Cranham Grasslands and the "Missing Link"

Yesterday, I drove with my wife to meet friends in the picturesque Gloucestershire village of Cranham. It was eventful, as we had not reckoned with the recent new diversions for traffic on the A417. For sure, we had seen before, the extraordinary works going on - the so-called Missing Link (Air Balloon) development - as we have travelled these Gloucestershire roads many times. But somehow, this time, we found ourselves perplexed and delayed by the new diversions, which were taking traffic to new sections of the development, whilst work could be carried out on the areas familiar to us over time.

The village of Cranham is about 7 miles driving distance, (roughly 14 minutes by car) northwest of the former Air Balloon roundabout area. This is immediately adjacent to parts of the wider A417 Missing Link development boundary. Nearby locations are Cranham Wood and Buckholt Road.

In our visit, when we finally arrived and settled into our time with our friends, we discovered that the common at Cranham at the heart of the village is one of a number of very special “unimproved grassland” commons on limestone soil in the Cotswolds.

These ancient grasslands are rich habitats for wildflowers, butterflies, bees and many more creatures. In the 1930’s, unimproved limestone grassland covered 40% of the Cotswolds area. Now it covers just 1.5% – which is over half of the UK’s total remaining Jurassic unimproved limestone grassland.   We also learned that the rich  and unique diversity of this grassland is lost when it is “improved” for farming by reseeding and fertilising.

When we discovered all this,  I immediately thought of the effects of those extraordinary earthworks we had negotiated a couple of hours before.

 The A417 “Missing Link” — What Is Being Built Across the Cotswold Escarpment?

The enormous roadworks visible around the A417 between Gloucester and Cirencester are part of the A417 Missing Link (Air Balloon) project. It is one of the largest road schemes currently being undertaken in the Cotswolds.

What  a bewildering collection of earthworks, new roads, temporary routes and roundabouts! I have discovered that this is in fact the construction of an almost entirely new strategic road across the Cotswold escarpment.

The essential purpose is to replace the notorious single-carriageway section of the A417 with a safer, more reliable and substantially better-engineered route.

So, I have had a look at the details of it all. I try not to be too hasty in condemning the destruction of yet more of the Cotswolds' natural habitats. Although from the outset, it is clear from research that The Missing Link does indeed concrete over some of the Cotswolds' precious remaining calcareous grassland. This includes a significant proportion of the unimproved grassland within the scheme boundary.

In compensation, the project proposes to create a far larger area of species-rich calcareous grassland and to connect habitats through ecological corridors and a green bridge. The numerical biodiversity balance is therefore strongly positive on paper. 

But the ecological question is not simply one of acreage: newly created grassland cannot immediately possess the history, soil ecology, species communities and maturity of established unimproved limestone grassland.

The true success of the scheme will therefore depend upon whether the new habitats survive, mature and become genuinely species-rich over the decades ahead.

When someone walks across these hills fifty years from now, will they see a road that damaged an already-fragmented Cotswold landscape — or a road around which a new and genuinely flourishing limestone-grassland landscape was successfully created?

The new eco-bridge imagined

I plan to expand this piece when time allows.

The Distance Between Knowledge and Wisdom

I had cause today to remember the September of 37 years ago. It marked the end of my year studying Computer Science at the then Hatfield Polytechnic, now the University of Hertfordshire. I came across the bound copy of my dissertation, in another one of those clear-outs of which I find myself engaged in at spare moments these days.

This master’s thesis of mine discussed data modelling. My eyes lit upon a passage which highlighted distinctions among data, information and  knowledge .

I asked myself today – I guess I could have gone the distance and included wisdom? Data - Information-Knowledge-Wisdom. That’s the journey.

Was I not influenced by these lines from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Choruses from the Rock’?

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

And why did I not make that final step? Or even at the time recall the poetry?

I guess an explanation lies in the intense nature of that academic year. I was entirely immersed in a field that valued technical accuracy over any kind of philosophical  reflection – though for sure I was meeting folk with minds which could do both, and more!  

Success for me meant defining systems that were functional, bounded, and demonstrably competent. Wisdom—with its fluidity and resistance to rigid schemas—simply did not fit into those data types and  engineering equations I was encountering.

In the decades before and since those days at Hatfield, I have  regularly revisited  T.S. Eliot’s poetry.   I guess the master's degree taught me to focus on  how to assemble information, but the years before and since have been a slow, necessary journey towards trying to understand what is worth keeping.

Powhatan Pines Remembered

 At this end of summer, I remember the summer of 1973, when I had a few months in the USA,  working on a summer camp by Pleasant Lake in Oxford, Maine. I worked on general maintenance, and shared a gallery room in a set of wooden buildings with 4 other guys, all of whom were fun and energetic and all a little crazy. There were other random rooms for others, including for the girls, and a communal area for meals and shenanigans. We all got to know each other pretty well through shared work and lake-borne activity. It was fun. But as with all these adventures, there is that 'end of summer' sense when things close off and are left behind. Here are a couple of diary notes which I've recently revisited. 

I found a little poem. I do not know who wrote it. But it echoed a feeling. 

And, after all those new-found friends had gone away at the season's end, I sat alone and wrote this ditty:

Powhatan Pines – Going Home

She sat on a box with her things in
Strumming an old guitar
Pamela her mind on yesterday
Pamela you'll be a star.

And Helen goodbye, I'll not say it
Just wish you well now I'm alone
You'll be fine all the way down to New York
With your song a song I have known.

Merle what a Pearl and you know it
With  your red Dexter shirt and your hair -
It has grown in the weeks I have known you
Will you change or grow old, do you care?

Will you ever stop Greg with your bitching
At Julie and Sherri and the gang?
Will Glenn help you out 'cause he's younger?
Shall you let him like the rest go hang?

And Dave, friend Dave, can you leave me
Here with this axe in my hand?
Is today the real day you see clearly?

Will today see you making a stand?

We stood in these groups, and all chatted
We felt free for the first time in weeks
Our farewells rang around in the pine trees
And the future was ready to speak.

What has it been this long dream that we've been through?
Was it real now I sit on my own?
It is strange in Powhatan without you:
We made summer and now we're alone.

She sat on a box with her things in
She was strumming an old guitar
Pamela my mind is there with you
Pamela you'll make me a star.

Resisting any further possible  descent into mawkishness, here's how I best remember that room and its inhabitants....

Merle , Glenn , Greg, Dave L-R

... and I did not mention 'Chef', whose name I've either forgotten, or perhaps only knew as 'Chef'. He would  greet me every day at breakfast, or any time he emerged from the kitchen : "Hey, Churchill! How ya doin'?"

'Chef' at work - I think that's Sherri in the background...

Always reminded me of my 'Britishness'...

Footnote:

Powhatan Pines / Camp Powhatan on Pleasant Lake, Oxford, Maine was run by  the Bloom family from 1921 - 1996. I remember Joel Bloom, who employed me. He was  a kindly man, open and generous. Though the Bloom era is long gone, the camp facilities themselves are still actively used for summer camps today.