The New Forest 
Let's Go Geologizing (and fly a kite)!

Understanding what one is looking at on the ground adds greatly to the experience of touring the New Forest near Southampton. Because New Forest landforms are subtle, a keen eye is necessary to discern and decipher the clues of gravel shape, stream form, hill slope, and vegetation type. Winter is a great time to view the land as well as the landscape.

Geological Development of the New Forest
The area of the New Forest is underlain by chalk, laid down in Upper Cretaceous seas between 99 and 65 million years ago. This chalk bed dips to form a basin, which filled during the Eocene (ca. 56-34 million years ago) with sediments from transgressing seas, freshwater lakes and rivers. These strata were eventually uplifted and tilted towards the south, so that today there is a progression [like a tilted loaf of sliced bread with the top crust representing the overlying gravel and the stacked slice surfaces exposed] from north to south in the New Forest:

• the Lower Bagshot beds of deltaic origin
• the Bracklesham Beds of alluvial sand over clay
• the Barton Clay of marine origin
• the Barton Sand bed of loamy sand
• the Headon Beds of loamy clay and marine shell marls

In the Pleistocene (ca. 2 million to 10,000 years ago), these slanted beds were overlain by alluvial gravels, which now only survive on the high points of all the above geological beds.

New Forest Landscapes: Cliffs, Hilly Terraces, U-shaped Valleys
Piper’s Wait is billed as the highest point in the Forest. Surprisingly, it is not a mountain but one of nearly 150 named forest carparks, located on a high gravel terrace at the northern end of the Forest. Bordered on the north by the Bracklesham escarpment, the terrace represents the original, undissected surface of the Early Pleistocene floodplain gravels. The braided streams that laid down these gravels were early versions of the Avon and Solent Rivers.

Today the Avon flows down the western side of the Forest, having cut a spectacular river cliff affording views westward to chalk hills from the Castle Hill carpark. On the south, the Solent is now a submerged river valley forming the 1.2 –8 km wide sea passage between the New Forest and the Isle of Wight. In the Early Pleistocene it was an eastward flowing river that was capable of cutting terraces from west to east, flowing across a more extensive amount of land exposed by lowered sea levels and eventually into the river that drained the dry basin of the North Sea.

Erosional valley

From Piper’s Wait, about twelve such terraces drop down to the sea, cut and filled successively during the Pleistocene. Unlike the highest terrace gravels, the middle terraces bear angular flints, indicating they were deposited by steep gradient streams which flowed across chalk — a substance now exposed to the surface only to the north and west beyond the New Forest. These middle terraces were heavily dissected in the Mid- to Late Pleistocene by small streams, but their U-shaped valleys have since been filled up with erosional deposits housing small bogs.


From Grass ‘Lawns’ to Heathland to Woods
The gravels forming the surfaces of the higher points in the Forest can support little but broad Calluna heathland. Exposed Bagshot and Bracklesham layers are also acidic and nutritionally poor, again hosting little but heather, gorse and self-sown Scots Pine. But the marine Barton Clay and Headon Beds and the loamy Barton Sands

Ornamental woodland

are less acid, supporting the Ancient and Ornamental Woodland in the north-central part of the New Forest and allowing brown forest soils to develop. Wide-open grass lawns are also a feature on the valley bottom silty river gravels accumulated over the Barton Sands.

While bogs are often thought to occupy the lowest point in the landscape, a tussock bog has formed on the hillslopes above Picket Brook. The water feeding this hillside bog comes from seeps along a hilltop juncture of overlying porous sands on impermeable clays. The tussock bog vegetation on the hillside is entirely different from the bracken on the sands of the hilltop above.




Geomorphology in Action

Point Bar in Linford Brook

Linford Brook, flowing beside the Linford Bottom carpark, affords several lessons in landscape change. A stream bank has been cut on the concave curve, with a deep pool at its base, while in the convex curve, a point bar of sand deposits is developing. On both sides of the meandering stream are abandoned oxbows, not lakes but boggy areas with different vegetation than that of the valley floor. A short walk away on Picket Brook is a nick point, a sudden drop in the floor of the stream of half a metre that indicates the uppermost reach of current erosional forces.

Nick point on Picket Brook

Most visitors to the New Forest enjoy the trees and wide-open views from the heathland, but few look under their feet to the history of the land itself. It is a story beginning with the chalky sediments accumulating from Cretaceous Seas. The chalk was then covered by a succession of seabed and coastal sediments, which were uplifted as dry land. In the Pleistocene when the sea coast was south of the Isle of Wight, the Solent flowed across the Hampshire Basin towards the east, cutting the terraces of the New Forest area, stepping down from north to south.

