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| | | From Shetland to the Scilly Isles, Open Country travels the UK in search of the stories, the people and the wildlife that make our countryside such a vibrant place. Each week we visit a new area to hear how local people are growing the crops, protecting the environment, maintaining the traditions and cooking the food that makes their corner of rural Britain unique.
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Helen Mark visits the Sperrin Mountains, a gently contoured range straddling the border of Counties Tyrone and Londonderry, where the hedgerows are bright at this time of the year with the yellow gorse known locally as "whin".
Sperrin Mountains
Introducing the Sperrins, geologist Dr Patrick McKeever meets Helen on a slope overlooking the village of Gortin, where traces of the ancient oak forest which once covered Ireland are still visible. Looking north-west to Derry, west to the Blue Stack Mountains of Donegal, south-west to Omagh and east to Belfast, Dr McKeever explains how the local place names betray the geological roots of the area. While visitors tend to head for Lough Neagh, the Sperrins' lack of major roads has left the area relatively untouched by tourism.
British Geological Survey: Northern Ireland
Geological Survey of Ireland
The Sperrins is farming country, rich in sheep pasture, but there was a time when the landscape was blue with flax flowers, the basis of Northern Ireland's wealthy linen industry. The Wellbrook Beetling Mill near Cookstown is one of the very few places where the crop is still grown and Beth Black, the mill's curator, herself descended from a long line of linen workers, takes Helen through the many stages of the cloth making process. From sowing to pulling, retting to rippling, spinning to weaving, beetling to bleaching, a long, exhausting and sometimes dangerous business made a cloth so precious it was put under armed guard and cost thieves their lives.
Wellbrook Beetling Mill
The area has a dialect all of its own, cherished by local people like George Shiels, who reads Helen some of his poetry and explains how the vocabulary of the linen industry has left its mark on the area's language. The influence of the Sperrins is clear, too, in the work of Seamus Heaney, the Nobel prize winner who was born and spent his early years there and whose poem Follower was inspired by life on the family farm.
Seamus Heaney
Finally, in a glen filled with the distinctive coconut scent of gorse, Helen goes panning for gold with local countryside officer Martin Bradley. There's not much to be found, but the very presence of the precious mineral forms a direct link with the ancient peoples who lived and worked in the Sperrins. Britain's earliest evidence of farming activity has been found here, and archaeologist Tony Candon, of the Ulster History Park, describes the richness of the area's finds, protected and preserved by the peat bog which covers the land.
County Tyrone
Ulster History Park
This week's competition: one of the greatest finds of ancient gold ever made - the Broighter Hoard, found in County Derry - included a torque which many of us will have seen in a day-to-day context. Where would we have seen it?
Submit your entry by emailing [email protected]
Last week's winner is Mrs Ella Southwood of Lymington in Hampshire, who correctly said that a guinea weighed 8.35 grammes or 129.5 grains.
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Village Life
Terry Waite
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Yorkshire Dales, June 2002
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Yorkshire Dales, 8 July 2006
Z to Z Britain
Open Country looks back 2003
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