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HISTORY OF WOODLAND AND WOOD-PASTURE OLIVER RACKHAM
Wildwood There have been trees in Britain for about 14,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age. For the first half of that period the country was covered with vast woods, as yet unaffected by civilization. These are termed wildwood. Wildwood no longer exists; it disappeared too long ago for any memory, record or tradition of it to survive in Britain. Indeed, wholly natural wildwood is an elusive thing. Human activities have been so pervasive that in historic times there have not been many forests on earth (other than on uninhabited islands) never altered by people's activities. The obsession of some conservationists with untouched wildwood has been steadily undermined by archaeological research. Wildwood has to be reconstructed from pollen analysis. Although Norfolk is rieh in pollen deposits, Suffolk has very few. However, one of the best pollen records in Europe is that from Diss Mere just outside Suffolk. The mud of the mere records, in turn, the Coming of birch and pine to the tundra, the growth of wildwood, the sudden decline of elm (probably through disease) at the Coming of Neolithic civilization, the destruetion of wildwood in the Bronze Age, the cowboy country of south Norfolk in the Iron Age, the Coming of rye, barley, and Cannabis, and the growth of Diss town. Woodland as we know it is not wildwood, nor is it a mere artefact. Although part of the cultural landscape, it is also a natural thing and has a life of its own From pollen analysis we learn that ancient woods today share the following properties with wildwood: 1. Wildwood was not a dense monotony of oak-trees. There were many local variants, some of which (such as limewoods and hazel-woods) correspond to types of ancient woodland today. These were superimposed on a regional pattern of Variation, with lime and hazel the commonest trees in Lowland England; oak and hazel the commonest in the Highland Zone of north and west England, Wales, and south Scotland; pine predominating in the eastern Scottish Highlands; birch predominating in the western Scottish Highlands. Much of this Variation can still be discerned in ancient woods today. 2. Wildwood did not consist of trees, trees and trees. It contained plants characteristic both of temporary Clearings (e.g. ragged robin Lychnis floscuculi) and of the 'woodland grassland' of permanent Clearings today (e.g. devil's-bit Succisa pratensis). These plants are relatively well represented, even though most of them are insect-pollinated and leave little pollen in deposits. Pollen analysis reveals what wildwood consisted of, but to find out what it looked like we study surviving, comparable wildwoods. especially in North America. Surviving wildwoods have a remarkably wide ränge of struetures, but tend to exemplify these properties: 3. Wildwood contained much deadwood in the form of big fallen logs, especially of trees such as oak in which the log lasts a long time (compared to the life-span of the living tree. This is confirmed by fossil finds of insects which specialize in rotten logs.
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4. Many trees reproduced vegetatively rather than from seed. For example, American beech (Fagus grandifolia) perpetuates itself by suckers, which take over the site immediately when the parent tree rots at the base and falls down. Cherry, aspen and some elms would have done this in Europe. 5. Coppicing is possible in wildwood. American lime (Tiliaplatyphyllos) is selfcoppicing, and occurs in wildwood in the form of giant multi-stemmed stools. Most American and European trees (other than conifers) have the ability to coppice, which presumably evolved in response to some factor operating in wildwood. (Many wildwoods consisted of trees which will burn, such as pines, and in consequence went through cycles of burning and regrowth comparable to the coppicing cycles of woodland management; but fire is unlikely to have been a factor in Britain except in Caledonian pinewoods.) 6. Some wildwoods are periodically blown down by hurricanes. To judge by recent experience in England, this would result in an 'impenetrable' tangle of fallen but living trees. Trees in the Cultural Landscape The destruction of wildwood happened too early to be recorded. Domesday Book shows that about 15% of England was woodland and wood-pasture in 1086, a smaller percentage than France has today. Suffolk was no more than 9% woodland. Trees are not, and have not been, confined to woodland. They enter the cultural landscape in four ways: (a) Woodland. By this I mean woodland as natural Vegetation: either ultimately derived from wildwood, or that which has sprang up on land formerly put to some other use. All historic woodland, though natural, has been managed, usually more intensively than it is today. (b) Wood-pasture. This involves combining trees and grazing animals; reconciling the tendency of the trees to shade the pasture with the tendency of the animals to eat the regrowth of the trees. (c) Plantations. These are not natural Vegetation: the trees exist because someone has put them there. The intention is that they shall be cut down when they reach early middle age, the stumps shall die, and a new crop shall be planted. Plantations are the principle of arable farming applied to the growing of trees. (d) Non-woodland trees. These include not only hedges and hedgerow trees as familiar in medieval Suffolk as they are today - but also trees Standing in fields and meadows. Examples are the black poplars of Breckland fen Valleys, the fields fĂźll of pollard oaks also characteristic of the woodless Breckland, pollard willows along watercourses, and the pollard oaks, ashes, elms, and alders scattered in Yorkshire dales. Woodland, wood-pasture, and non-woodland trees are mentioned and distinguished in Anglo-Saxon charters from the eighth Century onwards. As usual with documents, the charters do not reveal their origin; they appear as established practices already of unknown antiquity. Plantations, with rare and unimportant exceptions, begin in the seventeenth Century. Modern forestry has been based almost exclusively on plantations, and has been concerned with ancient woods as possible sites for creating plantations.
