Woods and People E-Book

David Foot

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 356

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Britain's great cloak of natural forest disappeared mostly in prehistoric times. Over the passage of time and by the industrial revolution, Britain's economy had become almost entirely dependent on timber imports from abroad. Shipping blockades in the First World War meant a frantic search for woodlands that could be cut down to make vital pit props and sawn wood for wartime construction. After the war, Britain's tree cover was near to an all-time low. Only since 1919 have practical measures been taken to reverse the long history of forest decline, and a hundred years of tree planting has seen the forest cover of Britain more than double. Today, tree planting in Britain is motivated more by environmental and social concerns than purely timber production. In Woods and People, David Foot reveals the story of twentieth-century forest creation, and the eureka moment in the 1980s that challenged foresters and conservationists to work together on new ideas.

Leseprobe

WOODS & PEOPLE

WOODS & PEOPLE

PUTTING FORESTS ON THE MAP

DAVID FOOT

To my young grandsons Jonny and Edward, in the hope that you get as much pleasure living with trees as I have.

First published 2010

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© David Foot, 2010, 2013

The right of David Foot to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9675 7

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Note on Area Expressions

Introduction

1

Beginnings

2

Voices for Forestry

3

The Ideal Place to Grow Trees

4

Woods and Private Landowners

5

Afforestation: Land and Landscape

6

The Greening of Forestry

7

Freedom to Roam?

8

Timber from the Trees

9

New Directions

Notes

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

When I set out to write this book, I did not know what I was letting myself in for; both as regards the time it would take and the road that it would lead me down. It evolved, as will be obvious, from a mixture of library research, personal knowledge and impressions acquired over many years of involvement with trees. So it would be wrong to start these acknowledgements without an expression of gratitude to all the people, in several organisations, who, over the years, have helped to shape my experiences and thinking. That said, it is inevitable that some of my past colleagues and present friends will not agree with the particular emphasis I have given to events or necessarily share the words and sentiments with which I describe them.

Graham Hamilton, Michael Medcalf and Jenny Claridge read the book in its entirety at different stages in its preparation and offered many suggestions. I am very grateful to Graham, Mike and Jenny for the time and effort they put into what at times must have seemed an uphill task! Of course, the responsibility for any mistakes is entirely mine.

Several other people helped me with advice, assistance or offers of help along the way. They include Bridget Bloom, Steve and Nadine Cooper, Elaine Dick, Julian Evans, Peter Freer-Smith, Tim Rollinson, Marcus Sangster and my son Mark Foot. I am most grateful to all of them for their help.

The library and photographic staff of the Forestry Commission have been generous with their time, particularly Catherine Oldham, Eleanor Harland, George Gate, Isobel Cameron and Neill Campbell – thank you all.

Most of all I want to thank my wife, Nina, who encouraged me to start the book and was always confident that it would progress from an idea to a finished draft that would ‘see the light of day’. She will now get that long-awaited holiday!

NOTE ON AREA EXPRESSIONS

Until the 1970s, the common unit for expressing and measuring area was the acre. Then, as part of Britain’s policy of metrication, it became common to express areas in hectares. One hectare is the same as 2.47 acres. Despite metrication, the expression of area in terms of acres is still in everyday use. Because most readers will be familiar with both units, area conversions have not been shown in the text. Thus historical references to areas before 1970 are in acres and references thereafter are expressed in hectares.

INTRODUCTION

To a rambler a forest is merely a delightful place to walk in; delightful because of its wild life and colour, its sounds and smells, and in the way it reveals its character little by little. But the woodman sees more in it than this. The forest is to him what the cornfield is to the farmer – a source of profit and the means of livelihood. There is, then, a great difference between exploring a wood for pleasure and regarding it through the eyes of a woodman.1

This quotation, from a children’s book entitled The Seasons & the Woodman, played a big part in getting me into forestry. Written by D.H. Chapman, it had an introduction by the well-known ecologist Frank Fraser Darling and illustrations by C.F. Tunnicliffe. As a boy I had always enjoyed woods as a place to run and play, but never thought of them from the viewpoint of the woodsman or forester. Woods and forests, it is sometimes said, are unique in being where industry and the environment meet, but these two sides of the same coin tend to be separated in people’s minds. When I set out to write this story, I wanted to join them together.

