Getting ridge and furrow out of a field?

[Princess Pooper]

no problem locally for large national leisure operators getting permission to level and fill 60acres with caravans (might be something to do with local lib dem MP being retained year in year out on 40k+ a year as a 'consultant')

not a peep from environment agency/ dethra etc.

It would be county council archaeologists and English Heritage, or local heritage groups.

 

[multi power]

what exactly is the pourpouse of ridge and furrow ?

 

[Sheep]

what exactly is the pourpouse of ridge and furrow ?

Drainage I think? Stops erosion as well.

 

[Rob Holmes]

I thought we learnt at school that it increased the surface area of the field = more could be grown

 

[multi power]

Drainage I think? Stops erosion as well.

if they are there for drainage thay might be just as well to stay

 

[jackstor]

I would spray it off, couple of passes with discs, sow a catch crop like kale stubble turnips etc, then next year it will be a lot easier to level with no sods to worry about.
For uneven ground I run a power harrow on back and dutch harrow on front, couple of passes with that its amazing how it can level things up.

 

[Princess Pooper]

Mediaeval ridge and furrow - which of course was arable - was formed by ploughing with oxen and a single furrow plough in lands and yes it always went up and down the slope if there was one so it helped with drainage. That''s one reason there may be many changes in direction (we all know many fields slope more than one way and these were very big fields). In a wet year the crops on top of the ridge did better and in a dry year the crops at the bottom did better - there is a really big difference in drainage between ridge and furrow. A farmer's land in the open fields (which were usually several hundred acres in size) was distributed in bundles of a few strips scattered around the fields, that way everyone shared the good and the bad land - or in my photo a few posts back - everyone lost a bit off the bottom when it flooded. There were often tracks running through the fields due to their size (baulks). At some point - in many cases after the Black Death when there weren't enough bods to till the land and some entire villages were wiped our or abandoned - it went into grass and has remained so ever since, enclosure often followed so that stock could be better managed in smaller enclosures (not everywhere had Enclosure Acts, much was enclosed a lot earlier). There is some later, often Victorian ridge and furrow too, tends not to have the sweeping curve at the headlands where they turned the plough. http://www.archaeologyuk.org/ba/ba33/ba33feat.html

 

[JCMaloney]

As above..... its part of our history that is ever diminishing. I look at it as a fingerprint of long gone farmers when times were harder than most of us can imagine.

 

[Ley253]

As its an ex clay pit for a brick yard, I would be very careful even ploughing it! Brick makers used to put the reject bricks into the hole the clay came from,could make the plough rattle a bit in places!

 

[Princess Pooper]

As its an ex clay pit for a brick yard, I would be very careful even ploughing it! Brick makers used to put the reject bricks into the hole the clay came from,could make the plough rattle a bit in places!

Very good point--- history - in this case in field names can tell us a lot!

 

[multi power]

As its an ex clay pit for a brick yard, I would be very careful even ploughing it! Brick makers used to put the reject bricks into the hole the clay came from,could make the plough rattle a bit in places!

Sounds like it's a job for a Ferguson plough

 

[Ley253]

what exactly is the pourpouse of ridge and furrow ?

It is to do with keeping the land dry, over winter.There is all the info you could want in Stephens "Book of the Farm" a very old tome indeed! I have looked but I cant find a date of publishing, but I only have a modern reprint.

 

[Ramrod]

I'm with Rob i.e. larger surface area.

Must of gone to same school !!!

 

[neilo]

Be very, very careful about just going in and levelling it by bulldozing, ploughing, discing, or whatever. You can very easily end up with thin patches of topsoil (or none) over where the ridges are, and deep strips where the furrows are. We have levelled lots in years gone by, by various means. If you get it wrong, you will have stripey fields for ever more.

When I was a child in the 70's, we levelled some big areas by outwintering a lot of dairy heifers on stripgrazed Kale. Being up to their bellies (literally sometimes) in clay mud levelled & mixed the ground up a bit, but still left stripes in the subsequently flat'ish fields. It was a 'fun' job for a child helping to move the electric fences twice a day through the winter, and we were all glad when we got the chance of some buildings next door to house them and rear them 'properly'. Surprising how things come full circle though and it's now back in fashion.

