The ancient landscape of the Ulverscroft Valley, Charnwood Forest

Fay Brotherhood
5 days ago
9 min read

Stretching over 100ha, Ulverscroft Valley SSSI/Ulverscroft Nature Reserve is a real jewel in the crown of Charnwood Forest and is one of Leicestershirs finest wildlife sites. Its mosaic of semi-natural ancient grassland, heath, woodland and wetland habitats boast over 200 plant species, including several Leicestershire rarities. It's also of great importance for invertebrates and birds.

Poultney Wood, Fox Covert, the Valley Marshes and Herbert's Meadow are owned by the Trust. The rest of the reserve is owned and managed by the National Trust.

Landscape History of Ulverscroft.

Landscape historian Oliver Rackham describes the concept of "Ancient Countryside"in his seminal text A History of the Countryside (Rackham, 1986). This is a landscape of small fields delineated by ancient, tree lined hedgerows derived from piecemeal clearance of woodland. These ancient enclosures can date back to the Saxon age or earlier.

Ulverscroft is the epitome of ancient countryside, appearing on aerial mapping as an island amidst a surrounding Post Enclosures landscape of straight, planned hedges.

The presence of Medieval ridge and furrow amongst its meadoes is testament to the landscapes unspoilt antiquity.

Check out the photo below. Can you see how the landscape of Ulverscroft is "parcelled in" bit a seies of broad, tree lined hedges and woodlands? If you compare that to the straight, thin lines of the Enclosures Act landscape surrounding it, you can see how most of the interior and outer hedges quite clearly derive from woodland. I think we are looking at a "ghost wood".... That being the remains of a woodland etched out in a ghostly outline.

The "Ancient Countryside" Landscape of Ulverscroft Valley North in Charnwood Forest (Bing Maps, 2025).

This is a phenomenen you can find frequently on old maps and is usually a product of the medieval practice of "Assarting", wherein common land was taken as private land. Pockets of wood, heath or moor were grubbed out to create a field (assart). A strip of woodland would be left around the boundaries to form a hedgerow.

These were multifunctional and served not only to mark ownership and contain stock, but to provide a self renewing harvest of poles and fodder, just like the woodlands themselves.

Assarting created what we today called "piecemeal enclosure"... where local woodlands diminishd one "cookie cutter hole" at a time.

These assart hedges are in essence linear strips of ancient woodland. As such, they qualify as Irreplaceable Habitat.

The remnants of an ancient oak hedge, with a distinct "browse line"

Parochial History

Ulverscroft as place is centred around The Priory of St Mary, which was founded in 1134 by Robert, Earl of Leicester, and was taken over by the Augustinian order in 1174. It was dissolved in 1539 and stands today as ruins set in a picteuresque scene along he Ulverscroft Brook where it associated with two medieval fish ponds, set amongst sheep pasture. Previously, Ulverscroft was extra-parochial land and became a Civil Parish in 1858, set within the ancient West Goscote Hundred in the Mid division of the county.

Ulverscroft and the Agricultural Revolution

As the agricultural revolution marched the name of progress across the countryside, It was rare for a landcape to escape the attentions of the "Improvers". Their goal after all was to achieve food security and prosperity. The Improver would not stop until all the "wastes" and marginal land had been converted to a state of high productivity.

Yet the meadows of Ulverscroft escaped and consequentially, its ancient habitats and their precious communities have suffered very little change. The types of grasslands it hosts were once widespread over the siliceous, Triassic clays which rest between Charnwood's rocky summits.

It is a living antiquity.

In that lies its value.

Site Layout

Ulverscroft Nature Reserve and SSSI stretches over around 3km, from Poulteney Wood, south east to Bailey Sim wood. The below map from MAGIC (DEFRA, 2025) shows us the general site layout of the SSSI to the North.

Dark green = broadleaved deciduous woodland Orange hashed overlay - Ancient woodland

Bright green = lowland meadow

Bright Pink = Good quality semi-improved neutral grassland

Pastel pink = Lowland heath/acid grassland

Light blue hash overlay = SSSI extent

Ulverscroft Valley Habitats and SSSI Extent (Magic, 2025

In my visits of the 23rd and 24th May 2025, I was mainly looking at the grasslands of the northern section, above Priory Lane. This part and Stoneywell Wood, just south of Priory Lane comprise the 59ha Ulverscroft Nature Reserve, a site joint managed by the LRWT and National Trust.

