Nunhead Cemetery, London
Author: Daniel Greenwood
Landscape photographer with a focus on woods and trees, fungi, and macro photography
It’s the eagle
Glen Einach, Cairngorms National Park, Scotland, October 2013
Lying on the grass where the road forks up and into the wind I watch the redwing and fieldfare slip across the grey sky. Down below us the River Am Beanaidh flows with great force. My friend has finished in his attempts to separate map from wind and joins me on the gravelly soil, rolling himself a cigarette. A few minutes ago we watched redwing appearing from the heather like particles drawn, magnetised to the scots pine. Some remained in the heather for a time, before using the air and their wings to join with the trees. My smug little siesta is embellished further by a reward received a few minutes earlier: the sight of a crested tit mixing with its coal tit cousins and picking at the sticks and lichens. I have felt the tiredness and tenseness that comes from a lack of proper rest since summer’s end but this landscape reinvigorates me like no other that I have set foot upon. Listening to the quickening wind dashing through the medium of pine needles, my friend calls an end to our pause.
We head up over the top path, the wind bursting through. It’s much cooler, a hint of ice. I automatically reach into my coat pockets seeking woollen gloves. It’s reported to feel like -11 on the peaks today and here blows the clue as we climb to 450m. Trudging along, a shape appears in the distance, passing over the pinewoods, across the river and the slopes of Cairn Eilrig:
‘Big, big bird,’ I shout, into the strength of the wind. My friend stops.
It passes across our view, a cloak caught by a gale. The thought process begins: buzzard… raven… its dark, primary wing feathers like digits. Its wings catch a slither of sun, a golden sheen. It’s the eagle. It disappears behind the trees, appearing again, coasting and now lost to the pines. My friend and I have both leapt up onto a lichen and heather-covered bank of soil. We jump back down, carried back by the wind by an inch or two. We hit a gloved high five, hard and true.
Essay: The threat to English ancient woodlands is a challenge to our collective sense of place
I live in an area of London that was once covered by a stretch of woodlands, commons, meadows and wood pasture that was called the Great North Wood. It was not the continuous wildwood which some argue had covered parts of England totally after the melting of the ice 10,000 years ago, before humans began to cut the trees down. It was known as the Great North Wood because it sat north of Croydon, a large market town fringed by chalk downlands which are not so hospitable to the kind of woodlands dominating the land to the north on London clay, namely hornbeam and sessile oak. On London’s open downlands livestock grazed and rabbits were bred for their fur and flesh. The wild but manipulated landscape of the Great North Wood would have stretched all the way north to the Thames at Deptford (where timber could be exported on ships or turned into ships), cutting off at Penge (Celt for ‘the end of the wood’) and slithering down a little like the continent of South America to Selhurst. Many of the placenames in the locality echo the woodland past, the history of its woodspeople, or the woodsman (which Ben Law neatly points out means ‘wood hand’ rather than excluding women). This can be seen most clearly by Norwood, derived from the name of the landscape itself, as well as Brockley which could describe a human settlement where badgers were notable. The ending of ‘ley’ generally means a clearing or settlement next to woodland. Honor Oak is a pointer to the Oak of Arnon Wood, a slab of probable millennia-old woodland which is now embellished by the Local Nature Reserve One Tree Hill, where the Oak of Honor stands in the form of an English oak replanted some 100 years ago after the site was saved as a public open space by dissenting locals in 1896. The lack of a ‘u’ shows that this is of the old English spelling for honour, the language taken to the Americas by settlers some centuries ago and now seeming somewhat alien or incorrect.
The Great North Wood was not merely one of endless woodlands or of wildwood, it was a landscape that humans were a part of and dependent on for their livelihoods. Some of the woodlands which remain today such as One Tree Hill and Sydenham Hill Wood, have shown that they were at times more open, that larger trees stood singularly with commoners grazing their livestock on the grasses and herbaceous plants underneath the shade of trees like elm, oak, hornbeam and ash. This before the advent of the enclosures when commoners had their rights removed through an Act of Parliament, a series of events which define the landscape of my hometown to this day. As recently as the 1950’s one of the Great North Wood’s most unaffected remainders, Dulwich Wood, was grassier and more open whereas today it is darkened by holly and an array of other trees such as hornbeam, ash, hazel and rowan. Still, the ancient remnants of the Great North Wood hold colonies of wood anemone, dog violets, wild garlic and other plants which indicate continuous woodland for at least 400 years.
One of the main ways that people would have earned a living was by inhabiting the woodlands. Charcoal burning was one of the most common sights and vocations in the Great North Wood. They were known as the colliers, their presence indicated by Collier’s Wood in Wandsworth, beyond the western fringes of the catchment. Hornbeam was ‘coppiced’ on a cycle of 10 or so years, the trees cut at about 20-30cm, a vigorous regrowth the next year created multiple stems and thus an eventual greater crop to be burned and sold to blacksmiths and those needing intense heat to fire their craft. Other trees coppiced were hazel and ash, with hazel especially important for its usages for fencing and walking sticks. Sessile oaks were allowed to grow tall and true for their timber and the tannin residing in the bark. But coppicing is not necessarily as destructive or exploitative as it may sound, as when coppicing was more common – before the advent of coal and the increase in imports of cheaper fossil fuels from abroad – the Great North Wood’s coppices were home to populations of nightingales and nightjars, not least at Penge Common (now covering the famous Crystal Palace Park and the town of Anerley) where locals were said to visit at night to listen to the nightingale song, and there is some anecdotal evidence that the nocturnal music fuelled an increased birth rate. Coppicing allowed light into woods, enriching the herb layer of these woodlands, giving life to wildflowers such as dog violet which then supported the silver washed and dark green fritillary butterflies, as well as beloved primroses, now diminishing from the English landscape as ancient woodlands and hedgerows have been grubbed out and poisoned over time, feverishly in the latter part of the twentieth century.
