136 - South Purbeck : 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: Conserving and promoting South Purbeck’s unique geodiversity including the Jurassic Coast coastline, the suite of national and local geological sites and the highly legible relationship between geology, soils, landform and land use. Maintaining and enhancing access, including via the South West Coast Path National Trail, and providing interpretation to enhance educational and recreational opportunities. In both cases, placing the local community at the heart of this opportunity, through engagement and participation.

For example by:

• Ensuring that natural function of coastal geomorphological processes is unimpeded and that only in extreme cases is intervention adopted.
• Continuing to provide high-quality interpretation and engagement activities to local people and visitors to the Jurassic Coast to highlight its importance on an international and local scale.
• Providing ongoing, high-quality access to the 42 km of the coast, via the South West Coast Path, and ensuring that inland linkages to the public rights of way network are maintained and, where appropriate, enhanced.
• Using the expertise and intelligence provided by Local Access Forums to manage access in partnership with communities and landowners.
• Managing the coastal strip and hinterland to ensure that new or existing developments neither impact upon the setting or visual coherence of the coast nor pose a future threat to continued unimpeded natural processes.
• Developing and providing interpretation for sites which illustrates the link between underlying geology and soils, thus providing a link with land use and management, and aiding interpretation of the wider landscape. Access to many potential exposures of soils that could be recognised under Local Geological Site designations is provided by the coastal path.
• Ensuring that measures are taken to maintain or bring about favourable condition of the geological Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) running the length of the coast and that the sites of local geological importance are appropriately managed and, where possible, accessible for study.
• Protecting important features, for geological/geomorphological interpretation, from inappropriate changes in land use, for example planting woodland on the southern slopes of the Purbeck Ridge.
• Conserving the visually outstanding and unspoilt coastline.
• Ensuring that the policies outlined in the Jurassic Coast and Dorset Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) Management Plans are implemented.
• Utilising the Dorset AONB Landscape Character Assessment & Management Guidance (Conserving Character) to inform agricultural management and development choices.
• Planning for Swanage’s continued protection from rising, stormier seas while managing coastal processes in as natural a state as possible.

SEO 2

SEO 2: Helping the communities of South Purbeck to protect, manage and enhance the diverse but coherent landscape character and tranquillity of this rural NCA, conserving the mixed farming land use which contributes to food provision, and a distinct landscape pattern, reducing the risk of soil erosion and strengthening resilience to climate change.

For example by:

• Understanding the systemic changes which may be occurring in the agricultural system of the area. Working with farmers, land managers and communities 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 alike.
• Helping land managers to develop profitable agricultural systems which will provide sufficient stock to effectively graze this and the adjacent NCA’s large areas of semi-natural grassland and heathland and result in a valuable livestock product.
• Understanding and promoting the services provided through specific management of ecosystems by land managers and seeking financial mechanisms which reasonably reward and incentivise those practices.
• Maintaining and restoring the network of small woodlands and copses and interlinking hedgerows typical of the Corfe Valley and Chaldon Downs, utilising their potential for wood fuel and as a community resource as a catalyst to bring them into positive management.
• Maintaining the network of stone walls found on the limestone plateau, both for their landscape value and their function in reducing surface water flows and erosion.
• Encouraging land use which maintains long views along the coast and ridges, headlands and touts (local name for lookout hills).
• Promoting cropping patterns on Chaldon Down which create ground cover in the autumn and winter months, arresting water flows, reducing erosion and providing cover and food for farmland biodiversity, including the farmland bird community.
• 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.
• Ensuring that the relevant policies outlined in the Dorset AONB Management Plan are implemented.
• Managing access in a way which balances the desire of people to enjoy and experience the geological, biological and cultural assets of the NCA with the prevention of damage to them.

SEO 3

SEO 3: Maintaining and enhancing the calcareous, acid and neutral grassland, ancient woodland, parkland, coastal cliffs, quarries, fen meadows and flushes, arable farmland and offshore reefs that are the key semi-natural habitats of this area. Additionally, conserving and strengthening the populations of the distinctive suite of species that are characteristic of the NCA.

