104 - South Herefordshire and Over Severn : Description

Physical and functional links to other National Character Areas

The South Herefordshire and Over Severn National Character Area (NCA) is bordered by the Severn and Avon Vales, Malvern Hills, Herefordshire Lowlands and Forest of Dean and Lower Wye NCAs to the east, north-east, north and south respectively. The Welsh county of Monmouthshire and the Black Mountains and Golden Valley NCA border the western edge, separated from the NCA by the River Monnow.

Garway Hill in the west, the highest point in the NCA at 366 m, provides stunning panoramic views across the area and surrounding area from the peaks of the Black Mountains in the west to the Cotswolds in the east and across to May Hill, at the south-east corner of the NCA, which itself provides views of up to 12 counties on a clear day. The meandering valley of the River Wye provides attractive views north and south out of the area, both from the valley floor and from vantage points along the steep valley sides.

Lower Old Red Sandstone underlying much of the area is found right along the Wye Valley from Hereford to just south of Tintern and extends right through Herefordshire into Shropshire and westwards into Wales.

The rivers Wye and Leadon flow into the NCA from the Herefordshire Lowlands NCA to the north. The Wye flows south through the centre of the NCA before passing into the Forest of Dean and Lower Wye NCA, joining the Severn at Chepstow, the Leadon passing through the north-east corner before flowing through the Severn and Avon Vales NCA into the River Severn at Gloucester. The water quality of the Wye through this NCA is significantly influenced by discharges from Hereford and Ross-on-Wye and sediment from intensive agricultural land use upstream. Flows in the Wye are influenced by extraction for water for Gloucester in the neighbouring Severn and Avon Vales NCA.

The A40 (south of Ross-on-Wye) and M50 provide an arterial route connecting South Wales to the Midlands, heavily used by commercial traffic to avoid the Severn bridge tolls. The A40 east from Ross-on-Wye provides a transport route and connection to Gloucester. The A49 and A466 run north-south, connecting Monmouth to Hereford. There are no railway stations in this NCA. A section of the Wye Valley Walk long-distance path crosses the area from Goodrich to Hereford and the River Wye is navigable by small boats and canoes.

Thirty-nine per cent of the Wye Valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) and 3 per cent of the Malvern Hills AONB lie within this NCA. These protected landscapes provide additional recreational resource to the wellwooded countryside for both local residents and the many visitors to the area from South Wales, the West Midlands and beyond.

The South Herefordshire and Over Severn today

South Herefordshire and Over Severn is an NCA of three principal parts: the Wye Valley with its narrow flood plain dissected by the river channel meandering through farmland from Holme Lacy to Goodrich, in the centre of the area; to the east the Woolhope Dome, Marcle Ridge and Over Severn, rising abruptly out of the Herefordshire Lowlands and influenced by limestone geology, with well-wooded ‘daffodil country’, old orchards and views east across the Leadon Valley to the Malvern Hills, Cotswolds and the Gloucestershire-Herefordshire borders; and to the west the Garway Hills, a group of rounded Old Red Sandstone hills which abut and contrast with the Welsh Borders across the river Monnow on their south-western edge.

The area is unified by the underlying Old Red Sandstone, resulting in characteristic fertile red soils, the exception being the grey soils associated with the Silurian limestone rocks, shales and siltstones of the Woolhope Dome, Marcle Ridge and May Hill. The Woolhope Dome is a distinctive feature of the Herefordshire landscape: from distant views, it appears as a wooded dome but, from within, there is a landscape of sheltered vales where the shale crops out and a more open, almost downland landscape on the limestone outcrops.

A number of rivers drain the NCA, the largest being the Wye. It has a narrow flood plain, with wide incised meanders, prominent riverside slip-off slopes and steep outer slopes and abandoned meanders/oxbow lakes, for example to the east and south of Penyard Hill (Rudhall Brook) near Ross-on-Wye. The River Wye is of international importance and is designated as a Special Area of Conservation (SAC) for species such as native crayfish, otter, salmon, shad and lamprey. The Leadon, in the north-eastern corner, drains southeastwards towards the Severn, fed by a complex dendritic drainage pattern in the many valleys at its head. On the northern and western edge of the Woolhope Dome, small streams drain radially and westwards to the Wye and Frome. The River Monnow flows southwards along the south-western edge of the NCA, fed by short streams from the ridge that extends from Kentchurch down to Welsh Newton. To the north-east of the Garway Hills, the Garren Brook drains south-eastwards into the Wye, fed by numerous streams arising in the steep-sided valleys.

