Oak and Ash and Thorn

The Ancient Woods and New Forests of Britain

Peter Fiennes

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786071675
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

A Guardian Best Nature Book of the Year
The magic and mystery of the woods are embedded in culture, from ancient folklore to modern literature. They offer us refuge: a place to play, a place to think. They are the generous providers of timber and energy. They let us dream of other ways of living. Yet we now face a future where taking a walk in the woods is consigned to the tales we tell our children. Immersing himself in the beauty of woodland Britain, Peter Fiennes explores our long relationship with the woods and the sad and violent story of how so many have been lost. Just as we need them, our woods need us too. But who, if anyone, is looking out for them?

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The woodland thicket overtops me,
the blackbird sings me a lay, praise I will not conceal;
above my lined little booklet
the trilling of birds sings to me.
The clear cuckoo sings to me, lovely discourse,
in its grey cloak from the crest of the bushes;
truly – may the Lord protect me! –
Well do I write under the forest wood.

Anglo-Saxon poem

Timber!

Croft Ambrey, late May

It is early summer in the woods above Croft Castle in Herefordshire. The silver birch leaves are turning a deeper green, their bark a smooth, tender shade of white. Snug among the leaves, the pale green catkins are furled and ripening like a million caterpillars trembling on the brink of release. There is only a narrow strip of birch here, by the edge of the path, a sprinkling of young trees standing at a crossroads in the heart of a gloomy expanse of conifer plantations, but enough light has reached the woodland floor at this point to mean that there is also grass, bracken, red campion and even a dash of bluebells. Butterflies waltz in the sunlight. And beyond the birch, the conifer plantations are spread far across the hillside, the forest floor dark in the midday sun, dead brown needles lying thick on the dismal ground.

I am gazing at a newly erected National Trust sign:

Visitors to Croft Castle and its surrounding woodland may be surprised to see a number of trees being felled over the next six months, but this is a major step towards reinstating the beauty spot’s historic wood pasture.

The Forestry Commission is removing 70 acres of non-native conifers from the central part of Croft Wood as part of its planned woodland management.

Conifer plantations conflict with how the landscape looked up until the mid-20th century.

Over the decades, many of us have learned to hate conifer plantations. Even the Forestry Commission now seems to regard them with a glum and sheepish dissatisfaction, despite the fact that it was they who were responsible for most of the planting in the first place. Certainly, in the decades after 1919, when the commission was formed as a response to a wartime shortage of pit props and trench cladding, it was unstinting in its efforts to secure the national supply of timber. ‘Non-native’ conifers were selected – they are fast-growing and regular in their habits – and were spread with aggressive abandon across the country. Neglected farmland was chosen first, followed by remote expanses of peat and the thin-soiled uplands, before the commission finally turned its Sauron-like gaze on Britain’s last isolated remnants of broadleaved woodland. Nothing was safe (there was almost no legal protection), as ancient woods across the land were grubbed out, drenched in chemicals, uprooted and replaced by orderly rows of Sitka and Norway spruce, Japanese larch and Corsican pine.

We know all this now – although anyone who was paying attention also knew it at the time. R.S. Thomas, the Welsh poet who preached and brooded just across the border from Croft Ambrey, had his own bleak perspective of the plantations:

I see the cheap times

Against which they grow:

Thin houses for dupes,

Pages of pale trash,

A world that has gone sour

With spruce.

from ‘Afforestation’

‘A world that has gone sour with spruce’ pretty much sums it up. Mind you, Thomas’s solution was to return the land to men and their sapling-stripping, monocultural sheep, an idea that would give most modern-day environmentalists the vapours. The poem was written in the 1960s – and the destruction and regimented planting had become especially frenzied in the years after the Second World War. Oliver Rackham, our pre-eminent woodland writer, dubbed the years 1950–75 ‘The Locust Years’ – although, to be more accurate, what these particular locusts devoured they also replaced: thousands of hectares of diverse ancient woodland gave way to monotonous lines of spruce; teeming, self-regenerating, wildlife-rich woods became closed, sterile circuits of industrialized timber production.