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Woodland and Coppicing Documents from (about 1250) onwards give the names and areas of woods, their owners, boundaries and management. Wildwood was no longer remembered and wood-pasture was separately recorded. Many of these woods still exist, or have only recently been destroyed. For example the five woods of Barking (Suffolk), listed in the Ely Coucher Book of 1251 and ranging in area from 5 to 180 acres, all still exist, four of them with the same names, with approximately the same areas. The many documents which survive from intervening centuries leave no doubt that they are the same woods. Early maps, such as the seventeenth-century maps of some of the Barking woods in Suffolk Record Office (Ipswich), leave no doubt that the boundaries of many woods have not changed since the late sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. Woods were normally coppiced to yield successive crops of underwood. This depends on the fact that most trees survive being cut down: they have the property, inherited from wildwood, of sprouting from the base or from the roots. Wood - the product of coppicing - was used for various specialized crafts: tools, the two kinds of hurdles, thatching wood, birch as a teaching aid, etc. But the bulk use of underwood was for general purposes such as fencing (especially wattlework woven in situ), fuel (faggots, logs, charcoal), sea-defences. In the middle ages woods were typically felled every 4 to 8 years for short rotation produce; later the rotation lengthened to 10-18 years. Woods normally had a scatter of Standard trees, left standing for several rotations of the underwood and then felled to yield timber as opposed to wood. Coppicing was applied without much distinction to trees as diverse as beech, elm, ash, and alder. The one discrimination that was drawn was that oak was treated, wherever possible, as a timber tree and other species as underwood. Only in oakwoods, where oak was too abundant to be treated only as a timber tree, was some of the oak coppiced. Secondary woodland Virtually any piece of land, left to itself, turns into woodland. How this happens was the main question studied by ecological scientists 70 years ago. Anyone who travels by train will know how rapidly railway banks and ex-industrial land turn into woods. The increase of woodland (called 'scrub' for propaganda purposes) at the expense of heath, fen and grassland is a major conservation problem, and is often controversial - should Ken Wood (Highgate, London) be allowed to go on swallowing up Hampstead Heath? This process of succession does not re-create ancient woodland. New woods are dominated by trees that invade easily, such as oak, ash, birch, and hawthorn. Trees such as hornbeam come in much later, and some, such as lime, may not appear at all. Herbaceous plants are also slow to invade. Those who expect a new National Forest to be a replacement for destroyed ancient woodland are likely to be disappointed, especially if the land is fertilizer-sodden arable which will grow nettles and cow-parsley instead of bluebells and primroses. This has happened at different times down the centuries. Some ancient woodland has clearly not always been woodland, for it is underlain by ridge-and-furrow which proves medieval cultivation.
