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Along the Moors - Crudgington Green
Outnumbered by Sheep
By the early 1600s, the agricultural improvements of the previous century had reaped great dividends for local landowners. Yet, while the Weald Moors became highly-valued for summer pasture, the area began to suffer the consequences of overgrazing; as specialist graziers from outside the area increasingly brought animals onto the remaining commons during spring for fattening before winter sale. Although the practice caused consternation among many locals, it appears to have persisted over the next century or so and, in his memoirs, Reverend Plaxton of Kynnersley commented in 1707, ‘I have heard some graziers say, they could not by their best upland hay feed an ox so fat as the moor hay would do’.
Drainage improvements also appear to have had a catastrophic effect on the delicate hydrology of the wetland habitat, resulting in the erosion of moorland peat deposits. Of the changing landscape around Kynnersley, Reverend Plaxton commented,
“These grounds have been formerly much higher, for I have observed oaks or other trees, where the soil is so much shrunk and settled from them, that they stand upon high stilts, and are supported from the great fibres of the roots, so that the sheep may easily creep under them”.
Although hundreds of acres of moorland had been brought into regular cultivation, the area had not earned the name of the ‘Wild’ Moors for nothing and, as events of the 18th Century would show, local landowners were still some way from gaining mastery over the area… a lesson the moors original improver-in-chief, Walter Leveson, certainly found out to his cost. Despite being knighted in 1587, he later fell on hard times and was locked up in the Fleet Prison for being unable to pay his debts, where he died in 1602.