FOR generations they have been used by northern picnickers, courting couples and ramblers but are hay meadows fast becoming a thing of the past? That's the question being tackled by workers on an innovative project up at Lancaster University and so far, the results don't look too good. Funded by the World Wide Fund for Nature, the research team at the university's Unit of Vegetarian Science has already discovered an alarming drop in the amount of meadows in our local countryside.

According to surveys, there are only around 600 hectares of these herb-rich grasslands left in the north, on the few farms where traditional management has safeguarded them.

Free from chemical fertilisers, never treated with herbicides, the fields still give a home to an enormous range of flora and fauna as well as giving our countryside its distinctive look.

For the first time, maps of all these sites where wildlife can still thrive have been produced on computer but the project doesn't stop there. Researchers are looking for remnants of the distinctive meadow flora scattered along road verges and in the corners of fields now given over to intensive silage production. Those fragments could provide the key for the return of the hay meadow.

The team are talking to farmers in and around the Lancaster area, piecing together the traditions of farm practice which have given the landscape its particular stamp.

And they will be working with botanical illustrators to get novel insights into the particular beauty of this kind of local countryside.

Dr John Rodwell, director of the unit, said: "Artists see things differently. We need their skills to complement our own. Habitat and landscapes are cherished for things that cannot be completely described by scientific survey, mapping or photography."

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