95 - Northamptonshire Uplands : Description

Physical and functional links to other National Character Areas

The Northamptonshire Uplands National Character Area (NCA) extends north-east from the Cotswolds NCA south of Banbury to border the Northamptonshire Vales NCA and Leicestershire Vales NCA around Market Harborough at its northern extent. In the west it borders Dunsmore and Feldon NCA and it shares most of its eastern boundary with the Northamptonshire Vales NCA. A small area in the south-east abuts the Yardley Whittlewood Ridge NCA. It is part of the wider Jurassic ‘wolds’ landscapes that include the dip slope of the Cotswolds and extend north to the High Leicestershire NCA and the Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire Wolds NCA. The south-western corner of the NCA is designated as part of the Cotswolds Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB).

The hills are ‘the main watershed of Middle England’, with wide, far-reaching views from the edges and across the ridgetops. The area is an important supplier of water to towns in surrounding NCAs with many reservoirs and much abstraction from rivers. The River Cherwell rises in the south near Charwelton and flows south. The Tewkesbury Avon rises on the north-eastern edge near Naseby, and flows west then south-west, while the north-east-flowing Welland rises near Sibbertoft. The rivers Tove and Ouse rise here too and flow southeast. The eastern slopes form the upper catchment of the Nene, with the major tributary of the Ise in the far north-east. Topographically, the Upper Nene divides the Northamptonshire Heights to the north from the Cherwell/Ouse plateau, sometimes known as the ‘Ironstone Wolds’ in the south.

The NCA is crossed by several nationally important transport corridors. It is effectively divided in two from Rugby to Northampton by the M45, M1, A5, the West Coast Main Line railway and the Grand Union Canal. In the south, the M40, A423 and the Oxford Canal cross through, and further north the A14. Urban areas and large towns include Daventry and Banbury. Close by in neighbouring NCAs are Northampton and Milton Keynes, Kettering, Rugby, Coventry, Leamington Spa and Warwick. The many historic houses, parks and gardens, the Knightley Way, Jurassic Way, Brampton Valley Way, Battlefields Trail and the Grand Union and Oxford canals provide well-used recreation assets for people in surrounding areas.

The Northamptonshire Uplands today

An area of gently rolling, rounded limestone hills and valleys capped by ironstone-bearing sandstone and clay Lias, with many long, low ridgelines and wide, long-distance views across the ridges throughout. It lacks a strong sense of identity, not least because of its very varied landform.

The area forms the ‘main watershed of Middle England’, with rivers radiating in all directions. At the southern end, the River Cherwell rises near Charwelton and flows south. The Avon rises on the eastern edge near Naseby flowing west and south-west, while the north-east-flowing Welland rises near Sibbertoft. The tributaries of the Tove and Ouse originate in the south-east flanks, flowing south-east. Much of the eastern side of the area forms the upper catchment of the Nene, with its major tributary, the Ise, arising in the north-east. Topographically, the Upper Nene divides the Northamptonshire Heights to the north from the Cherwell/Ouse plateau or ‘Ironstone Wolds’ to the south.

In the northern half of the NCA, the Northamptonshire Heights have a rolling, gently hilly landform, with long, level views criss-crossed by a regular pattern of high hedgerows with frequent mature trees. Settlement is sparse with some small villages prominently sited on hill tops, and some lying within the small, sheltered valleys, often with large stone churches with prominent steeples. The widely spaced villages and infrequent, isolated farmsteads give the area a remote, empty feel. South of Daventry, the Cherwell/Ouse plateau (known as the ‘Ironstone Wolds’) is hillier and the undulations are sharper and more frequent. There is less of the glacial boulder clay which dominates the northern area, settlement is more frequent and arable predominates. The two distinctly hilly areas are divided by the low, flat valley of the River Nene and surrounded to the west, east and north by wide, open, low-lying vale landscapes. The south-western corner of the NCA is designated as part of the Cotswolds AONB.

There are, however, strong unifying landscape elements across the Northamptonshire Uplands. The most historically important of these, found in the remaining pasture fields, are the extensive areas of open field systems with ridge and furrow and the earthworks of deserted and shrunken settlements. Occurring frequently throughout the NCA, they are prominent and evocative in evenings and winter, when low sun casts long shadows and they seem to dominate the landscape. Other unifying features include the high, wide, A-shaped hedgerows (associated with the strong hunting and steeple chasing traditions of the area) bounding the largely rectilinear fields with their frequent mature ash and oak trees; the many historic country houses and their associated extensive areas of designed parkland landscapes and gardens; the attractive and distinctive ironstone, cob and brick villages; and the small, scattered but prominent broadleaved woods and coverts.

