Through the dune slacks of Newborough Warren in search of Marsh Helleborine

Newborough Warren is a very special place, a wilderness of sand dunes, grassland, and damp hollows (or ‘slacks’) crucial for threatened species such as skylark, dune pansies and marsh orchids. It is one of the wildest places I have walked in where the only sound in high summer is the song of a multitude of invisible larks. This is a place that feels far from machinations, procedures, assessment and accounting.

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

– Gary Snyder, ‘For the Children’

  

We explored this place on a sultry, overcast day in a circuitous ramble that began at the Marram Grass statue car park and followed the path towards the forest before branching off through a gate into the dunes to the left. Then we headed out towards the strait, following marker posts all the way up across the dunes and down into the slacks.

For centuries rabbits have grazed here (hence the term ‘Warren’), helping to maintain a species-rich habitat. In the 1950s myxomatosis drastically reduced their numbers leaving the dunes in a vulnerable condition, no longer able to support plants and animals. However, rabbit numbers are slowly increasing, and they now graze side by side with horses, helping to keep the dunes healthy by controlling unwanted vegetation.

Semi-wild horses graze on the Warren

This is the largest area of dunes in the British Isles, the result of significant environmental change in the 14th century.  At that time Newborough area was an area of rich farmland, the prosperous settlement of Newborough populated by people evicted from Llanfaes, in the north of the island, by Edward I to make way for the construction of Beaumaris castle. But, in the 14th century a series of violent storms buried a large portion of this area under sand dunes. The residents feared that the dunes would completely swallow the town, prompting Elizabeth I to enact a law protecting the marram grass, the roots of which help to stabilize the dunes. This stopped the advance of the dunes and also provided raw material for a new industry in the town, the weaving of marram grass leaves to form mats.

Rabbits soon colonized the dunes, giving rise to the name Newborough Warren and providing locals with another valuable resource – at one time, as over 100,000 rabbits a year were being taken from the warren.

Now Newborough Warren is a National Nature Reserve, consisting of a large expanse of sand dunes, saltmarsh and mudflats. It is the dune slacks – areas which are submerged by winter rains, but drying out during the summer months – which are of most interest to those wishing to see the many wild-flowers for which this site is renowned. The slacks provide the ideal habitat for vast colonies of Northern Marsh Orchids and Marsh Helleborines.  We were keen to find some of these rare flowers.  They didn’t take much finding.

Northern Marsh Orchid

Pyramidal Orchid

White Common Spotted Orchid

Marsh Helleborine

There’s a lot of glamour and mystery associated with wild orchids, including the belief (which I adhered to) that they’re all rare and endangered.  However, when I consulted Richard Mabey’s Flora Britannica, I discovered that although this is true of some species, others are, according to Mabey, ‘proving themselves highly adaptable and capable of moving into the most improbable habitats’ (he cites abandoned waste tips, old colliery land, reclaimed airbase runways and bunkers, motorway roundabouts and power station ash-tips).

Apparently, there are Bee Orchids here, too, but our chosen path through the dunes did not bring us to them. Nevertheless, scattered amongst the marram grass is a wide range of plants such as Dune Pansies, Sea Spurge, Rest Harrow and Viper’s Bugloss. Here’s a gallery of the flowers we chanced upon (hover for details; let me know of any mis-attributions):

Yellow rattle

Yellow Flag

Wild Pansy

Wild Pansy

Common Spotted Orchid

Viper’s Bugloss

Toadflax

Viper’s Bugloss

Thyme

Sea Spurge

Sea Holly

Rest Harrow

Ragged Robin

Pyramidal Orchid

Purple Loostrife

Poppy

Northern March Orchid

Marsh Woundwort

Marsh Helleborine

Marsh Helleborine

Bird’s Foot Trefoil

Ladies’ Smock

Ladies’ Bedstraw

Grasses of many sorts

Evening Primrose

Dog Rose

Common Mallow

Sea Campion

Large Bird’s Foot Trefoil

As we worked our way over dune and through slack, it was interesting to come across areas colonised by a single large community of a particular plant, whether Helleborines, Orchids, Yellow Rattle or Sea Holly

A colony of Yellow Rattle clustered on the slope of a dune

A field of Sea Holly in one of the slacks

As we neared the shore of the Menai Strait and the ground grew damper, reeds and rushes began to predominate.  With the mountains of Snowdonia brooding purple across the water in the heat haze, the landscape felt timeless, or out of time – no sign of human habitation or intervention, no sound but the larks’ song and the rustle of reeds shifting in zephyrs that eased in from the water’s edge.

