'It was a really big party. But no one now knows what the celebration was for. Early in the third millennium B.C.E., on a hilltop at Hambledon in southwest England, in the midst of a complex of ceremonial enclosures and defensive earthworks, people gathered for purposes we can no longer identify, but one thing is obvious from the archaeological record. They were there to eat and drink. They brought a mixture of food with them. They got some of it, such as venison, by hunting. Other items, especially the large quantities of hazlenuts, were the fruit of gathering. But there were also foods the people produced for themselves by herding and farming: cattle, pigs,sheep, and wheat and barley that had already been cleaned of chaff. They intended to eat thefood, not store it, because the site is strewn with the fragments of broken plates and cups, butthere are few remains of large containers. Some of the animals they reared were enormous, yielding 600 pounds of meat, organ meats, and fat, and on some of the days of feasting at the site, two or three such creatures were butchered at one time. So these were gatherings of hundreds or thousands of people, who knew how to breed livestock for size. The people who lived in the area at the time exhibited strikingly varied food habits, which implies that there were different ranks or orders of society, marked by differences of diet. Most people lived mainly on meat and milk, but some ate only vegetable foods. They probably washed their feast down with wine, because archaeologists have found the remains of grapes and grape vines at the site.
 

The feasting at Hambledon Hill perhaps sprang from a hunter–gatherer way of life, which people in the region had not yet altogether abandoned in favor of farming. Once hunters kill a large animal, such as a deer or even a wild ox, they have to eat the meat quickly in communal meals before it rots. Yet the eaters who gathered at Hambledon were engaged in a huge transformation of their way of life—from foraging for food to growing and breeding it—that had already been going on for centuries in their part of the world and, in some places, for thousands of years. The transition has been gathering pace ever since and now includes most of the Earth’s inhabitants'. (Pearson: The World; a brief history)

Hambledon Hill is one of the prominant chalk hills of the county of Dorset.  The South West comprises the modern counties of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire. This region bestrides the divide between highland and lowland England.' The majority of the region comprises the older, harder rocks of upland Britain, together with the more acidic soils derived from those rocks, the consequent pastoral farming systems, an ancient Image landscape and a dispersed pattern of rural settlements. There are few large towns. The upland moors of Mendip and Exmoor and the granite bosses of Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor add transhumance and mineral exploitation of silver, tin and lead to the economic equation, whilst the long, indented coastline to both the north and south of the peninsula brought opportunities for fishing, coastal trading and links with South Wales. Ireland, north-west France and Iberia. However, the south coast is altogether more sheltered than the north with its steep cliffs and lack of inlets.

In contrast, Wiltshire, Dorset and east Devon are part of the lowland zone with fertile clay vales, chalk and limestone escarpments and plateaux. Soils are more fertile, the climate is drier, mixed farming systems predominate and nucleated village settlements are the norm. However, there were also large areas of lowland heath on the poor sandy soils of south-east Dorset, and extensive down-land pastures on the chalk of Salisbury Plain which could be exploited to feed huge flocks of sheep. Whereas water WAS in short supply on the downs, the opposite was true in the marshlands of the Somerset Levels which provide a third distinctive local landscape of much richer pastureland.  Some of these grazed grassland have been the basis of pastoral production since the first inhabitants first colonised the chalk downland. 

This division between upland and lowland, between pastoral and mixed farming, was reflected, too, in the political divide of the early medieval period.

At the regional level, British grasslands are most often components of rural landscapes made of spatial associations of different types of ecosystems, which are grouped together within a local agro-silvo-pastoral system. The ways grassland, forest and/or scrub ecosystems are spatially arranged within landscape, and their use combined within agro-silvo-pastoral systems, are important factors that determine the nature of the usually wide range of ecological, social and economic services that these agroecological systems provide.

Ecosystem services at the regional level do not result only from the intrinsic properties of single ecosystems, but also from their interactions with other ecosystems that have different properties. This is even true for primary production services. It is well known, for example, that grasslands in watershed bottoms play an important role in flood limitation and that hedges in steep cropland help to prevent wind and water erosion. Many studies in landscape ecology also stress the major role of the habitat mosaic in biodiversity, especially in fauna communities. For example, forest and grassland fields in agricultural landscapes act as reservoirs and also as corridors for many species, especially insects that are useful for pollination and crop-pest control. Additionally, societal changes have increased interest in the visual quality and aesthetics of rural landscapes, their cultural and heritage value, and their economic value for rural development through tourism and other activities.

The vegetation of semi‐natural grazed grasslands comprises a mixture of grasses and herbaceous plants, along with sedges, rushes, mosses and other low‐growing species. In the UK.   Seminatural grasslands are the remnants of non seeded habitats created by low‐intensity, traditional farming, or, in some cases, the natural vegetation on poor soils or in exposed locations. Much grassland in the UK has undergone agricultural ‘improvement’ through the re‐sowing of plants, high inputs of inorganic fertilisers and intensive cutting or grazing. These activities have created grasslands dominated by a few agricultural grasses and white clover . In contrast to the generic and species‐poor composition of agriculturally improved grasslands, plant communities in seminatural grasslands often have a rich variety of grasses and herbs, and fall into distinct types which have developed over many decades in response to  the local climate, soil, geology and management methods.

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