THE WILTSHIRE WILDLIFE TRUST’S VERA JEANS NATURE RESERVE 257 
springs and tributary streams rather than the more 
usual dams on the river. The temperature of spring 
water is very constant so in cold weather it did not 
just blanket the soil but actively warmed it. 
Another unusual feature of the meadows is that in 
Jones’s Mill Mead the carriages and drawns run 
parallel to the river. The Jones’s Mill water 
meadows as such fell into disuse probably 
sometime in the nineteenth century, though there is 
a local memory of controlled flooding up to the 
First World War (Wall, 1999). Even so, the land was 
still used for occasional grazing of cattle. The ridges 
are still up to 20 centimetres above the troughs and 
stand out well in the patterns of vegetation. 
Hidden just below ground level is a hard-core 
track across the fen along the eastern edge of Jones 
Mill Mead. This may be part of an ancient track, 
Kepnal Drove, which ran from Kepnal along what 
is now Dursden Lane, down the existing green lane 
and across the site and possibly on to Sunnyhill 
Lane and up to Martinsell. It was blocked in 1808 
when this part of the Kennet and Avon Canal was 
built. There are no rights of way on the reserve, but 
there are permissive paths. 
An estate map of 1811 shows a ‘Strip by Pond’ 
but not the pond itself. It looks as if the pond could 
have been where the Avon runs through the present 
carr (woodland on water-logged soil). The same 
map marks another part of the carr as ‘Alder Bed’. 
At the north-east end of the reserve [1 on the inset 
Fen & Carr map], watercress beds, fed by springs, 
were in use serving the London market until just 
after the Second World War (Wall, 1999). All that 
remains of these old beds is a mire with a stream 
flowing through it and a line of diverse, exotic trees 
along its western edge, probably planted to protect 
the beds from frost. A dam, reconstructed in 1990, 
diverts part of this stream into the leat that supplies 
water to the north-eastern third of the water 
meadows. 
At times, probably in the 1940s and 1950s, the 
old water meadows were deliberately burnt off to 
promote fresh growth — ‘It would be green again in 
about a week’ (Wall, 1999). 
~ In 1975 the Jeans family, who owned the land 
from 1905, leased the old water meadows that form 
the core of the reserve to the Wiltshire Trust for 
Nature Conservation (now the Wiltshire Wildlife 
Trust). Miss Vera Jeans loved the old water 
meadows and to ensure their long-term protection 
she gave them to the Trust in 1980, on condition 
that they be kept as marshy areas. Their current 
plant community is in a transient stage in a 
succession which, without active management, 
would ultimately become woodland. To preserve 
this rare and valuable habitat, water levels have to 
be maintained and the taller, ranker vegetation kept 
under control either by annual cutting or, better, by 
summer grazing with cattle. In order to be able to 
control the water levels, some of the leats were 
restored by the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust in 1987. 
When the meadows were in working order, the 
runnels leading out from the leats on to the ridges 
were blocked by removable boards, now long-since 
gone. A fine sandy silt had accumulated where they 
had been and, when the banks of the leats were 
restored, these silt patches remained in place. The 
effect was that alongside the tops of the old ridges 
there are now porous spots through which water 
continuously seeps, thus, probably as much by good 
fortune as design, keeping the water table on the fen 
at the optimum level. With the aid of local 
donations and two substantial grants from the 
Heritage Lottery Fund towards both purchase and 
maintenance, the Trust bought many of the 
surrounding fields during the 1990s, to protect the 
water meadows, and to enable the small herd of 
Belted Galloway cattle that graze them during the 
summer to be kept on the reserve throughout the 
year. The southern part of this was a large arable 
field, now under grass. This has become known as 
Big Forty — nothing to do with its size (10-6 
hectares) but rather the Director’s birthday! 
The 1922 Ordnance Survey map appears to 
show two ponds in the other spur of woodland that 
runs almost due north in the centre of the reserve 
[Compartment G on the main map]. These dried up 
and were subsequently used as ‘earth’ watercress 
beds until the 1960s (Wall, 1999). In 1975 these 
were dry except for a stream running through them, 
but the remains of an earth dam could still be seen 
where the lower pond had been. This pond was 
restored by the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust in 1982 and 
1983, the work paid for with a gift in memory of 
Miss Ida Gandy. A further dam was installed in 
1997 to restore the upper pond. 
LOCATION, GEOLOGY AND 
HABITATS 
The Vale of Pewsey was formed when the chalk 
anticline arching from the Pewsey Downs to 
Salisbury Plain was eroded to reveal the underlying 
greensand (Barron, 1976, 87 et sequ.). The reserve 
covers 33 hectares in the Vale just north-east of 