Ulverscroft's Geology & Soils

The Ediacaran basement geology of the entirety of Charnwood is volcanic or igneous intrusive and it boasts a dizzying array of of rock types. It is in fact of international geological interest. In this location, the "type rock" is that of the Blackbrook Reservoir Formation. These are volcaniclastic rocks (both pyroclastic & reworked volcanic rocks) deposited between 635 and 541 million years ago. Charnwood's buried mountainscape crops out as rocky tors, between which the fossilised landscape is overlain by the red mudstones of the Gunthorpe Member. Deposited by Triassic deserts, this is part of the wider Mercia Mudstone Group and was commonly referred to in the past as The Trias or Keuper Marl. Both terms are now obsolete but you will find them in most historic literature about Charnwood and the Leics coalfield and I like them so I will continue to use them!

Many millions of years later, during the Quaternary period, a layer of superficial deposits were lain by glaciers in the form of the Diamacton Oadby Member.

Diamicton is a geological term describing poorly sorted, unsorted, or heterogeneous sediments of varying "clast" sizes, from clay, silt, sand, pebbles, cobbles, and boulders, in a muddy or sandy matrix.

The Diamicton of the Oadby Member is described by the British Geological Society as;

"Grey, weathering brown, characterised by Cretaceous and Jurassic rock fragments; subordinate lenses of sand and gravel, clay and silt. Clay, brown to grey, and silty clay, with chalk and flint fragments. In some places are glaciofluvial (glacier transported) and alluvial (river derived) clay, silt, sand and gravel deposits".

The combination of variably permiable gravels, sands and clays, atop a thick and impermeable layer of mudstone and rock has generated a series of slowly permeable seasonally wet acid loamy and clayey soils of low fertility (Soilscape 17, Landis) and slowly permeable, seasonally wet, slightly acid but base-rich loamy and clayey soils of moderate fertility (Soilscape 18, Landis).

These soils are all hindered by poor drainage and this tends to generate seasonally wet pastures and grasslands. Agriculturally they are best suited to grass production for dairying or beef, with some cereal production, often for feed. Indeed, cattle are the typical livestock of the wetter central part of Charnwood. Sheep cope poorly with wet ground, often succumbing to foot rot, and they are the prevailing stock around Charnwood's drier parts (for example around Whitwick).

The distribution of these soil types across the site broadly correlates with the distribution of acid grassland and lowland meadow across the site and the base rich element could give us some clues as to why some of the enclosures qualify as lowland meadow rather than acid grassland.

This variability takes place at a far more detailed resolution than Soilscapes indicates. It is dry in the centre, and slightly acidic towards the top (pH 5.5, see Primavesi & Evans,

1988, Habitat Study 27); and marshy around the margins where spring water seeps through (up to pH 7.6).

Ulverscroft Brook

Aside from the geology and soils, the foundation of any valley complex is of course its watercourse.. The Ulverscroft Brook is fed by various springs and minor watercourses rising from Poultney Wood, Fox Covert and local fields. It is one of many lovely Charnwood streams - quick and bubbling and dotted with stone. Places where in times past the dipper would dabble.

The springtime streamside show is distinctive and a carpet of opposite leaved golden saxifrage Chrysosplenium oppositifolium and marsh marigold Caltha palustris clothes the banks and. White-clawed crayfish Austropotamobius pallipes and Brook Lamprey Lampetra planeri are recorded alongside bullhead Cottius gobi.

Travelling further south, this eventually becomes the River Lin, which of Bradgate Park fame is the shortest river in the UK, flowing but a short way before it disappears into Cropston reservoir. But it is this that is the saving grace of its crayfish, having isolated them from the relentless spread of the American signal crayfish and its plague......

Sphagnum Pools

Ulverscroft is one of the areas where we can find one of Leicestershire's rarest habitats..... sphagnum bog/pools. This is reportedly present to the west of Fox covert.

Ulverscrofts Grasslands

Natural historians are drawn to Ulverscroft because it hosts the "golden unicorn" that is true unimproved grassland. It is incredibly rare to find a grassland which has survived the ages with no agricultural improvement at all and some argue that in the lowlands it probably doesn't exist at all. But here the landscape layout and the diverse and distinct species assemblages suggest that maybe.... just maybe... this really is the real thing.

Ulverscroft hosts a real mosaic of grasslands, traversing all the boundaries between acid, neutral, dry and wet and stepping at either extreme towards mire and wet/dry heath.

