Historical Perspective

The Cheshire region occupies the Midland Gap, the low-lying plain between the Pennines in the east and the Welsh uplands in the south. The rivers Dee and Mersey and their wide, level-bottomed valleys delimit the region's western and northern boundaries extending out to the Irish Sea, eventually draining into large estuarine inlets and creating the Wirral Peninsula. Rising from the plain, the mid-Cheshire sandstone ridge effectively divides the county into an eastern and western lowland.

The landscape of the region, and consequently its vegetation and wildlife, has developed in comparatively recent times. Only 10,000 years ago sheets of ice scoured the face of the landscape. This glacial erosion reinforced features such as the deep fissures underlying the Dee and Mersey estuaries and contributed to their development in subsequent drainage. As glaciers retreated northward, leaving expanses of sands and clay, the landscape was colonised by a succession of vegetation.

Vegetation became established with the colonisation of bare mineral surfaces by mosses and liverworts, followed by a diversity of herbs, grasses and sedges. These were succeeded by scrub, with pioneer tree species such as birch, pine and hazel. As soil and climatic conditions improved this developed, by about 3,000 BC, to full deciduous mixed oak forest of oak, elm, alder and lime. On acidic, sandy areas, a heathy birch/oak woodland dominated, contrasting with oak/ash/maple/lime/elm/cherry woods on the more calcareous boulder clay and alder/willow on wet ground. During this Mesolithic and early Neolithic period man was predominantly a hunter-gatherer and there is little evidence of human disturbance to vegetation in the region.

Human Impacts
Since about 3,000 BC, however, the region's landscape has been increasingly affected by human activities. The pollen record from this period shows a decline of tree species such as elm, accompanied by an increase in the extent of grasses, bracken and 'weeds of cultivation', such as plantain. Although such early forest clearance may have been localised, evidence for it occurs in many of the region's meres and mosses. At Lindow Moss this clearance phase, associated with charcoal and Neolithic flintwork, is radiocarbon dated to just before 3,000 BC. Similar dates have been obtained for elm decline and forest clearance at Hatchmere, Norley. There is however, no evidence of cereal cultivation in the region until the Iron Age (c700 BC - 47 AD), when there was also a marked decrease in tree cover. At Lindow Moss the pollen of wheat and barley is associated with major forest clearance dated around 450 BC.

Alongside human influences, climatic change also accounted for the development of the extensive peatlands in the county, during cool wet periods. Thus much of the colonisation of open moorland and lowland raised bogs occurred in the Iron Age when the earlier forests in these locations were encroached upon by water-holding mosses. Substantial erosion in this period, attributed to both forest clearance and high rainfall, gave rise to increasing sedimentation in the estuaries, developing subsequently into extensive saltmarsh.

Reduction in woodland appears to have continued throughout the Roman period and there is evidence of spelt wheat and, perhaps, rye being cultivated at Wilderspool, Warrington, in the 3rd century AD.

We know relatively little of the region's economy and environment in the early historic period, though it seems likely that the pattern of forest clearance and mixed agriculture accelerated. Wood pasture developed where clearings were maintained by grazing domesticated animals, and heaths were also sustained by rough grazing.
Habitat diversity has been further increased by sporting interests which have generally involved the hunting of wildlife. Heathland has been managed by burning, to increase game productivity and woodland has been maintained or, indeed, created, as covert. Rivers and lakes have also been actively managed as fisheries. As a result of human interaction little remains of the county's primary habitats. The closest approximations to undisturbed communities include the estuaries, remnant woodland in the river valleys, the meres and the areas where peat continues to form.

Agriculturally the Cheshire region is primarily a dairy farming area - the thick glacial drift of clays and sands deposited by the retreating glaciers, during the last Ice Age, giving rise to soils more suited to pasture than the plough. Permanent pasture is also the predominant land-use on the upland peat soils of the Pennine fringes, although the grasslands here are acidic with low agricultural potential.

Another long-established industry in the region is centred on the Weaver valley and the Mersey Estuary, where the commercial exploitation of the salt-beds around Northwich, Middlewich and Sandbach, has greatly impacted upon the local landscape. Salt and its derivatives also provided the raw materials for the development of the region's heavy chemical industries during and Mersey valleys.

The region has been a main line of communication between the south and north-west of England since prehistoric times, and has proved attractive for settlement. Despite considerable post-war urban development, particularly in the north region, around Warrington, Runcorn, Urban Wirral, Stockport, Tameside and Trafford, the major conurbations are still comparatively widely dispersed and surrounded by a rural hinterland.

The overall result of these mixes of topography, geology, soils and land-use is an area of contrasting landscapes - wooded river valleys and sandstone hills, meres and mosses, estuaries and heaths, industrial wastelands and old parklands - all set within a matrix of intensively productive farmland and urban development. The diversity of landscape types, in turn, supports a fragile and vulnerable wealth of different types of wildlife habitats, some of which are of national and international importance.