The age of the British chalk grassland

Tansley1 erected the hypothesis that the grasslands of the British chalk were the product of neolithic human forest clearance although he did not discount the possibility that in some areas the grasslands might have persisted throughout the forest period. Pigott and Walters2 suggested a range of calcareous habitats where forests perhaps failed to form a closed canopy: where erosion was rapid, slopes steep, or soils too thin for trees to root. Despite these exceptions, most authors describe chalk grasslands as the product of neolithic clearance (for example, refs 3 and 4). The debate has been starved of evidence until now by the almost total lack of Flandrian botanical data from sites actually on the chalk. Here we summarize the results of a broad palaeoecological study (using pollen, and plant and animal macrofossils) of a site in the heart of the Yorkshire Wolds which has yielded the first late-glacial and early Flandrian pollen record from the British chalk5. This deposit has provided evidence of early Flandrian chalk grasslands and of their persistence throughout the Pre-Boreal and Boreal periods.