We are now at an unusually interesting point in forest history. Hardly a week goes by without some reference in the national newspapers to tree planting. The Sunday Times is helping the Woodland Trust to plant its Heartwood Forest to ‘exploit the calming effects of woodland therapy’.2 The News of the World wants to help fight climate change by planting a million trees in the ‘biggest, most ambitious green project ever undertaken by a national newspaper’.3 And the Green Alliance, in their Green Manifesto on Climate Change and the Natural Environment (September 2009) called for ‘significant progress’ by 2020 towards a doubling of woodland cover in Britain.4

Ninety years ago, it was a very different tree-planting aim that occupied people’s minds. Blockades by enemy submarines in the First World War had exposed a critical weakness in Britain’s defences. By putting a squeeze on imports of foreign timber, enemy action starved the mining industry of the pit props it needed for coal production. This in turn threatened to halt the manufacture of the steel that was needed for shipbuilding and armaments. Home timber production suddenly became a matter of keen interest to politicians. David Lloyd George in his memoirs described timber as:

a very badly neglected asset … There was no more useful contribution to our mortal struggle with the submarine than [the] organisation of our home supplies of timber … It stripped this island of some of our best forest. Not only most of our hill sides, but large areas once clad in fine timber are now bare and broken.5

Even as the war progressed, Lloyd George and his coalition government ordered a review of Britain’s forest resources and the drawing-up of a plan to plant trees.

There is a powerful link between these two contrasting themes – the notion of forests as timber reserves illustrated by the wartime thinking of Lloyd George and the present-day approach to tree planting exemplified by the newspaper campaigns of the kind described above. Both themes have the common purpose of reforestation. Britain can claim no moral high ground when it comes to deforestation, having largely destroyed its own natural tree cover in prehistoric times. However, it can claim to have a lot of experience of reforestation. Because we cleared our forests at an early date, we were the first to think about replanting them. Stimulated initially by the First World War, and later by changing social and economic influences, an extraordinary 7 per cent of the land surface (1.6 million hectares of forest) was added to Britain’s tree resource between 1900 and 2010, so increasing the country’s forest cover from 5 per cent at the end of the nineteenth century to some 12 per cent today; still, it must be said, almost the lowest percentage in Europe, but increasing all the time.

This book, then, is a popular account of twentieth-century forest and woodland restoration. How have the actions of individuals, government, private landowners and, in more recent times, the voluntary conservation movement shaped the nature of the landscape and of the forests and woods that embellish it? The book makes no claim to be an ecological study, nor is it a technical account of forestry, nor indeed does it make more than a passing mention of ancient forests like the New Forest which are well catered for in more specialist books. Inevitably, it must be selective and personal; all history, they say, reflects the writer’s preoccupations and those of the era in which he or she is writing. And since it is impossible to understand the countryside without examining the human factors that have shaped its development, I have tried to place the story in the context of the social and economic circumstances of a quite remarkably transformed century.

I gave some consideration to whether the book should have an all-Britain approach and concluded that this was the right one. The shared threads of economic and social change across England, Scotland and Wales, and the common political background of forest law and policy throughout nearly the whole of the twentieth century (political devolution of forest and countryside matters having taken place in 1998), was reflected in the development of country-wide institutions. The Forestry Commission, for instance, formed in 1919, exercised a common policy on forestry on behalf of successive governments, and the larger representative bodies and voluntary organisations that influenced forest policy were also mainly nationwide.

Turning now to the layout of the book, the first chapter is scene-setting to get to a point where the reader has some feel for the background to the tree-planting history of the twentieth century. Subsequent chapters explore the story in a mainly chronological order, diverting here and there to look at topics of special interest. By the mid-1980s a remarkable change was in the air. In a decade marked by new ideas, agricultural reform and important legislative change, the ‘timber-first’ philosophy that had prevailed since 1919 gave way to a multi-benefit approach that is still evolving today. The talk now is about the ‘non-timber’ benefits of trees – trees for wildlife and woods for recreation; trees for shelter on farms; community woods of different kinds; trees for restoring the health of degraded landscapes; and trees as producers of oxygen and storers of carbon. These ‘new directions’ are the subject of my final chapter.

