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City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
Rain Stops Play
It’s all a matter of balance of course and it was
because cattle grazed the Thames meadows that
they were once full of wild flowers. Now we’ve
lost over 97% of our old fashioned hay-meadows
to the plough and to intensive monoculture. The
snakeshead fritillary, that chequered beauty once
so abundant along the Upper Thames that it filled
the spring markets at Covent Garden is now one
of our rarest wild flowers and too see it a
special
Spring journey must be made to one of just 30
sites including Iffley Meadow, North Meadow
at Cricklade or the village of Ducklington a mile
south of Witney in the valley of the Windrush.
At Duckington each year on Fritillary Sunday the
fritillary meadow is opened for the public to enjoy:
bunting is hung, Morris Men perform and the
church raises funds through the sale of
ploughman’s lunches and teas. Usually in April
the wet weather pushed Fritillary Sunday in
Ducklington back to May this year and at the
massive 100 acre North Meadow in Cricklade,
where each April perhaps half a million fritillaries,
80% of the national total might blossom, this year
they were all but wiped out because the rainy
summer of 2012 meant that the meadow, lying
between the Thames and the Churn, was flooded
almost continually so the hay meadow could not
be harvested and the fritillaries were smothered
.
Meadow - grassland often but not always near a river,
which is traditionally mown for hay in summer to
provide winter fodder is the best recorded land use in
the Domesday Book. For some 800 years the Lord of
the Manor in which the meadow lay sold the rights to
the hay crop from parcels of land known as lots or doles
to local farmers. Once the hay had been harvested the
meadow was then turned over to common pasture from
Lammas (August) until Candlemas (February) when
once again the meadow was laid up for hay. It is thought
that common grazing rights on Lammas Meadows might
be far older than the coming of the Saxon and Norman
lords going right back to Iron Age communities before
the Romans came. We know that this happened at
Cricklade from a document called a
glebe terrier
, which
survives from the 1500s showing that North Meadow
was divided into allotments and that a Lammas tithe
of the grazed cattle was collected for the two Cricklade
parishes. That the fritillaries survive in the North
Meadow today is testament to the fact that common
grazing here survived the land enclosures of the 1800s.
Murderous Millinery
A common sight on the Upper Thames throughout the
year is the Great Crested Grebe but this beautiful bird
was hunted almost to extinction in the United Kingdom
in the 19th century because the bird’s head plume – its
very crest, was coveted for the decoration of hats and
even ladies undergarments. The population of Great
Crested Grebes fell to less than 100 pairs. In the later
Victorian and early Edwardian period clothes became
less fussy and streamlined but hats became more and
more outrageous. Exotic plumage was imported into
the luxury goods dock of St Katherine next to the
Tower of London. In the pubs and music halls of
London the working class women loved the showy
(and cheaper) ostrich feathers – ostrich feather
millionaires were created on the back of this fashion!
For upper class women more delicate feathers were
favoured – in 1892 a single order to a London feather
1904 Taffeta, Chenille and Velvet
Hat with Full Bird of Paradise