The best method we found was with a big 360. Scrape the topsoil back, level the subsoil, then scrape topsoil back over. Surprising how much you can do in a day. Not sure sure if it costs any more than the umpteen multiple passes with any type of cultivator that a botch job needs. Field use is much more flexible and productive after, whether it stays in grass (reseeded) or arable cropping. I can't think it would do any harm to the capital value of it either, if it's done properly.

 

[Red Fred]

I always thought it came from ploughing open field plots with oxen as Princess Pooper said.
Down our way, we don't get much arable ridge and furrow, but some people confuse it with relic water meadows. They were constructed between 1600 and 1850 in most of the southern chalk valleys to control water flow over the meadows. It kept the frost off the grass and gave them an early bite as well as irrigating the grass in summer. They constructed them by hand in ridge and furrow shape, and many are now left high and dry by later drainage schemes.

 

[JCMaloney]

Bit more about the historic value of R&F.
http://www.archaeologyuk.org/ba/ba33/ba33feat.html

Fascinating stuff to detect where you never know what will turn up hence the importance of recording the finds accurately.
Last outing we had on any R&F was mostly Modern to Victorian coins & bits interspersed with Roman coins & brooches that weren`t any deeper down but must have been pulled up from the furrows over time.

Landowner was fascinated by the display box and that it spanned the thick part of 2,000 years...... before that she just called it her "sheep field" !

 

[multi power]

it would seem the best thing is to have a bit of a dig to check top soil levels, i would have had assumed the ridges were just made of topsoil, if so easy to level them off, but, if the ridges are made of sub soil then as @neilo says a digger n strip the top soil, level subsoil n replace top soil

 

[Princess Pooper]

it would seem the best thing is to have a bit of a dig to check top soil levels, i would have had assumed the ridges were just made of topsoil, if so easy to level them off, but, if the ridges are made of sub soil then as @neilo says a digger n strip the top soil, level subsoil n replace top soil

The soil - at least round here - in most is basically solid clay. The ridges are not made of topsoil. The only 'topsoil' you have is the result of 700 years of permanent pasture which as I have said before is around 4-6" in most cases. The difference in height between top of ridge to bottom of furrow can be up to 3ft in places on well-defined r & f. In our area, local arable farmers are amazed when I show them a sample of that topsoil as they have never seen anything like it, they have to deal with the horrible sticky mess (mainly Ragdale series) that resulted when their arable land was (re)created in the 1940's - 1970's by ploughing out the ridge and furrow that used to cover almost the whole of this area. It is recognisable as a poor topsoil created by mixing in that good stuff plus a few decades of stubble etc being returned, because you soon know about it if you tough the underlying clay and bring it up! It does fill me with respect when I think of what the mediaeval farmers had to cope with, trudging along behind an ox plough on that land.

 

[Princess Pooper]

Bit more about the historic value of R&F.
http://www.archaeologyuk.org/ba/ba33/ba33feat.html

That's the same link I posted!

 

[neilo]

The soil - at least round here - in most is basically solid clay. The ridges are not made of topsoil. The only 'topsoil' you have is the result of 700 years of permanent pasture which as I have said before is around 4-6" in most cases. The difference in height between top of ridge to bottom of furrow can be up to 3ft in places on well-defined r & f. In our area, local arable farmers are amazed when I show them a sample of that topsoil as they have never seen anything like it, they have to deal with the horrible sticky mess (mainly Ragdale series) that resulted when their arable land was (re)created in the 1940's - 1970's by ploughing out the ridge and furrow that used to cover almost the whole of this area. It is recognisable as a poor topsoil created by mixing in that good stuff plus a few decades of stubble etc being returned, because you soon know about it if you tough the underlying clay and bring it up! It does fill me with respect when I think of what the mediaeval farmers had to cope with, trudging along behind an ox plough on that land.

Ours was all similar, with a good topsoil (as with most pp) over hard packed, glacial clay. I think the biggest difference in production on ours, was from gaining the ability to put some decent grasses in, rather than making the best of the ancient (weed) grasses that are there purely by virtue of having survived.

That said, there is plenty of R&F left there, that is earning lots of els points. Farming it is not always the best way of farming it these days, IYSWIM.