LCA5C Upper Test Valley Floor

Landscape Strategy and Guidelines

The Upper Test Valley Floor is a particularly intimate, almost secret landscape, with important historic and ecological features forming an important part of the River Test chalk stream SSSI and containing nationally significant water meadows. The overall strategy is to conserve the remote small scale pastoral character of Upper Test Valley Floor.

Land Management

Landscape Distinctiveness

• Reinforce existing local features and conserve intimate and tranquil water meadow and woodland pattern

• Maintain the characteristic water channel and drainage ditches, mill streams and pools

Agriculture

• Encourage management of traditional water meadows and reintroduce management of farmland as seasonally wet pastures where appropriate

• Resist change from pasture to arable

• Discourage merging of remaining smaller fields

Hedgerows

• Encourage traditional methods of hedge management

• Maintain hedgerow field boundaries

Woodland and Trees

• Management of the pollards and lines of poplar, which characterise some sections of the valley floor

• Encourage the retention of hedgerow trees and individual specimens in the landscape

• Conserve valley floor wet woodland and promote good woodland management

• Encourage where appropriate new areas of woodland planting to mitigate visual distracters

Biodiversity

• Conserve, enhance and manage riparian habitats

• Encourage agricultural management that will protect and enhance remnant unimproved grasslands

• Protect the water from further damage from pollution, soil erosion and construction projects

• Seek opportunities for wetland creation and ditch reinstatement

Historic Landscapes

• Protect the surviving water meadow systems including the earthworks and their structural remains

Land Use and Development

Built Developments

• Conserve the existing settlement form and settlement free character of the valley floor

Infrastructure

• Avoid overhead visually intrusive power lines and individual masts

• Avoid increased suburbanisation arising from introduction of highway measures, which conflict with the predominant rural character

• Improve the visual and acoustic containment of the A303

Recreation, Tourism and Access

• Seek opportunities for additional access to the river for the public

• Volume 1: LCA5C Landscape Character Types and Areas