For example by:

• Ensuring that the suite of biological SSSI is maintained in or brought into favourable condition and that the Sites of Nature Conservation Importance in the NCA are in positive management.
• Ensuring that the 1,415 ha (12 per cent of the NCA) of principally coastal habitats which are designated Special Area of Conservation attain and retain favourable conservation status as an element of the Natura 2000 Network.
• Returning traditional management regimes to those habitats that require them, particularly grazing to the range of grasslands and active management interventions in woodlands.
• Returning plantations on ancient woodland sites (PAWs) to broadleaved species and exploring and, where feasible, promoting local woodfuel produce schemes across the woodland resource in the NCA.
• Allowing natural erosional and depositional processes on the coast to continue without undue constraint, creating and maintaining ecological niches essential for early successional species and habitats.
• Engaging with the farming community and their local communities to promote understanding of the linkages and dependencies between people, their surroundings and the way in which they are managed.
• Maintaining and expanding low-intensity arable farming around St Aldhelm’s Head to expand the suitable habitat for the nationally valuable relict community of rare arable plants which survive there.
• Restoring and strengthening the matrix of connecting landscape and habitat features such as hedgerows, copses, stone walls, thickets, ponds and ditches to increase landscape permeability.
• Supporting the aims and objectives of the Wild Purbeck Nature Improvement Area.
• Assisting land managers in realising biodiversity gains through adjusting methods of production, thereby creating farmland of higher nature value, particularly low-intensity arable farmland around St Aldhelm’s Head to enhance the nationally significant population of rare arable plants.
• Creating new wetlands in the corridors of the Corfe River, Swan Brook, Ulwell Stream and the network of smaller Purbeck streams to enhance biodiversity and water flow and quality.
• Promoting the benefits of agri-environment schemes and other environmental land management schemes to the land management community of South Purbeck and helping them with applications to these schemes.
• Securing opportunities to extend and buffer existing habitats, particularly the pinch points in semi-natural coastal grasslands.
• Managing deer populations in the NCA and beyond to realise a reduction in grazing damage, particularly to the woodland resource.
• Affording suitable levels of protection to the internationally significant reef communities found off the South Purbeck coast.
• Utilising a range of media and locations to provide local communities and visitors with an integrated, high-quality interpretive experience explaining the evolution, development and conservation of the biodiversity of South Purbeck.

SEO 4

SEO 4: Protecting and managing the rich time depth and landscape texture created by the wealth of heritage assets located within the NCA, engaging both visitors and local communities in understanding the relationship between historic environment, geodiversity and biodiversity in the evolution of South Purbeck to the present day.

For example by:

• Promoting, through engagement, people’s understanding of the combined effect that multiple historic features have on the landscape character and the importance of their conservation and presentation.
• Bringing all heritage assets within the NCA into sympathetic management, seeking communities’ engagement in the process of restoring and maintaining their heritage, and explaining English Heritage’s ‘at risk’ register.
• Promoting the understanding and use of traditional materials and techniques both for maintaining historic structures and for new builds.
• Engaging local communities and visitors in preserving and celebrating the history and legacy of the quarrying and masonry industries, where possible combining the interpretation of the quarrying industry, geodiversity and natural history of the NCA.
• Ensuring that sufficient stone of the right strata is available to both maintain existing and construct new buildings to preserve the unifying nature that these materials have on South Purbeck settlements.
• Linking the low-volume/high-quality and value output of some quarries to the opportunities provided to maintain valuable biodiversity features, particularly hibernation sites for bats and microclimates favoured by many species of invertebrates and reptiles.
• Planning for restoration and creation of valuable habitats following mineral extraction.
• Maintaining and, where possible, creating access to historic assets or, if access is not possible, creating viewpoints from which they can be studied.
• Protecting historic barrows and areas of known archaeological interest at risk from ploughing by reverting to pasture. Managing the levels of grazing on historic features to prevent poaching and erosion damage on the one hand, and ensuring that scrub is removed on the other.
• Maintaining the setting of Corfe Castle.
• Maintaining the principally rural setting in which these assets are found and within which most of them have their best context.
• In an NCA where geodiversity, biodiversity and human endeavour are so closely linked it would be useful to ensure a partnership approach to new interpretation which places all of these in context through time in a way which would explain to residents and visitors alike how the area has arrived at its present state.