RSPB Minsmere
RSPB Minsmere is a nature reserve owned and managed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. It lies within the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and the Suffolk Heritage Coast area. The reserve has a visitor centre, eight bird hides and an extensive network of footpaths and trails.
About RSPB Minsmere in brief
RSPB Minsmere is a nature reserve owned and managed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. The 1,000-hectare site has been managed by RSPB since 1947. It lies within the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and the Suffolk Heritage Coast area. It is conserved as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, Special Area of Conservation, Special Protection Area and Ramsar site. The reserve has a visitor centre, eight bird hides and an extensive network of footpaths and trails. The area was the site of an ancient abbey and a Tudor artillery battery. Potential future threats to the site include flooding or salination as climate change causes rising sea levels, coastal erosion and possible effects on water levels due to the construction of a new reactor at the neighbouring Sizewell nuclear power stations. The only visible structure is the ruined chapel of St Mary, built within the nave of the former church. The lower section of the chapel was built soon after the demolition of the abbey in 1363, and the brick upper parts are thought to have been added by former abbot John Green, who lived there as a hermit when he retired from his post in 1527. The site was abandoned in 1537 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the only further construction being a pillbox chapel that was built inside the chapel during World War II. The ruins are a scheduled monument of national importance, and a 12th century Peat cutting place from at least at least the 12th Century describes the coastline as ‘Minsmere’ In the Domesday Survey in 1086 Minsere was known as Menesmara or Milsemere.
The manor, which was in the Hundred of Blythling, was held by Roger Bigot. It is recorded as having six households headed by freemen with one plough team. The higher land consists of a deep layer of gravel and sand, the legacy of the beach formed by the sea before it retreated. The river mouth was finally closed in the 18th century as sand and shingle deposits formed off the coast. In about 1780 a coastguard station operated at the coast to control smuggling along this stretch of the coast in an attempt to control the smuggling in the area. In the 1780s a sandbank was cut and improved using alluvial sand from all sides to improve access to the higher areas of the land. The land was reed bed, lowland heath, acid grassland, wet grassland and woodland and woodland. The geology of the wetland areas below the topsoil is marine clay with darker freshwater deposits from the M Insmere River. Two extensive sandbanks lie off the coastline, and the beach is sand overlain with shingle. The sandbanks are amongst the most rapidly eroding in the UK, at an annual rate of 1–2 m. From 500 BC to 700 AD, the sea level in Suffolk was about 6 m higher than it is today.
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This page is based on the article RSPB Minsmere published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 02, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