The rediscovery of these wider functions of trees, woods and forests could not be more timely. Alarmist forecasts about the effect of climate change on Britain’s tree landscape continue to worry us. What is certain is that we shall need to plant more trees to maintain the ecological health and diversity of the countryside in testing times. The questions for the future will be how and where, and what approach will truly maximise the benefits of Britain’s trees and woods for society. The lessons and experience of forest restoration gained over nearly a hundred years of changing times is what this book is about.

1

BEGINNINGS

For a man keen on hunting, it might have been expected that William the Conqueror would have gathered more information on woods and forests. But woods are not a great source of money, nor have they ever been, and the Domesday Book of 1086 was intended for business purposes rather than pleasure; in other words, for collecting taxes. Domesday helps historians to build up a picture of the social order, how the land was used and, by implication, the extent of woodland decline from prehistoric times. Woodland information in Domesday is scanty and difficult to interpret, but historians have concluded that around 15 per cent of the land surface of Norman England was covered in trees,1 and probably rather more in Scotland and Wales. The woods that did exist were already much modified by man from the natural tree cover that had once covered Britain like a great cloak after the last Ice Age.

Domesday then, the first detailed description of the more populous parts of Britain, is a good starting point for the book. Norman England, often pictured in the mind’s eye as a land of great forests, was in fact a mainly agricultural and pastoral country. And the royal forests, we are told, were not the predominantly tree-covered lands that we usually associate with the word ‘forest’ today, but a mosaic of woodland, pasture, wetlands, heath and scrub, and scattered settlements and cultivation. More generally, beyond the boundaries of the royal forests, the growing peasant population of medieval times filled out the farming map, making inroads into the areas of ‘waste’, a process checked at times by periods of economic stagnation or decline when semi-natural woodland re-colonised the medieval fields.

It was still early days in the era of Britain’s naval supremacy when we start to hear about timber shortages. Laws to preserve timber for shipbuilding were a regular theme of the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Acts of Parliament. In 1558, Queen Elizabeth I banned the use of timber trees of oak, beech and ash for the making of charcoal within 14 miles of the sea and certain navigable rivers in the south of England and Wales. Oak, of course, above all other tree species, played the key role in shipbuilding, and its availability in large quantities in a range of curved and straight pieces was crucial to the architecture of a ‘ship of the line’.

By the sixteenth century, the grip of the old forest laws was fading and the royal forests were breaking up through encroachment and because successive monarchs sold or gave away timber for favours. Meanwhile, the process of estate-building was getting under way. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth century, books and pamphlets on better farming methods started to appear, opening up the fashion for ‘improvement’ and hastening the process of field enclosure. Enclosure meant better farming, arable as well as pasture, not least because it extinguished the rights of commoners and gave the landlords freedom to manage the land as they wished. Landowners began to drain wet fields and bogs, and clear away inconveniently sited woodland. A remark in a manorial survey of a Shropshire village in 1563 that ‘the many enclosures … are like to destroy the woods’ is quoted by the historian D.C. Coleman.2 He supposes that this comment would have been echoed all over the country. It was probably a reference both to the displacement of managed medieval coppices and the enclosure and ‘breaking-in’ of ‘waste’ – extensive areas of common ground that supported the rough open pasture woodlands where villagers grazed their animals and collected firewood.

Planting and Propagation

Exactly when early man in Britain started to plant and cultivate trees, nobody really knows. Dendrologist John White tells us that Bronze Age farmers brought in bundles of English elm plants or cuttings from southeast Europe between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago.3 Obviously it was the special uses of foreign trees that motivated their introduction; in this case for cattle fodder and bedding. So it was with the Romans. What was more natural than introducing trees from warmer climes as a civilising influence to a conquered land, so adding a touch of familiarity to their surroundings and to their diet – they are thought, for instance, to have introduced several fruit trees and to have planted the sweet chestnut and walnut for their nuts.

Popular history has it that one of the first woods to be successfully planted was in Cranbourne Walk within Windsor Great Park in 1580, when an area of 13 acres was sown with acorns by order of Lord Burleigh. We know that his lordship’s oak wood survived the browsing attentions of the cattle and deer because, in 1625, it was described as ‘a wood of some thousands of tall young oaks, bearing acorns, and giving shelter to cattle, and likely to prove as good timber as any in the kingdom’.

