139 - Marshwood and Powerstock Vales : Detailed Statements of Environmental Opportunity

This section expands on the Headline Statements of Environmental Opportunity and provides further detail on each of the Statements of Environmental Opportunity.

SEO 1

SEO 1: Protect, manage and enhance the Marshwood and Powerstock vales’ highly legible relationship between geology, landform and land use. Protect and manage the naturally functioning, highly accessible and internationally important coastline and the suite of nationally designated and Local Geological Sites.

For example by:

• Explaining the connections between the geology of the National Character Area (NCA) and its settlement and land use history.
• Making the links between the types and patterns of agriculture that have developed in relation to the soils and hydrological conditions that the underlying geological strata and structures have created.
• Explaining the role that the geology and geomorphology of the Marshwood and Powerstock vales play in maintaining the ecosystem services we value – water, food provision, wildlife, sense of place and sense of history.
• Ensuring that the sense of place imparted by the localised use of specific building stones is maintained and, as often as possible, re- enforced by new development.
• Protecting important features for geological/geomorphological interpretation, from inappropriate changes in land use, for example maintaining the open, uncluttered flat tops of the Greensand hills and the magnificent vistas from them.
• Explaining underlying geological processes through the semi-natural vegetation of the area, for example linking heathlands to the acidic Greensands and wet alder woodlands and mires to the springline.
• Ensuring, wherever possible, that the natural functions of coastal geomorphological processes are unimpeded.
• Continuing to provide high-quality interpretation and engagement activities for visitors to the Jurassic Coast in order to highlight its importance, from the international to local scales.
• Providing ongoing high-quality access to the 12 km of the coast, via the South West Coast Path National Trail, and developing inland linkages to the public rights of way network.
• Managing the coastal strip and hinterland to ensure that new or existing developments do not impact on the setting or visual coherence of the coast or its scientific and cultural values.
• Planning for rising, stormier seas while managing coastal processes in as natural a state as possible and ensuring that new developments are not located where coastal defence will be required, posing a threat to continued unimpeded natural processes.
• Ensuring that measures are taken to maintain or bring about favourable condition of the geological SSSI interests running the length of the coast and that the sites of local geological importance are appropriately managed and, where possible, accessible for study.
• Ensuring that the policies outlined in the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site and Dorset Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) Management Plans are implemented.

SEO 2

SEO 2: Protect, manage and enhance the diverse but coherent pastoral landscape character: the range of semi-natural grasslands, woodland and relict heathland with their characteristic wildlife. Manage these simple patterns of land use maintained by the long history of agriculture.

For example by:

• Explaining the links between the current distribution of semi-natural habitats and the strong landscape character with the history of settlement and land utilisation over the last 4,000 years.
• Explaining that the highly valued wildlife and landscape are both products of a principally small-scale and extensive agricultural system that has been largely maintained since the Second World War.
• Working with farmers and other land managers to positively shape the way in which land is managed into the future, innovating and diversifying to maintain the agricultural economy while simultaneously preserving and positively enhancing the physical, ecological and cultural landscape that is so highly valued by local people and visitors.
• Alongside established agri-environment schemes, identifying and implementing an incentive mechanism to protect and enhance ecosystem services, allowing land managers to make business choices that are not always driven by market forces.
• Making available sufficiently robust and accessible evidence of the need to secure and improve ecosystem services, the ecosystems that provide them and the semi-natural habitats and geodiversity that underpin them.
• Ensuring that the Special Areas of Conservation, the suite of biological Sites of Special Scientific Interest and the Sites of Nature Conservation Importance in the NCA are in positive management.
• Returning traditional management regimes to those habitats that require them, particularly grazing to the range of grasslands and active management interventions in woodlands.
• Restoring and strengthening the matrix of connecting landscape/habitat features within a functional farmed environment, such as hedgerows, copses, thickets and ditches, to increase permeability and movement opportunities for wildlife.
• Returning plantations on ancient woodland sites to broadleaved species and exploring and promoting local wood fuel/produce schemes across the woodland resource in the NCA.
• Allowing natural erosion and deposition processes on the coast and cliffs to continue without undue constraint, creating and maintaining the ecological niches that are essential for early successional species and habitats.
• Creating new wetlands along the River Brit and River Char to enhance biodiversity water flow and quality and regulate flood events.
• Identifying the potential impacts of climate change on grassland and woodland habitats and targeting climate change adaptation actions.
• Increasing land managers’ understanding of the importance of the soil resource and the need for its sympathetic management for the delivery of a range of benefits and services and to enable better control of the costs of agricultural production.
• Understanding the implications of and planning potential responses in vegetation cover to environmental changes and pathogens, with particular attention being paid to loss of ash from Chalara fraxinea and beech from drought and windthrow.
• Giving high regard to the guidelines contained in the Dorset AONB Landscape Character Assessment.
• Promoting land use practices which create ground cover in the autumn and winter months, arresting water flows and reducing erosion. Seek to minimise negative impacts of compaction and soil organic matter loss from excessive tillage.
• Ensuring that the relevant policies outlined in the Dorset AONB Management Plan are implemented.
• Avoiding development that detracts from the character, natural beauty and tranquillity of the NCA and, in as many cases as possible, identifying alternative approaches which enhance and reinforce them.

SEO 3

SEO 3: Manage and enhance people’s awareness of the connections between the NCA’s strong landscape character, sense of place and distinctive wildlife and the continuity of agricultural land use and legibility of historic influences.

For example by:

• Utilising a range of media and locations to provide visitors with an integrated, high- quality interpretive experience, explaining the evolution, development and conservation of the landscape of the Marshwood and Powerstock vales.
• Using the distinctive landscape of the Marshwood Vale as a basis for thought-provoking stories for visitors and residents alike.
• Linking the landscape of the works of William Barnes and Thomas Hardy to the modern landscape to illustrate the low levels of change that have maintained the pastoral landscape into the 21st century.
• Developing new permissive access to historical sites, open access land and other areas of interest as part of a cohesive network of inspiring access provision.
• Promoting the ‘whole landscape’ approach adopted by the South Dorset Ridgeway Landscape Partnership in the adjacent Dorset Downs and Cranborne Chase NCA and investigating whether this can be used in this NCA.
• Promoting the inspirational qualities of the NCA; exploring the cultural imprints of thousands of years of human occupation which are clearly legible in the landscape; reviewing the depiction of the NCA in the arts; and understanding the changing relationship between the landscape and the people who lived and live in it.
• Explaining the intimate relationship between geodiversity, human occupation and land use history in the NCA.
• Using this section of coast with its abundant fossil record, geological strata and formations and long historical association with the natural sciences to bring a greater understanding of geodiversity and its importance.
• Maintaining and, where appropriate, enhancing the South West Coast Path National Trail, the Wessex Ridgeway and the Jubilee Trail.
• Maintaining and enhancing the rights of way network and open access land throughout the area.
• Taking opportunities to increase and improve the area of accessible natural green space in places that are currently poorly served, especially in often overlooked rural areas.
• Promoting sustainable tourism initiatives that target a broad range of visitors, allowing farm businesses to diversify, simultaneously benefiting from and conserving the landscape, its wildlife and tranquillity.
• Maintaining the high levels of tranquillity that can be experienced within the NCA. Additionally, enhancing the ‘experience of tranquillity’ at certain locations through, for example, creation of semi-natural habitats and removal of eyesores.