The Roding Valley Meadows - Wildlife Gem

The flower rich meadows are easily the                                                                                                most outstanding natural feature of  the    Roding Valley.

At one time meadows like these were common place stretchung as they did along the whole length of the Roding. This is in sharp contrast to today where arable agricultural dominants the land use.

The Roding Valley meadows have had a long continuity of traditional management. For centuries cattle have grazed the meadows during the autumn and winter months and during summer the meadows were cut for hay. Importantly, there has been no application of artificial fertilisers, herbicides or pesticides. The general lack of this type of interference is vital for the continuity of the flora and fauna. In the past the grazing of cattle has been an important aspect of the management. Cattle tend to graze selectively, eating the more palatable plants such as grasses, leaving the coarser ones like sedges and rushes to grow into prominent clumps.

Not only do sedges and rushes tend to survive but in doing so they also provide nesting sites for birds such as Snipe and Redshank, two species which are characteristic of flood meadows, both of which formerly bred in the Roding Valley at Loughton.

As the year unfolds the rich and varied flora of the meadows is revealed. Spring sees plants such as ladies smock and kingcup flowering in the meadows, the latter showing as vivid splashes of yellow in Hither River Mead. A little later the many species of sedge appear, looking rather like grasses but having triangular stems. The Roding Valley list includes hairy sedge, spiked sedge, carnation-grass and brown sedge, the latter three species being typically found in meadows and marshes. About this time the rich grass flora begins to come into flower, some thirty three species having been recorded here. Many common species are found in the meadows including cocks-foot, red fescue, rough meadow-grass and meadow barley. Sweet vernal grass, the grass, which gives hay its distinctive aroma, also grows in abundance. Two quite uncommon grasses are to be found here, meadow-brome and hybrid fescue (a hybrid between a fescue and a rye grass). Both are characteristic of old flood meadows.

By late May and early June the meadows are at their best and in full flower. Ragged robin is found in four of the meadows, although it is abundant in only one of them. It is easily recognised as one of the campion family and can be identified by its deeply-cleft pink petals. It tends to occur in the wet parts of the meadows along with kingcup and ladies smock.

In the hay meadows birds-foot trefoil, ox-eye daisy, knapweed, sorrel and burnet saxifrage all become evident by early summer. Summer also sees the appearance of meadowsweet, a favourite plant although very common. Coming late into flower are two specialities of the hay meadows, pepper saxifrage, an umbellifer much declined in Essex, and devils-bit scabious, so called because of its truncated root, its blue flowers in August and September being very attractive to insects.

A rich flora with many wild flower in turn supports a varied fauna. Most obvious to the casual observer is the rich bird life of the meadows. Over the last few years some 90 species have been recorded in the Roding Valley. In late spring and summer, sedge warbler, skylark, reed bunting, and whitethroat can be found about the river and meadows. Late summer sees flocks of finches and other seed-eating birds on the dying heads of thistle and teasel, and cold late autumn weather can bring uncommon migrant ducks to the gravel pit lake. Shoveller, goosander and red-breasted merganser were all seen on the lake in the harsh winter of 1978–9. Less obvious is the invertebrate fauna, the bugs, beetles, flies and other small insects, which inhabit meadows and hedgerows. As in the case of the plants the fauna contains characteristic species that are declining elsewhere as their habitat is diminished. At the same time many common species find refuge here. Most summers produce myriads of Meadow Brown butterflies drifting over the meadows with their lazy dipping flight.

In the absence of any ancient woodland in this part of the Roding Valley the hedgerows and hedgerow trees assume a greater significance.