[Terrapreta] Indigenous burning

[Michael Bailes]

I am a "Who-dun-it" fan and love quirky detectives. I am currently
delighting in Nicholas Rhea's delightful D.I. Montague Pluke He is an expert
on horse troughs and local folklore. (Yes I know only in an English/UK book
could you get this)
In the first few pages of "Prize Murder' we came across a body in a burnt
field.
Just before this we get a little history of Yorkshire Moors. Pluke is
talking to his long suffering wife, Millicent.I hope you find this quirky
bit of information as interesting as I did.

"'A whole area of heather has been burnt away'
'It's a swidden, sometimes called a swizzen.' Pluke aired his knowledge.
 'It's a result of controlled burning. It's done every year, often in march
before the grouse start their nesting.  The landowner burns off about a
sixth of a given area of heather, then the following year it will be the
turn of another sixth and so on, so that over a period of years, the entire
mooreland is burnt.'
'Goodness! But why?'
'It destroys the old heather, clears and refreshes the ground and encourages
new growth.  New shoots of heather grow quickly and they're stronger and
healthier than the old; the new shoots are needed to feed the grouse too,
and in former times local people would remove the turf after the burning and
use it for domestic fires.'
'So turf is not the same as peat? I know a lot of mooreland farms had peat
fires,' said Millicent.
'That's right but they had turf fires too. turf burns more slowly and gives
out a lot of heat with a very pleasant scent. The thick heather stems which
survived the flames were collected for kindling to light home
fires.Thosestubby stalks were called cowls, they were collected in big
bundles called
boddins, the local way of saying burdens.  Boddins o' cowls, as the local
people called them.
The whole exercise of controlled burning was, and still is, a necessary,
useful and very effective means of maintaining the moors.'" P 14 -15

On 25/02/07, Duane Pendergast <still.thinking at computare.org> wrote:
>
>  Here is a link to some proposed research which might lead to useful
> results with respect to sometime understanding the role fires and charcoal
> may have played in soil building.
>
>
>
> http://www.gl.rhul.ac.uk/research/resops/PDF_opps/2007/ACS-wildfire.pdf
>
>
>
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