Worcester Woods Country Park
Worcester Woods Country Park is made up of two nature reserves: Nunnery Wood Local Nature Reserve and Hornhill Meadows Local Nature Reserve. The park has served many purposes over time: it was once a Medieval farmstead and also belonged to the nuns of White Ladies Aston and Christchurch College. Hornhill Meadows and Orchard, which forms the Meadow Trail, was a farmstead until after the Second World War - the remains of the farmstead and the ancient ridge and furrow undulations can still be seen today. Two longhorn cows are now used to graze the orchard and meadows through sporadic grazing.
Worcester Woods is an established, thriving wildlife hub with both woodland and meadows. In the UK, only 2% of the meadows that existed in the 1930s remain. However, you can easily expand hay meadows from existing meadows through a process called cut and collect. The green hay at Hornhill Meadows was taken to Aconbury to create new hay, species-rich meadows - imagine if we could do this all over Worcester, spreading new hay meadows all over the city and bringing back the lost grasslands!
There are signs that the UK is beginning to embrace the ‘managed messiness’ of wildflower meadows in city parks and even road-side verges by leaving the grass unmown. Our land is already fully planted with plant diversity waiting patiently in our soils ready to grow wild - on land where there was once meadows and ponds, seeds lie dormant waiting for the ‘return’ of the lost habitat. It is time to reconnect with the land around us and start making meadows.