The scenic quality and natural beauty of the Wye Valley landscape is nationally recognised as part of the Wye Valley AONB, designated in 1971. Large, wide, high interlocking spurs of land between Foy and Ballingham overlook the incised flood plain, giving long and very attractive views from vantage points such as Sellack and Ballingham Hill, or more spectacularly from Capler Hill.

Woodland cover is concentrated on the steeper hill slopes, the steep outer slopes of river bends, parkland-style clumps around hamlets and farmsteads, hedgerow trees and landscaped parklands. The areas around May Hill through Dymock up to the Woolhope Dome and along the Monnow Valley have abundant woodland, a mix of broadleaves and conifers, with more than half of the sites being of ancient semi-natural woodland. Woodland is noticeably sparse in the more fertile areas of the lower Wye and around the Garren Brook west of the River Wye. The Woolhope Dome provides many good examples of ancient semi-natural woodlands such as Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) at Sharpnage Wood, Cherry Hill Woods and Lea and Pagets Wood. Oak and ash are the main canopy species and there is abundant cherry and yew as well as some lime and wild service. The ground flora is rich and reflects the calcareous nature of the soils with species such as stinking iris, spurge laurel and stinking hellebore. Wild daffodils are abundant in some of the woods. Ancient semi-natural woodlands are also found along the valley of the River Monnow, and in the vicinity of King’s Thorn, such as at Mynde Wood, Aconbury Hill and Nether Wood towards the north-west of the area.

Part of the Dymock Forest is a deciduous plantation of native species (though not necessarily of local/British provenance) on an ancient woodland site. Dymock Woods SSSI is noted for sessile oak and small-leaved lime. Planting of ancient woodland sites with non-native conifers has been undertaken on the Woolhope Dome, notably at Haugh Wood. Many conifer plantations are of relatively low wildlife interest but some contain very old conifer stands that are of value for conservation and support breeding goshawk. Where a diverse ride-and-glade structure has maintained an element of the seminatural composition there is a good variety of invertebrates, particularly woodland butterflies and moths.

Traditional orchards are a significant feature of this NCA, particularly around the Woolhope Dome, May Hill and Over Severn area along the Gloucestershire-Herefordshire border and north-east of the Garway Hills. These older orchards with a wide range of fruiting trees are becoming fragmented but are of high conservation value, particularly for birds, lichens and saprophytic invertebrates such as noble chafer. Modern commercial bush orchards also occur widely but are of little conservation value except in relation to pollinators. There are numerous landscaped parklands and woodlands, some of which are registered, such as Hill Court, Sufton Court, Stoke Edith, Kentchurch Park and Holme Lacy, exhibiting a wealth of styles and landscape designs. These ornamental parklands support a wealth of deadwood invertebrates (many of which are nationally rare or scarce), nesting sites for birds and roosts for some bat species.

The acidic Broadmoor Common is found at the very centre of the Woolhope Dome on the Lower Silurian May Hill Sandstone, and within the smaller field pattern associated with the steep slopes of the Dome are important unimproved species-rich calcareous and neutral grasslands. These range from the steeper slopes of Common Hill SSSI above Fownhope to the more neutral grassland found within smaller hamlets such as Checkley. The highest points on the Garway Hills tend to be rather open with grassland, patches of bracken and the remnants of formerly extensive commons. The Over Severn area supports many unimproved or semi-improved neutral grasslands with abundant wild daffodils. Many daffodil fields may be fairly species poor because daffodils are more resistant to some agricultural operations than other wild plants, or perhaps because they have been cleared from woodland comparatively recently. The ‘daffodil country’ was well known as a tourist site in the 1930s and is of cultural and historical as well as wildlife interest. This NCA probably contains the most extensive populations of grassland wild daffodils in England.