This brings me to the issue of woodlands and biodiversity offsetting, a scheme mooted by the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) as a way to mitigate losses to wildlife from development. In recent times the former Transport Secretary Justine Greening advocated the ‘transplanting’ of ancient woodlands which are in the way of the proposed High Speed Rail 2 line intended to travel from London to Birmingham and then north to Manchester and Leeds in a final ‘Y’ section. More recently Environment Secretary Owen Paterson has confirmed his liking for proposals to clear ancient woodlands and plant 100 trees for every ancient tree that is lost. Both of these proposals fall flat after only a little research or, dare I say it, consideration. As Oliver Rackham puts it in his totemic ‘Woodlands’, ancient woodlands are not the place to look for ancient trees. Paterson is mistaken. What he is looking for might be something like Penge Common, or one of the other commons now gone from the Great North Wood. It is now only really in wood pasture or ancient hedge lines that you can find ancient trees. In ancient woodlands it is the landscape and ecosystem which is ancient. Paterson sells himself as a man in-tune with nature and the countryside, posing by fence posts and boasting of keeping badgers as childhood pets. His rhetoric suggests he is out of his depth.
Ancient woodlands are not the place to look for ancient trees.
Today ancient trees are loved, most in estates or arboretums where they are prized for their age and ‘wisdom’. In ancient woods, such is the diversity of life, many trees succumb to fungal infection, because fungi is another aspect of an ancient woodland. The life of fungi is in the soil, the mycelium, to be exact. The mycelium is, in some ways, the life force of woodland, passing nutrients back and forth between trees and soil, a little like the information superhighway I am using to publish this article. Fungi is as vital to human existence as trees, often described as ‘the third force’ after animal and plant life. So too are certain species of wildflower, insect, mammal and bird depend on ancient woodland ecosystems. We are talking about an environment that takes many hundreds of years to develop. This is why HS2 Limited’s desire to dig up the ancient woodlands (33 ancient woodlands are directly affected according to the Woodland Trust) and transplant them elsewhere is the thinking of people who should not be entrusted to decide on infrastructure projects that endanger ancient woods or natural landscapes. ‘Moving’ a woodland would not mean a big family moving from a big house to another. It would be the same as a city removing its hospitals and replacing them elsewhere without foundations or power to run the building and its infrastructure. The real point is that ancient woodlands, biodiversity, nature, these are hindrances to short-term economic gain, and in many ways, to this government’s ideological assault on the environmental sector. Biodiversity offsetting, on this level, is something those of us who love trees, woodlands and nature cannot accept or allow to occur.
But what does this have to do with the Great North Wood, or of woodlands that were not necessarily valued for their biodiversity and wildlife but instead for their produce? The failure of biodiversity offsetting is its inability to recognise the need that human beings have for woodlands int he environmental sense, the importance of access to green and ‘natural’ spaces. It fails to see the importance of place, let alone wildlife or biodiversity. Worst of all it is a signifier of our failure, not just that of politicians, to see that woodlands present an opportunity for a more simple and healthier existence than the one presented to many in England today. In Ben Law’s ‘The Woodland Way’, he outlines just how far the English have moved away from their ‘forest dweller’ existence, an era that would have dated back to the Great North Wood. Woodlands offer us sanctuary, food, the resources for infrastructure, a place for real learning – wood carving, coppicing, construction, food growing, fencing, tool use – and countless creative industries. Many people express the sense of belonging offered by time spent in woodlands. The woodland sell-off plans panned (but possibly remodeled to fit biodiversity offsetting) caused outrage in the UK and led to a 500,000 strong petition being delivered to the Prime Minister David Cameron. This was a worrying time – we learned then that this government do not hold the best interest of our woodlands at heart – but the public were able to send a unified message. The sell-off was not acceptable.
Biodiversity offsetting fails to acknowledge the importance of place
The Great North Wood is a case in point for people standing up for their woodlands in the shape of One Tree Hill, saved from enclosure by ‘the great agitation’, as it is known locally, when thousands rioted to protect it from enclosure. And then there is Sydenham Hill Wood, saved twice by local people, London Wildlife Trust and the Horniman Museum from plans for it to be developed for housing. I wonder how the battles would have gone if biodiversity offsetting was in place in those, both very different, times. Our woodlands are only safe when they are loved, ‘used’ and valued by local people. Sadly, it would appear that our woodlands are not merely under threat from invasive species and disease, but also from the short-termism, bravado and lack of thought from authority figures like Paterson. Though some woodlands have been around for more than 1000 years, even in a place like urban south London their national fate is at the whim of individuals looking only as far as 12 months into the future. But that is only the case if people do not speak out and challenge the ecological illiteracy of ancient woodland offsetting. Consider that the next time you walk through a wood in spring, when its wildflowers, birds and insects are flourishing around you. That place is only safe because you and the community value its sense of place.
The shock of the heartwood
Full set of photographs here on Flickr
Farthing Downs, London, January 2014
The long shadow of a jogger crosses me and at first I think it’s someone approaching. A peek over my shoulder shows the silhouette of a toiling woman, but is it new resolution or good habit? She is followed over time by a trail of cars, parents clutching the hands of young children, and finally the huffing shape of a cyclist rolling past. The world of the Downs reminds me again that the earth is something of a cauldron, everything is always changing. Groups of people walk along the lane, shadows breaking and reforming, pausing to watch something, perhaps a bird, perhaps the view of houses creeping up the hill, or views of a distant, spiralling city.
