A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside. Johnny Scott
regarded by historians as being responsible for much of the disinformation about trees that is still current today.
In contradiction of the accepted policy of mixed woodland management, John Evelyn advised landlords to make extensive new plantations of only one or two species together. Beech was widely planted throughout Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the beech plantations in the Chilterns are an example of traditional coppice woodland and wood pastures being sacrificed to the needs of the furniture industry. In other areas, landlords greatly increased their oak woods or followed the fashion for sycamore, hybrid poplar, wych elm, hornbeam or conifers.
Evelyn was a great supporter of ‘exotics’, as conifers were referred to, and considerable quantities of Norway spruce, silver fir and European larch were planted in the eighteenth century. The plantation movement was very active in Ireland, where plantings were ordered by statute, and in Scotland. Between 1738 and 1830, successive Dukes of Atholl – ‘the planting Dukes’ – planted X] million conifers, many of them European larches grown from seed sent over from the Austrian Tyrol, in the bare hills of their estate at Blair Atholl, in Perthshire. So obsessed was the fourth Duke with plastering the countryside in trees that he is reputed to have established conifers on the inaccessible slopes of Chreag Bhearnach, a jagged mountain overlooking Dunkeld, by firing canvas bags of seed at it through a cannon. One of the original trees grown from Tyrolean seedlings has survived – the Parent Larch, planted near the west end of Dunkeld Cathedral, which is the ancestor of many of the trees seen today on the Atholl estates.
During the Parliamentary Enclosure Acts, passed between 1750 to 1860, the landscape changed out of all recognition when 21 per cent of land in Britain was enclosed, thousands of miles of stone walls were built and quick-set hedging planted as stock-proof field boundaries. It was common practice to plant saplings of oak, ash, beech, elm or other hardwood species, which were allowed to mature undisturbed among the body of hedging plants. These were deliberately left either as a source of future timber, as boundary markers or, in some cases, to act as a pointer which ploughmen could use to make a straight furrow, and it is in old hedgerows that some of most impressive native hardwoods can still be found.
This was the era of the great agricultural improvers, such as Coke of Holkham in Norfolk, Bakewell of Dishley Grange in Leicestershire, Christie of Glynde in Sussex and Graham of Balgowan in Perthshire, all of whom had travelled extensively in Europe and studied farming practices in Holland and Flanders, the most agriculturally advanced countries on the Continent at the time. The Dutch and Flemish were experts at planting woodland to protect crops and livestock or to prevent soil erosion, particularly on exposed sandy ground. Hundreds of acres of Scots pine ‘hedges’ were planted in the Brecklands of East Anglia with Scots, Corsican or maritime pine woods planted around the Norfolk coast and parts of Lancashire, to consolidate the sand dunes and reduce soil erosion in the adjacent farmland. Establishing shelterbelts or small areas of mixed woodland became an additional part of the hedge-planting policy on virtually every farm in the country and there were now species which would grow at almost any altitude and soil type. Behind the steading here at our farm there is a shelterbelt, presumably planted in 1825 when the buildings were put up, containing larch, Scots pine, oak, ash, Norway spruce and beech, which is fairly typical of this part of the Borders.
During the agricultural depression which followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars, more woodland was planted as long-term investments on poor-quality arable areas. These woods and wooded strips provided an ideal habitat for a whole range of wild bird life, and pheasants in particular, where trees had been planted to protect crops. By 1830, the percussion cap – fulminate of mercury contained in a small brass cylinder – had replaced flintlock and priming powder as the ignition system in shotguns. This enabled sportsmen to shoot game on the wing for the first time and in any weather. It was only a matter of time before guns discovered that pheasants were most effectively shot when driven from one cover to another, and within ten years landowners were developing existing woodlands and sighting new ones specifically for driven shooting. In those days, woodland bare of underbrush was often planted with snowberries, laurels and rhododendrons, still seen in many old woods, to provide cover for game birds.
FOR A NUMBER OF REASONS, COPPICING BEGAN A GRADUAL DECLINE FROM THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY. ONE WAS THE TREND TOWARDS GROWING MORE STANDARD TREES FOR THE PRODUCTION OF TIMBER … ANOTHER WAS THE DEMANDS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION FOR A MORE EFFICIENT FUEL SOURCE.
For a number of reasons, coppicing began a gradual decline from the early nineteenth century. One was the trend towards growing more standard trees for the production of timber, following the fashion for new plantations which had been started by Evelyn’s Discourse of Forest Trees. Another was the demands of the industrial revolution for a more efficient fuel source, with charcoal and firewood rapidly being replaced by coal and coke. Without a market for charcoal, commercial coppicing continued, but on a reduced scale, with many woods neglected or coppiced on a much longer rotation.
The plantation movement did little to meet Britain’s timber requirements, and with our industrial cities sprouting like mushrooms, we became increasingly reliant on timber supplies from overseas. By the beginning of the twentieth century about 90 per cent of all timber and forest products were imported softwoods from Scandinavia and Canada. The danger of an island depending on such a high percentage of any commodities became apparent during the First World War, when the German naval blockade prevented imports of food, fuel, timber and other necessities getting through. Over the four years, about 200,000 hectares of assorted domestic woodland had to be felled to meet the requirements of the mining industry and to supply materials for the trenches. The perceived need to rebuild and maintain a strategic timber reserve led to the Forestry Act 1919, and the establishment of a Forestry Commission responsible for woods in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The Commission had wide-ranging powers to acquire land, develop afforestation and encourage private landowners to plant trees by offering grant aid. Land was cheap during the post-war agricultural depression, and by 1939 the Commission had acquired 38,000 hectares, about a third of which had been planted with blocks of fast-growing, closely packed, single-species conifers. These hideous plantations, sprawling across the landscape with no regard for variations in terrain or local features, were only the beginning of the greatest act of vandalism ever perpetrated on these islands.
Much more damaging to the landscape and remaining semi-natural woodlands of Britain were the ridiculous agricultural and forestry policies implemented immediately after World War II and in the following forty years. In 1939, the Commission forests were still too young to provide workable timber and a further 200,000 hectares of private woodland was cut down to meet demand. Much of this was hardwood which would have regrown if left to its own devices, but the overall shortage of domestic timber and the threat to ‘peace in our time’ posed by communism led to a blinkered policy of conifer planting on a massive scale. ‘Large-scale systematic forestry,’ enthused the government, ‘is necessary for the welfare and safety of Britain.’ Simultaneously, there was assumed to be an urgent need to increase food production and grants were directed at hedgerow and small woodland clearance to maximise agricultural land use.
With productive land at a premium, Forestry Commission planting focused on marginal upland districts, hill and moorland, most of it totally unsuitable for growing trees. Vast areas of beautiful, wild open spaces became filled with dark, regimented, forbidding conifer plantations, displacing isolated farming communities and engulfing many semi-natural woodlands. I remember being taken by my father, on one of his monthly visits to the family farms in Northumberland, to watch the planting of a big area of hill above Stannersburn and thinking how strange it looked, as a caterpillar tractor dragging a huge Cuthbertson plough gouged black lines through the green fields in front of an abandoned farmhouse. Today the Forestry Commission manages 7,720 square kilometres of land in Great Britain; 60 per cent is in the hills of Scotland, particularly the Highlands, western Borders and Galloway; 26 per cent in England, including Kielder Forest, which covers