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4. Ecosystems
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4.2 Woodlands
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Woodland history begins
for practical purposes about 11,000 bc, when the last
glaciation ended and the British Isles became suitable for tree growth. The trees
which had retreated to southern latitudes during the Ice Age slowly migrated north
again. The first to colonize our tundra were birch, aspen, and sallow. These were
followed by pine and hazel; then alder and oak; next lime and elm; then holly, ash,
beech, hornbeam, and maple. The process was rather like the making of secondary
woodland now; the distances were greater but there was no farmland to stand in the
way of the advance, nor at first was there an English Channel or Irish Sea. Birch,
aspen, and sallow are relatively arctic trees. The later species were either trees of
warmer climates (hornbeam, maple) or bad colonizers (lime). Latecoming species
were slow to become abundant, for there was no vacant ground to occupy; they had
to wait for existing trees to die.
Much the greater part
of the land below 2000 ft. was originally covered with forest or
scrub, and this woody vegetation was gradually removed by felling and clearing,
mainly in the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Period, to provide fuel and
timber for human use, to make room for sheep and cattle grazing, and in the
lowlands for agriculture. Though the lowlands and the lower slopes of the hills were
once occupied by forest, the existing remains of native woodland are now very
scanty. In 1920 not much more than 5 per cent of the land area of Great Britain was
woodland of any sort, and this included modern plantations.
Of the old native,
deciduous (or ' broad-leaved') forest, consisting mainly of oak,
beech, birch, ash and alder, that which had not been cleared was maintained for the
supply of timber, small wood, and oak bark for tanning, though the native timber
supply became so scanty several centuries ago that much of the demand had to be
increasingly met by importation. Some of this originally native woodland which does
remain is still in a more or less natural! condition, and woods dominated by all five of
the trees mentioned are represented. Many, though not all of these woods have
been 'planted up', mostly on the sites of old felled woodland and often with the
original kind of tree proper to the site, so that they have now come to assume most
of the characters of natural woodland. This does not however, apply to modern
conifer plantations, which introduce quite different conditions. The beech woods of
the southern chalk, the oakwoods of the clays and loams of the southern and
midland plains and of the northern and western valleysides, the ashwoods of the
Derbyshire dales, the alderwoods of undrained marsh and fenland, the birchwoods of
sandy soils and of northern hillsides, and also the few remaining native pinewoods of
the Scottish Highlands, are all genuine representatives of native woodland.
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In the 1690s Gregory
King estimated that there were only three million acres of
cultivated woodland left (about 8 per cent of England and Wales) and another three
million of forests, parks and commons. And the contraction was still going on. There
was hardly a county in the kingdom, thought a contemporary in 1764, where one
would not find places called 'forest', 'grove' or 'park' which were now arable or
pasture or bare heath. In the 1790s, when John Byng sat down to list the changes
which had occurred in England since the seventeenth century, he put high on his list
the further erosion of the old woods. By 1800 there were no more than two million
acres of woodland in England and Wales, and by the beginning of the twentieth
century the percentage of the United Kingdom occupied by woodland (4 per cent)
would be the lowest in Europe.
To many, this development
symbolized the triumph of civilization. Forests had
originally been synonymous with wildness and danger, as the word 'savage' (from
silva, a wood) reminds us. Early man, it has been plausibly suggested, preferred
open country to woodland because it was safer: he could see what was coming and
guard against it in advance. When Elizabethans spoke of a 'wilderness' they meant
not a barren waste, but a dense, uncultivated wood, like Shakespeare's Forest of
Arden, 'a desert inaccessible under the shade of melancholy boughs'.
A mid-seventeenth-century
poetical dictionary suggests as appropriate epithets for a
forest: 'dreadful', 'gloomy', 'wild', 'desert', 'uncouth', 'melancholy', 'unpeopled' and
'beast- haunted'. In New England, Plymouth Colony was founded in a 'hideous and
desolate wilderness ... full of wild beasts and wild men ... and the whole country full
of woods and thickets'. The colonists were aghast at the sight of a countryside
covered by 'wild and uncouth woods'; and they set about destroying trees so as to
make 'habitable' what Cotton Mather regarded as 'dismal thickets'. Only 'wild
creatures' they thought, would 'ordinarily love the liberty of the woods'. Old England,
explained the Elizabethan lawyer John Mariwood, had also originally been 'a
wilderness', but the early inhabitants had destroyed 'the woods and great thickets'
near places of human habitation so that they would provide no shelter for dangerous
wild animals: 'by that means the wild beasts were all driven to resort to those places
where the woods were left remaining to make their abode in them ... so that... the
first beginning of forest in England was propter defectum inhabitants populi, for want
of people to inhabit those vacant places wherein wild beasts were.'
