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Gravel extraction years
As you probably now know, Dinton Pastures Country Park was created from an old gravel extraction site. What you may not know is how and why this came about.
Why gravel?
Building homes and offices, shops and roads, creates a huge demand for sand and gravel. Apparently 10km - just under 6.5 miles - of motorway requires 1 million tonnes. Think about 4 million family cars – well, roughly - of aggregate: sand, gravel and/or crushed rock, for surfacing and as fill beneath the road surface.
Why Dinton?
About 30% of Berkshire is covered with gravel deposits. During glacial times, between 2 million and about 10, 000 years ago, ice sheets reached a line from the Severn Estuary to the Thames Valley. The eroding action of these ice sheets produced a mixture of sand, gravels, clay and boulders, which lay beneath the ice sheets. When the climate warmed huge meltwater rivers were created, carrying large amounts of sand and gravel into the Kennet and Thames Valleys, depositing their load as they began to lose energy.
The area around Dinton Pastures has undergone much change in the last 50 years. A large growth in the surrounding population sustained by a mass of house and road building, including the M4 and A329M, required a huge amount of aggregate.
Changing times
To satisfy this need, gravel was extracted from the area now known as Dinton Pastures between 1965 and 1979, under three separate contracts. Unfortunately, all this digging can cause a bit of a mess. Apart from disruption to the local community caused by lorries and trucks coming and going from the site, gravel extraction causes enormous disturbance to the local environment. Woodland and grassland communities would have been destroyed or disturbed, surface contours would have changed and large proportions of the land would now fall below the water level.
Finding suitable sites for extraction can be tricky and extraction companies have to spend a lot of money searching. Conditions such as the suitability of material, location - how close is the extraction site to where the material will be processed and used, and of course, the amount of material available, all affect where they decide to dig. They then have to consider the environmental impact gravel extraction would have on the landscape and ways in which they can minimise the effect of extraction on the local environment.
Look to the future
When planning applications for gravel extraction are received, local authorities have to carefully evaluate plans for the restoration of the site. Stiff opposition can be expected from the local population, usually due to destruction and scarring of the immediate landscape and also because of the noise, congestion on local roads, and dust that the extraction will cause. The way around this opposition is usually by making sure the community gains something from the extraction company. This is known as a Planning Gain.
Restoration
The most common forms of restoration of gravel pits involve either returning the land to its former level as farmland or forestry, or allowing lakes to form and then using the land for some type of recreational activity. This ensures the local community gains something from the extraction and can help change attitudes to the project. For a more unusual restoration project, take a look at the Eden Project in Cornwall, where an old china clay pit is being transformed into giant biomes - huge greenhouse type buildings, to recreate ecosystems from around the world.
At Dinton
Berkshire County Council possibly only granted permission for extraction as they could see the potential for establishing 'a valley park' in the Loddon Valley region, and although public support for the extraction work was never gained, the future plans probably 'sweetened the bitter pill'.
