About Orwell Clunch Pit
The Pit is designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) of national importance for its rich chalk grassland flora. It is located on a chalk outcrop called Toot Hill which is at the western end of a ridge where Bronze Age and Iron Age settlements have been found. The welldrained chalk hillside with springs at its foot and fertile heavy clay soil in the valley below made it attractive to early settlers. Archaeological evidence of Roman and AngloSaxon settlers has been found in Orwell village.
The Pit is a site of some 4.4 acres located on the northern edge of the village in an area also known as Toot Hill. It is accessed via Quarry Lane from the High Street, or along a footpath alongside St Andrew’s church and then via the Glebe Field. The Clunch Pit consists of a central hollow carved into the south-facing hillside, with footpaths on more elevated sections on the surrounding sides leading to a flat plateau area at the northernmost edge. From the top of the Clunch Pit, there are commanding views to the south over the low-lying farmland across to Royston and beyond.
Information signs are posted at the various access points as shown below, click the image for full scale view.
An aerial view (courtesy of Google Earth) below shows the Clunch Pit (which is designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest or SSSI) and surrounding areas. The Clunch Pit is owned by Orwell Parish Council who are at the time of writing in the process of purchasing the adjacent Glebe Field (recently designated a County Wildlife Site and also an area rich in chalk grassland flora) and the Paddock area (which provides alternative access to the Glebe Field).
Initially a bare quarry, then open grassland which was grazed by cattle, during the nineteen-sixties and seventies the Clunch Pit became severely overgrown by shrubs. These have since been cleared (except around the perimeter areas) to restore the open chalk grassland with its distinctive flora which is now only to be found in a few sites in South Cambridgeshire. Because the site has never been ploughed, it has retained this chalk grassland flora that has vanished from much of the surrounding area due to intensive farming.
The view south from the top of Orwell Clunch Pit
Orwell Clunch Pit is one of several such excavations which are dotted along the west-east trending chalk ridge. Particular levels within the chalk, known as ‘clunch’, were once quarried for building stone.
The ‘clunch’ is also known as Totternhoe Stone or Burwell Rock in neighbouring counties. Indeed it appears that some of the properties in Orwell originally built from clunch retain the right to extract material from Orwell Clunch Pit for repair work, but if such rights do exist it is a long time since anyone has exercised them (and now that it is an SSSI as well as a Local Geological Site or LGS, it is unlikely that anyone would be allowed to do so).
The clunch which is extracted can be readily cut or tooled, but it is not particularly resistant to weathering. However, in the absence of much other local building stone in this part of England, it has been widely used in both village properties and even parts of several Cambridge colleges, although there does not appear to be any suggestion that Orwell Clunch Pit ever provided stone for anything other than local dwellings and probably the church. Certainly a significant volume of rock has been excavated, entirely by hand, over many years.
The Clunch Pit has not seen any active quarrying now since the nineteen-thirties and is designated an SSSI (Site of Special Interest) due to the rich chalk grassland flora and associated butterflies, moths and other insects. It is a significant village amenity which is used both by villagers and visitors for leisure activities.
The site is managed by the Clunch Pit Management Trust (CPMT), a voluntary body which manages the site (as well as the Glebe Field and the Paddock area) on behalf of Orwell Parish Council. Membership of the CPMT is open to representatives from any village organisation and any village resident willing to devote time to preserving the site under a management plan agreed with Natural England (previously English Nature and the body responsible for the site under its SSSI designation).
The site is marked as Quarriehill Furlong on the map of 1686, so it seems that quarrying was already established by that time. It is probable that the quarrying originates much earlier with the building of the original village church. The earliest surviving part of St Andrew’s, which contains clunch, is dated as 12th century. It seems that clunch in Bedfordshire was already being quarried in Roman times, so it is quite likely that excavations on some scale commenced very early on in the history of Orwell too.
Certainly many village properties contain at least some clunch in their construction, and there is even a thatched wall in the High Street which is constructed of clunch. There are no medieval houses in Orwell; the surviving timber-framed houses, some of which may have replaced medieval buildings, are of late 16th to early 18th century and clunch was used mainly in the 17th century chimney stacks of these properties.
In 1977 the Parish Council secured the ownership of the Pit ‘for the benefit of all villagers.’
The most recent history of the site is well-documented, so we do know that in 1977 the Parish Council established a trust deed with the then owner, a Mr Whiskin, whose company Village Properties owned the freehold of the Clunch Pit as well as the site of Quarry Farm on the High Street (which was demolished to make way for six new properties in the nineteen-eighties). Subsequently two Parish Councillors, Mr Brown and Mr Miller, purchased the freehold, which they then donated to the Parish Council who now own the land.
From 1978 a village organisation (the CPMT) was established to manage the site ‘for the benefit of all villagers’, and from 1985/86, when the site was designated a SSSI, the CPMT has worked in conjunction with firstly English Nature and then Natural England to keep the site in the best possible condition.
Orwell Clunch Pit is today a recreational area which supports a rare flora, yet it has clearly been used over hundreds of years as a source of local building stone until the use of brick in residential properties became widespread.
If anyone reading this article is in a position to provide any more detail on the history of the Clunch Pit over that long period of time, then your help in fleshing out the history of this site would be much appreciated.
Clive Pickton September 2012
Orwell Clunch Pit Management Trust
Orwell Clunch Pit is managed by the Clunch Pit Management Trust (CPMT), a voluntary body which reports to Orwell Parish Council who own the site. Membership of the CPMT is open to representatives from any village organisation and anyone willing to devote time to preserving the site under a management plan agreed with Natural, the body responsible for the site under its SSSI designation.
The current CPMT Committee is as follows:
- Chairman – Colin Hoptroff
- Secretary – Clive Pickton
- Treasurer – Nick Chambers
Two Parish Council members are delegated specifically to the CPMT but all members of the Parish Council are automatically entitled to be part of the committee. Any Orwell resident is welcome to attend meetings but does not have a say in any voting matters.