Jackdaws dot the horizon in the east, their indentations against the sky encourage the play of human language. They are a slow swarm of insects, embers from a smokeless blaze, or simply jackdaws doing their winter dance. Woodpigeons pass them in the foreground, redwing, too. I sit and watch. On New Hill, the land beneath the jackdaws, the small ash trees are indeed like matchsticks, or else the stiff hairs of a broad and worn broom. More have been felled, chopped and piled, and against the brown wash of wood and winter grasses the shock of the heartwood is telling.
The sun slips down to me, the ant hills like boulders at the edge of a lake, dropping chunky shadows from the daylight. Squirrels cavort, their music one of scratched syllables, like little huffing corvids. We regard them with equal disdain, forgetting their own intelligence and desires. They feel a dislike for their kind, too, sometimes. A helicopter careers overhead, a primitive design still, but how long until tiny drones trail through these skies, how long before they snag in the branches of oaks or the tangle of hawthorn? Who will collect them and what will be done with them. The helicopter is navy blue and white, it heads south-west towards the North Downs as vulnerable as flesh and feathers.
North Downs diary: the endless scene
King’s Wood, Kent, December 2012
The piles of birch trunks tell us that this chalky fringe of King’s Wood has recently been coppiced. The heartwood glows golden against the black, brown and grey of a winter’s afternoon. The paths are boggy, holding the tracks of boots and the tyre marks of cyclists and scramblers. Large ditches appear at intervals, home to trees and dead wood. A Soakham Downs poster a little way back identified these as chalk pits dug in old times to extract the chalk from the soil. The chalk was then spread in the fields – what once would have been woodland – to fertilise the soil, left to weather under sun and rain.
Further ahead the woodland opens in earnest, endless tracts of sweet chestnut coppice climbing into the sky. A brown puddle reflects the bare branches. Sweet chestnut provides the nuts we like to roast at Christmas, as well as forming the most economically viable form of coppicing in today’s market. The poles are cut after about five or six years and split down the middle to make chestnut paling, a type of fencing used in parks and nature reserves up and down the country. It’s another aspect of the Roman’s botanical legacy – they brought it along with them. The vertical slant of the branches is interrupted by a movement of four legged animals crossing our path in the distance. Our talking pauses as we watch an endless trail of deer move from right to left, disappearing into the trees. One of them was all white and it sticks in my mind like a puncture. We make our way towards Chilham, stopping briefly to search amongst these overgrown trees for walking sticks. We listen to the multiple stems tapping together as the wind steals through, some trees creaking. This a sound that in the endless scene of coppiced trees we mistake for shrill and distant calls of people.
The fabric of time
Farthing Downs, London, September 2013
Standing on the track leading into Devilsden Wood I look to the ground for dryness, somewhere that hasn’t been soaked by this perpetual rainfall. I see fallen ivy leaves that appear like cuts of leather when really they are crisp under foot. Dog shit, too, the new waybread for the modern ancient footway. I hate the stuff. My waterproof sheds its load onto my jeans and it’s wait and become cold or move and receive woodland raindrops, some chucked from the canopy of mature yew, ash and beech, some fifty feet up. When they get behind glasses, these droplets shock the senses.
It’s fungi season, the signpost of falling temperatures, not too cold but a shift from the sultry summer. I gawp at log piles with an explosion of mushroom caps, marked by striping and shapes that would define them to those who understood them. But still, I spy an oysterling appearing from a rotting trunk and feel that in two years of woodland obsession I have at least learned something about this magical animal that appears so fleetingly it could almost be through the fabric of time, a monitor on how we’re doing. Checking the sole of my boot again, we’re crap. I wipe it off in a mud puddle. The rain has not lessened. I head back out from the dark, autumn-beckoning woodland and onto the wet warfare of the Downs. The change in mind is clear, the atmosphere of a woodland changes you. It is not like the open land, so much a canvas for human experimentation, our impact on woodlands is never so clear as the plough’s to the open landscape. A woodland to all but a minority could have been in that state for millenia, before human time. The wood is a wild city, with nature’s social housing, swimming pools and fast food. It was our home once, too. There is the semblance of a summer out here, yellow rattle not yet rattling, knapweed funked-out in pinkish purple, even a bit of scabious. These wildflowers have something of January’s left over Christmas decorations about them. A car passes along the lane. Woodpigeons are striking through the rainy sky, turning their wings and bodies at an angle – to avoid the direction of the rain? – always as individuals. These birds cut several different figures in a year – hurried, panicked on the wing, or else male birds cutting arcs out of the sky as they display to females long into the summer recesses. Now they could be migrating, they could be hunted. Mostly they are gorging on elderberries outside my bedroom window.
On the Downs a flock of goldfinch are startled into the sky like pieces of a broken vase put back, its smash rewound and fixed. They sit in a small hawthorn bush and I look more closely. On the end of a branch, clear and possibly not so fearful of man is a juvenile, all grey on the head, interested in looking but unaware of the perils of being watched. My advances fracture them once more and I’m left with a snapshot of their escape into the landscape captured on my camera.
As we trace the final sett of a south London badger it has to be asked – where next?
It dawned on me a few months ago, when a cull looked to be too stupid and ugly a prospect, that we can show no real mettle in the battle to stop the slaughter of wildlife overseas if we are seen to be slaying it without scientific basis.