At last we emerged from the dunes onto Llanddwyn, the beach beneath the mountains. There was no one there but us.

 

See also

• Walking out to Llanddwyn island
• A midsummer eve walk to the beach beneath the mountains
• Across the burning sands of Malltraeth and Llanddwyn
• Big sky country: a walk on Llanddwyn beach

A midsummer eve walk to the beach beneath the mountains

Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander every where,
Swifter than the moon’s sphere;
And I serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green:
The cowslips tall her pensioners be;
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours,
In those freckles live their savours:
I must go seek some dew-drops here
And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear.
Farewell, thou lob of spirits: I’ll be gone;
Our queen and all her elves come here anon.
– William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act II, Scene I

It was more than we might have hoped for.  After two weeks of dry, warm and sunny weather we set off for a week’s holiday on Anglesey under a a sky of clearest blue, and with the forecast predicting days of warm sun to come.  We arrived at the cottage near Newborough in the early evening and set out immediately to walk the trail down through the forest to the shore at Llanddwyn beach.

 The marram grass sculpture at Newborough Warren

The path begins just a few yards from the cottage where we’re staying this week.  There’s a car park with a bright yellow steel sculpture representing marram grass. A plaque explains that the sculpture depicts three gafrods of marram grass, harvested and drying in the sun. Newborough residents used to harvest the grass from the sand dunes every two years and leave it to dry from its green colour to a golden yellow. Gafrod was a local term for the bundles of marram standing on end, gathered and tied at the top with a plaited cord of marram.

The sculpture is a reminder of the importance of marram grass for the area. The dried marram grass supported a local industry from which locals gained a major source of income,  making mats, nets, baskets and rope.  At the same time the marram grass protected the village from being encroached upon by the advancing dunes. In 1331, sand from the dunes was blown over the village of Newborough, burying fields and houses. In the 16th century the government of Elizabeth I ordered that marram grass be planted to stabilise the dunes and halt any further advance. Uprooting the grass became a punishable offence.

Newborough itself has an interesting history,  being established as a village by people from Llanmaes in eastern Anglesey who were evicted by Edward I in 1294 in order to create the new port of Beaumaris and the huge castle he had ordered to be built there. The new settlement was, literally, a ‘new borough’ and gained its charter in 1303. In the 16th century, Newborough was the county town of Anglesey.

Late evening sun falls on the track to the sea

We follow the track as it skirts the edge of Newborough Forest on our right, a 2000-acre area of pine woodland that is a designated nature reserve in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. To the left are the sandy wastes of  Newborough Warren, a wilderness of sand dunes and slacks which we will explore later in the week.  The largest area of sand dunes in the British Isles, its sand dunes, grassland, and damp hollows (or ‘slacks’) are crucial for species such as skylark, dune pansies and marsh orchids. For centuries rabbits have grazed here (hence the term ‘Warren’), helping to maintain a species-rich habitat. In the 1950s myxomatosis drastically reduced their numbers leaving the dunes in a vulnerable condition, no longer able to support plants and animals. However, rabbit numbers are slowly increasing, and they now graze side by side with cattle and ponies, helping to keep the dunes healthy by controlling unwanted vegetation.

At the summer solstice, the sun was still high above the western horizon as we followed the path onwards.  Shafts of golden sunlight slanted through the pines to our right, the air was balmy and filled with the liquid sound of skylark song which seems, in the words of Mark Cocker, ‘to shower down from the very ether itself’.  That well describes the ‘disembodied music’ of birds that mostly stay well hidden, with only the occasional one  being visible as a hovering speck.  Or, as Shelley wrote:

All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflow’d.

At the beginning of the 20th century, WH Hudson described skylark song as ‘sunshine translated into sound’. Hearing the anthemic song of a multitude of larks as we walked along the edge of Newborough Warren we treasured a rare and precious experience.  For this song of sunlight is going out all across these isles as the number of larks has fallen by nearly 90 percent in the past thirty years, primarily as a result of intensive farming methods and the use of pesticides.

Finally we arrived on the beach beneath the mountains.  On Llanddwyn beach the air was clear and the views breathtaking. We first discovered this place last autumn and knew we had to return. From the great sweep of golden sand the mountain peaks of Snowdonia and the Leyn across the water were crisply defined in the clear evening air. Behind us, the rays of the sinking sun had bathed the shoreline in gold.

