The ancient woodlands that made Britain great
- Ancient by Luke Barley (Profile £25, 320pp)
After all the trouble one has taken to be a modern man, one has come back under the spell of a primitive awe, wordless and humble.’
Such is the effect of stepping into the cool green peace of the woods, so perfectly expressed by the American poet and environmentalist Wendell Berry.
And it makes the perfect epigraph to this book. While other landscapes have their appeal, there is something especially potent about ancient woodland, says National Trust forestry expert Luke Barley.
Straight-tusked elephants used to bulldoze through British woodlands
He has worked in the North Downs, the Peaks and the Lakes, and communicates his love and knowledge of woods with eloquence.
Ancient woodland, incidentally, may be defined as any woodland that also appears on maps from 1600 or earlier. Before then, people didn’t plant new woodlands anyway. Our older woods aren’t just medieval, or even Roman: they may date back to the start of our current interglacial era, 10-12,000 years ago! No wonder they are so complex and teeming with life.
Another way to identify them is from the presence of flowers such as herb Paris, or the delicate white wood anemone, which only likes old woodlands.
Barley explains how working with woods gets you closer to them, even when thinning them.
Opening up dense woods to sunlight is one of the best things we can do because we long ago exterminated all those large, wild animals which used to do it for us, crashing through them like herds of bellowing bulldozers: aurochs, bison, and straight-tusked elephants 35,000 years ago.
We must now thin them ourselves to create sunny glades.
A healthy woodland is a mix of flourishing, fallen and dead trees, rotting wood and fungi, ferns and epiphytes and dark forest ponds, a complex kaleidoscope of habitats.
Earlier woodland management was smart. Coppicing was key. Hazel trees were cut down to stumps every ten years, producing an abundance of long poles and rods for fencing, building and firewood. After ten years, they could be harvested again . . . for ever.
By 1650, reckons one expert, England and Wales got through 1.2 million tonnes of firewood a year, yet with careful woodland management, they produced this from just 1.6 per cent of the landscape.
Offcuts and sticks would be bound into ‘fascines’ to fill in potholes. You can’t help wonder if they were smarter than we are.
Sadly, barely a tenth of our coppiced woods are still managed as they were, hence the collapse in butterfly and bird species. More than half of our resident 57 butterfly species are woodland inhabitants, not grassland or hedgerow.
Given their value, surely our ancient woods, covering just 2 per cent of Britain, are safe? Shockingly, no. More than 50 were partly destroyed to make way for the first phase of the HS2 line. But Barley remains an optimist – woodlands can be restored, with determination.