In general, the hedgerows of Broadway Parish are not herb rich for reasons previously discussed. This is not true for all examples however and the reader is encouraged to dispute any negative ecological comment made in the Enchiridion which can only ever be a starting baseline against which improvements in knowledge and effort may be measured.
Hedgerows, like walls and other linear features, provide important migration corridors for many animal and plant species. Where one species-rich hedge remains in a network, the others to which it is linked, directly or indirectly, may be biologically enriched, in time, from it.
Rackham (1996) divides the lowland English countryside into ancient and planned landscapes pointing out that the one is the product of at least a thousand years of continuity and most of it has altered little since 1700. The other is, in the main, a mass-produced, drawing board landscape, hurriedly laid out parish by parish under Enclosure Acts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; but occasionally, Rackham points out, there survive features, notably woods, that the enclosure commissioners failed to destroy.
An examination of appropriate scale Ordnance Survey maps makes it clear that in the parish of Broadway, small irregularly shaped fields (a feature of ancient landscapes) are a feature of the scarp and parts of the Vale rather than the high Cotswolds. The hedgerows bordering such fields are good candidates for boundaries demonstrating some antiquity and these, especially, should be retained wherever possible. In Broadway Parish, it is the scarp which has largely preserved the ancient landscape pattern, though some areas bordering the disused railway line are also of interest. It is usually discordant features such as railway lines which sever the corners of pre-existing fields, or facets of the landscape which make land difficult to work, which have preserved features of interest including ancient hedgerows and fields.
Examples of ecologically sympathetic hedgerow management include:
Cutting a hedge from one side only in any one year in order to retain foraging, nesting and egg-laying sites for insects and birds on the uncut side.
Avoiding hedgerow management during the bird nesting season, which is weather-dependent but generally between March to September inclusive.
Dry-stone and Cotswold stone walls are an important habitat within the parish for lichens, mosses, liverworts and a range of wall colonising flowering plants and the insects and other animal species which feed, or otherwise depend, on them. There is a particular need to establish a management agreement to protect and enhance the wall flora of the village itself and this, subject to refinement, should include:
Nil use of herbicides
Reduced, and selective, manicuring and ‘weeding’ of boundaries
Allowing pockets of soil to develop naturally on wall tops
Raise village awareness of Broadway’s wall flora.
