The Badger Menace

Winston Churchill called the battlefields of England ‘the punctuation marks of history’, places where the nation’s future sometimes turned over the course of a few bloody hours.The battles of Hastings (1066), Bosworth (1485) and Naseby (1645) are but a few of the violent struggles that made our history. Often the landscapes over which they were fought survive little altered. Here it remains possible to stand in the places where history was made.

"Sites like Iron Age hill forts, Bronze Age burial mounds, and Neolithic long barrows are highly at risk from burrowing animals," said Amanda Chadburn, an English Heritage ancient monuments inspector.

Such locations are ideal for European badgers and rabbits—animals that like to burrow into banks and tunnel horizontally, rather than straight down. Earthworks are easier to dig through than natural subsoil or bedrock.

"A lovely man-made mound is just perfect for these animals, so they're actually attracted to ancient monuments," Chadburn said.

More than half the British government’s historic estate is in the hands of the Ministry of Defence,  ranging from Bronze Age barrows via country houses and cottages to purpose-built barracks, dockyards and airfields.

Almost half of the MOD’s monuments are on Salisbury Plain, the largest military training area in the UK. Because the Plain has been in military use since 1897, its nationally important prehistoric, Roman and medieval archaeological sites and landscapes have been exceptionally well protected from modern agricultural practices. Despite the high level of training that takes place on the Plain, the MOD makes sure that this is not allowed to compromise the sustainability of the natural and historic environment.

Ironically, the most significant threat to monuments on Salisbury Plain now comes not from humans but burrowing animals, whose digging can cause irreversible damage to fragile archaeological deposits. However, practical research by Defence Estates and English Heritage has shown how this can successfully be mitigated – for example through the cost-effective covering of Bronze Age barrows with protective rabbit-proof wire mesh.

Offa's Dyke is an amazing 1200 year old linear earthwork which runs through the English/Welsh borders from Treuddyn (near Wrexham in north east Wales) to Sedbury Cliffs (on the Severn estuary, in southern Gloucestershire).  [Is is perhaps] the most impressive monument of its kind anywhere in Europe, and a construction project of comparable landscape scale was not again to be undertaken for 1000 years until the great canal schemes of the 18th century. It is one of the great engineering achievements of the pre-industrial age and the most dramatic built structure to survive from Anglo-Saxon times - as such it is crucial evidence of a key phase in British history which has generally left relatively few substantial visible remains.

"This destroys archaeological deposits in the layers within the dyke and can make it quite dangerous," he said.  "Ultimately if you've got enough big holes in a particular section, it will disappear, because the structure will start to collapse,"

We are a small island famed for – and proud of – possessing one of the richest and most varied historic environments in the world. It is therefore an extraordinary fact that until now we have had no precise way of knowing the condition of that remarkable inheritance.

To understand the overall state of England’s heritage we have first to assess each of its different components. In particular, we need to identify those that are facing the greatest pressures and threats. Armed with this information we will then be in a much better position to work out how to mitigate those pressures. In turn we will be able, for the first time, to calculate the resources needed to ‘make safe’ our unique legacy of historic places – not only for our own benefit but out of respect to our ancestors and generations to come.