The undulating landscape of the lower Wye Valley, Over Severn and the gentler slopes of the Garway Hills are of good agricultural quality, with much of it being used for cereals and grass leys, but with a wide variety of other uses including horticulture, potatoes, pigs and poultry rearing, and dairying. Fields tend to be large and rectangular, resulting from the piecemeal enclosure and successive re-organisation of medieval strip fields, particularly on the low, flatter land inside the meanders of the Wye and along the Garren Brook. In enclosed valleys of the Woolhope Dome, such as that around Sollers Hope, and the steep-sided valleys of the Garway Hills, small pasture fields with irregular boundaries and overgrown hedgerows predominate. There is an area of horticultural land use north of Newent, with its usual mixture of polythene tunnels, shelterbelts and glasshouses.

Many hedgerows in the NCA are several hundred years old and in places, for example at Hentland, Peterstow, Ballingham and Llandinabo, the parish boundary hedgerows may well be based on very early monastic estate boundaries and therefore could be at least a thousand years old. The condition of hedgerows is variable. Some are lush and overgrown with large hedgerow trees, many more are severely flailed. In other cases, only a scattered line of trees and individual shrubs survive. Hedgerow trees are generally mature or over-mature and are very sparse in areas where the agricultural fields are larger.

South Herefordshire and Over Severn is a landscape of large weathered sandstone farmsteads standing in their own fields and of numerous hamlets formed around a manor house and church: there are few villages. Ross-on-Wye is the principal settlement, dominated by the spire of St Mary’s Church, visible for miles along the valley. It has an attractive core of 18th- and 19thcentury rendered buildings and a market centre. To the south-west of this, The Prospect, laid out by John Kyrle – the ‘Man of Ross’ – in the 18th century, has wide views across the river. The often-photographed and painted view of Rosson- Wye from the river’s edge remains particularly distinctive. The remainder of Ross-on-Wye is mainly 20th-century housing, spreading northwards across the A40 to Blackfield and southwards to Tudorville, with the built-up and urban fringe character continuing across the river to Wilton. The A40 and its traffic dominate views from and towards the town on the western side.

Outside Ross-on-Wye, the main settlements are small hamlets and isolated farmsteads. Sandstones of the Lower Old Red Sandstone predominate as building stones, even if they are in places rendered and whitewashed. There are many typical Herefordshire foursquare houses with hipped slate roofs and massive farmstead buildings with rugged faces of heavily weathered sandstone. The larger settlements of Woolhope Dome are Fownhope and Woolhope, although both are relatively small. Here some of the older buildings are of the underlying grey Silurian limestone in the robust Herefordshire style; others are of black-and-white construction. Over Severn settlements are dominated by Newent and Dymock. Enclosed, winding, commonly single-track lanes link the settlements. The larger settlements have older cores, with their styles of building commonly found in an attractive mixture, as at Fownhope. Twentieth-century development is limited: modern housing, for instance, is prominent on the edge of Newent. In the Garway Hills, the pattern of small hamlets and clusters of farmsteads, linked by numerous narrow lanes and only sporadically by a more substantial road, is typical of the Welsh Borders, as are the more dispersed settlements on the patches of former common.

Farming and cider production are the main industries in this NCA, but tourism increasingly provides a significant economic resource. The many parklands, accessible woodlands and historical sites such as Goodrich Castle, together with the nationally recognised AONB landscape of the Wye Valley, provide a range of tourist destinations. The National Cycle Network Route 46 (Hereford to Abergavenny section) passes through the west of the area. There are also sections of a number of long-distance footpaths including the Herefordshire Trail, Gloucestershire Way and Wye Valley Walk. Access to the Wye for watersports is permitted only in places; however, a public right of navigation exists all the way to Hay-on-Wye.

