One of the most interesting aspects of restoring Green Farm for me has been learning about the fascinating history of the site. This is something that wouldn’t have interested 'teenage Dom' one bit – I hated history at school and dropped the subject as soon as I could. We only ever seemed to learn about the British monarchy; if only someone could’ve dropped in a bit of landscape history or archaeology instead, I might’ve paid more attention!

My newly found interest started with a winter walk across Green Farm in 2021. I’d been told that the landscape is easiest to read in the winter when everything is in stark silhouette, the sun comes in at a low angle to highlight raised features and the grass has been grazed low, making any bumps and dips more obvious. So on a sunny day in February, I went exploring for anything that looked unusual, mysterious and random in the context of the site as it is now. It takes time to get your eye in but after a while, things start to reveal themselves. Could that shallow bowl have once been a pond fringed with water mint and dancing damselflies above? Why is there a shallow trench that stretches all the way across Bullocks Ground? And why is there ridge and furrow going in different directions in Long Meadow?

Let’s take the ridge and furrow in Long Meadow as an example. Ploughing nowadays is almost always done with a tractor and plough, creating neat rows of overturned earth between 40-60cm wide. Cast yourselves back 500 years ago, though, when tractors and steam engines hadn’t been invented and ploughing was done with oxen instead. The ploughs they pulled were much wider and as the first oxen were fairly small, large teams were needed to pull the heavy ploughs. This meant that the whole thing was less manoeuvrable and needed more space to turn into the next row. They always turned to the left when they got to the end of a row (don’t ask me why) so, over time, the strip of ploughed earth got progressively deeper and the soil that was constantly being piled up formed ridges. Some of the oldest and highest surviving ridges in Europe are over 60cm high and would probably have been taller when in use. As the system became more efficient, larger oxen and then horses were strong enough to pull a plough using just a pair of animals rather than a team, so the turn could be tighter and rows, therefore, became closer together.

Ridge and furrow ploughing had advantages for drainage too. Water naturally pooled in the furrows and ran off the higher ridges, thus creating two different growing conditions in one field. Wheat could grow on the ridges whilst crops such as peas, beans, oats and barley that liked extra moisture could be planted in the furrows. 

Land that has stayed in ploughed agriculture since that time won’t show the visible remains of ridge and furrow as it’s been worked for many years subsequently. But in fields where management changed and meadows thrived after ploughing ceased, the ridge and furrow has often been preserved and a landscape has been retained that wouldn’t be unfamiliar to a medieval ploughman.

You can see some of the highest ridge and furrow at Green Farm with your own eyes but this drone footage shows it really clearly. If you look closely at the colourful map below, you might be able to pick out three different types of ridge and furrow in Long Meadow. To the north, there’s a section that is orientated north-south. Below that the direction changes to east-west. And, finally, the bottom half of the field is still going east-west but in much narrower rows. That’s the easy bit! The harder bit is trying to figure out why there are three different styles of ridge and furrow in one field. Why didn’t they just make life easier and plough all of it in the same direction?!

We can cheat here and have a look at our archaeology report and old maps to get some clues. From this, we know that in 1840, Long Meadow was still being used to grow crops and was actually divided into two fields by a hedge. You might be able to see a curved line just above the dotted line on the coloured map – this is where the hedge used to be. A hedge is obviously a boundary feature that even a plough can’t get through, so straight away we can see that the northern half of Long Meadow was a different field to the southern half until the 1920s when the hedge was taken out. It looks like the southern half may’ve been an arable field for a bit longer because the narrower rows indicate a more recent type of plough.

What about the northern half? The direction changes even though there isn’t any evidence of another hedge or boundary marker. Maybe as the field narrows towards the north end, it was just easier to go north to south. Maybe the field had two different people farming it and their way of showing which bit was theirs was to plough in a different direction. Either way, the rows in the northern half are wider and bigger, suggesting an older style of ploughing and perhaps reverting back to grassland earlier than the rest of the field.

These are the things that a landscape can’t tell you but I find it so interesting to think of all those people over millennia who have lived and worked on this piece of land. Through good harvests and poverty-stricken winters, from large teams of oxen with wooden ploughs to sleek modern-day tractors, this land and its people have been through a lot. Like us all, scars and interesting features develop with age and this is an ancient landscape with a fascinating story to tell.

I think what does it for me isn’t just the connection to our ancestors but the comforting idea of a simpler time, when people lived off the land and were much closer to nature than we are today. Through my rose-tinted vision, wildlife was everywhere and no-one thought about whether they’d ever hear a cuckoo again or how lucky they were to have nightjars churring outside their farmstead. In reality, I’m sure life was pretty tough. But by just taking a moment to learn how things might’ve been at Green Farm many years ago, we can capture a moment of nostalgia, a yearning for what we’ve lost and use it to drive forward our vision to bring nature back.