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HIGHWAY VERGES EVALUATED
Two interesting species, Crested Cow Wheat and Sulphur Clover occur mainly on the
verges in north west Essex. They are in good order and increasing as a result of co-
operation between members of the county Verges Team.
The Team includes local engineers, farmers, contractors and the highway managers and
planning department, local councils and, recently, museum curators and local N.F.U.
secretaries.
The engineers with the planning department, have safeguarded Special Verges from their
own and public service operations by arranging for contractors to consult the list of
Special Verges before starting work. Where excavation cannot be avoided, a protective
routine demonstrated by B.T. in 1982 at Wickham Bonhunt has been successfully used
ever since.
The highway engineers are ultimately responsible for all decisions and to avoid having to
deal with conflicting advice on unfamiliar topics they rely on eight volunteer "Verge
Representatives" who are responsible for all local communication connected with the
Special Verges and liaison with local highway engineers covering the whole county. They
also send an annual report to a meeting of the three area managers held in November.
This meeting is devoted entirely to Verge affairs and here county level decisions are taken
on the advice received. The Verge Representatives are volunteers from the local groups
of the County Wildlife Trust and include three who are also Essex Field Club members.
Acceptance of advice is not automatic. In competition with public services the relative
importance of a site can be a deciding factor, and here the natural history curators make
available local, county, national and research information.
When advice is unacceptable the engineers explain why and the Representatives look for
a satisfactory alternative. No-one wastes time attempting to "persuade" anyone else, we
all assume each is already doing all they can.
An example of a follow-up after rejected advice occurred early on when financial
restrictions decreed disastrous low-priority grass cutting, and also no specially timed
management, because of the impossibility of supervising visiting machine operators. A
very successful 2-year basic routine for all sites was produced from the following three-
way consultation in 1986:-
• Evidence of the benefits of original traditional, harvest-related management as
demonstrated by farmers who had been voluntarily managing the more important
verges on their boundaries;
• advice from the relevant research of Terry Parr at I.T.E. Monks Wood, and Derek
Wells of the (then) N.C.C.
• the County Council offer of a little more money, a routine spread over two years, and
an annual grant for supplementary management alternate years from the County
Landscape Improvement Fund.
This had several advantages and was adopted county-wide after due trials. Public
complaints ceased immediately. There was no need for any close supervision of machine
operators. It provided reliable control conditions for the farmers' experimental
adjustments in timing supplementary management, and unexpectedly, also happened to
include an economical way of maintaining Sulphur Clover.
Essex Field Club Newsletter No. 25, May 1998