The landscape through time

The NCA (and much of neighbouring Herefordshire, the Black Mountains and Brecon Beacons) is largely underlain by Old Red Sandstones, formed in the arid environment of the Lower Devonian period, resulting in an undulating topography, the rounded sandstone Garway Hills of the Devonian Brownstones Formation and rich, red fertile agricultural soils. Towards the west, much older rocks were pushed up during the Variscan Orogeny (mountain building phase), forming the upfolded Silurian limestones, fossiliferous shaley mudstone and siltstone (laid down when the area was covered by a shallow tropical sea) of the Woolhope Dome, Marcle Ridge and May Hill, with their distinctly different grey Silurian soils. Along the border with the Severn and Avon Vales NCA Permian and Triassic sandstones are found, the boundary being formed by the southward continuation of the East Malvern faultline along a major line of weakness in the Earth’s crust. At Woolhope Dome, erosion of the domed upfold exposed a succession of limestones and shales in concentric ridges and vales; the oldest rocks are the Llandovery May Hill Sandstone Group (Lower Silurian). These are the sandstones of the Haugh Wood Formation which outcrop in the centre of the Woolhope Dome. The Wye Valley is separated from the hilly land of the Woolhope Dome to the east by the line of the Woolhope Fault, which runs from north-north-west to south-south-east.

The underlying rocks have directly influenced the flow of the River Wye across the sandstone. Between Mordiford and Fownhope, the weaker Silurian Raglan Mudstone and Devonian St Maughans formations result in a wide, flat valley floor with the river meandering across a larger flood plain. Where the river crosses onto the slightly more resistant Brownstones Formation, it has developed meanders of larger amplitude which are incised into the land surface, exposing the sandstone which can be clearly seen in the old river cliffs at Ross-on-Wye. There are river terrace deposits, gravels laid down from meltwater during the last interglacial, which mark the former, higher level of the valley floor. At Holme Lacy there are remnants of the highest and oldest of the river terraces. Both the Wye and Monnow rivers have augmented the agricultural quality of the soils in the river valleys by depositing alluvium in times of flood, and this continues to the present day. Carboniferous Upper Coal Measures have been mined in the Newent area.

Evidence of Palaeolithic human activity over a 25,000-year timescale has been found in Merlin’s Cave and King Arthur’s Cave at The Doward on the border with the Forest of Dean and Lower Wye NCA (Herefordshire Through Time); artefacts such as animal bones suggest use by nomadic hunters taking shelter in the caves. There is also a bronze-age cemetery at Pontshill, south-east of Ross-on-Wye. During the Iron Age, settlements became larger and iron-age activity is evident at the hill fort at Little Doward on the NCA’s southern border, at Capler Camp near Brockhampton and Aconbury Hill south of Hereford.

To the Romans, the Marches in the west of Herefordshire were an area of conflict with local tribes. There is little evidence for Roman settlement within this NCA, only of a Roman villa at Putley, the town of Ariconium at Western under Penyard and suggestion that the fort on Aconbury Hill was occupied by the Romans, a strategic position that continued to be occupied periodically up to the 17th century.

In the early Middle Ages, much of the area of the Garway Hills lay within Archenfield, created from the Celtic British kingdom of Ergyng in 740 ad when some of the kingdom became part of English Mercia. Welsh law and customs were still being observed at the time of Domesday Book and many of the place names in Archenfield today are Welsh or anglicised, and indeed the area was known as ‘Herefordshire within Wales’ and remained part of the Welsh diocese of St David’s until the 19th century. The pattern of small hamlets and clusters of farmsteads is typical of the Welsh Borders as are the more dispersed settlements on the patches of former common. The historic character is summed up by Sylvester (The Rural Landscape of the Welsh Borderland: A study in historical geography, Sylvester, 1969): “The solitary parish church, the Welsh place and farm names, the rugged field pattern… are all reminiscent of Wales… this pattern is only rarely broken by the introduction of alien elements, usually an Anglo-Norman defensive work or the moated house which succeeded it, a dovecote such as that at Garway or the interpolation of English names in farm and field.”�

Following the Norman invasion in 1066, conflict between the Welsh and Normans continued. Many small motte-and-bailey castles were built along the border with Wales. The building of Goodrich Castle, one of the many Marcher Castles, was begun in the late 11th century by the landowner Godric of Mappestone. During the 12th century many of the wooden castles were replaced by stone keeps, as was the case at Goodrich and nearby Wilton Castle.

