Wild Flowers at Farway 

It may surprise people to learn that many of the small airfields across the country are excellent nature reserves, as are some of the military training grounds. The key is that many of these sites are left alone largely, people are kept out and nature gets on with life.

The SVBG has an excellent relationship with Farway Common Airfield, a private grass airstrip near the Hare and Hounds. Being an airstrip means the public do not usually have access but the owners and staff are keen to maximise the nature on the extensive site and they have allowed us to survey areas on several occasions.

On Saturday, May 23, we hosted a group of botanists from the Devonshire Association, several knowing far more about our wild flowers than any of the SVBG volunteers. It was a burning hot day walking around the very exposed site but the group persevered for five hours, in that time over 200 species of plant were recorded.

Up until the early 19th century the site was part of the upland common that surrounded the Sid Valley. The area was described as waste because it was of little use for agriculture, it was wet lowland heath with some livestock scratching a living roaming among the gorse.

As with most of the flat upland from Salcombe Regis to Honiton, the site is on the clay with flints geology left over from the chalk beds that used to cover the land millions of years ago. The clay is waterlogged in winter, but baked to a brick in the summer, this affects what will grow there.

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Most of the common land was enclosed around the 1870s and various uses were tried, most were unsuccessful. Large areas have reverted to scrub or used as horse pasture. The airfield has been managed as a traditional hay meadow for about the last fifty years.


The actual runway is mown regularly to keep it suitable for the light aircraft to take off and land, and it is not unlike many poorly maintained lawns, although it is home to some unusual red tinted dandelions. The rest of the site is more than thirty acres of flat ground that is mown just once a year and the hay collected and removed for animal fodder.

The vast hay meadow is not a uniform mix. Gentle undulations in the surface mean some areas are wetter than others and different plants find different conditions to their liking. Areas along the boundary hedgerows have different amounts of shade and this too affects what will grow.

There are many different grasses and a wonderful collection of different orchids across some areas, although the plant that aroused most interest among the botanists was Stachys x ambigua, a hybrid between Hedge and Marsh Woundwort, although few other people would give it a second glance.

The diverse plant life supports a diverse animal population. There are many butterflies and moths in the summer. A wide range of solitary bees can be found. The vole population feeds buzzards and other birds of prey, while adders and grass snakes hunt in the long grass.

We hope the current management of the site continues so that our threatened natural populations will have a home for many years to come.

Full Plant List Below

National botanical records are organised according to OS grid squares. Most of Farway Common Airfield is located in recording square SY1693, but there is an area to the east of the runway that is in square SY1793. The Devonshire Association botanists made 218 records on 23rd May, but this included some duplicates in the two squares, in total the group recorded 151 different species, see the attached list.

Ed Dolphin