Woods, Hedges and Fields - Gower - page 268

FIELDS
In the peninsula there are compact nucleated villages with a subsidiary pattern of single farms. The fields
tendtobelargeandregularinshapeandhavedescriptivenamesinEnglishsuchasGreenField,Limekiln
Close and Longfurlong, the latter name arising because the field had previously been managed as part of
an open common field. This is in clear contrast to upland Gower, where single farms and hamlets domin-
ate and the names of the small irregularly shaped fields are Welsh. In the early 1970s Michael Williams
(1972) used the field-name data from tithe redemption surveys completed between 1838 and 1848 to plot
the precise boundary of the Welsh and English cultural frontier in Gower. Allowing for the greater sta-
bility of field names compared with the spoken languages he claimed that they represented the linguistic
situation of the late 1700s and early 1800s. His work confirmed, as expected, that peninsular Gower was
the core of the English-speaking area and that upland Gower was Welsh-speaking. The neck of the pen-
insula between Pen-clawdd and Swansea was the transition zone between the two areas, where a belt of
woodland, the coed or boscus , began and continued northwards. Similar work around the same time by
Emery using farm names taken from the first edition of the Ordnance Survey one-inch map published in
1830 suggests a boundary between English and Welsh Gower running from northwest to southeast along
a line of common land from Welsh Moor to Clyne Common.
ARABLE PLANTS
Theplantsthatgrowinthearablefieldsincludenotonlythecropplantitself,butalsootherspecies.There
has been debate for some time over the status of arable plants in Britain, and whether they are native or
introductions,butitisnowalmostcertainthatthevastmajorityofBritisharableplantsarenotstrictlynat-
ive. Instead they were probably brought here by Neolithic farmers as agriculture spread to Britain around
3,500 years ago. As seed corn was exchanged between neighbouring farms the plants were transferred
with them. With no effective methods of control, distinct communities of plants developed over the cen-
turiesalongsidetheintendedcropplant.Thesecommunities,whichshowslightvariationsinspeciescom-
position depending on the climate and soil type, appear now to be completely natural and their ancient
ancestryisnotappreciated.Withtheassistanceofnewgeneticanalysistheseplantsmightrevealtheirori-
ginsandprovidearecordofthemovementofagricultureintoBritain.Differentplantsprobablyarrivedin
variousareasofBritain,asfarmingspreadfromseparatepartsofEuropeandthepresentpatternscouldbe
'fossils' of former distributions. Financial support and advice is now available to farmers in Gower who
sign up to the arable options within Tir Gofal, the Wales agri-environment scheme, and they are encour-
aged to leave the field margins unsprayed and unfertilised. Without the help and support of farmers the
outlook for arable plants is very depressing.
As much of the recent history of farming in Wales has been involved with grazing animals it is easy
to forget how important arable cultivation was in the past. From the Neolithic period onwards cereals
were extensively cultivated, especially in lowland coastal areas such as Gower. The arable plants found
today represent just a fragment of this rich past, much of which has been destroyed in the last fifty years
or so by the intensification of arable farming, which has involved massive advances in technology and
huge increases in efficiency, crop quality and crop yields. Many species of plants which once grew in the
fields alongside the crop have declined, some to the point of extinction, since they cannot compete with
densehighlyfertilised crops.Asaresult arable fields nowcontain alargeproportionofBritain'smosten-
dangered plants and arable field margins are identified as one of the highest-priority habitats. In the New
Atlas of the British and Irish Flora (Preston et al ., 2002) arable plants are identified as the group that has
undergone the most remarkable decline in distribution during the last thirty years.