The Landscape of the Vale

From rolling downland in the south to a deep clay vale in the north, the varied relief and soils of the Vale of White Horse support three distinct land uses:

grazing for sheep on the downs;
arable crops on a shelf of rich, loamy greensand just below the chalk downland;
meadowland and pasture for dairy farming in the clay vale

To provide communities with a share of each of these three resources, narrow elongated strip parishes became a common feature in the area. Wantage developed as a spring-line settlement at the foot of the Berkshire downs and its parish boundary extends over some 9.5km, from the downs in the south to the clay vale in the north.

Today, traditional chalk grass land is still found on the scarp where the downland rises, but southwards, as a result of an increase in intensive arable farming, much has been lost to large rectilinear fields of cereals.

‘Planned’ and ‘Ancient’ countryside

Although across lowland England a variety of forms of landscape exist, in the 1980s Oliver Rackham identified two broad divisions which he described as ‘planned’ and ‘ancient’ countryside.

The Vale of White Horse falls within the ‘planned’ countryside definition. It is characterised by villages and regular shaped fields often split by straight roads, and was mainly created by large-scale planned enclosure of open fields in the period after 1700. Before enclosure the farmers living in the villages held their land in the form of numerous small and unhedged strips which were mixed together with those of their neighbours and were farmed communally. In this open landscape hedges were few in number and woodland and pasture were often in short supply.

‘Ancient’ countryside, in contrast, is characterised by isolated farms and small hamlets, hedged irregular shaped fields, and larger amounts of woodland and common land.

A recent study by Brian Roberts and Stuart Wrathmell builds on Rackham’s work and divides lowland Britain into three ‘provinces’ based on settlement patterns. We look at these ideas in our Medieval Investigation.