The Downswatch Plan for the Downs and Avon Gorge Management

Roger Yates, Downswatch Founder, January 2009

The correct approach to management should start from the point of view that this is a beautiful landscape that needs care and enhancement, rather than a problem landscape that needs to be changed. The Downs and Gorge can benefit from professional botanical intervention on a precise scale with due regard to landscape. Here are some constructive proposals.

The Downs and Avon Gorge at Bristol must have been the first natural landscape in western history to have been preserved specifically because it was valued as a wild and natural landscape. In previous eras forest and hills had been preserved for hunting, or, in the ancient world, because they were sites of religeous significance. But it was because of the new world view that arose with the European Enlightenment, which provided theories of the natural and the sublime, that landscapes such as the English Lakes began to be valued and eventually preserved. Bristol was absolutely in the vanguard of this impulse to preserve sites of natural beauty with the Downs Act of 1861. No less than the S.S.Great Britain and Brunel's Suspension Bridge, the conservation of the sublime and picturesque natural landscape of the Downs and Avon Gorge was a Bristol first.

So it must be of great concern to anyone who values Bristol's contribution to modernity that a whole range of new management policies for the area recently put forward completely ignore the cultural and historical significance of the site.

The Downs and Avon Gorge are significant in our natural history because they are a landscape shaped by natural processes. But the comprehensive redevelopment now proposed will change that absolutely and create a new landscape shaped by human agency. A plethora of over-egged management prescriptions are being put in process:

> to cut down something like half of the woodland on the Bristol side of the Avon Gorge, as well as blocks of woodland on the Leigh Woods side
> to fence areas with chain link fencing to enclose goats on the Bristol side, and cattle on the Leigh Woods side
> drastically to thin woodland on the plateau to create a parkland of scattered trees that will be cut back and lopped to create sitelines for health and safety reasons, and to make room for heavy equipment to slash down undergrowth as it returns
> to expose the ramparts of the iron age fort at Observatory Hill by cutting down all of the trees in order to create an archeological tourist feature

How has this come to pass? The truth is that the Downs Committee (composed of Merchant Venturers and BCC councillors), has been influenced by a small number of interest groups - the government environmental quango Natural England, some botanical enthusiasts, heritage landscape experts, the archeological lobby, and the council's own Parks Department (always on the lookout for new spheres of activity). These groups have been presenting the view that the natural evolution towards woodland along the Avon Gorge, and on parts of the Downs since the area was first preserved, has been some kind of an environmental problem.

This is not the case.

Hanging woodland is the natural vegetation for the Avon Gorge, and there can be no doubt that to have allowed this landscape to return to its natural form was absolutely in keeping with the spirit of the original bequest. Our Victorian benefactors (like most modern Bristoleans), would without doubt, prefer the present natural wild aspect of the Gorge sides to the semi-industrial and mined area they inherited in the early nineteenth century. Yet last summer (2008), at a Downs Committee Meeting which was discussing the new management works beside the Circular Road, the Chair of the Meeting said that "to leave the area wild was not an option". Let us offer a number of reasons why this view is misguided:

Because the Downs were bequeathed to the people of Bristol as a natural or "wild" landscape, and this bequest was a historic first.
Because the part of the Downs in question are a Special Area of Conservation for Limestone Gorge Woodland, a type of wild woodland that does not require management like, say, wood pasture or coppice woodland. The only management required is that which allows it to return to its natural state.
Because the Downs and Avon Gorge are not like other Bristol Parks, they are a natural landscape which has evolved over the last 150 years in keeping with our forefather's bequest.
Because letting this area return to Nature has increased biodiversity by allowing for the evolution (even since the bequest) of unique tree species to Bristol, which will be threatened by any arteficial management.
Because the council's own landscape assessment states: "Despite the close proximity to the Bristol urban area, the Avon Gorge character area retains a sense of remote wilderness, which makes it a particularly valuable recreational resource." {Clifton and Durdham Down Landscape Character Appraisal Consultation Draft, April 2005 - Bristol City Landscape Design team on behalf of Bristol Parks}
Because none of the grassland plant species cited by Natural England as a reason to fell hundreds of trees along the Gorge edge, and return the area to managed grassland, is actually in danger of extinction.
Because opening up lines of sight through the scrub also opens up lines of sound from the many cars which use the Downs roads as a throughway. There are currently places amoung the downland scrub where it is possible to believe that you are not in a large city. In the Gully and Walcombe Slade even the roar of the Portway is muted.
Because of the commitment to repeated on-going expense to keep hithertoo self maintaining areas artificially managed, when to let areas remain wild would be free from cost. Where is the money to come from but our taxes?

