Not many people seem to know about the Chalk Pit which is located on the footpath from New Road through to the path leading to the Icknield Way from Heydon Road. Over the last year, Robin Dibblee has worked tirelessly, with the help of some other volunteers, to start to turn this overgrown dump into a village amenity. Robin writes:
Chalk Not Clunch
As Peter Wiseman’s slides record, late Victorian Chishill was desperately poor, with chalky soil and bare of trees, chopped down for fuel. The Chalk Pit was dug in the hope that a valuable building material, Clunch, might save the day. Unfortunately there was only flinty chalk – and the Pit had closed by 1900.
Thereafter, the Pit became a scrap-heap for the village, increasingly infested with an invasive creeper that killed off trees by draining the roots of water and crowding out the leaf cover with dense foliage. New Zealand is eradicating this creeper over the entire South Island.
The Pit Club took up this challenge by removing the scrap, using its value for reduced costs from the skip company. The creeper is piled up, awaiting disposal. The cleared rising ground has been planted with 150 indigenous free trees from a conservation charity. It was necessary to remove further scrap for tree planting, for which it is hoped the Parish Council will pay for costs of disposal.
The Bowl has now been opened up, with the footpath meandering through. Footfall has increased five-fold with people taking short-cuts from Heydon Road to New Road. It is unique in being a wooded environment in what is otherwise bare downland across other village footpaths.
Nick Kiddy the farmer leases this land from County Farms and has to pay rental for no return. He has been a ‘kindly landlord’ to the Pit Club, allowing the environmental improvements which make the Chalk Pit a special place. It is hoped the Scouts will use it for meetings and woodcraft – and maybe even have the Bowl a setting for a Chishill Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Not Fly-Tipping!
Anyone passing out of the village down New Road on 30th April could be forgiven for thinking that there had been some fly-tipping! However, the pile of rubbish from the chalk pit – mainly old corrugated iron and other metal junk, was put there by a team of volunteers, using 11 wheelbarrows to move the rubbish, mainly collected up by Robin, up to the road ready for same day collection by skip lorry.