I have spent time recently with Andrew Lynch, an MSc student who is voraciously charting the former range of badgers in an area of London from which they disappeared in the 1990s. A few weeks ago we entered a wood of ancient origins that is closed to the public armed with a rusty key and the permission of the landowner. We crunched through leaf litter rarely trodden by humans, through spider webs, brambles and holly. There were no paths. We discovered two specimens of Solomon’s seal, an ancient woodland plant that was surviving here in the deep shade of an unmanaged but very old and undisturbed woodland. The next day Andrew discovered a crumbled badger sett, its former inhabitants long gone. Why did they go? It’s hard to say, but that’s the point of Andrew’s work. In my view it is probably because the human population rose and the local environment felt the eventual impact of the post-war development of open fields and other pockets of woodland. They were most likely cut off from badgers living on London’s periphery. This is an animal that likes to create new colonies and does not like inbreeding. The badgers were reintroduced but their roaming nature led them to their deaths on main roads a few miles away. Amazingly we have recently had a record of badgers returning to one of the woods that is open to the public and well used. It was a moment of immense satisfaction and gave us hope for this network of dysfunctional woodlands. To think that badgers could be returning to woodlands which suffered disturbance in the Victorian times but still makes a home for owls, bats and other woodland animals, feels like a crowning moment. They will not have a sett in this area of London for many, many years, but to think that they have been by is, in part, a conservation triumph for the local community.
I find it difficult to respond to the fact that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) are contracting the slaughter of badgers in Somerset and Gloucestershire with anything other than anger. The cull is wrong, expensive, bloodthirsty, unscientific, barbaric and worst of all, it is happening. It angers me like nothing else that afflicts our environment. For British wildlife conservation today it’s worse than the Lydd Airport trump, the shameful Oaken Wood debacle, the threat to privatise the public woodland estate, the idea of 50 ancient woodlands lost to HS2, and far more sinister than the threat of ash dieback disease or oak processionary moth. I feel a deep seated sense of injustice. A cull has already been done and proved ineffective in reducing bovine TB (bTB) in any meaningful way. I believe the National Farmer’s Union and DEFRA should take greater responsibility for biosecurity and that badgers and cattle should be vaccinated, that the government should show a greater willingness to invest in this rather than focusing solely on political gains for 2015. They have, however, turned more than 300,000 people against them, perhaps for good. I am convinced, from what I’ve read and heard from all involved that it is based on political ideology – much like the government’s attempts to downgrade Lewisham A&E (deemed unlawful by the High Court) – and is purely to accrue political support from the farming lobby at the next election. I feel there is a bloodthirsty element to the cull, just like the killing of hen harriers to the point of extinction in England, the poisoning of buzzards and golden eagles in Scotland. With the badger cull we are in the throes of a witch hunt. It has the hint of Chairman Mao’s communist war on tree sparrows which backfired completely. This is the very thing we as leaders of the global conservation effort are attempting to halt overseas and now, it seems, at home.
Life and people have moved on from the days of the hunt, when the aristocracy took to the countryside to chase foxes on horseback. Wildlife is valued for more than its fur and flesh, many people in the UK have come to value the need for a connection with the natural world, and science has taught us the need for humans to maintain the environment and to repair degraded ecosystems. The repair takes on many different forms – the work of the Great Bustard Group, reintroducing this charismatic and iconic bird to Wiltshire after it was hunted to extinction in the UK; the resurgence of otters, another animal ‘clashing’ with humans where it forages from commercial fish ponds, but a welcome sign of healthier rivers in England; and then there’s the crane, a bird that was slaughtered in its thousands and now returning, like the spoonbill, to breed for the first time in over 400 years. It’s hard to say why the crane is back, but it could be because larger areas of land are being set aside for wildlife, larger reserves rather than pockets. These are great moments in the history of British wildlife conservation and are not all because of human action. Another great thing is the thriving badger population in England, of which there is no set figure. However, one thing that the badger cull reminds us is that whenever wildlife does well – foxes and cormorants being examples – it is treated with disdain and someone, often on the right wing of government, will call for a cull. Take Boris Johnson’s recent attack on London’s foxes. It is an instinctive, atavistic response, rooted in a love for slaughter that is abhorred by more modern attitudes towards animal welfare and the environment. Most pertinently it is a human failing, an inability to look at the impact we have on species and ecosystems we believe ourselves to be free from and above. When it comes to natural resources no species is more invasive and damaging than we and yet no other species has the ability to think and reflect over how we might improve our behaviour, to evolve, and improve the health of the environment not merely for ourselves.
Perhaps my lifestyle is implicated somewhere in the decline of the hedgehog but the badger is not to blame.
For me, the beauty of badgers is their very nocturnal nature, something which has inspired artists, scientists, conservationists and authors down the centuries. The image of a twilight woodland is one of the most magical, with badgers beginning their nightly forage for worms (and yes, even hedgehogs sometimes), moths taking to the wing with the moon as their guide, and tawny owls calling from the canopy, their prey of mice and voles scrabbling around in the leaf litter. If I were to talk like this to many people who are for a badger cull, I would be labelled as emotional and naïve or worse, only against a cull because I think badgers are sweet. I know that badgers predate hedgehogs but I don’t blame them for the decline in their prey. It’s an excuse used by individuals who have no scientific grounds to defend the cull. Perhaps my lifestyle is implicated somewhere in the decline of the hedgehog but the badger is not to blame. The blame for that can firmly remain with human impacts on the landscape, the lack of suitable habitat, a loss of food sources after the tidying up and poisoning of the English landscape through mass expansion of intensive agriculture after the Second World War (note that in modern times Owen Paterson went against the will of the people when voting to continue with neonicotinoid-laced systemic pesticides that kill wild pollinators and ruin the soil).
