Rita Gardner

The raw material

Most of the spectacular landscapes of England and Wales are found within the rugged, higher lands of the north, west and south-west. Why is there such a striking difference between the areas of mountains and moorlands, and the gently undulating lowlands characteristic of the south and east? The answer lies in the nature of the rocks and of their susceptibility to being worn away by the elements.

The Cheddar Gorge: ‘a frightful chasm’

‘A deep frightful chasm in the mountain’ is how Daniel Defoe described the Cheddar Gorge in 1724. Since then millions of visitors have come to gaze in awe and wonder at the most renowned landform in south-west England.

Drumlins of the Eden Valley

Where in England do you think you can find more than 600 small oval hills, all roughly the same size and shape, in the space of 300 square kilometres? The answer is in Edendale, south of the river Eamont, in the Eden Valley of Cumbria. The hills are so regular that, viewed from above, they look like eggs in a basket, hence the term ‘basket of eggs’ landscape commonly used to describe such clusters. Most of them in this area have steeper southern ends, elongated tails to the north, and trend in a SE-NW direction, parallel to the valley sides. They are called drumlins, from the Gaelic word druim, meaning mound or rounded hill.

River capture and the Lydford Gorge

When one river is able to cut back more effectively than one of its neighbours, it may succeed in ‘capturing’ the headwaters of the other stream. It thereby increases its own discharge and power, reducing the other stream to a mere trickle within an over-sized valley — a misfit (see site 43).

Newtondale: an Ice Age torrent

Walking or driving across the wild and windswept Cleveland Hills in the North Yorkshire Moors, you may be surprised to encounter a deep sinuous trench, as much as 250 m wide and 100 m deep, with very steep sides. Newtondale, as it is called, stretches from Pickering northwards for 15 km towards Whitby. On further inspection you may ask, why does such a large winding valley contain such a small stream? Indeed, at its upper end there are no streams whatever, only a great peat bog and some artificial drains. It is impossible for such a small volume of water to have carved this imposing feature, although its meandering course, like that of many rivers today, suggests that it was formed by running water — but how and when?

Tregaron Bog: an overgrown lake

Tregaron, a small village in mid-Wales, has the distinction of being perched beside the biggest set of bogs in Britain. The three great bogs together cover an area of over 15 km2 in the upper reaches of the Teifi valley. Follow the Teifi river up stream of the bogs and you will enter an area of upland so remote that it has been called the ‘Teifi Desert’.

The Manger of the White Horse, Uffington

To the delight of Oxfordshire but the chagrin of Berkshire, the local government reorganisation of the 1970s transferred the famous White Horse of Uffington to Oxfordshire. The horse itself is a major attraction of great antiquity, although no-one is quite sure when this galloping creature was cut into the chalk escarpment of the Berkshire Downs. It looks down onto the vale to which it has given its name, and to its rear is the great prehistoric route — the Ridgeway — and an Iron Age fort. The attractiveness of the site, however, owes much to the setting, for at this point the escarpment is particularly high and steep, and peculiarly furrowed by a deep embayment, the Manger.

The slipping sides of Cleeve Hill

To Cleeve Hill, the highest point of the Cotswolds, the inhabitants of Cheltenham and its surrounding villages come in their hundreds by foot, by car and by bus, partly to escape the sultry humidity of a summer’s afternoon in the vale — the same weather that attracted the fabled peppery Anglo-Indian military men to retire there — and partly to appreciate the notable views. On a clear day one can see some tens of kilometres across the vale of the Severn to the older rocks of the Forest of Dean, May Hill, and even to the Sugar Loaf and the Black Mountains near Abergavenny in Wales.

Culpepper’s Dish

Thomas Hardy, the Wessex novelist, immortalised Puddletown Heath as the famous ‘Egdon Heath’. The heathlands of Dorset and Hampshire that so fascinated Hardy occupy a lowland basin bounded on the north by the rolling chalk downlands of Cranbourne Chase and on the south by open grassland plateaux and ridges of the Isle of Purbeck. To the layman, the sands, clays and gravels underlying the heaths scarcely merit the term ‘rocks’, but they were nonetheless laid down as some of Britain’s youngest rocks, within the past 70 million years. Their acid soils are infertile and are thus much given over to military use, to forestry, and to the growth of heather and gorse.

The Norfolk Broads

There is probably no place in Britain more popular for the inland waterways enthusiast than the Norfolk Broads. Every year tens of thousands of the boating fraternity come to this group of otherwise peaceful lakes and ply from Broad to Broad. Why are the lakes there and how were they formed?