Norfolk Conservation Corps - More Information

The History of the Corps: The Story So Far, Volume 1
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"One man went to mow, Went to mow a meadow" is how an old song begins, and it was certainly true in 1979, although it wasn't exactly a meadow, and he didn't have a dog.

In 1979, we began working on the Lolly Moor nature reserve, and our first job there was to create the figure-of eight footpath which many of you will have walked around, but another task was carried out that year by just one volunteer.

...One of our number, being a student at the University of Excessive Abbreviations (U.E.A.) at the time and therefore having lots of free time in the summer went to the reserve every day for a period and mowed the then largest open area, mowed it with a scythe, raked and tedded the mowings until they had turned into hay, then took all the material off and burned it on the newly created footpath.

In the early summer of 1980, six cowslips appeared on an edge of the mown area, and this came as a great surprise to the Hon. Warden, a local botanist who had caused the site to be adopted as a nature reserve by The Norfolk Naturalists' Trust. He had had no idea that there were cowslips on the site.

This was an excellent example of why we do all our mowing tasks. The first mowing of Lolly Moor, done in early August, removed a very large amount of nutrients from the site, locked up in the plant bodies, and turned it all, when burned, into oxides and dioxides which went away in the breeze, off the site. It also meant that sunlight could reach the ground for the first time in many years, and the six cowslips which had survived the constant shading and which had just been growing vegetatively, could flower again and set seed.

The site was mown again, this time as a proper Norfolk Conservation Corps task, on the tenth of August, 1980, and fifteen cowslips appeared in the summer of 1981; the site was mown again in 1981, and there were forty-two cowslips in the summer of 1982; and so it has gone on, the site being mown every year. At the last count, there were three thousand, five hundred and forty-six cowslips in this area, the cowslips being counted every year because they come up early, before most of the other flowers and are thus easily counted - but the site now has to be divided up with strings to enable the counting to be done.

While the cowslips have been increasing, the other flora has greatly benefited from our work. There are now masses of yellow rattle and common twayblade to be seen every summer, a large number of common spotted orchid, several fragrant orchid, a few marsh helleborine, a surprising number of the rather uncommon adder's-tongue fern, and so on. At the same time, there now being such a variety and quantity of food-plants for the caterpillars, the butterfly population of Lolly Moor has greatly increased in number and variety. Lolly Moor is a great success story for the volunteers of the Norfolk Conservation Corps, and it is not the only one.

We began mowing on Scarning Fen on the seventh of August, 1983, this time not only for the same reasons as on Lolly Moor, but also to try to control the spread of reed. Scarning Fen is considered by experts to be the most important site of its kind on this planet, and in 1976 local politicians, being only concerned with money, caused a new road to be constructed across the lower four acres of the site. The siting of this road was also wrong in that Scarning Fen is a valley fen, so a huge embankment had to be created to bring the road up to the same level as the surrounding countryside, i.e. a major dam was built across the lower end of this phenomenally important wetland site. As a result, reed has been spreading across the whole fen since 1976.

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