The wet grasslands north of Priory Lane scontain an exceptionally rich flora, enhanced by the structural complexity created by the ridge and furrow system. For this reason they are described in Natural Englands SSSI citation as unrivalled in Leicestershire. Of these, the best is Herberts Meadows, which over just 2ha contains around 185 vascular plants, including 25 grasses and 15 sedges. This remarkable species richness comes from the variable soil conditions we talked about earlier. Variability brings biodiversity because or creates a multitude of micro-niches, allowing many more species to find their home than they could in a more "boring" habitat.

Herberts Meadows contain 5 species of orchid, including the marsh orchid Gymnadenia densiflora and flea sedge Carex pulicaris which grow nowhere else in the County. Further species include fragrant orchid Gymnadenia conopsea, heath spotted orchid Dactylorhiza maculata, quaking grass Briza media, devils bit scabious Succisia pratense in ENORMOUS amonts, bitter vetch Lathyrus linifolius, meadow vetchling Lathyrus pratensis, tormentil Potentilla erecta, greater birds foot trefooil Lotus corniculatus marsh thistle Cirsium palustre and heath grass Danthonia decumbens. Spring Sedge, Carex caryophyllea and a hybrid betwen greater and lesser pond sedge Carex acutiformis x riparia.

Of the sedges, most are doing well but one sad loss is cottongrass Eriophorum angustifolium, which was lost in the 1960's and gives us a flavour of the peak district like moorland that may once have clothed the Charnwood landscape. This is supposed to be present in Charnwood Lodge but I have not yet found it. Some of the surviving sedges and rushes include wood Club-rush Scirpus sylvaticus, star sedge Carex echinata, tawny sedge Carex hostiana, common yellow-sedge Carex viridula ssp. oedocarpa and spring sedge Carex caryophyllea

Three County rarities include fragant orchid Gymnadenia conopsea, and bottle sedge Carex rostrata. Sedges are very well represented, numbering 13 species. Further important species include heath spotted-orchid Dactylorhiza maculata ssp ericetorum, marsh violet Viola palustris and marsh arrow grass Triglochin palustris.

Adjacent to Lea Wood and south of Ulverscroft Priory lie some of the County's best areas of unimproved acid grassland, Lea Meadows Nature Reserve (Leicestershire & Rutland Wildlife Trust reserve).

In the unimproved neutral grassland adjacent to Sandhills Lodge and Lea Wood to the south and Poultney wood to the north, drier areas are dominated by sweet vernal grass Anthoxanthum odoratum, crested dog's-tail Cynosurus cristatus and fescues Festuca spp, with adder's-tongue fern Ophioglossum vulgatum and quaking-grass Briza media being an extra treat.

To the northeast of the site, we see a transition to a mire/rush pasture community in which an area of acid, marshy grassland is dominated by purple moor-grass Molinia caerulea, tufted hair-grass Deschampsia cespitosa, various sedges and rushes, some heather Calluna vulgaris and meadow thistle Cirsium dissectum.

Transitioning to a dry heath/acid grassland mosaic, blberry Vaccinium myrtillus appears.

Ulverscrofts woodlands

Another fine feature of the Ulverscroft valley is its woodlands, which contain both planted oak and beech woods and ancient sessile oak woods, and boast a correspondingly rich tree, shrub and ground flora, which includes wood sorrel, wood anenome, greater stitchwort, yellow pimpernell and yellow archangel and in Poultney Wood a spectaculat show of bluebells each spring. . Charnwood is of regional importance for its fungi and a rich assemblage appears in autumn.

Heath and Scrub

It is likely the heathland areas would once have mirrored those of Charnwood Lodge NNR, but they are today dominated by bracken Pteridium aquilinum, although bilberry Vaccinium myrtilus remains around hill tops and some heather Calluna vulgaris regenerates along paths.. There are areas of gorse scrub, featiring European gorse Ulex europaeus, western gorse Ulex galli and sallow Salix cinerea, which supports a diverse moth fauna.

Ulverscrofts Birds

Ulverscroft supports some interesting breeding species, including snipe, woodcock, yellow wagtail, tree creeper, nuthatch, green and great spotted woodpecker and sparrowhawls. There are records of redstart in the woodland and isolated trees make song posts for the tree pipits who bob about the heaths.

Ulverscrofts Insects

The diverse and specialist array of habitats found in Ulverscroft is inevitably excellent for invertebrates. Ulverscrofts butterflies include large and small skipper, common blue, small copper and meadow brown and I am sure hundreds of more specialist species. I saw THE MOST DELIGHTFUL shiny jewels of a pair of beetles!