Country Walk: Brandyhole Copse
My walk this week is more of a visit than a march and is really a continuation of Nature Trails. It is a pleasant place to explore, with wild spring flowers, butterflies, and woodland.
My map shows you the location of Brandyhole Copse local nature reserve (LNR). It is on the west side of the A286 road that goes north out of Chichester and it is sometimes named East Broyle Copse. You can park in bays along Hunters Race, which leads west off the main road, just south of Lavant village. The No. 60 bus goes from Chichester railway station every half hour past the nature reserve.
Thirty five years ago, the land either side of Hunters Race was quarried for gravel and is now an open space southward, but filled with solar panels northward. A public right of way and cycle path also runs south to the city and is called Centurion Way.
This was the old railway line which ran on to Midhurst. Cowslips grow over the meadows, together with
100 species of wild flowers, such as toadflax, common and autumn hawkbits, St John’s wort, marjoram and birdsfoot trefoil.
The LNR is woodland and was planted as sweet chestnut coppice centuries ago to provide house building and farm equipment wood. This is where the bluebells and the wild orchids grow.
You will also see a long earth bank called the Devil’s Ditch, part of a defensive rampart built in the Iron Age, over 2,000 years ago.
In spring and autumn, this LNR is a vital link in the chain of copses, hedges and meadows that allow migrant birds and butterflies to travel backwards and forwards between Africa and Britain. Selsey is their landing and departure point so Brandyhole is bang on the flight line.
Masses of warblers, for example, use the wood and meadows for feeding and shelter as they travel, together with rarities such as wrynecks, cuckoos and spotted flycatchers.
Perhaps the most exceptional
foreign visitor here in recent times is an exotic butterfly which bred for the first ever recorded time in Britain, ten years ago.
The Queen of Spain fritillary is a southern beauty, which was not known to breed in the UK until it came to Sussex in October 2009 and chose the two fields known colloquially as Maize and Dewpond Fields, which are the subjects of my article this week. The two fields were obviously perfect for this extraordinary event. This could well occur again, so great care is needed to preserve them.
All kinds of criteria were met here on the outskirts of Chichester, from microclimate to natural plant species being available as a single unit for the insects. These two fields need to be kept open as an adjunct to the woodland. They also provide feeding and breeding areas for the other butterflies of the LNR, such as meadow brown, small and large skippers, speckled wood and ringlet. Many of the woodland birds feed and breed there as well as moths, solitary bees, sawflies and beetles.
The list of species has perhaps not yet been quantified, but enough to say the fields and the woodland are indivisible so must be protected as a single unit if we actually do care for the health of our city and all the villages west to Emsworth.