John Evelyn’s celebrated tree book Sylva, first published in 1664, was the first serious tree reference book and an arboricultural tour de force that is still a pleasure to read today. Although best known for his descriptive diaries of the restoration era, Evelyn was a man of many parts: a courtier to Charles II, a landowner and a passionate lover of trees and gardens. Prompted by the ‘waste and destruction’ of forests in the Civil War, his book was based on a lecture he had presented to the members of the newly founded Royal Society. The topic, suggested to him by the navy commissioners, was forest decline and the perilous shortage of oak trees for shipbuilding. He could hardly have imagined how durable the message would be in the face of the centuries of further forest decline that followed the publication of his book. Delivered in the typically flowery language of the times, it was a clarion call for more planting: ‘Truly the waste and destruction of our woods has been so universal, that I conceive nothing less than a universal plantation of all sorts of trees will supply, and will encounter the defect.’

It might seem that the target of Evelyn’s appeal would have been the royal forests; falling as they did under crown control, they provided the authorities with a direct and immediate means of remedying the anticipated shortage of timber. But there were two reasons why this did not happen. First, by the end of the Civil War the royal forests were just a shadow of their heyday in Norman times, many of them having passed by grant or sale into private hands. Secondly, they were not the exclusive property of the crown to do with as it wished; rather they included the property and interests of many people with leases or ancient rights. Commoners’ ancient rights – as, for example, the grazing of livestock or the right to take wood for fuel – were jealously guarded and could only be set aside by agreement, perhaps with the payment of compensation or through an Act of Parliament.

Something of the problem can be gleaned from the enquiries of a government commission set up at the end of the eighteenth century to report on the ‘state and condition of the woods, forests and land revenue of the crown’. In the commission’s seventh report, published in 1793,4 the many interests in the crown woods were described as a ‘confused mixture of rights’, such that the crown’s attempt to manage the forest was a ‘perpetual struggle of jarring interests in which no party can improve his own share without hurting that of another’. This then was no simple background for an imposed programme of tree planting, even before the days of planners or planning! A number of Acts for the ‘increase and preservation of timber’ had been passed in the later years of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. The most important ones permitted enclosure and tree planting in the two great surviving royal forests – the New Forest in Hampshire and the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. But what was successfully established with trees was, it seems, limited and can almost be dismissed from the reckoning in the big picture of post-Evelyn planting. The same 1793 report recorded that the crown forests ‘in his Majesty’s reign’ (George III, 1760–1820) had provided ‘not more than one twelfth part’ of the oak required by the navy shipyards.

The prospects for tree planting on private estates at the end of the Civil War were a lot more encouraging than those that existed in the crown woods. Confiscated estates had been returned to their owners while, more generally, landowners were feeling confident about the prospects for a settled future. Land in the late seventeenth century became one of the safest investments, and the estate owners put in hand improvements and enlargements. Evelyn recommended that landowners ‘at their first coming to their Estates, and as soon as they get children, should seriously think of this [tree] propagation also’. His ideas, it seems, fell on receptive soil. Evelyn’s book was a great success and, not a man to hide his achievements, he boasted in the 1706 edition (addressed by Evelyn in 1678 to King Charles II) that ‘many millions of timber-trees have been propagated and planted … at the institution, and by the sole direction of this work’.

Although Evelyn’s headline appeal was the planting of oak trees for the navy, he nonetheless cast far and wide for his ‘universal plantation of all sorts of trees’. His contents list for Sylva included fruit trees and ornamentals, and his tree descriptions were enlivened with stories and gossip from his self-imposed exile in Europe during the Civil War. Europe, in a way, became the inspiration for the tree craze that followed the Civil War. The Grand Tour introduced wealthy young men to art and architecture, capturing their interest in the aesthetics of landscape and introducing them to the visual appeal of new kinds of trees. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, land-owners returned to Britain from their European travels with a determination to improve the look of their own family acres, planting pines, larches, birches, elms, beeches, sycamore, limes and chestnuts in their tens of thousands.

Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown was another historical figure with a special enthusiasm for trees. Where Evelyn was an academic, Brown was a practical man whose legacy was his physical achievements on the ground rather than his written words. Brown came to the fore as a garden contractor to the great and the good in the second half of the eighteenth century, and is famed for the natural look of his landscaping designs. Christopher Hussey, the pioneering architectural historian, once described Brown as the ‘Director-General’ of trees.5 This was not because Brown planted trees in great numbers (though he did), but because of his ability to see beyond the immediate view and to picture how they would look after his lifetime. ‘While [he] could not hope to see the finished picture’, Hussey says, Brown was ‘animated by the faith and foresight to visualise that which we now too readily accept as the gift of Providence or Nature’.