In those years, even people who loved their local woods may have felt that their destruction was somehow necessary. Perhaps a leftover spirit of sacrifice from the war, along with a new obsession with the statistics of economic growth, convinced enough people that scientifically managed plantations were the right, futuristic solution to Britain’s perceived timber shortage. More likely, most people didn’t care enough and just sort of assumed that someone else knew better. It’s true that immediately after the Second World War there was less woodland in Britain than at any time since the last Ice Age, but there had been many similar panics about a national shortage of timber over the centuries. Unfortunately, this was the first moment that the panic coincided with the tools (and the imported seeds and trees) to transform our landscape within a generation. No one stopped to consider whether we actually needed to be self-sufficient in timber (it was centuries since we last had been), they just demanded more trees. Lots and lots of them. And, whereas in the past, the oak tree had been the patriotic tree of choice for the would-be forester, this time it was the spruce.

If you want a glimpse of the national mood during these disastrous years, then a good place to start is Trees, Woods and Man by H.L. Edlin, first published in 1956 as part of Collins’s iconic ‘New Naturalist’ series. Edlin loved his trees, and lamented the dying out of the traditional woodland crafts (and even the disappearance of our native woodland), but what he really wanted to see was the efficient ‘re-establishment of forests by modern methods’. One of his most frequently used woodland words is ‘crop’, because in his eyes trees were really no different from wheat, beans or potatoes. Trees were timber. And a wood was nothing more than a production line of trees. Anything else that grew or lived in the wood was getting in the way of the harvest.

‘The general practice of the British forester is to clear fell his woodland and to start his new crop from scratch,’ he notes approvingly, but ‘How closely does the forester plant his young crop, and what type of trees does he use? On the average he sets the trees in rows, five feet apart each way, using about 1,750 to each acre (or about 1,500 after allowing for roads, rides, and like gaps).’

A sense of urgency pervades the pages; there is no time to wait for nature to run its course, or for our slow-moving, clearly rather hopeless native woodlands to get their act together. There is pressing, grown-up business at hand: ‘Vast woods, ripe for slow regeneration in this way [i.e. self-seeding], have had to be slaughtered within a few months,’ he tells us, and as for Britain’s fragile and irreplaceable reserves of peat: ‘The Forestry Commission, following the lead of a few pioneering private landowners [oh yes], has steadily been developing ways and means of draining peat bogs, and finding trees, such as the spruce, that tolerate them.’ In his vision, learned in his years as a rubber planter in Malaya, every scrap of what was deemed to be non-productive land had to be put to good use. It’s not a crazy idea – no doubt Edlin and others had witnessed enough shortages, hardship and starvation to make them impatient of any obstacles to economic growth or bleatings about aesthetics – but it was symptomatic of the forces that led to the almost total annihilation of Britain’s native woodland. There has been a bitter and hard-fought backlash, and a change in policy at the Forestry Commission, but we remain stuck with a veneration of productivity and growth, along with a corresponding confusion about anything that cannot be measured as useful. We may have left the Locust Years but, if anything, the state of mind that gave rise to them is even more entrenched. Why else would anyone even have to explain what a wood is for?

Many (English) nature writers and landscape historians, surveying the destruction, seem keen to blame the Germans for all this. At some point in the eighteenth century the Prussians got it into their heads that the forests could be regulated, the trees paraded into neat lines and the productivity of woods maximized on strictly scientific, Enlightenment principles. It was all a question of measurement. Oak trees and most other broadleaves (messy, erratic, slow, inclined to host wildlife and far too tolerant – if not downright neighbourly – towards other species of tree) were destroyed and replaced by the conifer plantations that we now think of as a quintessentially German landscape. Within a couple of generations, the famous German oak forests had gone. Edlin (with his suspiciously Teutonic name) was just following the mood of the times. It wasn’t that he was unaware of the beauty of trees or the glory of the woods (he wrote with elegiac intensity about them, even as they disappeared from view), but he would hardly have expected such intangible ideas to take precedence over the nation’s economic needs. In the 1965–67 ‘stocktaking’ at the start of Trees, Woods and Man (a census of woodlands carried out by the Forestry Commission) he proudly displays a table showing the state of Britain’s woodlands, alongside the same ‘stocktaking’ from 1947. It shows that in the period between 1947 and 1967 (the years when the locusts really got going) the amount of woodland in Britain had actually increased by twenty per cent, but that the increase was entirely down to the mass planting of conifers.

