Yorkshire Dales Road Verge Project
For many years it has been recognised that some of our local road verges harbour fantastic semi-natural wildlife. There is now a new project within the Yorkshire Dales National Park and Nidderdale AONB to get some of these special verges into beneficial management.
This does not mean more daffodils! Far from it, we will be aiming to increase the amount of native flora and fauna already found within these superb narrow ‘nature reserves’. These are often the only links for wildlife where they form ‘natural corridors’.
Management
We intend to manage these verges by a combination of community / volunteer led activities, by talking to local landowners who already look after the verges where they live, and by liaising with the North Yorkshire County Council Highways Dept who look after the main trunk roads within the project area. After the pilot 3 years are completed, we will be using the knowledge gained to inform the better management of road verges throughout North Yorkshire.
There are over 250 miles of road verges within the Yorkshire Dales National Park deemed worthy of special management (out of a total of over 1000 miles of roads within the area), so we have our work cut out! The idea is to make the project self-running, by helping local people who value their local areas to learn how to manage these areas themselves, and then how to continue to do so with minimal help from us in the future. We will equip them with knowledge of how to manage these areas (with simple map-based management plans), some tools, and we will keep in touch to make sure all is well with their project.
There are many aspects of road verge management.
The most obvious part is the management of the vegetation. We will be aiming to manage these verges as little linear hay meadows - cutting at the right times of year, and then removing the arisings shortly afterwards. The latter point is really important because if the cuttings are left on the ground they swamp new growth by acting as a mulch, and by taking them away you also reduce the levels of nutrients in that area – and delicate native wild flowers are better able to exist in nutrient poor soils than the coarser grasses and plants.
Dealing with the cuttings (or arisings as they are properly called) is a thorny problem for the project. We could maybe find local landowners who would not mind us disposing of these arisings on their waste heaps. Another way would be for a community or village to agree to have a local compost scheme – whereby they would have one discrete location for the areas green waste, owned and managed by the community, to which we would contribute our arisings when we cut the verges. Obviously the compost generated would be available to those who contribute for their own gardens and allotments.
Of course good road verge management does not only concern managing the vegetation. It also concerns ditch management, salt / grit bins, boundary management, passing places, poaching where vehicles drive over them, contractors digging them up for services, and so on.