Brown’s designs, and those of his self-appointed successor Humphrey Repton, were a showpiece for the landscaping effects of trees. Trees added stature, maturity and an aura of naturalness to the engineered setting of the great houses they worked on. Trees channelled the eye, opened up vistas, masked what they thought of as untidiness and brought shelter and privacy from the agricultural hinterland beyond. Brown’s typical parkland was designed with an encircling band of trees, broken by occasional openings to give just glimpses of the local landmarks; Repton ventured that ‘a ploughed field was no fit sight from a gentleman’s elegant mansion’.

Beyond the boundaries of the great houses, the enclosure movement was approaching its climax in the latter part of Brown’s professional career. The parliamentary enclosures in central England were at their height between 1760 and 1820. How did woods and woodland fare in this great reorganisation of the land? While the general trend of tree decline continued, it seems that there were now some gains to set against the losses. New woods were fitted into the developing mosaic of fields and hedgerows where the soils or the lie of the land was unsuitable for agriculture. In the lowlands, many new coppice woods were created by sowing seed or planting cuttings, so replacing some of the medieval coppices that had fallen victim to the changes. During the Napoleonic Wars (1773–1815), buoyant wood prices reinforced the fashion for tree planting. The very process of enclosure stimulated a surge of demand for wooden artefacts of all kinds – fencing materials, tools, barns, bridges, carts and so on. The idea of managing woods as ‘high forest’ rather than by coppicing was catching on. Conifers were planted on former areas of waste and on previously unenclosed hill ground in the upland regions. In the previously marginalised crown forests, a renewed planting effort was made. Starting in 1808, around 33,000 acres were planted in the New Forest and Forest of Dean.

The Commercial Spirit Catches On

an oak must grow an hundred years, or more, until it comes to maturity; but profits arising from tillage or pasture are more certain and immediate, and perhaps as great: It cannot, therefore, be expected that many private individuals will lay out money on the expectation of advantages which they themselves can have no chance to enjoy: Commerce and industry seek for, and are supported by, speedy returns of gain, however small; and the more generally the commercial spirit shall prevail in this country, the less probability is there that planting of woods, for the advantages of prosperity, will be preferred to the immediate profits of agriculture. It is accordingly in the northern, or mountainous parts of the kingdom chiefly, and on land unfit for tillage, where any great plantations have lately been made; and these are mostly of fir.

For all its commercial insights, this quotation from the 1793 commission report does not completely explain why trees in Britain were pushed so completely to the margins of agriculture in the course of the enclosure movement. The industrial revolution was under way and timber consumption by industry, together with a rising population, should surely have suggested a terrible shortage.

There is a simple explanation for the complacency and disinterest. From medieval times, trade was preferred to forestry, and Britain came to rely on the closed world of the timber importer. Oak timber, for instance, which was still common enough in medieval times, was nevertheless imported from the virgin forests of Poland and the Baltic countries from the thirteenth century6 because the long straight lengths needed for the construction of large and important buildings were already scarce in the more accessible parts of the British Isles. Oak timbers could be obtained more cheaply from abroad than from the inland parts of Britain. Ships’ masts of pine or fir were imported from the Americas and Baltic countries, and, by the eighteenth century, mahogany for furniture-making had become fashionable, brought in from the West Indies and South America. By then, what had started as the import of small amounts of timber for specific markets had developed into a flood of every kind of timber. With the growth of its empire and of the Royal Navy to protect its merchant ships, Britain became the biggest importer of timber and wood products in the world. Why then grow timber at home or preserve forest when it could so readily and cheaply be bought abroad?

The commercial appeal of imported timbers played a critical part in this trend. Very few of the tree species in Britain’s natural forest are of commercial importance in the timber and wood product markets of Britain today, and the usefulness and adaptability of imported timber was already a major influence in the eighteenth century. Imported softwood became the preferred wood for building and everyday carpentry. Compared to oak as a building material, softwood was easier and quicker to cut, lighter to carry about and easier to fix in building structures, and above all much cheaper to buy. Among the conifers, only Scots pine among Britain’s native trees is of commercial importance, but this too is seen as an imported timber (red-wood) outside its natural range in the Highlands of Scotland.

