NHER 51391 (Designed Landscape record) - Winter's Grove, medieval woodland

May 1988. Designation: Site of Special Scientific Interest.
Winter's Grove is one of four woodland areas included in the Shotesham-Woodton Hornbeam Woods Site of Special Scientific Interest. It is an ancient coppice-with-standards woodland, and the core is surrounded by a large medieval woodbank and ditch, providing a complete example of an ancient wood.
Information from English Nature (S1).
H. Hamilton (NLA), 26 March 2008.

Earthwork survey.
Winter’s Grove wood comprises two distinct sections. The larger northern and eastern block covers 9 hectares. A narrow field separates the smaller southern section which covers around a hectare. The largest block of the wood, occupying the north and west predominately consists of outgrown coppiced hornbeam and scattered oak standards, the ground is dominated by bramble, honeysuckle and dog’s mercury. This section of the wood is surrounded by a substantial medieval boundary bank, but there are no internal earthworks of any kind throughout this area of the wood. Along the boundary bank, in the south west, which borders the narrow eastern slither of woodland there are four pollards of varied girth. This piece of the wood has no boundary bank or internal earthworks, but there are a couple of dry pits to the south east. The small southern piece of wood does not appear on the Tithe Award map and was evidently created at the expense of a small field in the mid nineteenth century. This area largely consists of coppiced hornbeam and fifteen oak standards which are roughly 150 years old. The largest section of the wood, surrounded by the wood bank, is certainly medieval but the level character of the ground within the wood suggests it is a late medieval secondary wood. The origins of the narrow eastern section of the wood are almost certainly post-medieval.
C. Goodwin (NLA), 26 August 2010.