Yesterday, we were privileged to go on the Royal Geographical Society Tour of the Salisbury Plain Training Area. The SPTA is the largest military training area in the UK and much of it is closed to civilians, for obvious reasons, so the RGS tour was a rare opportunity to visit. We were only a few miles from Stone Henge, in one of the most archaeologically-rich regions of Britain, where the landscape is dotted with neolithic burial mounds and barrows, Iron Age hill forts, and the remains of Romano-British villages and their agricultural surrounds - some 2400 identified sites. Because the area is heavily used for tank manouevres, each archaeological site is surrounded by white marker posts so the tank drivers can identify and avoid them.
The SPTA is also a rich wildlife habitat. The
UK Great Bustard Reintroduction Project, in the buffer zone area of the SPTA, is gradually reintroducing this globally threatened species to Britain 170 years after they were hunted out of existence in this country. A Barn Owl conservation project has seen the number of nesting pairs in the area increase from just 3 to 90-100. The rare Fairy Shrimp
Chirocephalus diaphanus is also found here - an odd little thing that lives in puddles and other ephemeral bodies of water. We were lucky enough to see one but unfortunately it's almost impossible to photograph unless you hoik it out into clear water (which would have been frowned upon, had I tried) or happen to be a two-inch long Scuba diver with a special muddy puddle camera lens. Which, obviously, I'm not. The area is also home to many native raptors, badgers, foxes, roe deer, and Muntjac deer, amongst other things.
Salisbury Plain is chalky grasslands, and the SPTA is rich in grasslands botanical species, butterflies, moths, and other bugs. There also seemed to be more slugs per square foot than I've seen anywhere other than my vegetable patch. Tank tracks and bomb craters - strange though it seems - facilitate the area's botanical richness by turning over the surface and creating mini-habitats where various rare species thrive.
It speaks volumes of the destructiveness of modern life that a region in which tanks and ordnance are widely deployed provides a better wildlife habitat than one given over to civilian towns and roads.
Unfortunately the weather was dismal so my pictures are a bit dark and hazy. Midsummer, eh.
Our tour was led by Lt. Colonel Mike Jelf, here showing us the monument to the highwayman Benjamin Colclough who - according to the inscription - "fell Dead on this Spot in attempting to escape his Pursuers" in 1839.
The tank road, running through land leased by the MoD to tenant farmers. Schedule 1 land is protected farmland. Schedule 3 land is leased for a pittance but the downside is that if a tank rolls over your crop, you're not entitled to compensation. It's a gamble.
An Iron Age hillfort, can't remember which one but I'm told it's Cley Hill ...
The village of Imber was evacuated in 1943 to make way for an extension of the military training area. Most of the village has been blasted to rubble now but the Imber parish church is still standing and is currently being renovated.
