Diseworth's Landscape
Although Diseworth is surrounded by motorways and an airport, there are clues to its past in the landscape. Ones of these is the presence of clear signs of the ancient field system known as ridge and furrow.
Ridge and furrow in fields on Long Mere Lane
The term ridge and furrow is used to describe the pattern of peaks and troughs created in a field, caused by the system of ploughing used during the Middle Ages. Early examples date to the immediate post-Roman period and the method survived until the seventeenth century in some areas. The characteristic shape arises from the use of non-reversible ploughs on the same strip of land each year. Traditional ploughs turn the soil over in one direction, to the right. This means that the plough cannot return along the same furrow. Instead, ploughing is done in a clockwise direction around a long rectangular strip (a land). On reaching the end of the furrow, the plough is removed from the ground, moved across the unploughed headland (the short end of the strip), then put back in the ground to work back down the other long side of the strip.
The width of the ploughed strip is fairly narrow, to avoid having to drag the plough too far across the headland. This process has the effect of moving the soil in each half of the strip one furrow's-width towards the centre line. In the Middle Ages each strip was managed by one small family, within large common fields, and the location of the ploughing was the same each year. The movement of soil year after year gradually built the centre up of the strip into a ridge, leaving a dip, or "furrow" between each ridge (note that this use of "furrow" is different from that for the furrow left by each pass of the plough). The building up of a ridge was called filling or gathering. It is thought that the raised beds offered better drainage (on some well-drained soils the fields were left flat). The dip often marked the boundary between plots.
Although they varied, traditionally a strip would be a furlong (a "furrow-long") in length, (220 yards, about 200 metres), and a chain wide (22 yards, about 20 metres), giving an area of one acre (about 0.4 ha), or about a day's ploughing. Where ploughing continued over the centuries, later methods removed the ridge and furrow pattern. However, in some cases the land became grassland, and where this has not been ploughed since, the pattern has often been preserved. Surviving ridge and furrow may have a height difference of 18 to 24 inches (0.5 to 0.6 m) in places, and gives a strongly rippled effect to the landscape.
This is the case in the examples shown from the Diseworth area:
Fields to the north of the
village (Grimes Gate on the right)
Fields to the left of Long Mere Lane (see pictures above)
(images from Google Earth, all rights acknowledged)
In this close up view of the fields on the left above, the extend of
the ridge and furrow system is clear. The version below shows
the ridges to be straight, indicating they were worked relatively
recently.(In early ridge and furrow, the tendency was for the path
of the oxen and plough to cause a twist at the end of each furrow
slightly to the left, making these earlier ridge and furrows a
slight reverse-S shape).
