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MENDIP TIMES
East Harptree plants new woodland EAST Harptree Environment Group has celebrated the completion of a new wildlife corridor at the village playing field. The woodland strip has more than 400 native trees and shrubs and is designed to link with nearby hedgerows and create a protected corridor for wildlife. They have also put up owl and bat boxes. The volunteers have now started planting in the corner of a field near the village church and are appealing for more landowners to suggest other sites, Chairman, Chris Johnson, said: “These green corridors can create a nature recovery network and make a contribution to reversing climate change.” Playing field trustee, Graham
Chris Johnson
Volunteers on the village playing field
Harding, said: “It’s good to see all these village groups coming together to support this project and doing
something so positive for the playing field, for wildlife and the village itself.”
Amy Johnson and Olivia, aged 19 months
Nick Roberts and Bea Alexander
The Sweet Track is safe
THE Sweet Track, the UK’s oldest wooden walkway on Natural England’s Shapwick Heath National Nature Reserve in the Somerset Levels, has been found to be safe from the effects of climate change. The wooden trackway, built by the first farming communities in 3,806 BC, crossed the reed swamp, joining an island in the floodplain to the Polden Hills. The wood has miraculously survived for almost 6,000 years because it lies within waterlogged peat, where the lack of oxygen prevents decay. There were fears that climate change and hot, dry summers might mean the peat surrounding this prehistoric trackway will dry out and the archaeological remains will suffer decay and be lost. In one area of the Shapwick Reserve, the Sweet Track is protected by an active pumping system that maintains a high water table. A four-year project by the South West Heritage Trust, funded
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by Historic England, has found that the remains of the Sweet Track outside the pumping system are not at risk of drying out, due to a combination of good water management on the rest of the Sweet Track uncovered reserve and the immediate topography. Extensive reedbed, similar to that which existed when the Sweet Track was built, maintains a high water level year-round, preventing the Sweet Track from drying out in summer.