It dawned on me a few months ago, when a cull looked to be too stupid and ugly a prospect, that we can show no real mettle in the battle to stop the slaughter of wildlife overseas – migrating birds in Malta and Cyprus, lions in Africa, tigers in India – if we are seen to be slaying wildlife without any scientific basis. England is just as bad as everyone else. In the same way that we are looking to destroy our own version of the rainforests through development, we cannot truly argue with deforestation in the Amazon, the Congo and Eastern Europe when we are championing the very same thing at home. Overseas these people are barbarians, at home they are ‘doing the right thing’. And as we look for badgers in a landscape that has lost them, the loss feels peculiar with the government’s mindless slaughter of this beautiful and vital wild animal echoing in the background. I just hope that in twenty years people in Somerset and Gloucestershire will not be retracing old setts mindful of the senseless brutality that was inflicted in the past. Looking at the state of things it appears a distinct possibility.
© Daniel James Greenwood 2013
After Oaken Wood, ‘biodiversity’ has come to mean very little
“The very considerable need for both crushed rock aggregates and dimension stone, together with the eventual biodiversity improvements, and the ongoing socioeconomic benefits, would clearly outweigh the loss of the ancient woodland and the other adverse effects of the development in this case.” – Eric Pickles, July 2013
When Eric Pickles described ‘the eventual biodiversity improvements’ in destroying Oaken Wood in Kent, an ancient woodland sat conveniently on a bed of limestone and next to a commercial aggregates mine, it may have been the final call for a phrase that has come to mean so little. By this I mean ‘biodiversity’, a phrase that attempts to describe the diversity of non-human life. It’s now a word sucked into planning regulation and the corporate tongue that blankets all meaning – it is impossible to put into one word or describe the immense variety of wild animals, plants, fungi and other living organisms that make their home on planet earth today. In the case of Oaken Wood it is a saddening instance, where a kind of Orwellian newspeak is being used to make people feel better about the largest loss of ancient woodland in England in decades, and purely for economic, short term benefits. Note also the phrase ‘the ongoing socio-economic benefits’, hinting that the government’s stance on the environment is improving the economy and getting people ‘back into work’ where they belong.
In the case of Eric Pickle’s ecology lesson, he should note that an ancient woodland takes 400 years to mature and establish, for the soil conditions to be right for the species of plants, lichen and fungi (yes, wildflowers and mushrooms, not just trees) that will make it a unique and stable ecology for the insects that will pollinate it and act as food for the bats and birds that give ancient woods their star turns and top predators. We can only hope that in 400 years no one will have heard of Eric Pickles but sadly people might have no idea that an oak woodland once grew in that part of Maidstone, nor might they enjoy Pickles’ ‘biodiversity improvements’, which sounds like a London landscaping company. There will be no benefit to wildlife in comparison to how things are now, just disruption, local extinction, desecration and, for the species of birds and migratory insects that might manage to return on the wing after the aggregates gurus have had their way with the landscape, pollution.
It is perhaps now time to point out that if woodlands and other wild places are not treated with their ecological and natural importance in mind that there will be wider and wider declines in species depending on ancient woodlands, meaning that in 400 years there will not be the diversity of wild creatures to even enjoy a renewed woodland. In short, biological life will be far less diverse. Unfortunately this horrendous government do not understand the impacts of their decisions. Just like Justine Greening thinks the 50 ancient woodlands that HS2 Ltd have in their sights could be ‘moved’, Eric Pickles thinks a woodland can be put back where it was, like a rug pulled up from the floor, swept under and replaced. The characters mentioned here are not fit to make these decisions, just like Owen Paterson’s failure to listen to the people and the science over both a badger cull and bee pesticides make him ethically unsuitable for his post as Environment Secretary.
If we can’t use ‘biodiversity’, what can we say? I always go for ‘wildlife’, it’s not perfect, but it indicates the living creatures which do not have a voice, which haven’t been domesticated like dogs or cats and refers even to urban ‘horrors’ like the brown rat or ring necked parakeet. It also rouses our sense of the wild, of freedom from human strictures and civilisation, of the world that we came from and that underpins all our activities, for which we depend on for nourishment, energy, mental and physical well being. It also uses that vital word – ‘life’ – which ‘biodiversity’ fails to point to at all. The loss of a wild place means a lot of death and, in Oaken Wood’s case, purely for human greed. Isn’t that what society was developed to put an end to? Biodiversity is a scientist’s term and for all the incredible scientists out there more often than not many fail to describe things simply or to capture people’s interest and passion for nature. Smartphones wouldn’t be as popular if they were marketed by the geniuses who developed them.
I remember listening to a park keeper talking about doing things for ‘the biodiversity’, to attract ‘the biodiversity’. I have no doubt this phrase had filtered down from talking to bureaucrats in the council, the same language drenched all over planning documents and used in this sense to mask the fact the speaker didn’t know or really care about how the land was being managed to benefit the environment. It’s also used by politicians to appease conservation charities, to make them feel they’re being listened to. It’s the new ‘green’. When people hinge their argument or point on the word ‘biodiversity’ is it possible it could be to hide the fact they don’t know or care about what they’re saying? Perhaps not always but at times it is resoundingly true. All we can do is be clear when arguing the case for preserving and enhancing our natural heritage both for wildlife but also ourselves and those yet to be conceived who deserve and need to see, experience and live alongside wildlife. For those trying to champion the diversity of natural organisms, our language has been compromised and used against the very thing it’s intended to support.
