Roding Valley Meadows LNR - Links to the past

Apart from their considerable aesthetic value the flood plain and valley-side meadows have great historical and natural history interest. They are the legacy of an ancient and conservative system of management, some of these Roding Valley meadows having almost certainly existed, virtually unaltered, for many hundreds of years. One meadow is mentioned in a 16th century document as a “mead” (a flood meadow) and there is every reason to believe that most of the remaining meadows have been in existence since medieval times.

Traditionally, the flood meadows in the Roding Valley were grazed by cattle and to a lesser extent by horses with the higher meadows cut for hay. The flood plain meadows were flooded in winter as a natural consequence of the Roding overflowing its banks. This long and stable management history has allowed a rich and characteristic flora to develop, and with it a distinctive fauna. Recording in the Roding Valley, carried out over the first half of the 1980s, has revealed the presence of some 250 species of flowering plants, with over 150 in the meadows alone. Individual meadows support between 40 and 50 species. Many of them, such as the southern marsh orchid, kingcup, ragged robin, pepper saxifrage and tufted sedge, are characteristic of ancient grassland and are yearly becoming scarcer in such an intensively farmed and increasingly urbanised county as Essex.