Fields in bloom

The conservation area being established as part of the Weymouth Relief Road project will become an extension to the Dorset Wildlife Trust’s Lorton Meadows Nature Reserve.

Two of the fields have changed this summer from bare land into wildflower meadows.

Last autumn the grass was cut and wildflower hay from the MoD rifle range at Chickerell was strewn across the field to provide wildflower seeds for this season, and a further sowing of native grass and wildflower seed was applied.

This autumn, now there has finally been enough rain to germinate the seeds, the plants have started to grow and flower. In the picture you can see the yellows of Fleabane and Bristly Ox-tongue and the white of Mayweed. Most of the rarer species will flower next year.

Creating a nature reserve

Work has begun in the Lorton Valley – as part of the Weymouth Relief Road project – to restore more of the meadows between the Dorset Wildlife Trust nature reserve and Horselynch Plantation.

Two of the meadows have become covered in scrub, mainly brambles, in the past decade and there are only small pockets of grassland and wildflowers left.

To start the restoration, much of the scrub is being cut to the ground, but small patches of scrub and some individual trees are being left as song posts and breeding areas for birds.

The opening up of the meadow will also allow people to wander through the area, and to be able to avoid the muddy paths.

Early next year some of the cleared areas will be sown with wildflower seed, and next summer we hope the area will start to look more like a grassland nature reserve and less like a bramble thicket.

New-t home for local residents

Newts are being moved to a new home during the next few weeks in some of the wetter areas of the scheme. These two will be moved a few metres from where they were captured, to the other side of a protective fence that will keep them out of the works area when work starts on one of the scheme cycleways next year. Work with the newts is carried out by an ecologist under a licence from Natural England.

Conservation work

Hay from Tidmoor Ranges at Chickerell, which is known to have a good range of wildflowers in it, has been spread over maize fields next to Horse Lynch Plantation, known locally as Teddy Bear Woods, as a seed source.

This will be supplemented with wildflower seeds, collected by Dorset County Council, to restore the fields to provide an abundance of local wildflowers.

The work follows a series of arson attacks over the summer in the relief road conservation area, which runs from just to the east of Horse Lynch Plantation across to the Dorset Wildlife Trust Reserve.

Read more about it here.