Open Country

Helen Mark explores the Lincolnshire Wolds through the poetry of Victorian Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

The Lincolnshire Wolds are a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, remote and in some ways little-changed since Tennyson was born here, in the village of Somersby, in 1809.

Helen meets dialect speakers, like Tennyson, whose 'first language was Lincolnshire'. She'll find out how he might have described the landscape and how it appears in some of his dialect poems. She meets some rare farm animals that would have been familiar to him and visits a rookery he describes in his famous poem 'Maud'. We'll hear direct descendants of those very rooks!

Producer: Mary Ward-Lowery.

Helen Mark spends a day at Southwell Races in rural Nottinghamshire. It's one of the smallest and most rural racetracks in Britain, but it's also one of the busiest.

Helen follows a day in the life of the race-track, meeting some of the people who make it happen. She talks about dreams and 'babies' (two year old horses) with trainer David Brown as one of his horses has a swim in the pool.

There are the Travelling Stable Lasses, jockey Andrew Mullen (no, he hadn't eaten anything all day), racehorse trainer Ollie Pears, who has several legs of horses for sale if you'd like one.

There's drama, as Helen joins the race-course vet as they race alongside the horses just in case one of them takes a fall. And she learns how to choose a horse to put your money on. Or not.

Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery.

Helen Mark visits the National Forest as its marks 25 years since it started to create huge areas of woodland.

The entire area covers 200 square miles across the boundary of the East and West Midlands over the three counties of Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Leicestershire. Helen explores how this regeneration through nature has impacted upon the lives of the people in the area.

She begins by planting our very own 'Open Country' oak tree.

Producer: Perminder Khatkar.

Helen Mark visits the Iron-Age Hillfort in Oswestry, Shropshire to discover why it's the "Stonehenge of the Iron Age" and how plans for housing might affect the landscape. Dr Rachel Pope tells Helen why the size and scale of the Western entrance ramparts help make the Hillfort one of the most important Iron-Age monuments in England, and why it's a symbol for community and trade rather than defence. Dr George Nash explains how the site was used to train soldiers in trench warfare and mortar practice during World War One. John Waine links this to soldier and poet Wilfred Owen who returned to his home-town of Oswestry for training and may have written 'Storm' in the shadow of the Hillfort. Helen meets Sarah Gibson of the Shropshire Wildlife Trust and goes in search of Yellowhammers and Linnets which nest in the ramparts, and finds out how the Violet Oil Beetle hitches a lift on the backs of bees. Following Shropshire Council's decision to include a piece of land near the Hillfort in their plan for development, Bill Klemperer of Historic England explains how they hope to minimise its impact should an application for housing be made. But for Rachel Pope the Hillfort has so many tales to tell that any erosion to the landscape around it would devalue its setting.

Producer: Toby Field.

Forget Texas! There's oil in the plains of Lincolnshire. But not many people seem to notice.

Helen Mark travels to the market town of Gainsborough to discover more about the nodding donkeys that pepper its landscape. Oil wells sit comfortably fringed by a housing estate, the leisure centre and the golf course.

It turns out that the East Midlands is the UK's second largest inshore oil producing area, courtesy of the Gainsborough Trough, once a deep and dirty patch of sea. Now it produces twelve hundred barrels of high quality oil a day, mostly pumped up by nodding donkeys.

Whereas fracking attracts protest and controversy, local people seem quite content to live alongside these nodding pumps, perhaps because they look so benign - friendly even - and work away quietly with apparently little human intervention.

Helen meets local teacher and long-distance runner Nigel Bowler, for whom the donkeys are a landmark on his running routes. There's artist Verity Barrett, who loved the pumps as a child, part of the 'scenic route' on trips to visit her granddad.

Julie Barlow from i-gas explains the business of oil extraction and geologists Malcom Fry and Paul Hildreth slice through the soil to bring alive the geological layers that led to the Gainsborough Trough. Then there are Daniel Ashman and Louise Hammond, who've spent the last week camping outside a new exploratory oil boring site near the village of Laughton, as part of an anti-fracking protest.

