occupation with forum, amphitheatre, theatre and so on, and of that city in ruins some time later. 

Bede describes a genocide and was influential for many centuries, while others (more recently) have argued for more integration.

Alan Everitt in Continuity and Colonization Evolution of Kentish Settlement uses locations and place-names to try to tease out an answer (Lambarde in the late c16 also used his interest in Anglo-Saxon language to seek evidence) but there is clearly a need for new methods of investigation.

A KCC paper in 2013 recommended such a fresh approach to the Romano-British/Anglo-Saxon transition, and a project which concluded with The Fields of Britannia by Stephen Rippon analyses a different set of data, using "a regional approach to studying landscape", using:

• pollen samples 
• field systems and
• landscape development.

Pollen data is analysed by region, to provide changes in the proportion of plant types in the landscape during and just after the Roman occupation. An increase in tree pollen and a reduction of pasture and arable plant pollen would indicate a loss of farming activity:

For the south east region (admittedly a large and varied area) there was indeed a change in this direction, with the greatest change of all the regions:

Woodland pollen increased by 5-6%, and unimproved pasture pollen by 3-8%, whereas arable pollen fell by 1-2% and improved pasture pollens by 8-11%.  This could support a theory of discontinuity but as the author points out this could just reflect the reduced need for supplies for the Roman empire.

Animal bones and crop residues give more clues to agrarian changes; beef gave way to sheep and goats, and wheat was eclipsed by barley, rye and oats, reducing the trade in goods most needed by the Roman market-based economy in favour of local self-sufficiency.

Landscape development 

In a very difficult area of study, the project concludes that 50-60% of pre-Saxon field patterns remain visible today, and that since woodland regenerates to a level that obscures previous boundaries within 30 or so years (questionable?) that - and the pollen evidence summarised above - supports the view that there was not a significant abandonment of agriculture after the Roman withdrawal, but a reduction in its efficiency and yield.

However, the issue of population should be considered; the estimate for England is 4m during the Roman occupation based on the amount of land used, but only c1.5-2.2m at the time of Domesday, a significant fall. A number of points arise from this comparison:

• is the method of estimate appropriate?
• if so, is the fall due to mercantile and urban population loss, leaving the countryside at a similar level;
• was there a significant reduction in food production efficiency (in line with lower demand) but similar settlement sizes for this reduction?
• was there only a small number of Germanic invaders (conquerors not settlers) who drove the unproductive (urban) population to the west?

Conclusions of the project

The overall conclusion of The Fields of Britannia project is that the money-based market economy did indeed collapse leading to more subsistence-based agriculture, while higher-status (and effectively less economically-useful) parts of the population would have been most affected. Towns and villas became unimportant and so were depopulated.

This principle is continued by Fiona Fleming who analysed settlements in north Kent during and after the Roman withdrawal and found relatively little continuity, with even lower status settlements persisting in only 20% of cases studied.

The Saxon migrants settled (at first at least) in the most favoured areas, not where the Romano-British had been based. In Kent, lands near the north and east coast and rivers were easily accessible, defendable and productive, so early settlements near Eastry, Mongeham, Thanet, the Medway and the Darenth were quickly populated.

Applying this conclusion to our local area

Landscape development is a tantilising subject for local field-walkers, who (if you're like me) "see to much". It is especially interesting when you have a Roman road system on your doorstep, and so try to apply local structures like field boundaries, chapels and churches, villages and water courses to the road. 

As Paul Harvey and John Blair observe in the context of local historical studies, a map is the best possible antidote to scholars’ often subconscious tendency to focus on what is there to be studied, and to airbrush out the gaps in knowledge: "The map will have none of this. It gives equal emphasis to every part of the whole and there can be no sliding over doubtful points. … Faced with the questions posed by any reconstruction on a map one realizes just how imprecise one’s knowledge is, how many gaps there are that on the map will have to be represented by blank spaces or the most hesitant of outlines."

Two local sites illustrate this theme, one from Romano-British time and one after the withdrawal.

Beside the Roman road running north from Dover towards Richborough there is a very clear settlement outlined by cropmarks (the 2007 aerial photography is particularly good), which A.E. Johnson who  investigated this area and published papers in 1999 and 2000, concluded represent "a series of conjoined and relatively well organised enclosures of probable later prehistoric or Romano-British date".  There appears to be no evidence of later use, despite the close proximity of the road which remains in use up to modern times.

In contrast, apparently from later date, between Ripple and Mongeham on Beacon Hill there are crop marks showing the locations of an early chapel (left, below) and a large burial ground (right) which seem to be early Saxon.

These are well away from the current village of Great Mongeham with its church dated from Norman times, although incorporated into its fabric are many pieces of Roman brick; was there a Christian church on the current site when the Saxons arrived, and they relocated the cemetery to Beacon Hill, and then moved back to the village on reconversion? 

There needs to be an archaeological study on the Beacon Hill site to determine the dates of occupation (was it occupied before Saxon times?)

Excavation of a cemetery north of Sangrado's Wood (Updown, near Eastry) found 77 graves with at least 20 encircling ditches, dating from the second half of the 7th century and possibly associated with the royal villa at Eastry.  Grave goods were absent or modest but included spears, knives, beads, latch lifters, shears, bangles, pins etc plus pottery and glass vessels - on the cusp of conversion to Christianity?

John Blair in The British Culture of Anglo-Saxon Settlement writes

"Kent is one of the unlikeliest places to be considered marginal in a conventional view of Anglo-Saxon England. Why, with such spectacularly rich cemeteries and minsters, such an abundance of metal small-finds, and the opulent sixth- to seventh-century aristocratic culture now displayed at Lyminge, is ordinary rural settlement so elusive? A continuing British — and thus invisible — domestic tradition is perhaps not quite so implausible as it might seem, given the unusually persuasive hints of a British ecclesiastical tradition in late sixth-century Kent."

Eastry's settlement is especially elusive.