In search of Mayo’s native woodlands
First published on the Earthlines Review
Co. Mayo, Eire, April 2013
Saturday
Last night we arrived to watch the mountain burn. The flames licked up from behind the plantation at the end of the field, capturing the tinder of last year’s heather. I thought of how dry that wood was, how it would go up in an instant. The farmer ghosted down the lane, no knowledge of who could have set fire to the mountain, or why. He always strikes me as part wild, so accustomed to the lay of this land that he has partly-merged with its bogginess, its giant boulders and streams, in the way I am accustomed to the wildness of streetlamps and new woodlands, how they impact me. Seeing an Xbox and satellite TV in his house a few years back diluted that idea. This isn’t the first time the mountain’s been set on fire, five years ago it happened. Waking up this morning it’s as if last night was a dream brought on by the exhaustion of a long and early journey from London, across the Irish Sea from Holyhead and then from Dublin. At the foot of the Ox Mountains this morning I see no sign of fire, no people, no animals. It must have been much further away than we thought it was. The bracken lies dead and dry, concealing crevices between rocks. How quickly this could burst into flame. The ground is dry at the foot of the mountain, the sphagnum mosses and reindeer lichens spreading as I climb with the wind. A herd of feral goats watch me from the top, filing away, perhaps in disappointment that I’ve blocked their path. Turning to look to the west I see Nephin in silhouette where the valley of farms and gorse-covered bog ends. I head south-east and up into the Ox Mountains.
Trees are sparse, only a hawthorn or a mountain ash in 100 metres, bedraggled and gnawed by the animals that graze between the rocks. The heather is growing again, and where there is some dampness a cladonia cup-lichen pouts its miniature red lips on pale blue stems. I search along the south-facing banks for wildflowers and find dog violet and wood sorrel. Being a woodlander at heart, it draws me back home and to the question of origins – did woodlands once grow on the Ox Mountains? They must have. Looking around me, I am not convinced. But early or common dog violets do grow in ancient woodland in south London, and wood sorrel, too. One of my holiday reads is Oliver Rackham’s Woodlands. I will be tearing into it on my return back to the cottage.
A small bird is calling, barely audible above a wind that’s gained momentum as I’ve gained height. Two giant boulders sit like mountain fauna and all I see above and between them is sky. The ground is boggy, covered by the papery yellow grasses and red mosses. A goat path is indented through it all. I take it, stepping up into the goat hoof clefts and up between the two boulder gods. Though unseeing, they will have presided over a valley wrought by famine in the 1840s, worn only by the deep breaths of time. Last night they will have been coloured by fire, unmoved. To be rock is to be asleep.
The rocks are beneath me now, a plane of damp dead grasses and moss pervades. The wind is stronger, still. How strange that even on a tree-less moor of a mountain the movement between rock and mound can feel like entering somewhere new. I sit on the rocky deity’s scalp. Down below, the plantation is crossed by bare larch trees, and in the distance the blue promise of Sligo Bay. Further west, in the realm of the imagination: America. But I’m hungry, and the basic desire for food always wins out over beauty.
I wander across and down, away from the sheer drop. At least the fall would be into a mattress of bog. A raven calls out, kronk, kronk, kronk, but so bare is the mountain the call could be a thing of the distant past, or my imagination. I grab onto heather forgetting that the soft ground will give and I nearly tumble bearing yet-blooming flowers, but a goat print saves me and I land on my backside. Gradually the song of a robin replaces the mountain wind, the images of sheep return to life and the mountain looms again, forgetful, triumphant.
Easter Sunday
It’s evening, the weather is warmer here than in England but when the wind blows it cuts through you. I have been reading Rackham’s Woodlands. In the period between 1350 and 1500 woodland cover expanded in the United Kingdom in the wake of the Black Death. England’s population declined by 1/3 and so too did global warming[1]. Why? Less trees were being felled and burned. The woodland came back and captured the carbon. I wonder when that will happen again. Today we visited my grandfather at his nursing home in Kiltimagh, it’s an old estate with pollarded horse chestnut and beech trees. On the hillside wind turbines have been built. They do not look a scar or a slight on the land. But granddad never leaves the house to see these things, most of the people there drift in and out of sleep and eating, the radio playing in the background. It was Aerosmith when we arrived. He used to live in Ballindine, crossing the motorway to the shop, forgetting how many times he’d been. He always asks me when I’m going to get a haircut. I feel a little apprehensive about visiting the home but when I get there I enjoy it, the people are friendly even if some aren’t in their right mind and there’s a welcome warmth about the long faces, slow gestures and blazing radiators.
After a day spent in the car I decide to visit the mountain again. I’ve never been to the top. Me and my dad nearly got up there a few years ago but we didn’t feel the desire to. I take to the path again, passing the sheep in the field, the caravan shot to pieces, a lace curtain blowing through the hole where the window once was. I climb up the track again and feel no desire to reach the summit. I turn into a small cove where a stream runs down and the path becomes sphagnum moss, soft, white and red. I sit on a boulder and look up at the sky and the mountain. But for the stream there is no sound at all. All my thoughts come in and out again. Having had my fill of silence I return back down. On the way I see Nephin traversed by the sun setting behind clouds, the trees silhouetted on a hill before it. I can’t help but think of those who used to live on this mountain and in this valley who were shackled and degraded by famine. How did they view this overbearing rock and heathland, the sight of Nephin and sunsets like these? Surely they couldn’t have had the energy or mind to even think about it. It would not have mattered. I was reading a book called The Great Famine last night. When one ship carrying food and aid from England arrived in Ireland during the famine, three went the other way. At times I feel torn between my heritage, between my anger for the cruelty wrought by the British and the suffering inflicted upon the Irish. I do not feel completely one or the other.
On the way back down I have a sudden desire to remain, to sit against a rock and enjoy the fresh Atlantic air. I remember hearing a cuckoo a decade ago, but it hasn’t returned yet. After my breather I continue into the valley and meet the farmer on the track. I ask him if cuckoos still come here. He doesn’t understand me. I sometimes forget that my accent isn’t clear to everyone. He eventually realises what I mean and points to the plantations growing on either side, comfortable with the knowledge that they come often.
