When Wooh decided early this morning that he had better get out before the rain, he had not expected two amazing discoveries. Both are difficult to evaluate. There is a cropped field not far from Wooh's barn on which John the Somerset farmer had sown corn.
Because soil clings mercyless to one's feet, its not the sort of field Wooh likes to take for walking. Nevertheless, the field is very useful as a short cut across the top-lands. It was the fact that the field was a sort of top-land that interested Wooh. The field had possibly been farmed for over three thousand years and there was geological evidence of a mysterious kind that Wooh had been puzzling over for several days. So the walk across the field could help gather more information about the geological mystery.
Wooh decided to take his morning walk in that direction. The field was there and reasonably dry. John, the Farmer, had not yet sown his corn for the 2008 summer season, although there were piles of cow manure ready for the spreader at one end. The field was stumpy with the tops of corn shoots that had not been ploughed under. At a casual glance the field looked rather uninteresting. Along one side away in the distance there stood a row of rather tallish beech trees. They formed an interesting wood that Wooh had never explored. This morning he decided that it was about time.
As Wooh walked across the field he had to step over corn stumps, so he had to look down and watch carefully where he was stepping, otherwise he would trip over. Curiously, the soil mixture was different from the other fields that Wooh had crossed in the area. For one thing, there were loads of small stones. Some of these were quite smooth as one would find along a beach in southern Devon, say at Sidmouth. But, the field was over sixty miles from the shoreline. Some of the stones looked like sand stone while others were like quartz, the sort of stone in which one finds metals, such as silver and gold. Wooh realized that there was no gold in the field but he had to wonder about finding all these small stones on what was after all the shorn-off top of a hill.
At one point, Wooh looked down and found a piece of clay pottery. It was a largish piece, such as one would expect from a drain pipe or a roof tile. Yes, the man made piece seemed to be the remains of a roof tile. How very strange? Why would a roof tile be in the middle of a large field on the top of a hill? There was no easy explanation. The finding of all the stones in a field that normally would be stone free was also without real explanation, as was the mix of smooth and rough stones.
Wooh walked slower and tried to think more deeply about what he was seeing unfold under his feet. He noticed a larger stone that was layered. There were several layers and these layers were of different colours. Again, to find such a stone in the middle of a field of rich soil seemed strange, but it did help to explain why there was a mix of different colours of stone, and possibly why the stones were so thoroughly mixed up.
Wooh knew that the land of Britain was once under the Atlantic ocean. A very long time ago, the shelf on which the land was sitting rose out of ocean and the mountains of Wales were formed. These mountains had stones similar to the ones that Wooh was finding. At last, Wooh began to think that he understood.
The soil of the hills of his countryside was once the result of dust that had fallen on the ocean and had settled down to bottom of the ocean. It was volcanic ash that the water of the ocean had digested and made into smooth particles many epochs earlier. When the mountains rose out of the sea floor, the water of the ocean created streams and the streams formed a moving shoreline from the highest to lowest point. The creation of the landscape must have taken a long time and in the process, small stones were deposited in the field which was the bed of a stream.
Over time the edge of the shoreline moved further south, and the field rose within a topography of many hills formed by streams as they wore down the soft particles. Eventually, the field was higher than the surrounding landscape and as rains came and went streams poured away from the hills in all directions shaping the countryside as a landscape of hills topped with soil that had once been at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean.
These thoughts helped Wooh understand why there might be small stones on the top of a field of soil. The clay roof piece was now a different story. It must have come during a period of human settlement and perhaps people lived on the top of the hill in this field. These people may have had stone houses with clay roof tiles. There was no easy way to figure out when this might have been.
Building in stone and tile is not something that one normally attributes to early Britons. It is thought that the Romans began to use stone and rectangular structures having secured the region. So, it is more probable that the roof tile was something more recent than early Britain though one does not know for sure. Instead, having been found in that field which commands a wonderful view, the discovery of a single tile is suggestive that the field at one time may have had a different purpose from that of being used to sow crops.
In any event, Wooh continued his walk across the field until he arrive at the other side. He found a sight that he had not expected. The trees that he had seen from the other side of the field were an illusion of a forest. The landscape at the edge of the field altered dramatically and fell several hundred feet into the most beautiful private valley that Wooh had ever seen. Indeed the ridge, that he had found formed a large horseshoe shaped valley in which a stream curved around the edge of the horseshoe. There was a sharp drop down to a farmer's field that was being used as grass land. The ridge itself was covered in beech, but the interesting thing was how well hidden the valley landscape was from any vantage point.
Then Wooh found something else, the ridge was a habitat for wild life. Along the top of the ridge there was a stone wall about eight feet high falling down to a a lower level, which fell again like a terrace. Down the ridge, Wooh could see about five such terraces each with pathways that had been shaped and worn by wildlife. It was an amazing site. So here it was, a ridge that housed many badger sets, foxes dens, rabbit warrens and all sorts of habitat for birds and animals of all descriptions.
Wooh climbed down to an area where fresh soil had been dug out of the side of the ridge, which was covered in beech that had held the solf soil of the ridge in place. Wow, he thought, the amount of soil here suggests hundreds of yards of animal's tunnels criss-crossing up and down the interior of this ridge. Wooh was certain that his wild habitat was a gold mine for wild animals and a place that people should preserve for all time. It had been hidden there for many thousand so years and so it should remain.