As such, home-grown timber played second fiddle to imported timber from an early age, although there seems to have been no doubt that some of the introduced conifers would produce useful timber when they were grown in Britain. Norway spruce, for instance – the typical ‘whitewood’ or White Deal of the timber merchant – was introduced in the sixteenth century. Traveller, writer and diarist Daniel Defoe in his ‘Tour’ of Scotland (1729) seems to have been confident of its usefulness, remarking with optimism: ‘In a few years, Scotland will not need to send to Norway for Timber or Deal, but will have sufficient of her own and perhaps be able to furnish England too with considerable Quantities.’7 Another great traveller, the agricultural diarist Arthur Young, when on a tour of the Vale of Tywi in the 1770s, wrote in his journal that locally grown ‘spruce fir’ was ‘very good; almost as white as Norway deals’.8

European larch was another interesting tree to eighteenth-and nineteenth-century landowners because it was seen as a substitute for oak in shipbuilding. Not only did it grow more quickly – 75 years rather than 150 years or more for oak – but it grew well in the more testing conditions of soil and climate that were typical of the upland estates in Scotland and Wales. The Reverend C.A. Johns, a late nineteenth-century writer on trees, thought larch to be:

better adapted for naval architecture than any other timber. It becomes harder and more durable by age in a ship. It holds iron as firmly as Oak, but, unlike Oak, it does not corrode iron. It does not shrink; it possesses the valuable property of resisting damp. It catches fire with difficulty, and it does not splinter when struck by a canon-ball.9

Famously, the Dukes of Atholl were the first landowners to establish European larch on a big scale, clothing the then barren valley of the River Tay between Dunkeld and Blair Atholl in a way that, even today, grabs the attention of travellers on the A9 for its particular charm. The dukes planted over 21 million trees between 1730 and 1830 on some 15,000 acres of ground. The legendary fourth duke – the so-called ‘Planting Duke’ – was the greatest advocate of the species: ‘There is no name that stands so high, and so deservedly high, in the list of successful planters, as that of the late John, Duke of Athole’, says Johns. ‘His Grace planted, in the last years of his life, 6,500 Scotch acres of mountain ground solely with larch which, in the course of seventy-two years from the time of planting, will be a forest of timber fit for the building of the largest class of ships in His Majesty’s navy.’

Less commonly known is that European larch also made an appearance in the upland landscapes of eighteenth-century Wales. Elisabeth Inglis-Jones, in her book Peacocks in Paradise, tells how one Cardiganshire (now Ceredigion) landowner, the eccentric Thomas Johnes, was determined to transform the denuded and inhospitable hills of his Hafod Estate to a ‘green cloak of woodland’ where ‘nothing would be allowed to offend the naked eye’. We might surmise that Johnes got his inspiration from the Atholl dukes when he attended Edinburgh University in the 1760s, before leaving for the ‘well-beaten’ track across Europe. When he inherited Hafod in 1769, he set his mind on the complete rehabilitation of the estate, both farming and forestry, and between 1795 and 1801 planted 2,065,000 trees, half of them larch, which ‘flourished vigorously in exposed places’ and, for the rest, ‘every variety of timber tree was represented in his woods and all seemed to thrive’. His tree-planting successes won him several gold medals from the London (later Royal) Society of Arts. Trees, it was said, ‘prospered for him as nothing else did’. Unfortunately, they and his agricultural improvements led him into debt and poor health, and ultimately to the sale of Hafod. Despite his disappointments, he ‘talked of Hafod as a paradise, and of his improvements with rapture, as if he had never met with a single disappointment in his life’.10

These great planting projects were not just the work of a small eccentric band of tree enthusiasts. The list of the great and good who took an interest in trees was formidable. ‘Nicol’s Planter’s Kalendar’, prepared in 1812 by nurseryman E. Sang of Kirkcaldy in Fife (whose plant lists went to landowners all over the country), contained the following:

at no period of the history of this country has a spirit for planting more prevailed among private individuals, than within these last sixty years; whether we consider the decrease of trees in our natural forests, the high price of timber, or the difficulty in obtaining foreign supplies of that article. The extensive scale on which plantations … particularly in Scotland, have lately been conducted, certainly reflects very high honour on the landholders. The business of planting is now established on a broad basis, and has become more or less the case of every great landowner in the Kingdom.11