The spirit of this place is captured in lines from RS Thomas’s poem ‘Retirement’.  Thomas lived across the water, in Aberdaron at the far tip of the Leyn, so he knew this landscape well (and the Phantom jets that sometimes scream across the sky, heading for their base at RAF Valley further up the island):

I have crawled out at last
far as I dare on to a bough
of country that is suspended
between sky and sea.

From what was I escaping?
There is a rare peace here,
though the aeroplanes buzz me.
reminders of that abyss,

deeper than sea or sky, civilisation
could fall into.

Aftermath: Formby Point after the storm

On Friday, for the first time in several months, we returned to Formby Point, a favourite place for a walk for both of us – and for our dog.  Because it had been a while since our last visit we were taken aback by the changes along the beach.  The signs of the damage wrought by the storm surge of 5 December were clearly visible.

Dr Phil Smith described the event on the website of Formby Civic Society as:

The biggest storm-surge since 1953.  On the 5th, a 9.8m tide combined with a severe westerly gale and low atmospheric pressure gave rise to high-water at least a metre above its nominal height. Large waves attacked the dune frontage all along the coast, causing severe damage especially at Formby Point where the dunes have been eroding for a century. Over the next few days I visited several parts of the Sefton Coast to make observations and take photographs. The National Trust frontage at Formby Point had retreated by 10-12m, leaving spectacular sand-cliffs and strange sculptured dune fragments reminiscent of a scene from the Wild West. Equally spectacular were the great blocks of tobacco waste washed out of the dunes and scattered across the beach, while hundreds of tonnes of rubble from the former car park had collapsed onto the shore off Victoria Road. The disabled-access boardwalk near Lifeboat Road was damaged but not terminally, according to Coast & Countryside staff.

Formby beach: storm damage to the boardwalk. Photo by Colin Lane, Liverpool Echo

Phil Smith also described how the gale swept in huge flocks of gulls – a spectacular roost of over 15,000, mostly Herring Gulls, was observed on the Ainsdale stretch of the shore, accompanied by 650 Cormorants and impressive flocks of Oystercatchers.

Herring Gulls on Ainsdale shore,  8.12.13 (Formby Civic Society)

There have been sand dunes along the Sefton Coast since the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago – scoured from the bed of the Irish Sea and dumped there by retreating glaciers.  The last 100 years has been a period of dune retreat at Formby Point, with the sea working often dramatic changes to the littoral landscape at times when high spring tides coincide with strong to gale force onshore winds.

Formby Point erosion after 5 December 2013 (Formby Civic Society)

This gently shelving coast experiences the second highest tidal range in Britain of over 9 metres (which is why such a great expanse of sand is exposed at low tide). That vast expanse of drying sand, once a breeze gets up, blows and shifts, beginning the process of dune building.  But when high tides coincide with gales, dunes are washed away and sand cliffs form.  During a storm-surge around 26 February 1990, nearly 14 metres of dunes were washed away at Formby.

Formby Point this week: new sand cliffs

It was the new sand cliffs and the sense that the sea had sliced perhaps 30 feet or more off the dune line that astonished us.  A finger post pointing to the path back to the car park that once stood at the top of the beach by the dunes now leaned drunkenly at the high tide line.

‘The sense that the sea had sliced perhaps 30 feet or more off the dune line…’

A finger post that once stood by the dunes now leaned drunkenly at the high tide line …

Just as dramatic was the evidence of how the waves had sliced away layers of sand that over many decades had submerged the footings of old buildings, pipes and assorted rubbish – all now exposed and littering the beach.

The footings of old buildings, pipes and assorted rubbish – all now exposed and littering the beach …

Every passing walker stood and stared at the mess of rubble from an old car park, long since buried under the sand, that had collapsed and now lay spread along a stretch of the shore.  In other parts, the old Christmas trees buried to stabilise the dunes now also lay exposed.

Old Christmas trees, once buried, now exposed …

The storm had also exposed huge blackened lumps of some indeterminate material that looked like exposed rocks, but was somewhat softer to the touch.  These must have been ‘the great blocks of tobacco waste washed out of the dunes and scattered across the beach’ mentioned by Phil Smith.  But, how did lumps of tobacco waste come to be buried here in the first place?

