The destruction wrought on the Common during the war years was the most traumatic event in the known history of the landscape. The rigorous years of heavy mechanised training on the landscape had reduced the once-beautiful countryside into a wasteland of mud and sand. ‘Not even a piece of heather or gorse survived’, remembers Peter Spice ‘there was nothing but sand’. The photograph below is the same aerial photograph that displayed Superior Camp in Chapter 2, but the image is presented in its original scale so to give a view of the Common. The perpendicular aspect of the photograph, and the black-and-white shading make it difficult to gauge the exact condition of the landscape. It can be seen that the open countryside of the Common is utterly barren of identifiable features, and the western half of the site is just sand. Vast amounts of the Common’s topsoil had been poisoned by oil and diesel fuel from the armoured vehicles, and this contamination posed a significant obstacle to the natural regeneration of the foliage. Furthermore, the ubiquitous covering of scrub, heather and woodland that had served to bind the soil with its roots had been removed by the incessant military activity. There was very little to hold in the moisture when it rained, and consequently, the ground was constantly inundated and at risk of flooding.
According to Chris Webb, the National Trust Warden for Ludshott Common today, the National Trust had been in correspondence with the War Department since the last months of the war over the restoration of the site. It was recognised that the first step in restoring the Common was the drainage of the excess water that inundated the site. Until this was managed, there was no hope that the plant life would take back, or that the fuel contamination could be dealt with. The urgency of the situation was brought home in the years immediately following the war, when the risk of flooding was realised.
In 1947, heavy rainfall on the Common swelled into flooding, since there was no foliage on the Common to hold in the water. The precipitation simply ran off the Common in streams down to Pond Road on the southwest edge and Fullers Vale in Headley Down. The landscape towards the southwest of the Common today is crisscrossed with
Fig 3-1: The original 1946 aerial photograph showing the Camp and the surrounding devastated Common landscape
haphazard, chaotic trenches, the result of this flooding. The heavy streams of rainwater wore these natural furrows in the land (Fig. 3.2), that remain today long after the Common was drained. With no foliage roots holding the earth together, the floodwater took a lot of the loose sandy topsoil of the Common with it, so Pond Road and Fullers Vale were faced with not only a flood of water, but a covering of thick sand. The pond at the meeting between Pond Road and Fullers Vale, for which the former is named, was filled with so much sand that the pond was lost. It has only just been restored in the first years of the twenty-first century.
Fig 3.-2: Evidence of the flooding on Ludshott Common. Some of the natural stream trenches on the southern side of the Common.
Fig 3-3: The large concrete dam spanning one of the trenches near Pond Road.
A number of dams and barriers were constructed to restrict this flow of water and sand. A large concrete dam was constructed in the largest water furrow leading to Pond Road, to hold back the sand (Fig. 3.3). Peter Spice recalls that the majority of barriers were less permanent than this, being simply barricades of interwoven peasticks that diverted the waterflow. Once the Common was drained of this excess water, the restorative efforts amounted to the removal of the remaining oil-contaminated topsoil before the landscape was left to recover naturally. Peter Spice recalls that, with the Common freed from such inundation, the birch, heather and grass took back. With the Common’s native heather, gorse and bracken already hardened to the poor quality of the soil, it was not long before the site was returning to its natural beauty.
(c) Matthew Tilley