We are just passing through.
Need better writing around perspective of time – When you consider High Woods through the lens of man’s history it appears to stretch back to the very beginning; scratch the surface here and there is evidence from all the great ages of England’s history. From the Mesolithic and Neolithic epochs, through Roman and Norman times, Medieval, English Civil War, the development of agriculture and the industrial revolution. And right up to the present day, the “Anthropocene*”.
But the history of High Woods starts much further back, and to truly appreciate how significant (or insignificant) man’s part in the story is we need to think about the how the landscape today was created, and how it is still evolving, and changing.
It is accepted by people in the know/scholars that the earth is roughly 4.6 billion years old. If you were to scale the Earth’s age of 4.6 billion years down to 46 years, then humans would have only been around for 4 hours, and in the last minute of that time, we would have destroyed roughly half of the world’s flora and fauna.
Where we are now is just a point in time, and the ground is literally shifting under our feet, I would love to think that someone will update this document in a hundred years or so but it’s highly probable that Nature will have found a solution for the human species by then.
Landscape
Covering an “L-shaped” area of 370 acres/150 Hectares, High Woods Country Park is situated on what is known in geological terms as the “Tendring Plateau. It rises from around 10m above sea level at its lowest point, adjacent the railway line on the southern boundary, to around 50m in Brinkley Grove (circa 1.3 miles/2.1km to the north). What about predicted sea rises?
Two separate streams join in the Tubswick area of the site and then flow as one through the main landscape feature which is the valley known as “the Central Valley”, which broadly bisects the site from north to south
Midway it flows into an on-line lake, which acts as a storm water reservoir for the Highwoods estate. Although attenuated at the discharge point from the lake, the volume of water entering the stream at times of heavy rain can be flashy.
The stream spreads forming a marsh on the southern boundary before leaving the park through a sluice and an underground conduit. carrying it beneath the railway and Broadlands housing development to the south. It eventually enters the River Colne opposite the ornamental lake in Lower Castle Park.
A number of additional minor springs and seasonal streams have formed small side valleys running into the main valley, for example that which issues from Friars Grove and flows into the head of the marsh on the southern boundary.
Seasonal seepage lines are a feature of the central and south-western areas. Some of the woodland soils are free draining as are those on the slopes north-east of the lake and on the rising ground east of the marsh.
The site is characterised by number of slopes and hills. The main ones, in the South, are known colloquially by Colchester Harriers (Group 4) as “the Hell Hills of High Woods”, such is the challenge of running up them consecutively. For the visitor, the combination of historic paths and rolling hills provide horizon views that change with the seasons and the light. The view from the “Southern Slopes” (Colchester’s Greatest Viewpoint™) takes in the panorama of the University to the east, the Castle, Town Hall and Jumbo to Hilly Fields and Lexden in the west.
Conversely, from the town, the southern slopes and the backcloth of High Woods give a view of seemingly continuous countryside to the north. Boadicea and roman views/royalist/roundheads
Aerial maps help show that the site is approximately 50% under wooded canopy, mainly to the north, and 50% open, mainly to the south. But at ground level, the landscape is a rich mosaic of habitats, many delineated by arterial hedgerows, all highly valuable from a Biodiversity point of view, and which are described later in this pamphlet.
The railway embankment on the South Eastern boundary of the site was built in the 1930s, when 7-ton locomotives were used to bring sand via a light railway from a pit on the Harwich Road. The sand was then topped with clay to form the embankment.
Geology
Put all the factual stuff then say how this manifests into what is on the ground
Although there has not been a geological survey of the land within the Country Park, it is possible to construct a picture of the soils and rocks beneath, based on what can be seen, and what surveys elsewhere in the region suggest may be present.
Around 100 million years ago, in the Cretaceous period, the land that is now High Woods lay at the bottom of a warm sea of clear blue water, in which deposits of chalk were forming from the calcareous remains of minute marine organisms. At High Woods, these deposits are now several hundred meters thick (although of course entirely covered by the later London Clay). Subsequent movements of the earth’s crust pushed the chalk up to become dry land, where it suffered considerable erosion.
Around 50 million years ago, in the Eocene period, the land sank beneath the sea again and the chalk became covered in a deposit made up of fine particles of river borne sediments which eventually formed the London Clay. This is characterised as a stiff dark or bluish grey clay, which weathers to brown on exposure and shrinks and cracks in dry weather, such cracks being very common across the site.
At the end of the period of London Clay formation (brief explanation required), around 10 million years ago during the Miocene period, plate tectonics that were creating the Alps also pushed Essex back up above sea-level one again.
The period we call the “Ice Age”, began circa 2 million years ago, and during the greatest extent of its cover around 300,000 years ago, the icesheet penetrated well into north-east Essex, covering High Woods, and brought with it not just ice but a mixture of clays, sands and gravels.
As warm period followed cold so the melt water at the edge of the ice spread sand and gravel in the form of glacial outwash (define required). The last glaciation took place 10,000 years ago although it did not reach as far south as Essex.
Complicating the soils of the area even further, rivers carried sands and gravels from afar and deposited them, these in turn being moved and mixed during the glaciations.
During the Early and Middle Pleistocene, the original course of the River Thames appears to have migrated progressively south-eastwards through northern Essex, settling into the mid-Essex Depression through Chelmsford and Colchester before final diversion by the Anglian ice sheet into its modern valley through London. It is likely, or at least possible, that the Thames once ran across what is now High Woods. The ice sheet that covered southern England to a depth of 1,000 metres sometime between 300,000 and 400,000 years ago, then blocked the river valley and diverted the Thames into its present course.
Walking within the Country Park the soil can be seen to consist of a brown, sandy clay containing some gravel and silt. This is known as Loam and is largely glacial in origin. The fragments of gravel within it, a mixture of quartz, flint and sandstone, are generally rounded, which indicates erosion by ice or water.
A core sample taken from the Country Park might therefore show two or three hundred metres of chalk covered by one hundred metres of London Clay upon which lies a deposit of glacial sand and gravel 4 to 6 metres thick. The final covering of loam may be up to 7m in thickness.
Traditionally, outside of the woodland, the valley floor was used for pasture as the clay was generally too impervious for cultivation. Although much reduced, a strip of grassland still follows the valley bottom, whilst the extended arable fields such as Old Ley, and Boat Fields, were known for their difficulty of cultivation.
In addition, deposits of Brickearth, which are windblown alluvial soils, can be found at High Woods. As its name suggests this form of clay is ideal for brick and tile making and gave rise to the industry particularly to the north of Colchester. A brickyard dating back to at least 1842 was situated just at the south-west boundary of the Country Park on what is now Turner Rise, exploiting an accessible Brickearth deposit, although this ceased production in the first half of the 20th Century. This clay can also be found in the area of the marsh adjacent the railway line on the Country Park’s southern boundary. Reference brick/tile local names – relate big pond/slope/wilderness at turner rise
Although now housing, “Sand-pit Field” to the north-east of the lake was an area where the loam soil was thin or non-existent and sand and fine gravel exposed. This was utilised for various purposes when it was part of Myland Farm, with a pit excavated, now long filled in.
So, as regards the deposits of river and glacial borne sands and gravels, the geology within the Country Park footprint is relatively varied. And looking to man’s partnership with High Woods, it is the climate, the shape of the landscape and the nature of the soils upon it that have governed his utilisation of the land and created the environment we see today.
* the age now where mankind has run out of time to care for Nature better but may save himself if he understands that he IS Nature.