Nothing stops the sea

The answer is that tobacco was long one of the local industries, imported through the port of Liverpool and processed at places like the St Bruno pipe tobacco factory in Bootle that began operating in 1896. In 1956, the British Nicotine Company, a division of Imperial Tobacco, began to dump 22,000 tons of wet tobacco waste on fields behind the dunes.  It was spread in layers and left to dry, before being mixed with sand and then buried.  For years, as Jean Sprackland recounts in Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach, her book about the Formby shore, the activity aroused little interest from either local council or the public. The vague assurance was that a sand-tobacco mix would prevent coastal erosion.

But, as the evidence from the recent storm surge shows, the tobacco cliffs have eroded at much the same rate as the rest.

High tide: detritus still moving down the beach …

Writing in the London Review of Books in October 2011, Jean Sprackland noted that this stretch of shore is hardly

The prettiest or the most unspoilt beach: its sands are not the most golden, and there are no rockpools or hidden coves. It’s not dramatic either: no pounding surf or rugged cliffs. Stand here, on a reasonably bright day, and you can see the offshore wind farm in the Mersey estuary. Turn the other way, and there are the familiar Blackpool landmarks: the tower, the rollercoaster. But in really clear weather you can see the southern fells, the Clwydian hills, the pale but unmistakable shape of Snowdon.

But now, for a while at least, the buried rubbish of decades has been exposed and cast along the shore.

Buried rubbish of decades exposed and cast along the shore…

I pondered an exposed plastic bottle: how deeply had it been buried, how long had it lain beneath the surface as the windblown sand piled up above?

Buried beneath the surface as the windblown sand piled up above …

In Strands, Jean Sprackland reminds us that erosion and renewal is a constant process along this shore:

I haul my bike over the high sandbar and cycle to the first wreck, far out near the sea’s edge. It’s a wooden vessel, very well exposed, with a sturdy post which might have been a mast, and curved wooden spurs like the ribcage of some extinct beast, picked clean of its flesh by the sea.

I cycle on to the second, an old favourite. It’s the Star of Hope, a wreck I’ve visited several times on occasions when the sand has yielded it. It’s lying forlornly in muddy water, heavily barnacled, black and rotting in places.

The third, further north and closer to shore, is huge and listing, spilling its cargo of wet sand. It’s a more solid sort of craft, and I’ve never seen it before. The deck is missing, but there is a frame­work of bent spars with iron knees which must once have held it together and now give some idea of its size. There’s a contraption which looks like a windlass for winching freight on board or for raising the anchor.

When I say that this place is changeable, this is one of the things I mean. The tides and currents conspire to move and reshape the sand, and in the intertidal zone a skeletal old ship emerges. The rest of the time it’s buried and invisible; people and dogs walk and run over it with no idea that it’s there. Then, without warning, it rises to the surface. It takes the air for a few weeks, before subsiding into the sand again.

I first experienced this on a spring day five years ago, when a friend called in a state of high excitement and read out an article from the local paper, under the marvellous headline Boat sunk in storm rises again. According to the report, it was the first time in seven years that the Star of Hope had come so completely to the surface. Once wrecked, she was claimed by the sands, which stowed her away underground, working her to the surface only occasionally. No one knew how long she would remain visible, so my friend and I arranged to meet on the beach, along with our teenage sons, and catch a glimpse of this phenomenon while it lasted.

Wreckage of The Star Of Hope, shipwrecked in 1883 on Ainsdale beach (Liverpool Echo)

The sight of the rubble and rubbish exposed by the storm surge – signs of human construction (a car park, drainage pipes, bricks and slabs of concrete) and litter absent-mindedly tossed – reminded me of another passage from Strands, in which Sprackland writes:

In their book Edgelands, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts sing the praises of forgotten and overlooked places outside our towns and cities, spaces which are neither urban nor rural.  I could make a case for the beach as a kind of edgeland.  It’s a literal edge, of course.  It’s liminal but not unspoilt.  There’s litter, there’s joy-riding; it’s still possible to see the historical evidence of what little industrial activity has been possible here – sand extraction, tipping.  But it’s essentially intractable land, unreliable and unproductive, so its heart remains wild.

See also

• ‘Prints’: 6000 year-old footprints in the sand
• Ancient footprints
• Betwixt the sand and the foam
• On the beach at Formby
• September sunset at Formby Point
• Walk at Formby Point: lark and dune
• Back to Formby Point
• Formby Point
• There was no message
• A Christmas walk on Formby beach
• Boxing Day at Formby Point
• New Year’s eve on Formby beach