‘But it’ll be too cold for them here now,’ he says.
Easter Monday
From Woodlands, page 206: ‘Ancient woods are not the place to look for ancient trees. Indeed, the presence of ancient trees, unless they are boundary pollards, indicates that the wood is not ancient, but has grown up around freestanding trees (in-filled savannah).’ There are no ancient trees at the foot of the Ox Mountains, there are barely even trees. I still have hope of finding something.
Tuesday
We aren’t visiting granddad today. We drive to Westport to see what they have in the bookshop there. On the river a grey heron is mobbed by black headed and common gulls. They stand on the wall having their pictures taken by everyone, including me and my family. We drive to Achill Island for the day, the sun beating down but the cold wind still lingers. It’s snowing in London. The views from Achill are astounding, rock pipits merge with the winter grasses and silver boulders as they feed at the cliff’s edge. Spring is still not with us, the leaves are not on the trees, no swallows nest in the barn and no cuckoo calls from the wood. The bogs on Achill are strewn with rhododendrons, thriving on the acid soils, clearly admired by the locals for their unusual pinks and purples when in flower. I bought The Story of Ireland by Neil Hegarty. This quote from Oliver Cromwell stuck with me:
‘For to what purpose was it to plow or sow, where there was little or no Prospect of reaping? – To improve where the Tenant had no Property? This universal Neglect of Husbandry covered the Face of the Kingdoms with thickets of Woods and Briars; and with those Vast extended Boggs, which are not natural but only the Excrescences and Scabs of the Body, occasioned by Uncleanliness and Sloth.’ (page 136).
It’s what I love about Ireland, the bogs, the boulders, the ‘Excrescences’, the 1970s Opel car rusting in the ditch. In Mayo the Irish are not erasing their visual history, the ghost towns of the 1990s are still standing and the eerie cottages of the times gone by are still decaying at the roadside. In England we are obsessed with tidiness.
Today has again been spent in the car, imprisoned. I haven’t been able to contend with the landscape other than through the camera. It’s evening and the sky is broad and blue. The children are playing in the fields, traversing the margins and fence lines. Now I feel the need to see the mountain’s top, I want to know what’s on the other side. I make it to where I stopped the other day, no need of silence or thought, I continue up through the goat clefts, driving shin-first through midge clouds. A wren is singing up above me as I dip in to the path as it bends around an alcove home to boulders that have become dislodged and crashed down over time to sit in the vegetation, cool. I pass back out and the track becomes more steep, the heather creeping across. Now I can see another fire in the south, the smoke blowing to the west across the glassy Roosky lake. The field lines are clear from up here, the margins deep and defined. I turn and clamber to the top. The zenith opens out with a gust of a cold, cold wind. I put my hood up and watch as a meadow pipit raises aloft, calling, a single peep, escaping on deep undulations. So that was the little bird I’d heard the other day. The top of this mountain is peat bog, the feral goats see me and disappear over a peat bank. There are lines where the peat has been removed in the past, a practice which is now criticised by environmentalists because so much carbon has been stored in the bogs. To the Irish who cut out this peat it was just a local and available fuel, it was not an evil act. A trough in the heather is full with water reflecting the sky. The wind ripples the surface. Frogspawn sits in large clumps in one corner. It’s only the second lot I’ve seen this year, here and on Exmoor. I decide to head back down the mountain
A meadow pipit appears and clings to a sprig of heather. I watch it through my binoculars as it looks from side to side, its speckled breast twisting. I pass the winding path again and overshoot, taking the wrong goat path this time. I spot an unusually verdant green peeking from behind a boulder. And here we have it, lesser celandine, wild strawberry. Woodland indicator species hiding behind a rock. So, could it be, did the Ox Mountains once have ragged woods rather than heather? How long ago? I think of how I came to find these plants, by following a goat path. There will be no woodland as long as the goats roam these moors. A man is standing on rock down below covering his eyes, looking around in a fashion not far from the meadow pipit’s.
‘Have you seen a sheep and a lamb passing up these ways?’ he asks.
I haven’t. I see the smoke plumes again. ‘Who is setting fire to the mountain?’ I ask.
‘Just cats,’ he says.
Wednesday
I walk up to the top of the mountain again but with my family this time. I want them to see this view. I see how much good the walk does them, out of the car, not worrying about granddad, if he has enough clothes, if he remembers us, if he’s happy.
Thursday
Stepping off the main road we tread carefully over the rocky steps to Lough Conn, the water lapping against the rocks as it flows under Pontoon Bridge. On the opposite bank the gorse is flowering at every opportunity. North of Foxford it’s bright orange, the dry weather and warm sun has lit fires across the Ox Mountains, this morning the sun shone through the smoke and lit everything brown. It’s not arson this time. In the nursing home they mentioned it on the radio. This place feels like the whole world, the only place. In Pontoon the cars passing at 50mph on the road are not regular enough to dominate the soundscape. I listen – no birds. To the left is a pile of rocks and boulders, leading to a shoreline of reeds, grasses and willow. Beyond the water’s edge is woodland, rising into a lip that looks out over the lough. To me, from here, that is an ancient wood. I look through my binoculars and I’m sure I can see oak buds against the blue sky, growing amidst the straggly birch trees.
