North Ormesby Nature - Wilkie's Field

I was talking last week to a guy who grew up in North Ormesby (or Doggy, as it is called by local people) and he was telling me about some of the places he used to go and play when he was a kid.

One of these, Wilkie's Field (I'm not sure about the spelling), is about 200 metres from my house. The chap I was talking to, who was a similar age to me, told me that the name came from a Mr Wilkie who gave it to the people of North Ormesby. I have not been able to find anything out about who Mr Wilkie was or when and why he made this generous gift, so if anyone reading this knows more, please leave a comment below.

On the first sunny day after this I went to have a look at Mr Wilkie's legacy. It is a small (slightly over 1 hectare (1ha=100m x 100m)) area of mown grass with trees around three sides and a nice patch of fairly recently planted woodland in the southern half. The Ormesby Beck flows northwards on the western side and there is an old-looking stone wall (very overgrown with brambles) separating it from the beck. A beck, by the way, is a small to medium-sized stream in many parts of the north of England - including Middlesbrough which has several of them.

Although Wilkie's field is no Maasai Mara, and is unlikely to have any rare species of plant or animal, it is a nice little patch of green which, I suspect, is not visited by all that many people. This is probably mainly because of where it is - hidden away, behind a pub and a bingo hall, with the only access points being down a small road of fairly posh houses, or through two car parks.

Wilkie's Field from above. The blue line is the Ormesby Beck 

View from the north-west corner looking east towards the bingo hall

View from same place looking south-east

It got me thinking of my own childhood and of Lewis's Field. This was a similar area of grass and trees behind the house that I grew up in in Liverpool. I used to play there with my friend Gavin, as did countless other kids of my generation and before. It was where I saw my first Tawny Owl. It was also where my brother Simon and I met the lady who led the local Cub Scouts pack (4th Allerton, Drake Pack) which led to many happy (mostly) years for both of us in the Cubs and then the Sea Scouts, which I believe has been an important part of making me who I am now. I have lovely memories of hiding in the long grass (which at that time wasn't being mown by a cash-strapped Liverpool City Council), walking along the top of the high brick wall which ran along one side and playing in what remained of a burned-out sports pavilion (from when it was a sports field owned by Lewis's department store).

It seemed enormous to me when I was in primary school, but in fact, using the amazing free-to access technology that we all have at our fingertips now, I can see that  it was actually pretty small and only slightly larger than Wilkie's Field (13,923 sq. metres compared with 12,150 sq metres for Wilkie's Field).

You may have noticed that I am talking about Lewis's Field in the past tense. This is not just because it was forty years ago that I used to play there, but because Lewis's Field is now covered in houses. Sometime around 1980 or '81, when I was starting in secondary school, the council sold it off to a developer and with surprising rapidity, it disappeared.

Reminiscing about my childhood haunts has made me realise that we need to value what we have got, and to fight for it if we want to be sure of keeping it. By the time I was playing there, Lewis's Field was probably already doomed - it hadn't been maintained for some years, the tennis courts were long gone,  the former pavilion was a hazardous eye-sore full of broken glass and goodness knows what else, the wall I walked along was old and crumbling, and fewer and fewer children were actually using it. The campaign to save it (during which our teachers encouraged us to go there to play (on the day when councillors were coming to assess how well used it was)) was too little, too late and its demise was inevitable.

Last week, at a series of meetings over three days, about how we can make North Ormesby better, several people said that we needed more green places for children to play in. I went home on the first night and after looking at Google Earth for a while, I came to the realisation that there is actually quite a lot of greenery, from mown parks to more wild semi-natural spaces, within a few minutes walk of every house in Doggy. The problem is that people don't know about them, or they do know but in their heads those places are far away and 'unsafe' and not places they would think of taking their children or encouraging them to go on their own.

When I was making dens in the undergrowth on the edge of Lewis's Field it was still normal for kids to play out in any patch of rough ground, climb trees and cycle for miles. I know the world has changed, that roads are busier, people are much more aware of dangers that were in fact always there and kids have many more things to occupy them at home than when I was young. In many ways, the world (at least for children growing up in urban Britain) is a much, much better and safer place than it was forty years ago, but I think there is a real danger that if we insulate our children, and ourselves, from the natural world, and don't allow them to get their hands dirty, to pick blackberries, climb trees and make dens in the undergrowth they will grow up immeasurably poorer (while seeming richer, perhaps) than they might have done and they won't even know what they have lost.

                                           Some more pictures from Wilkie's Field

The planted woodland in the middle of the field - it contains several
native tree species including Ash, Silver Birch and Hazel

Hazel (Corylus avellana) coppice 'stools'. There have been many traditional uses for Hazel
including fencing, basket making and boat-building (plus the nuts which are
nice to eat, of course). Maybe we'll see some of those crafts being practiced again in
North Ormesby one day.
The tree in the middle is an Ash tree (Fraxinus excelsior), by the way 

A clump of Hard Rush (Juncus inflexus). Its presence on the southern edge of the
field might indicate that it gets a bit boggy at certain times of year

Although much of the field is very species-poor municipal grassland, there are some patches, such as this one, with a few common wildflower species. In spring and summer this spot will be white, yellow, purple and yellow-brown with the flowers of White Clover (Trifolium repens), Daisies (Bellis perennis), Creeping Buttercup (Ranunculus repens), Self-heal (Prunella vulgaris) and Ribwort Plantain (Plantago lanceolata). To some gardeners these would all be considered weeds but to me, especially in the absence of rarer or more interesting wildflowers, they are a welcome sight and will provide nectar for the insects that pollinate them.