Land is mostly in agricultural use, with a mixture of arable and pasture, though around the edge of the area, reservoirs are a significant element within the landcover, and along the Nene Valley, gravel extraction has occurred. Arable is extensive on the more level ground of the ridgetops, especially south of Daventry where the highest levels of field boundary loss have occurred. Here, hedgerows can be quite sparse and low and hedgerow trees intermittent. Limestone and ironstone walls also occur in some places, such as around Lamport.

Woodland is sparse, with many scattered, small, broadleaved coverts and copses, some in prominent hill-top positions, dotted across the landscape and quite frequent in an arc in the south from Badby to Woodend. The few ancient woodlands and bluebell woods, such as Badby, take on a special value and interest where there are few other areas of semi-natural vegetation and limited wildlife interest. Flood plain grazing marsh occurs around Banbury; there is a concentration of acid grasslands west of Northampton and south of Daventry, and of lowland meadow sites in South Northamptonshire, often associated with other semi-natural features; and there are small, scattered pockets of mire, lowland meadow, calcareous grassland and lowland dry acid grassland throughout, especially along the river valleys, some designated Sites of Special Scientific Interest for their biodiversity interest. The area is also important for farmland birds. The Brampton Valley Way and the Grand Union and Oxford canals provide important wildlife corridors. Upper parts of the River Nene fall within the Nene Valley Nature Improvement Area (NIA), which seeks to improve connectivity of habitats and restore the ecological network in the Nene Valley.

The predominant field pattern, and a strong unifying factor, is Parliamentary enclosure of the 18th and early 19th centuries imposed on an ‘up and down’ landscape; the rectilinear pattern is frequently strongly visible, though areas of earlier piecemeal enclosure are found in places. Straight, narrow enclosure roads with wide, grassy verges, often following ridges, add to a regular, characteristic pattern in the landscape. From the ridges, the essence of the uplands, described by W.G. Hoskins, can be seen: “In this hill country, partly isolated summits and partly high table land in places, the wind blows hard and cold… Up at Naseby next door to Cold Ashby… their voices are louder than anywhere else, they shout at each other to overcome the winter wind.”�

Settlements are generally small, nucleated villages with distinctive ironstone, cob and red-brick buildings with pantile, clay or thatched roofs, clustered around an ironstone church. Some villages, such as Naseby and the aptly named Cold Ashby, are on prominent hill-top sites but others lie in sheltered situations at the heads of minor valleys, often set within mature treecover, with an enclosed, intimate, sheltered character and a unity resulting from the distinctive local vernacular.

The modest village houses are a strong contrast to the nationally important great country houses with their strong character and extensive designed parklands and estates containing a great many veteran and mature open-grown trees, providing rare habitat for lichens and invertebrates. Cottesbrooke, famed for its gracious proportions and extensive parkland, has enabled the survival of extensive open field systems of ridge and furrow; Canons Ashby is built around a medieval monastery; and Althorp House has the grand Georgian elegance of Henry Holland’s design. There are also many fine smaller houses, most in local stone, including Ashby St Ledgers, Stanford and Sulgrave. The estate character of the landscape is emphasised by the uniformity of buildings in the estate villages and lodges.

Around the fringes, along the Cherwell and between Rugby and Daventry, many villages have become significantly enlarged by 20th-century development which does not reflect the distinctive local vernacular. The remoteness of the central undeveloped villages is emphasised by the minor roads that serve them, providing a stark contrast to the busy strategic routes of the West Coast Main Line and Great Western Railway and the M1, M40, M45, A14, A45, A5, A508, A422 and A423 roads which cross the area.

Recreation facilities include the Grand Union Canal and Oxford Canal, Pitsford Reservoir, the many historic houses, parks and gardens open to the public and long-distance routes such as the Knightley Way, Battlefields Trail, Jurassic Way and Brampton Valley Way.

The landscape through time

The area is mainly underlain by sedimentary strata of the lower and middle Jurassic periods. The muds and limestones of the Lias Group, which outcrop in the west of the area, were laid down in a warm shallow sea which was rich in marine life including many species of ammonites. Many of the limestones and sandstones of the Northampton Sands at the base of the Inferior Oolite Group, overlying the Lias Group, are very rich in iron. They were also laid down in a shallow sea, and subsequent weathering of minerals has resulted in the formation of rocks of distinctive colours. Overlying these, the clays and sandy limestones of the Great Oolite Group outcrop in the east of the NCA, continuing in a broad swathe through the central part of the Northamptonshire Uplands. Collectively, these rocks – which belong to the Rutland Formation, Blisworth Limestone and the Blisworth Clay – were deposited near to the shore of a shallow tropical sea.

