Years ago, MK and SB met on a hillside overlooking a stream which cascaded down among the trees of south Sheffield. The beech leaves around them would have been bright green if they happened to meet in the spring, or flame-coloured if they met bundled up against the autumn chill.
SB, who probably owned a pocket knife, as many did back then, decided to memorialise their day together. Rummaging for the knife in their bag, they then carved their and MK’s initials on the smooth bark of a hilltop beech tree.
Maybe soon after the pair had a row over something small, something stupid (“Why did you spend all of Julie’s party chatting to her cousin and ignoring me?”) and went their separate ways, maybe they got married and stayed together forever, maybe they’re your grandparents. But the tree reacted and remembered, and the letters of their initials are gradually crusting over the wounded bark, but are still there to see, like thousands of other old Sheffielders on old beech trees across the city.
Graves Park is the city’s largest parkland at over 100 hectares (248 acres) and despite growing up on its edges, I’m still uncovering places I’ve never visited before within its fields and meadows and woodlands. It’s been an exciting year for the park — two major projects have been evaluating the past and future of the land.
The first project, Lost Norton Park: Digging Deeper for All, was launched by the Friends of Graves Park group. The Friends, like many such groups in the city, volunteer to help look after the park in these days of a cash-strapped council parks department, and as a voluntary group they’re able to gain funding for projects in the park. The project has a laudable aim. Namely, to investigate this park’s history, archaeology and ecology (after all, the park is on land so old that according to the Friends’ website, it was cited in the Domesday Book).
Thanks to a £142,770 grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to the Friends of Graves Park group, this year local volunteers and professional archaeologists have been scouring the park for signs of what humans got up to there in the past. The work involves measuring and recording known sites of activities like wood and charcoal burning, and seeking out unrecorded features, like field or woodland boundaries. There’s also work away from the soil — digging through the archives.
The project, carried out mainly by trained volunteers (alongside so far around 20 professional archaeologists, ecologists and archivists), lasts until next July and has involved several hundred people so far. Earlier informal archaeological work had suggested Graves Park may have been used as a medieval deer park, for example, and I hear the new work may have found signs, yet to be confirmed, of a Bronze Age burial mound.
Meanwhile, visitors to the park, including the many local wildlife watchers of the area, recognised that the park itself was suffering from the effects of biodiversity loss and climate change, and perhaps with a few changes in management, might actually become more resilient to extreme weather and offer some solutions to local issues like flooding down the road at Woodseats.
So alongside the archaeological and archive work, a separate new Graves Park Climate Resilience project (funded by the JG Graves Trust to the tune of £45,000 this year) began in June, looking at how the park can be managed to help us deal with the climate and nature emergencies. The project was started by Professor Ian Rotherham (more on him in a second), the Friends of Graves Park group and other local people with an interest in the environment.
The park itself could reduce flooding, for example, if erosion on the steep sides of the park streams could be reduced, so plants could grow and retain water, while returning mown grasslands to meadows should boost insects and bring in birds, bats and biodiversity of many kinds, as well as hold more water higher up the hills.
I’m walking up the pathway from Woodseats to Norton with Professor Ian Rotherham, another local Graves Park lad. It is stunning, of course, this being a Sheffield woodland in autumn, but I remember barely noticing the orange and yellow tree canopy when I ran cross country here, or searched for conkers in the leaves of the twentieth century.
Ian is one of the founders of the two projects as part of the South Yorkshire Biodiversity Research Group (a local organisation based in Heeley to research and promote biodiversity and environmental conservation, of which he’s a member). SYBRG are working with the Friends of Graves Park and professional archaeologists and ecologists to provide the research and data to inform a new management plan for the park.
Ian’s long history in the world of Sheffield environmental science and campaigning means he can call on allies from all over the city, not least Sheffield Hallam University where he worked for many years.
He tells me the group did a bat walk with their wildlife event coordinator Karen Mayor and discovered loads of bats on the old boating lake: “pipistrelles, daubentons (the water bat), noctule, whiskered, and seven or eight others including the barbastelle, which is nationally rare.” He looks particularly cat-got-the-cream about the latter.
“No-one knew it was here. But barbastelles require loose bark to roost behind, so now we’re going to have a look at some of the trees to see what we can find.”
Ian was once a city council ecologist, and then a professor at Sheffield Hallam University, and now theoretically retired, he’s as busy as ever. Spend a minute or two with him in any Sheffield green space, and he’ll start chatting and opening questions about that tree, that bird, or this bump in the ground.
Earlier in the morning, I got lost trying to find him and the day’s archaeology team, despite this being my boyhood homeland. I took a wrong turn and found myself climbing into the spectacular tree canopy on a lesser used path up a steep slope near Cobnar Road.
I eventually found a track back down I’d never seen before, squelching through several years of leaves behind people’s back gardens. And then there they were, serious faces with phones and poles and measures, looking down at one of those bumps in the ground.
“It’s a charcoal hearth,” Ian explained, while the others took notes and measurements, and sketched the difference only a trained eye could see, between such a hearth and the slightly different Q Pits you can easily find across our woodland floors.
Q Pits, which were used to burn whitecoal for later metalwork, have a tail and a raised area within the Q shape, whereas a charcoal hearth has a more flattened shape, often with a bank on one side. Ian grabs a scoop of earth and shows me the centuries-old remnants of burned charcoal. The old trees growing out of the hearth indicate its age. “This one was probably abandoned in the 1800s,” Ian says.