At the same meeting it was also said that, "The Downs are a Public Park and should be managed as such". This in our view is a totally wrong-headed approach. The Downs and Avon Gorge (they are inseparable), should be managed as a natural landscape of unique historical significance. The aesthetic character of the Gorge (wild, natural) is no less significant to Bristol's history than is Brunel's bridge.

So the overarching principle of management for the Downs and Gorge should be that it is managed as a natural landscape, with an aesthetic character that is wild or shaped by natural processes.

This does not mean that we would stop mowing the grass and let the plateau return to woodland. It does not mean that we would abandon conservation of the Gorge flora. Those who favour a complete redesign of the landscape have trotted out these objections ad nauseum. The landscape has to be managed, but managed properly with an understanding of its cultural significance. So it does mean that to dismiss an unbroken flow of natural hanging woodland along the Avon Gorge as being somehow the wrong landscape, and to favour a return to an artificially created psuedo-agricultural landscape with fencing and scrub bashing is absolutely unacceptable.

Problems have arisen in designing a reasonable management strategy for the Downs and Gorge because of the insistence of seeing them as a habitat rather than a landscape. This is because management policy development has overwhelmingly been produced by nature conservation interests. Natural England, who have been made responsible for much of the Avon Gorge when it was made an SSSI, the AGDWP who wre created by Bristol City Council to promote conservation, and the council's own Parks Department. There is no advocacy for aesthetic landscape issues, which we are arguing are the primary concern. The Downs and Avon Gorge were not given to the people of Bristol for their biodiversity alone. Nor is the biodiversity of the area under threat. The kind of large scale management proposed, intended to redesign swathes of the landscape, are a result of a change in strategy in the nature conservation community in recent years away from the protection of individual species and towards the large scale restoration of habitats. This strategy is in the experimental stage and is driven by concerns over costs, and requirements to meet government targets. ("Get the trees down, put in the goats, and wait to see what happens".) In essence no one is willing to pay for professional botanic conservation and the government want "something done".

Create a small team of two young individuals who will receive training in botanical conservation and woodland craft skills (preferably in liason with the University Biological Sciences Department). They would manage environmentally important sites throughout the year. Their remit would also be to create and restore access paths through the woodland, with due regards to caring for this as a natural space. Their presence on a daily basis would undoubtedly restore public confidence and make these areas unsuitable for sexual activity.
Restore the base of the Great Quarry to a natural state, and create a reserve for the botanical species for which the Avon Gorge is famous (again, in liason with the University and leading limestone species botanists).
Make this area part of a footpath along the base of the Gorge, created and maintained by the team proposed above. Restore the other paths up and down the Gorge.
The drastic scrub clearance which was started in December 2009, and which will be extended to Observatory Hill, Fairyland, and Zoo Bank should be halted immediately. All this draconian exercise achieves is the opening up of sight and sound lines to the traffic that uses the Downs and before long this will means that nowhere is free from the invasive presence of traffic. Scrub clearance also limits bird-nesting in the same manner that increasing deer populations limit bird numbers by destroying the woodland understory.
The grazing of animals on the Downs is a right maintained by some modern commoners. It must not be used as an excuse to introduce goats and fencing to the Downs and Gorge.

Does this look like a problem landscape?

The beautiful appearance of the limestone gorge woodland canopy in Walcombe Slade, beside the Gully Walcombe Slade woodland canopy