Combining Palaeoecological and Historical Approaches to Investigating Post-Medieval Land Use Change at Sandford Mire, Cumbria, North West England, UK

Abstract Sandford Mire in western England provides a case study of how peat core based evidence and historical records can be combined to investigate the post-medieval history of a landscape. Data on pollen, testate amoebae and various aspects of peat sedimentology are combined with historical maps and written sources to elucidate the environmental history of the site. The peat core data allows additional detail to be added to the history described in the archival sources. In particular, these records identify what appears to be significant soil erosion. We suggest this may be associated with enclosure ploughing which is not described in local historical documents and adds significantly to the eighteenth-century agricultural history of the area. In addition the peat core evidence adds other details to the known historical record – such as the probable use of barley as a crop, the scrub growing on the mire surface during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century and inferred increases in twentieth-century grazing; as well as mire surface fires possibly associated with the opening of the nearby railway line in the mid-nineteenth century. The proxy data from our core also helps confirm some details recorded in the text sources, such as drainage and a drier mire surface in the second half of the twentieth century and helps identify the role of changes in grazing pressure on the bogs vegetation – which has the potential to inform future conservation management.