As the dustbin lorry and the postman do their rounds of the Park Springs Housing Estate on the edge of Gainsborough, another few barrels of oil are drawn up from 1500m underground. The nodding donkeys aren't bad neighbours, it seems. 'I think they're wonderful' says Paul Hildreth.

Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery.

Felicity Evans asks how the valleys of south Wales near Caerphilly have fared since the mines closed. She visits new parklands that have been planted where the collieries once stood.

She begins at Senghenydd, site of two mining disasters just one hundred years ago, one of them the worst ever experienced at a UK mine. Former teacher in the village and now a broadcaster, Roy Noble reflects on the legacy of the disaster, and how it's still remembered even though a primary school has been built on the site of the mine, since the pit was closed nearly 50 years ago.

Felicity also visits two other parks in the Caerphilly area which have been created on the sites of former collieries: Parc Cwm Darran which was planted in the 1980s, and Parc Penallta, which has been developed since the Millennium. How do residents relate now to their local landscape, and the memorials to the industry that once defined the region?

Producer: Mark Smalley.

In the final episode of this series Helen Mark visit Woodwalton Fen in Cambridgeshire with writer Simon Barnes to discover the lost landscape which inspired Charles Rothschild to draw up the Rothschild list. This list of wild places in need of preservation helped establish modern conservation ideas and in 1912 Rothschild established the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves for Britain and the Empire, the first society in Britain concerned with protecting wildlife habitats.

Helen Mark is in the Forest of Dean in search of mysterious geological formations known as 'scowles'.

These semi-natural features in the landscape are thought to be unique to the Forest of Dean but are plentiful in this area. They are crater-like features in the woodland that have been eroded over time by water-action and exploited by miners through the centuries for their bounty: iron-ore, coal, and ochre have all been found in abundance in the Forest of Dean.

Helen descends into the mysterious, mossy world of the scowles and comes face to face with one of it's inhabitants: a large cave spider and looks for the greater and lesser horseshoe bats. These two species thrive in the craters and caverns of the the Forest.

Tales of mining and the blast furnaces that smelted the iron-ore lead Helen across the Forest before she finds herself on a film set.

The visually stunning nature of the scowles have led to television and movie crews visiting the area to film in this mysterious, other-worldly landscape. They have become the backdrop to some memorable moments in the TV series Merlin and Dr Who and most famously in the recent Star Wars film, The Force Awakens that was filmed in a part of the Forest called Puzzlewood.

Presenter: Helen Mark

Helen Mark uncovers why peat makes the Somerset Levels a special place to visit, not just for the wildlife. Since earliest times humans have exploited this natural resource. Its wetlands once supported Lake Villagers whose secrets lay buried deep beneath the feet of the modern archaeologist keen to uncover what these wetlands preserves for millennia.

A mere 50 years ago the extraction of peat was a major industry employing hundreds of people. It was cut for fuel, for horticulture, even animal feed. That industry has all but faded into history and Helen visits one of the last remaining extraction companies. Once this landscape was scarred by man, littered by trackways and industry, yet today what remains of this scarred is being managed to return it to another use. Helen discovers the memories of those who walked this peatland landscape are enjoyed by a new visitor, the nature watcher.

Producer Andrew Dawes.

Yorkshire looks different in the dark. Helen Mark looks up into the heavens and deep underground for a new understanding of England's biggest county.

Off-road cycling in the Dales becomes a lot more thrilling when you strike out into the dark and, armed with an infra-red nghtscope you realise just how busy the forests of the North York Moors National Park are after sunset.

Helen will also be discovering how the Brontë sisters filled the long nights in the Haworth Parsonage and mining precious Blue John in the caverns of the Peak District.

Producer: Alasdair Cross.