References:
Chaffey, John (2009) “Geomorphology of the New Forest, Hampshire”. Fieldwalk handout.
Anon. (1986) The New Forest Landscape. CCP 220. Cheltenham, Glostershire: Countryside Commission.

Watch birds, don't shoot them!!!

Sorry, I've been in Spain bird-watching without good internet connections, but then I return home to this from our birding guide:

We’re being asked to pay for the destruction of buzzard nests to subsidise the shooting industry. This is from DEFRA, whose Minister is a landowner and rejoices in game shooting, from a survey by the game and shooting industry.
They’ve already reduced Hen Harrier numbers to near zero in England and now want to do the same to Buzzards.
They even want the taxpayer to cough up over £300,000 for it.

Sign the petition at this URL; it even gives the US as its first country choice, so not only of interest to Brits...In fact, it is of interest to the entire world. 

Minister for Wildlife and Biodiversity, DEFRA: Stop the subsidy for Buzzard nest destruction.

www.change.org

The Buzzard is an indigenous protected bird of prey that is about to be persecuted by DEFRA subsidy. It is supposedly to protect a tiny fraction of...

gleeb goes to Toronto: 'Visit Britain' posters

The last things I expected to see when arriving In Toronto were "Visit Britain" posters plastered everywhere on the subway. And they didn't even mention the Olympics! I thought that was very strange, given this time of year.

Except for the pictures, you might not even know the posters were for Great Britain, as the word Britain is sooooo small. And nowhere is mentioned, to the naked eye (you would need a magnifying glass to see it from across the subway track), that these are actually ads from United Airlines. I didn't know that until we boarded our United flight, and there, in the on-board magazine, were replicas of this ad.

I think, too, that countryside, culture and heritage are great, in whatever country. But indeed, Britain does have an excess. So come visit!

Valentine's Day 'stay-in'

So what are you doing today? Going out and shooting your wad? Or staying in and eating gourmet? Both John Lewis and Waitrose, not surprisingly, are pushing the latter. Spend your money here, say their ads. The supermarket Waitrose offers "Dinner for two: Starter + Main course + 2 Side dishes + Dessert + Wine or fizz" for £20. Now, that's worth considering any day! And John Lewis (the staff-owned department store) will set the table for you: "We've got everything you need to make dinner feel special this Valentine's day."

At first I thought a stay-in fancy dinner is like a stay-cation, a new type of British holiday promoted since the banking crisis started, to stay in Britain rather than go abroad for a vacation. But at least a stay-cation has the advantage of eating breakfast in someone else's house (B&B); staying home for dinner doesn't much cut it, especially if all the food is bought in.

Just cook me a nice stand-up lasagne from scratch and I'll be happy....But actually, we are going out for our Valentine's Dinner on Saturday, so I'll report back on it then.

It's Boxing Day in England!

When I first heard of Boxing Day, I thought, gee is it like the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day – a game on the holiday? A boxing match?? Who would want to watch?

But no, apparently it's the day all good little English children would put their new Christmas gifts back in their boxes ready for storage throughout the new year. Maybe this is why antique auctions can bring in so much moola for original boxed toys.

I always feel sorry for my American compatriots who have to go back to work the day after Christmas. At least here in England, we have a day to recover. And this year we have two days! Yes, two holidays on Monday and Tuesday to make up for Christmas being on Sunday. Sadly we don't get an extra day off on January 2nd, except for this year again on Monday because New Year's is on Sunday. I see from my filofax, though, that the Scots get an extra day on Tuesday the 3rd, so it looks like Hogmanay is going to last for at least five days this year.

Well, you can imagine what these holidays do to work patterns. Almost everyone who can get away with it takes off the entire time between Christmas Eve and January 2nd. The worst Christmas I ever had, ever, anywhere, was my first in England. Alone, I was in my first house when the boiler went out about December 23rd. Absolutely no tradesperson was available to come fix it until early January. So I suffered in one room with a gas fire in snowy weather for ten days; and I couldn't even go out because zilch was open: no shops, no cinema, no library.

These days I must admit it has gotten better. The shops are open as much as possible to make a quid, and the cinemas are open if you want to see a kids' movie. But we are conversely happy to hibernate throughout the week. How about you?

