Young Research Workers/Rural Geography Study GroupAuthor(s): Gordon ClarkSource: Area, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Jun., 1992), pp. 204-205Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20003112 .

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204 IBG Annual Conference

specialists, gained an insight into the use of remote sensing at small scales and that further collaborative meetings with the Remote Sensing Society may be arranged. A number of publi cations, including a book of the main papers to be published by Belhaven Press, will arise from this meeting which was generously sponsored by the Association for Geographic Information.

Giles Foody University College of Swansea

Young research workers/rural geography study group The session comprised five papers presented by young researchers in the field of rural geography. Lois Mansfield (Coventry) has chosen to work in the field of agricultural change and its environ mental consequences. She began by sketching the broad context of her study, namely the intensification of agriculture which has led to overproduction, social restructuring and environ

ment change. She then reviewed the proposed solutions in terms of agricultural and environmen tal policies. The unevenness which has characterised the uptake of these schemes is the specific focus of the field work which will start shortly. She will compare the characteristics of adopting and non-adopting farmers in the Countryside Premium scheme, and also examine their attitudes to conservation in place of food production. She will compare these farmers with those in the Set-Aside Scheme and with farmers who have joined neither scheme.

The second paper by Carol Morris (Wye College) reported on work at a similarly early stage and with a similar setting. The same background pressures of production grants, over production and environmental awareness lie behind her work. Her focus is on contractual conservation schemes and the motives which lie behind farmers' decisions to participate (and how fully). She intends to use agency, structural and scheme variables to explain the differential rates of uptake (between farmers and between schemes) of the Countryside Stewardship scheme on the North Downs and the Environmentally Sensitive Areas scheme on the South Downs. Initial findings are highlighting the limited success of such schemes to attract large amounts of land in the long term from those farmers not previously committed to conservation-conscious farming.

Jenny Seavers (Leicester) appeared to move the focus from agriculture to housing markets but again a central issue was decision making, in this case how individuals and families choose which house to buy in the rural area of North Dorset. She is concerned to see the extent to which the distinctive features of rural housing markets and rural house-hunters alter the picture of housing strategies which has been developed in an urban context. She described how decision plan nets and the analytic techniques of TWINSPAN and DECORANA would be used to model and analyse her results.

Chris Owen (Loughborough) was concerned with measuring the social and community impact of East Goscote which was a new settlement of 1,300 houses established in 1966 about 7

miles north-east of Leicester. His theoretical context for this study is the renewed interest in community and locality studies which seeks to explain how communities develop social struc tures and how these influence the way the community operates and interacts with other settle

ments. He was able to illustrate how different groups in the village held opposing views of what life was like there (active/dead, friendly/unfriendly). He concluded that overall East Goscote had become a mature and successful settlement remarkably quickly.

The final paper by Phil Cooke (Lampeter) focused on a small but distinctive sector of rural society, namely 15-18 year olds. He took the chaotic concept of deprivation as it has been used in previous studies and criticised the economistic interpretation which has dominated its use. His concern was to add a social and cultural dimension to the concept, and to see to what extent and in what ways teenagers in a small Welsh town felt that their lives were less than satisfactory. He had collected a fascinating set of tape-recorded semi-structured interviews with 80 teenagers and he was starting to analyse the results. Issues of money and jobs were an important component of some of the teenagers' dissatisfactions, but also important were issues of freedom to travel,

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IBG Annual Conference 205

independence from parents, fashion and Welshness. Some of the girls felt additionally under valued. Yet he also pointed to the variety of coping strategies which were employed and to the huge range of personal reactions among the teenagers to a particular set of circumstances.

The meeting attracted a large audience and the standard of the papers and of their presentation was gratifyingly high.

Gordon Clark Lancaster University

Quality of restored land During the financial year 1991-1992, ?31,000,000 will be made available from central govern ment funds for land restoration in Wales alone. As a result, over 500 sites throughout the Principality will benefit from a programme of land restoration which is currently the largest of its kind in Europe. Much of this programme of restoration has taken place in the area of industrial South Wales centered upon Swansea. Consequently, at a meeting held in the University College of Swansea, it is appropriate that the question of value for money is raised as 20,000 acres, the equivalent of 2 rugby pitches per day throughout the last 25 years, has been reclaimed from a state of dereliction.

The session devoted to The Quality of Restored Land was convened by E M Bridges (University College of Swansea/ISRIC, Wageningen) for the Biogeography Research Group.

The proceedings opened with a presentation by D G Griffiths (Director, Land Restoration, Welsh Development Agency) on the aims and strategy of the WDA. In a five-year rolling programme, the Agency evaluates sites put forward by the local authorities according to the hazard presented, development potential, visual impact, cost and any other specific features in preparation for restoration. The backlog of dereliction has nearly all been cleared and the Agency is hopeful that it can increasingly turn its attention to pressing problems of inner urban decay in the future. Some 50 per cent of sites are restored for amenity purposes and these include 12 country parks, 11 lakes and many playing fields. J Scullion (University College of Wales, Aberystwyth) discussed the importance of bringing back life into the restored lands in support of the newly created ecosystem. He illustrated his contribution with reference to the role of earth

worms, vesicular-abuscular mychorrhizas and bacteria in the restoration process. I G Carolan (Conservation and Restoration Officer, British Coal) explained the importance of introducing trees into the newly created landscape. In order to maintain satisfactory growth and provide shelter in an otherwise bleak, windswept surface, it is necessary to provide the correct mixture of trees and shrubs. A major advantage of tree planting is that the replaced soils have time to begin their own process of reconstruction.

In the second session, Anna Oldak (Warsaw University) provided an illustration of the way in which detailed environmental data including climate, soils, vegetation, hydrology and land use could be brought together by the use of GIS in the task of land management. The implications of this approach for the long-term management of restored sites is clear. Experience in Wales has shown that 35 per cent of restored land reverts back to industrial use. This is true, particularly for that part of Swansea known as the Lower Swansea Valley. H I Ifon Jones (City Engineer, Swansea City Council) described how a combination of expertise from Town and Gown eventu ally led to the successful restoration of 1,000 acres of derelict land in the City and the establish

ment of an attractive industrial, commercial and leisure parks in its place. M J Haigh (Oxford Polytechnic) drew attention to restoration work in Bulgaria, comparing it with similar work at Blaenavon in Wales. He also drew attention to some of the few areas where restoration work had been unsuccessful. This was because a combination of difficult, pyritic materials, high rainfall, high elevation and low temperatures, all of which inhibited the growth of the cover crop and allowed erosion to occur. Newly restored land is very vulnerable to adverse conditions and remains so until the grass cover has become established.

In the ensuing general discussion the reasons for the limited number of failures were explained and the necessity of making it clear that considerable care is required in the management of

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