Forncett Meadows, our SSSI in Forncett St Peter

This site is a rare and beautiful thing. It was saved from the plough in the 1980’s and remains a profusion of wild flowers each spring, a wonderful haven and rare habitat that was once common along the length of the Tas valley. It is one of only three remaining sites in this valley.

The drier grassy slopes are covered with cowslips, lady’s bedstraw and green winged orchids and below the spring line where it becomes boggy are lovely flora: ragged robin, marsh orchids and the damp loving valerian. Rare sedges and rushes are present including: crested-dog’s tail, adder’s tongue fern and sweet vernal grass.

It is a 13 acre Triple SI, or Site of Special Scientific Interest and is land notified as this under the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981, designated by Natural England, a body responsible for protecting our natural environment. It is private land but as a footpath goes through its centre (FP TM 165 926) it is easy to view. There are just two fields to the East of the River Tas, a small area surrounded by fairly intensive farming and vulnerable to groundwater abstraction. There is variation in wetness and soil type and fortunately there has been a long period of non-intensive grazing management. This makes it a rare example of unimproved meadow in the Tas valley.

The footpath is fenced to keep the grazing animals secure and the owners and the parish council cut it to keep it as an important and beautiful resource for the local community to access the surrounding countryside, the school and the church. It is a very ancient path linking farms and homesteads for thousands of years.

The management of the meadows is aimed to reduce the amount of ‘litter’ build up as the vegetation grows up and dies down. This holds up the process that would naturally allow scrub and trees to develop and increase drying out, so that in the end the meadows would become woodland with some open spaces. There are trees, mainly alders, woodland and scrub on the site that are important for wildlife. Low intensive conservation grazing by cob-type ponies is involved from May to November, depending on the weather and water levels. Some areas of vegetation are cut and the cut material is raked and removed. Some nettles, creeping thistles and docks are cut so they do not out-compete other species but in some places they remain for the benefit of invertebrates, including butterflies, for which they are caterpillar food plants.

Where these beautiful water meadows lie today in the shallow valley of the Tas there might once have been a more wooded and marshy landscape. There could have been small iron-age farmsteads, their doorways facing the rising sun, built above the wider, faster flowing Tas. In my mind’s eye I see uncultivated grass and scrub and areas of extensive woodland and small areas of wheat, barley and peas being grown where turf has been removed and banked. Some sheep are grazing watched by dogs and young people. These people are from the Iceni and since the Roman invasion of AD42 they rule themselves as a client kingdom with Prasutagus as king and Boudica, his wife, as their Queen.

The status of women in British society was the antithesis of the Roman ideal of the restrained woman confined to the house. Alice Roberts, archaeologist and TV presenter, has revealed through the excavations of iron-age British burials of women, some with horses and chariots, that they were both competent charioteers and respected leaders. Gaulish coins of this era show images of female warriors holding swords and shields on horseback.

So we can imagine Boudica having driven her light two-wheeled chariot from VentaIcenorum, now Caister St Edmund, along the winding Tas, arriving in Forncett to visit her kinsfolk. Here she is training young horses and practising the skills of spear throwing and swordsmanship with her people, a gold, braided torc round her neck, like those from the Snetterton hoard. Cranes fly overhead and some of her cousins are leaving to hunt local beaver, red deer and wild pigs.

Ultimately she is preparing for her brave rebellion against the Romans in about AD60 when she marched on the Roman towns of Colchester, London and St Albans, burning them to the ground, but was eventually defeated. This is ancient land with a long history.

References

Ancestors: A prehistory of Britain in seven burials by Alice Roberts, Simon & Schuster, 2022

This Hollow Land by Peter Tolhurst, Black Dog Books, 2018