Corn, Beans & Squash: a vegetarian Thanksgiving

Yesterday (Saturday) saw us celebrating Thanksgiving; since Thursday is not a holiday here in England, the dinner usually happens on the weekend. And since we invited vegetarian friends, we had to think up a menu that didn't include turkey. What's Thanksgiving without a turkey, you might ask? Well, how about the original pilgrim menu...

As I heard it in my youth, after many years and months trying to get to the Americas, the pilgrims finally landed on our eastern shores just in time for winter. Not having been able to farm and hunt beforehand to build up winter stocks, they were starving! Native Americans came to the rescue with their staples of corn, beans & squash, and a couple of wild turkeys thrown in for good measure. Ever since, the turkey has overshadowed the triumvirate of good complementary vegetable proteins.

Corn, of course, is the native English word for grain and includes wheat, barley, rye, oats – cereals that can be ground for flour. This is why many English towns have a Corn Exchange building where grains were once brought to market. So when the pilgrims saw Zea mays (named after the Taino Indian word, mahiz or maisí), they must have thought, Oh, this is American corn. While in England, if one wants to be perfectly clear you are talking about Zea mays, you should use the word "maize" rather than "corn", although the Brits do refer to corn-on-the-cob as "sweet corn".

Sorry, I'd eaten most of my cornbread when I decided to
take this picture!

In any case, our menu included both corn-on-the-cob (boiled in water for 20 minutes, eaten with butter and salt), and cornbread. Now the latter was a problem because coarse-ground cornmeal is not normally sold in England. They have "corn flour", which is our "corn starch", and they also unaccountably stock masa harina – fine-ground maize for making corn tortillas. I say unaccountably because the El Paso brand of ready prepared Mexican foodstuffs is very popular here, so why is anyone making corn tortillas from scratch? The American cornbread has definitely not caught on here – I wonder why not since it's soooo good served warm, lathered with butter.
 
To complement the corn, I made vegetarian Boston Baked Beans (what could be more tasty with its infusions of maple syrup, spiced rum and molasses?). Navy beans not being sold here, I used cannellini beans, which are way bigger than navy beans though they are both Phaseolus vulgaris L.; next time I will try haricot beans, another P. vulgaris variety. For dessert, pumpkin pie, classified as a "sweet pie" and served a la mode of course. The latter also caused problems because, not being a pastry chef, I prefer to buy frozen pie shells, but there were none to be had in the supermarkets. So I thought, graham cracker crust is a good substitute, but graham crackers aren't sold here either. Finally I found a recipe that substituted ginger snaps! These they do have here but are called "ginger nuts" or "ginger crinkles". To compensate, I left out the ginger from the pie filling recipe, and the combination of pumpkin and ginger snaps was really good!

Our English dinner guests very much liked the offerings to the extent that the cornbread recipe was shared and taken home. I hope they can find coarse-ground cornmeal somewhere down the line as it makes a lighter, more crumbly bread than the dense masa harina product.

Halloween or Guy Fawkes?

When we first moved to England, Halloween was not a celebrated holiday. Our American customs were just beginning to get known to the British, which resulted in some confusion. You see, only five days after Halloween is the one native British holiday: Guy Fawkes Day on November 5th (though you don't get off work to celebrate).

Guy Fawkes is renowned as a participant of the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament in 1605 in an attempt to return English rule to Catholicism. His capture on November 5th and later death are what's celebrated on Guy Fawkes Day. Traditionally, English children have made effigies of Guy and sat themselves with their Guys on the street, begging "A penny for the Guy" in the lead up to November 5th. On the day itself, at least in our early years in England, the Guys were paraded through the streets in a contest for the best Guy, then later added to a large bonfire structure which was lit in the evening along with a fireworks display.

Well, the advent of Halloween in Britain encouraged some children to start canvassing neighborhoods (neighbourhoods) two weeks in advance to collect sweets (candy), like collecting pennies for the Guy. With no sense that households may not have bought their goodies to hand out yet, the kids were turned away with nothing. Moreover, they had no idea of what the phrase "Trick or Treat" really meant: when we asked for a trick, they were dumbfounded.

With the cross-over of traditions in England, I was therefore surprised on a recent visit to the States to find that effigies are a big thing these days. So this 'Guy' sitting on the pumpkin could well have been taken onto the streets for collecting pennies -- though I think the real Guy, who called himself Guido while fighting for Spanish causes in the nether-lands, was a bit more sophisticated than the straw might imply.

So, Happy Halloween, and Happy Guy Fawkes Day -- the one English celebration that is not high church or purely commercial.