It was the woodlands that the Forestry Commission deemed ‘unproductive’ – broadleaf coppices and native woods – that were neglected or destroyed and in just twenty years had fallen (from an already shockingly low base) by another thirty per cent. For centuries, the coppices, the broadleaf woods that were managed on a cycle to produce most of our fuel and much of our timber, had been our most ‘productive’ of all; now they were dismissed as a waste of space: as too diverse, slow and complicated. The frenzy of destruction continued deep into the 1970s and continues – openly, insidiously – to this day. The idea that woodland – all of nature – is something to be accounted for, with stocktakings and harvests, and what’s more that it is incapable of looking after itself and is something that needs to be managed, has become deep-rooted and instinctive. There have always been other voices. John Fowles raged against the ‘disastrously arrogant male dominated religions, which supposed man to be in God’s image and duly appointed him, like some hopelessly venal and ultimately crazed gamekeeper, the steward of all creation’. But most of the time nature lovers and naturalists were dismissed as an irritating irrelevance and an encumbrance to progress and profit. The pendulum may be swinging, but it would be naive to assume that it is heading in the right direction.

The path up from the crossroads among the conifers leads towards Croft Ambrey, the remnants of an Iron Age fort. This land – these woods – has been worked by people for over 2,500 years and, as naturalists always seem quick to tell us, there is not a scrap of unblemished woodland left on these islands: it has all at some point been chopped down, managed, replanted or in some way pawed over by someone. I refuse to believe that – it’s a grim, desiccated thought, rather like knowing that every inch of Britain (the world!) can be conjured up on a screen, courtesy of Google Earth. Who would want that? So one thing I have in mind is to try to find a little parcel of woodland where it might at least be possible to imagine a world before people got so indefatigably busy with their axes, fires and crops. Or at least one where only the most light-footed people have ever trod, stepping with care over the fallen trees.

That place is not here. Many of the conifers, I now notice, have been marked with red crosses, a sign that their days in the forest are numbered. It’s a pleasing thought, but also unexpectedly and absurdly troubling, triggering a whisper of unease about the rounding up of ‘non-natives’ and the cleansing of unwelcome and invasive aliens. People do get very agitated about introduced species: rhododendrons, Corsican pines, parakeets, grey squirrels, Japanese knotweed, Chinese mitten crabs, horse chestnuts, sweet chestnuts, Spanish worms, Spanish bluebells, Dutch elm bark beetles, mink, muntjacs and rabbits. Foreigners every one. Brought here by the Romans, borne back triumphantly by Victorian plant collectors, escaping from farms and gardens to rampage through our land, overwhelming or just simply eating the insipid and degenerate locals. Some of them are undeniably successful, these imported plants, fungi and animals.

The native woodland that the National Trust is hoping to cherish on this hillside will include any species that once managed to scramble over the land bridge that still connected Britain to mainland Europe about seven thousand years ago, just before the ice melted and the waters rose, cutting us off from France and creating an island. There is still some debate about which species of tree qualify, but there are probably twenty-six of them. The last over the causeway may well have been the box tree, which has always struck me as a rather unlikely native, more suited to a sun-dazzled Mediterranean mountainside than the backdrop for a tense picnic in Jane Austen’s Emma. One tree that didn’t make it was...

Table of contents

• Praise forOak and Ash and Thorn
• About the Author
• Introduction
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• Epilogue
• Thanks to…
• Acknowledgements
• Select Bibliography
• Resources
• The Native British Trees