Nineteenth-century Introductions

There was an important phase of tree introductions still to come when ‘Nicol’s Planter’s Kalender’ was published. During the nineteenth century, the existing trickle of new tree introductions turned into a flood, with plant collectors scouring the globe to find new and interesting species under the patronage of wealthy landowners and with the sponsorship of botanical bodies such as Kew (founded in 1759) and the Royal Horticultural Society (in 1804).

David Douglas’ nineteenth-century journey into the interior of British Columbia stands out for its benefits to forestry as well as adding now familiar plants to almost every present-day garden in Britain. As the son of a stonemason from Scone in Perthshire, Douglas came from humble and unlikely beginnings, becoming an apprentice gardener at Scone Palace at the age of only 11. There he developed a lively and intelligent interest in plants, progressing through a number of appointments to work at the botanic gardens in Glasgow, and eventually stepping up to become a plant collector for the Royal Horticultural Society.

Douglas’ journal captures his great delight at what he saw on a bright but misty April morning in 1825, when the three-mast sailing ship, the William and Anne, entered the mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific coast of North America, still then one of the great unexplored areas of the world. He describes how he saw through the lingering mist the great Douglas firs (the tree that was named after him) that were ‘thickly clad to the very ground with widespreading pendent branches, and from the gigantic size they attain … form one of the most striking and truly graceful objects in nature’.12

The significance of the coastal fringe of north-west America to botanists and foresters is its climate. The oceanic climate of that coastline between Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands – the so-called coastal ‘fog belt’ – closely matches that of western Britain, with its moist, mild and variable weather, so providing the right conditions for many of its native plants to flower and flourish in Britain. Douglas’ expedition added over 200 new species to the botanical map of the world. His tree introductions, as well as the Douglas fir, included the Sitka spruce, the Grand and Noble firs, and – from a later expedition – the ubiquitous Radiata pine (Monterey pine), now widely planted as a commercial species in the southern hemisphere (see for instance Chapter 7). Douglas knew them all as ‘pines’ and when writing to his sponsor in Britain said: ‘you will begin to think that I manufacture pines at my pleasure.’13

Probably the most controversial of Douglas’ many tree introductions was the Sitka spruce, now Britain’s most important commercial tree and ironically, in modern times, a totem for the conservation movement in north-west America. Sitka in Britain came to epitomise the conflict between environmentalists and foresters; we return to this in Chapter 5. One side resented the planting of Sitka in the cherished open landscapes of upland Britain, while the other side saw merit and opportunity in its commercial qualities – vigorous growth on poor soils and a high degree of climatic hardiness. Foresters argued that it filled an obvious gap in Britain’s natural flora, there being no native timber tree so well suited to the prevailing cool, wet and windy climate of western Britain. Douglas himself seems to have contemplated benefit in every direction: in the Sitka’s appearance as well as its growth, noting in his journal that it:

possesses one great advantage by growing to a very large size on the northern declivities of the mountain in poor thin damp soils … it would thrive in such places in Britain where even Scots pine finds no shelter … This if introduced would profitably clothe the bleak barren hilly parts of Scotland … besides improving the beauty of the country.14

Douglas’ precious collections of tree seeds were quickly snapped up by nurserymen and the fashion-conscious Victorian landowners keen to try out the latest tree introductions. Seed and plants were scarce and costly, so most of his collections were planted out as single specimens or small groups in arboreta or in the grounds of the big houses; a few even survive today. Strangely, after Douglas’ insightful comments, Sitka’s timber-producing qualities were hardly noticed for nearly 90 years after its introduction, until it was ‘rediscovered’ as a forest tree in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Decline in the Rural Economy

By the 1820s, the enclosure movement had slowed and most of the great areas of waste that had existed a hundred years earlier had been brought into cultivation or, in much more modest amounts, planted with trees. In the lowlands, the estate-improvement period was coming to an end and, with it, the creation of new woods. Interest in the land and the availability of money to invest in it had declined in the face of social and economic change. In the uplands, however, where there was still plenty of suitable land available, tree planting continued, particularly in Scotland.

