Lightmoor site visit, Forest of Dean, 29th October
11th December 2019
We’ve been using Lightmoor as a project site for many years. Not because we can’t think of anywhere else to go but because it perfectly fits the bill in terms of its mining heritage which imbues the whole place with a unique historical context, as well as the various issues and challenges that the physical ‘brownfield’ landscape presents that means we don’t have to invent any for the brief.
As far as I can remember, it was a former colleague, John Simpson, who discovered the site in the 1980s and he used it then with the landscape students for a land surveying and terrain modelling exercise. Mining had long ceased there and excavations for road metal had sculptured a lunar surface. Students had first to ‘level’ this complex topography using surveyors’ instruments and tapes to determine the contours. Nowadays we can download from the Web high resolution Lidar (laser) spot height data – almost too much information as the resultant complex contour plan detracts from the general ground forms. All the harder for you to interpret! But it means also that the focus of the project can be more design orientated and demanding.
However, it is important the students are inducted in the practical techniques of site survey, so Bob Moore gave an overview of ground survey, slope measurement, microclimate recording, soil testing and vegetation survey. The site, as seen on the accompanying photos, suffers from poor, compacted soil, high acidity on the colliery spoil except in the more humic oak woodland to the north and east. The tips are steep, shaly and impermeable, well eroded in places and little vegetated.
Allan Mitchell subsequently led the group on a site tour to take in the various habitats and vegetation zones, pointing out problems of site drainage, especially in the ‘crater’ bottoms. The number of students probably scared away much wildlife but we did observe tracks of deer and boar in the soft mud. Other life included a few fishermen around the lake, one or two birds calling in the forest, but the significant memory of the place was the tranquillity we all experienced when exploring the mossy, unpolluted woodland glades.
It is no wonder Dennis Potter, dramatist born not far away from Lightmoor, chose to describe the Forest of Dean as a “strange but beautiful place”. The quote finishes by saying the district contains “rather ugly villages in a beautiful landscape, a heart-shaped place between two rivers, somehow slightly cut off from the rest of England … with a people as warm as anywhere else, but they seemed warmer to me”.