The woods, therefore,
were homes for animals, not men. Hence the poet William
Browne could describe wild beasts as 'forest citizens'. Hence also the assumption
that any men who lived in the woods must be rough and barbarous. The first human
beings, it was widely believed, were 'woodland men', homines sylvestres. The
progress of mankind was from the forest to the field. The ancient Britons, thought the
eighteenth- century antiquary John Woodward, were barbarous and savage and their
towns were 'groves and thickets', surrounded by a hedge or ditch. The Irish, said an
Elizabethan, remained 'wood-born savages', while John Locke contrasted the 'civil
and rational' inhabitants of cities with the 'irrational, untaught' denizens of 'woods and
forests'. The ancient Hindus, thought Edmund Burke in 1783, had developed a
civilization possessing 'all the arts of polished life, whilst we were yet in the woods'.
Only by being drawn out of forests would men be led to civility.
Untamed woodjands were
thus seen as obstac Literary convention as well as actual
experience thus underlay the seventeenth-century commonplace that forest-dwellers
tended to be lawless squatters, poverty-stricken, stubborn and uncivil. But it was
undeniable that the woodland areas really did contain cabins erected by beggarly
people, who had gone in search of space, or employment in the charcoal industry,
and had squatted illegally, often free from the normal social restraints of church and
manor courts, and subsisting by pilfering timber and game. The seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries would see many bitter disputes between forest-dwellers and the
officials of the Crown and the larger landlords, who tried to impose more efficient
control upon the resources and inhabitants of the forest areas. Competing claims to
land use led to mutual hostility and misunderstanding; and it is not surprising that
those concerned to maintain the social hierarchy disliked woodlands as potential
black spots: the forest, said the agriculturalist Charles Vancouver in 1813, was a
'nest and conservatory of sloth, idleness and misery'.
As well as being the
scene of protracted social conflict, the forests were also disliked
because they provided a refuge for outlaws and a base for dangerous criminals.
Selwood Forest, for example, was a notorious haunt of bandits and coiners until
Thomas, Viscount Wey-mouth, built a church there in 1712 and began to cut the
woods down. Cranborne Chase harboured smugglers and deer-stealers; and many
other forest areas had a similar reputation. Even clumps of trees on the roadside
were disliked because they provided a hiding-place for robbers. Fulbrook in
Warwickshire had once been a safe route for travellers, lamented the fifteenth-
century historian John Rous, but when it was imparked by its noble owner the
hedges and pales provided shelter for dangerous thieves. |
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Pioneer settlers see
landscapes in terms of commodities. This meant something
else as well: it treated members of an ecosystem as isolated and extractable units.
Explorers describing a new countryside with an eye to its mercantile possibilities all
too easily fell into this way of looking at things, so that their descriptions often
degenerated into little more than lists.
Martin Pring's account
of the trees of Martha's Vineyard illustrates this tendency:
As for Trees the Country yeeldeth Sassafras a plant of sove-reigne vertue for the
French Poxe,
and as some of late have learnedly written good against the Plague and many other Maladies;
Vines, Cedars, Okes, Ashes, Beeches, Birch trees, Cherie trees bearing fruit whereof wee did
eate, Hasels, Wichhasels, the best wood of all other to make Sope-ashes withall, walnut-trees,
Maples, holy to make Bird lime with, and a kinde of tree bearing a fruit like a small red Peare-
plum.
A
Voyage Set Out from the Citie of Bristoll, 1603 |
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In autumn the leaves
fell from the hazel wands and the ashpoles, from the
elderberries and the oaks, exposing against a drab sky the squirrel dreys and the
birds' nests–deserted tokens of hope. Deprived of leafy protection, the forms of the
year's failures were shown, hanging starkly and in silence. The flies that had buzzed
about the wasted corpses were dead, and only moisture dripped upon them from the
bare branches above. Some were green and mouldy, others were hairless and
mummified. In places only a whiskered skull–grotesque caricature of life with its
empty eye- sockets–hung grinning on a rotting string. Dishevelled crows dangled
from other tiers, with sparrow-hawks and kestrels, hedgehogs, rats and poaching
cats. This was the gallows-tree of the failures, of the wood rogues, of the beasts and
birds unrepentant in life and in death.
Henry Williamson |
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