How can I get there without drowning? It’s a family holiday and my parents are with me, so dad suggests climbing across the boulders to the left. When we were on holiday in West Cork in the 1990s he would go fishing off rocks our mum deemed dangerous. My sister and I would sit at the window waiting for him to appear on the lane, unsure if the ocean, a shark, a giant squid might have captured him from us. He risked it, and so I’ll do it. The water isn’t deep immediately below the boulders but a cold soaking isn’t on the cards when I’ve got my camera with me. I clamber up onto a big boulder, leading with my feet, stepping onto smaller, and sometimes shifting rocks. I bring my right arm round and the sleeve of my coat unclips my lens cap – and off it goes, somersaulting into the brown water. I can’t help but think of Leonardo di Caprio disappearing into the sea at the end of Titanic. This feels like one of those times when things go a bit wrong. I slip down onto my backside and try to drag the cap towards me with my boot. The lens cap begins to sink. I fish again and drag deeper, I pull my boot away and it’s there, I snatch at it and zip it away.
I climb across the final few rocks until the water has receded and a sandy shore is under foot. This route is rarely taken, it’s blocked by crouched willows and twigs that are so dry they snap as I move. Further along the shore is a stone hut with an iron roof. It looks old, really old, but renovated. The ground is sandy, boggy, midges and mozzies frolic in their respective mobs. Cutting across the marshy path towards the trees I get my first view of it – the green of an Irish rainforest. Everything is vibrant with moss, the tongues of ferns and decrepit trunks of birch and oak trees. At last, I’ve discovered one of Mayo’s ancient woodlands. A chiffchaff is singing from over the bank of collapsed oak and rock, the first of spring. There’s a slender path through the moss, leading to the lip I’d seen from the other side of the water. I wave to my family and call across. It’s ancient! It’s like entering into a new kingdom, a homecoming, a piece of land that hasn’t been twisted and torn by the plough. But there are signs: the stone hut on the shore has a back window (open casement) with a bar running through it, inside it’s dark and wet like a medieval prison.
A swing has been tied to an oak and some clothes are hanging up like the sails of a ship moored in this wood. I feel as if I’m trespassing, like in Frances Horovitz’s poem ‘Winter Woods’: ‘we have encroached – /this is not yet our land.’ There are signs of people yet I’m alone. A flock of long-tailed tits pass overhead, one holds the body of an insect and its sprawled limbs in its mouth – spring is beginning to move now – I wonder if that’s for a baby bird. I take one last glance at the mosses, a script lichen etched into hazel bark, the wood sorrel and ferns and head towards the water. A path through some heather leads up and out to the main road. I needn’t have scrambled after all.
Something new
Farthing Downs & New Hill, London, July 2013
On the Downs the butterflies are immediately evident, the week old broods of meadow brown ferry amongst the long grasses, rarely stopping to feed on flowers. Breeding season is ending but still the song of skylarks comes from over the slope, some ancient language remembered, its translation lost. Greater yellow rattle blooms now, the spring buttercups lost to a swathe of Yorkshire fog and other grasses I don’t know. The suntan lotion on my arms acts as an adhesive, my skin covered with seeds. The grasshoppers are conjuring up their rickety, wooden percussion. I am hopeless in finding them, except for one that hops between seed heads, a micro Tarzan in this meadow jungle. But where are the people? A man drives a BMW sports car along the lane, revving its engine. I know where I’d rather be. Men in England are bare chested at the slightest chance and here a couple stroll along the lane drinking from big bottles of water. The tattoo stamped on the man’s back stands out in this simple landscape of slopes and flowers.
Ghostly day-flying moths spread at my every step through the long grass. Bumblebees forage on clovers, dropwort and yellow rattle, small heath butterflies appear again, two fly together, eager to fulfil their short lives with as much fornication as is possible. I cut back on to the path I know best. A chiffchaff sings in the hedgeline at the bottom of the hill, a single blackbird and a whitethroat, too. There’s no sign of spring’s willow warblers or their clutch of young. A crowd of peacock caterpillars munch through nettle leaves, leaving only the dreadlocks of flowers. A yellowhammer appears from across the lane, landing in a small hawthorn bush, its strong yellow plumage brighter than dandelions, a South American yellow, and at its brightest here. I take a few photos. Along with skylarks, this is a bird I have to travel to see, when once, before my time, you might have woken to it flocking in the hedges and fields.
Leaving the Downs I enter the chalky wooded hollows at the bottom of the slope, with tor grass growing along the track, an indicator of the calcareous soil. My sweat cools with the breeze that slips through here. In the dappled shade I scan the path edges for orchids, black bryony creeping out from the darkened hedges. And there it is: the fly orchid. I change lenses and struggle to get the image right, sweat dripping, bringing lotion down my face. But it’s beautiful to look at – a bit like a bumblebee pinned and proffered by the long spike, with its little eyes and short antennae. A family are passing behind the hedge, discussing how to control the dog.
‘She’s pulling me down into these weird places,’ says the mother.
‘Just let her off the lead, let her off the lead,’ the dad says.
They arrive on the path heading down hill. Their daughter warns the dog to stay with them. I only see the mother, she’s dressed in an apricot coloured dress and heeled shoes. She’s young and glamorous, so fitting with the array of flowers bursting from the hillside.
‘Who needs Box Hill when you can come here, eh?’ says the dad. They disappear down towards Happy Valley.
I carry on along the ridge and settle on the desire line drawn down the hill and through the flowers. Ringlets move through the meadow, the first I’ve seen this year. They move at the same time and, stitched together, they are a tapestry of flickering wings. In my silence and stillness wildlife begins to move around me, perhaps more trusting. I see more plants now: twayblades, common spotted orchid, salad burnet, marjoram, ox eye daisy, rough hawkbit and bladder campion with its inflated, balloon like calyx-tubes. The wind blows through the trees. A speckled wood butterfly flaps about me, its wings audible as it hits my khaki shorts and leaf stalks. It clasps hold of a spear-like grass stem and curves its abdomen, laying a tiny pearl of an egg. This, for me, is something new.
Unlocking Landscapes 