Volunteer Nik Howes points out another sign of the past nearby. It’s a wood bank, again found all over our woodlands if you know what to look for. A raised bank, with a small ditch below. These are much older, used to keep livestock out of working woodlands where trees would be harvested for poles and fencing and furniture, and you and your neighbours built a bank to stop sheep crashing in and eating your young trees.
Centuries of leaves and washed in hillside soil line the ditch, but it’s still visible, edging the woodland south of Cobnar meadow. Over the last few months, teams of volunteers have been examining these kinds of features all over the park, and the work is continuing if you’d like to join them — the Climate Resilience project is here and Digging Deeper for All is here.
“This is my patch,” says Ian, “it’s the biggest public open space in Sheffield, and I always felt it was something rather special and unusual. And following the work we’ve done with Friends of Graves Park over the last few years, we can see it really is,” he adds.
As we walk and talk up and down the muddy paths, Ian tells me Graves was once a medieval deer park, then a grand landscape park between the 1500s and 1700s, then a famous (at the time) picturesque park, and then in the 1920s a Sheffield Corporation park. As we look round, at strange shaped bits of wall and stonework, he says all these elements are still there in the landscape, and even though this is probably the most visited open space in Sheffield, almost no one knows about that long history.
We’re strolling up the side of the Cold Stream, the small river that flows through the ravine down to Woodseats. The river’s stonework has been battered after the extreme weather events of the last few years.
This was once a key feature of the ‘picturesque park’ designed with waterfalls and cascades to delight visitors to the old Norton Hall, owners of the park in the later 1800s and early 1900s. And those designers often used older stones from the park wall of centuries before, like the half-moon shaped wall cappers, now fallen into the river after Storm Babet and other downpours in recent years.
We look up at the steep grey-brown walls of the ravine, where rainwater has been washing the soil down the slope, leaving carbon and silt and debris in the Cold Stream, then the Sheaf, then the Don, then the North Sea, says Ian. All caused by the park owners prettifying the park with beech trees a century or more ago, trees native to southern England, but not here, where they shade out the light so ground flora plants struggle to grow and hold the soil together underneath the imported beeches.
One of the resilience solutions the project is considering is to fell or drop some of the medium sized beech trees, and leave them on the slope, to allow light in and hold up some of the erosion. “If you did that you’d get bluebells back in five years,” says Ian.
Over the last few years, more of the ‘parkified’ short mown grass higher up in the park has been replaced with meadow, where grass grows long and is then cut and taken away in the autumn, so wildflowers appear and more water stays in the ground.
At present, whenever there’s very heavy rain, a lake appears where the Cold Stream heads under Chesterfield Road. Lake Woodseats, Ian calls it, and in some cases it floods local houses. Tackling the erosion in the ravine, and growing water-retaining meadows, will help reduce that flood risk.
The projects will both inform a new management plan for the park, which will then help a resource-strapped council to draw in funding to actually do the work needed in a world where parkified and picturesque parks on their own are no longer a practical option. (Parkified is one of those odd words used in the ecological world — usually pejoratively). Natural processes in city parks will need to help us manage extreme weather events.
JG Graves, the city’s wealthy mail order pioneer of a century ago, (imagine Jeff Bezos with a social conscience and a pay-per-month watch catalogue) saw parks as a crucial part of city life for his workers and the city as a whole. He gifted the park bearing his name to Sheffield, and the trust that carries on his philanthropic work seems keen to use Graves Park as a learning ground for how city parks can take on a new role in a world facing regular extreme weather events and biodiversity loss.
Those beech trees planted for their looks when Graves was building his business have their marks of passing generations, lovers’ initials, football obscenities, and air gun wounds. Ian tells me scientists are working on how you might date a tree by measuring the shape of a wound caused by knife marks. And how archaeologists in Scandinavia have found human marks made on peat-preserved trees dating back thousands of years.
These kinds of things can engage children, Ian says, and he notes a darker side to what might just seem a fascinating piece of work on local history. Children, and many adults, are finding the changing world terrifying.
“Climate change is horrendous and frightening, kids lie awake at night stressed because of biodiversity extinction and because of climate change,” he says. “Sometimes people say why should I bother? I can’t do anything. We say you can do something very tangible, you can be involved with a project that makes a real difference on your doorstep.”
Think global, act local is a longstanding dictum of the environmental and climate change world, and I’m hearing how this idea is strengthening local voluntary work in parks and green spaces all over the city. Getting out with other folk makes everyone feel better, and if you’re actually working on something that will benefit birds, beasts and insects, or increase wildflowers, or hold CO2 in the ground, or encourage others to get involved, you get home and feel you’re really helping to do something.
Archaeologist Chris Atkinson (who’s working on the Graves Park project) says learning how people used and lived in our parks and woodlands in the past gives locals (especially children) ideas that we can learn from nowadays. Woodland and farmland economies of the past had to be locally sustainable, he says, as back then there were no next day deliveries of far eastern fencing from Amazon.
Seeing how humans have made and used the landscape around us for hundreds and thousands of years shows us that we can do the same again, when we need that landscape and its woodlands and streams to help us more than ever.
I’d like to think that MK and SB are out there now with their Graves Park resilience notebooks, clambering round the beech woods together, counting the bats and butterflies, looking for medieval walls and bluebells, and mysterious bumps in the ground.
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