According to the economist E.J.T. Collins, the forest area of upland Scotland doubled between 1845 and 1924.15 Tree planting in the uplands was often carried out to improve sheep walks and provide shelter for cattle (See Picture 22). Many Scottish landowners, keen to improve their recently acquired shooting estates, experimented with conifer introductions. The famous Redwood avenue at Benmore near Dunoon in Argyllshire (later owned by the Younger family of brewing fame, see Chapter 2) was planted in 1863 and ‘wide tracts’ of the estate were also planted between 1871 and 1883. Between 1873 and 1910, Sir John Ramsden planted 10,400 acres at Ardverikie in Inverness-shire, best known today as the setting of the BBC’s Monarch of the Glen series. More generally, the great emerging industries of coal, steel and the railways lured people away from the land because they paid higher wages, leaving workers in rural areas at the bottom of the pay league. A population census in 1851 revealed that the urban population of Britain was, for the first time, greater than the rural, and with it wealth and influence migrated to the towns and the new industrial heartlands. Significantly, for the politicians, rural votes were no longer the main priority.

Victorian agriculture was a story of contrasting fortunes. From a state of depression after the Napoleonic Wars, farming conditions had improved by the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1837, and the years between 1850 and the mid-1870s are often described as its golden age. The reason for this was a surge in growth of demand for farm products. The development of transport opened up the town and city markets to fresh food. Canals and much-improved road systems were followed in the 1830s and ’40s by the railways, much to the advantage of farmers. They could now transport and sell their fresh produce in the market towns and, by the same token, return home with the latest ideas in agricultural husbandry, and with new tools and machinery for cultivating the land.

However, it is the ill-fortune of the landowners and their declining investment in the land that is the main story here. The tide turned in the 1870s when farming, and the great estates with it, went into an economic slide that lasted until the Second World War. The seeds of the depression had been sown by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and the move to free trade more generally thereafter. With farmers no longer protected from foreign imports of grain, and a run of bad harvests in the 1870s, the door was open to food imports from the emerging New World. For farmers and landowners, retrenchment was the only solution; large areas of cereal crops were given up or converted to pasture and job losses on the farms hastened to a new level. A.D. Hall (later Sir Daniel Hall), one of the great names in British agriculture and a one-time President Secretary to the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, summed up the attitude of the landowners in the 1890s in these words:

In the main landowners had accepted the position that there was little future in farming, that the development of their estates did not offer an outlet for their energies or capital comparable to those available elsewhere, and that their function was to be easy with their tenants in return for the sport and social status that the ownership of land conferred.16

Against this background of agricultural decline, woodland management also suffered from the economic and social changes of the times brought on by technical advance and the pressures of the free market. There were no sudden disasters – none of the catastrophic harvests that had happened in agriculture – just a steady decline in the traditional markets and a waning of landowners’ interest in their woods.

Declining Wood Markets

In the second half of the nineteenth century, we catch only the dying embers of perhaps the most important historical wood industry of all. The production of charcoal for iron-smelting had been an industry of supreme significance to the industrialisation of Britain, occupying at one time many tens of thousands of people in woods around the country. The ancient connection between woods and iron working was broken when Abraham Darby, in 1709, discovered a method of smelting iron ore with coke. The iron industry’s migration from the forests to the coalfields was a slow one, driven as much by wood availability as it was by the new methods of iron production. In the eighteenth century, wood became scarce and expensive in the iron industry’s two greatest traditional areas – the Weald of Sussex and Kent and the Forest of Dean. Yet where wood was cheap and plentiful, new sites were opened up, as for instance around Workington and Furness in north-west England, and in Shropshire, Herefordshire, North and South Wales, and in Scotland. The iron ore, if it could not be found locally, was brought in overland to the forests or by sea. One of the last sites to close was the Lorne furnace on Loch Etive in Argyllshire, which had opened for business around 1753 and shut down in 1876. By then, the transition from charcoal to coke and coal was complete.

Did the charcoaling industry contribute to forest decline? Some historians talk of the ironmasters’ cut-and-run activities exploiting the woods and leaving behind only ‘sterile, heath-like areas and scrub’, while others suppose that the ironmasters managed the woods renewably by coppicing. It was, after all, in their interests to do so. No doubt the truth was a mixture of both.