Overlying the solid geology in the east and north of the area are thick superficial deposits of Quaternary till (boulder clay), with stretches of alluvium (sands and gravels) in the main river valleys, both dating from the Wolstonian glacial cycle. While the area was not glaciated during the Pleistocene, it was affected by extreme periglacial erosion, which has influenced the drainage of rivers including the Cherwell. Soils are closely related to the underlying geology and superficial deposits; here there are mostly types of loamy and clayey soils, often seasonally wet or with impeded drainage and providing mostly Grade 3 agricultural quality land with pockets of Grade 2, good arable land in places, particularly in the river valleys and in the southern half of the NCA around Banbury.

The area forms part of the Jurassic belt of ‘wolds’ landscapes that stretch from the Cleveland Hills in Yorkshire to Lyme Regis in Dorset, via the neighbouring Cotswolds. In this NCA, all of the sharper features of the Jurassic scarp slope have been smoothed away by a long process of denudation. The history of the area is in many ways typical of a ‘wolds’ landscape. It was originally covered in thick woodland over a soil not very attractive to early cultivation. Much of the area, particularly the clay plateau to the north-east and the Lias uplands of the south-east, was cleared for grazing in the later prehistoric and Roman period. There is scattered evidence for settlement of this period, most evident around the edges of the area within the river valleys.

The early Anglo-Saxon settlements were along the river valleys but the middle Saxon period saw the farmsteads (-tons) spreading up onto higher ground, and the outstanding late 7th-century church at Brixworth in the north-east of the NCA indicates that these were sites of major significance. This is the area where the Vikings and Saxons met and the incidence of place names with suffixes of ‘-by’ and ‘-thorpe’ indicates the influence of the Danes and the Danelaw in this area.

By the 11th century, there was quite frequent settlement although at a lower density than the surrounding more fertile areas and the predominant pattern of nucleated settlement had already developed. Up to the mid 14th century, colonisation proceeded rapidly. Most of the woodland was cleared and nucleated villages, surrounded by a sea of open fields in ridge and furrow cultivation, dominated the landscape. The substantial churches reflect this main period of the area’s expansion and colonisation, which went into decline following the disasters of the mid 14th century: the population shrank and settlements were deserted for a variety of reasons including disease, the limited potential for cereal growth and the difficulty of maintaining the fertility of these upland soils. Ambitious landlords like the Spencers were able to accumulate large areas of land for grazing; in 1577, their flocks at Wormleighton and Althorp numbered 14,000. Gradually, arable was largely replaced by sheep farming over much of the area and, as a result of the lack of subsequent cultivation, the NCA is now one of the classic locations for deserted settlements, medieval earthworks and shrunken ends of villages, with nationally important survival of ridge and furrow reflecting the former extent of the open field system. As the population shrank in the 14th to early 16th centuries, and monastic lands were added to the estates of the wealthy and the profitability of wool production continued, the great landscape parks and country houses such as Althorp, Canons Ashby, Cottesbrooke and Holdenby were laid out, some by major designers such as Repton and Brown. The strong landlordship that often went with such parks is reflected in the distinctive common architecture of the planned estate villages and lodges. The Elizabethan and Jacobean houses, notably Holdenby, Althorp and Canons Ashby, are particularly associated with the court life of those periods, the poems of Edmund Spenser and the masques of Ben Jonson.

Tenant and freehold graziers tended to maintain or improve village farmsteads, reflected in the many surviving fine stone-built farmhouses, often with threshing barns attached, of the 16th to early 18th centuries. Many of the surviving historic houses within the villages were originally farmhouses, changing function in the 18th and 19th centuries as new, larger steadings with large barns and cattle courts were built on the fringes of settlements and in newly enclosed fields and the remaining open land was enclosed. While there are areas of irregular earlier enclosure, especially in the north, the predominant enclosure pattern in the NCA is regular Parliamentary enclosure dating from the 18th to 19th centuries.

In the 20th century, the main changes to a substantially remote, rural area were the massive loss of elm trees to Dutch elm disease during the 1970s; the building of major road routes including the M1, M40 and A14 which cross it; the widespread expansion of arable cultivation and the building of modern farm buildings, loss of permanent pasture, improvement of remaining grassland and consequent rationalisation of field boundaries, and loss of boundary trees and ridge and furrow, particularly in the southern half of the NCA; the construction of reservoirs around the edge of the area; and, more recently, the construction of telecommunications masts and large numbers of wind turbines, some within the NCA for example round Yelvertoft, but mostly in the surrounding areas.

In recent times, there has been significant development pressure in towns in surrounding NCAs such as Northampton, Rugby and Kettering as well as within the NCA in Banbury and Daventry, with much commuter-related development in nearby villages with good road and rail links to local towns and to cities such as Birmingham and London. The development and upgrading of the strategic transport road and rail routes which cross the area and subsequent associated warehouse, industrial and ‘out-of-town’ shopping and housing developments along these transport corridors have had a significant urbanising impact on the landscape and reduced levels of tranquillity in these areas.