By the end of the Middle Ages, the area comprised a largely cleared landscape of churches, small woodlands, parklands, sheepwalks (large open areas for grazing sheep, particularly around the Woolhope Dome), sporadic patches of common, cultivated land, substantial manor houses and farmsteads with numerous hamlets but without villages. The ancient woodland of Dymock forest was at one time probably continuous with the Forest of Dean, though by the time of the Domesday survey it had already become separated (Forest Service: First forty-five years of the Forestry Commission of Great Britain, Ryle, 1969). The area was widely regarded as part of one of the most fertile and productive areas in the country, most of the medieval strip fields having been enclosed and reorganised around farmsteads by the 18th century. There are pockets of earlier medieval irregular enclosure, especially in the hillier land to the east and west.

In 1794, the fertile agricultural land of the lower Wye was described by John Clark as “unequalled by few spots in the land of Great Britain for the production of every article that can contribute to the comfort, the happiness and in some degree the luxury of society. Here verdure almost perpetual reigns.”� (General View of the Agriculture of the County of Hereford, Volume 4, Issue 5, Clarke, 1794) The area’s attractive landforms lent themselves to the development of landscape parks and the wealth generated by agriculture found expression in the development of substantial houses within parkland, whether as the 17th-century formality of Holme Lacy, as Humphry Repton’s early-19th-century landscape at Sufton Court on the edge of the area, or as the fine manor houses such as Fawley Court. One of the most interesting parklands of Herefordshire can be found at Kentchurch which developed out of the less formal picturesque landscape movement, creating a more natural ‘forest scenery’ influenced by Uvedale Price (1747-1829). Kentchurch Park includes the famous Jack of Kent oak, whose girth exceeds 11 m, making it one of the ten largest in England. This parkland tradition continued into the early years of the 20th century with the development of the park at Brockhampton and its fine Arts and Crafts church.

Viscount Scudamore of Holme Lacy in the 17th century pioneered many of the modern fruit varieties used in Herefordshire and the West of England (Herefordshire Through Time). By the 17th century apple orchards had become extensive in Herefordshire and the neighbouring counties of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire. These orchards were used mainly for cider production, and the development of canals in the late 18th century expanded the market for it. The industry continued to expand until during the 20th century it contracted as a result of disease, imports and taxes.

Depression hit agriculture in the 1870s and lasted until the Second World War, after which improvements on the better agricultural land reduced tree and hedgerow cover and introduced substantial new farm buildings. Orchards, a prominent feature of the 19th-century landscape, disappeared through removal or neglect. However, it would be easy to exaggerate the effects of 20th-century change: the variety and distinctive character seen on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six inch series in 1870 persists, in the main, down to the present day, though remnants of heath supporting bilberry, ling and cross-leaved heath which were found within the Woolhope Dome until relatively recently have now disappeared.

Change in the agricultural landscape has seen the intensification of arable farming, the extension of coniferous woodland, the abandoning or conversion of farm buildings no longer required for agricultural use and a modest increase in the size of the larger settlements. Newent and Dymock have grown modestly from medieval market centres and a localised horticultural industry has developed to the north of Newent. Dymock has given its name to a group of poets which included Rupert Brooke and Robert Frost who gathered around Lascelles Abercrombie’s cottages at Ryton in the early years of the 20th century. Abercrombie himself wrote in celebration of the area’s famous daffodils. The Wye Valley AONB was designated in 1971.

Owing to the high fertility of the soil, agriculture continues to dominate the area, with small remnants of semi-natural habitat surviving on the steeper, less productive ground. More recently, the fertile flood plain of the River Wye has been used for more intensive agriculture. There has also been considerable diversification of crops, the most significant being the expansion of soft fruit (through the use of polytunnels) and less traditional crops such as asparagus on the versatile Ross sands. Bush orchards have also increased with the expansion of the cider industry.