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Wood boundaries - recognizing ancient woodland Some ancient woods can be identified from the modern map. They have their own peculiar names which teil a story. A Monks' Wood must date from before monks were abolished in the 1530s; a wood with an Anglo-Saxon name like Trundley is probably pre-Conquest; a wood with a Viking name like Lound is probably older still. Ancient woods have characteristic sinuous or zig-zag outlines. We know from early maps that these have not altered for at least 400 years. They are stable because they are surrounded by woodbanks: earthworks consisting of a bank with external ditch. Most woodbanks appear to be of Anglo-Saxon or early medieval date. The bank which surrounds all the sinuosities of Hindolveston Wood (Norfolk) was made by Norwich Cathedral Priory in 1297-8 - the contractors' accounts survive - but this is relatively late. Woodbanks defined the edge of the wood and made it easier to fence against livestock getting in and eating the young shoots. They are evidence of the importance attached to Woodland Conservation in the middle ages: the medievals took conservation for granted and did not often write about it. Woodbanks record the social history of a wood: for example the tendency for estates and woods to be subdivided in the course of the middle ages, giving rise to internal division banks, and re-amalgamated later. Where an addition has been made to a wood, the old bank is left behind in the interior. Where part of a wood has been grubbed out, the new edge often has a different type of bank; late woodedges are often straight, with a perfunctory bank and flimsy hawthorn hedge. It is essential to make use of fieldwork in reconstructing woodland history. Gamlingay Wood, Cambridgeshire, is probably the best-documented wood in England, with a fine map of 1601; yet its woodbanks record a change of outline which neither the mapmaker nor any of the medieval recorders knew about, probably because it happened too early to be written down. Documents never teil the whole story; among other shortcomings, they leave out anything that was happening at times when people were not writing. Giant coppice stools Every time a tree is cut down and grows up again the stool - the permanent base - gets bigger. The rate of expansion can be estimated either by cutting a crosssection of the stool and measuring the annual rings, or by observing the maximum size of stool in woods of known history. For example, the Bradfield Woods contain ash stools 2 m and more across, which date from the time of Bury St Edmund's Abbey. Giant stools are formed by many other trees including lime, maple, oak, chestnut (a Roman introduction) and (in Bradfield) alder. Herbaceous plants Ancient woods can be recognized by possessing certain plants which do not easily invade newly-formed woodland. These include, among trees, native lime (Tilia cordata) and Service (Sorbus torminalis). (See Plates 11 and 12.) Oxlip CPrimula elatior) (see Plate 15), though locally a common plant, is almost confined to ancient woodland such as the Bradfield Woods. Others include wood anemone and Paris quadrifolia. The validity of indicator species varies from one part of the country to
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another. In any one region, they are among those plants which grow in ancient woodland but not in ancient hedges. The reader is warned, however, against those few hedges which are the 'ghost' outlines of grubbed-out ancient woods. For example, a hedge in Shelley (Suffolk) anomalously consists of lime and has Service, wood-anemone, etc.; it represents the edge of Withers Wood, last heard of in the eighteenth Century. Kinds of ancient woodland As demonstrated by W. Kirby in this volume, ancient woodland is of many kinds. Within Suffolk about 21 types have been recognized; this excludes all those of the Highland Zone (corresponding to the Oak-Hazel wildwood) and all the beechwood communities, for beech is not native in Suffolk. The National Vegetation Classification is not an adequate Classification of ancient woodland, at least in Lowland England. It fails to differentiate ancient woods from other kinds of woody plant Community. It has has too few categories to do justice to their Variation: most ancient woods appear as either W8 or W10. The categories are based largely on herbaceous plants rather than trees, and hence cannot be compared with earlier states of the woods, for which, as a rule, only the trees are known. Coppicing and wildlife Coppicing was an all-pervasive practice, extending to virtually every wood in the country and maintained intensively for Century after Century. It must not be judged by the remnants which are all that anyone now alive can remember. In consequence the plants and animal communities of woodland have become adapted to coppicing, as they might to any other ecological factor such as frost. This is most obvious with flowering-plants. It is well known, and used to be a commonplace, that perennial plants such as primrose and oxlip flourish in the years after a wood is felled. Many others, such as wood-spurge (Euphorbia amygdaloides), live only in the years of light, and pass the shade years in the form of buried seed. Coppicing plants vary widely from wood to wood, often independently of the trees; they are unpredictable, depending in part on the weather and on what came up at the last coppicing. In the limewood of Chalkney Wood (Earl's Colne, Essex) prominent and regulär coppicing plants are red campion and wild raspberry (Silene dioica, Rubus idaeus). In Hatfield Forest (Essex), uniquely, hound's-tongue (Cynoglossum ojficinale) was a regulär coppicing plant in the 1920s; it still occurs but is no longer common. Some rare species come into this category, such as Hypericum androsaemum, recently found in Chalkney Wood and Hatfield Forest (Essex) after felling, and Euphorbia serrata in Monmouthshire. Coppicing, like other aspects of woodmanship, has an international dimension; the vast oak coppices of Macedonia (Greece) have an abundant felling flora, for instance Geranium asphodeloides. Throughout Europe, woods for centuries were very short of rotting logs. Those wildwood creatures which depended on dead wood and ancient upstanding trees survived, if at all, in woodpastures and field and hedgerow trees. Other contributors to this volume discuss the effects of coppicing on mammals, birds, and invertebrates. Coppicing is one of the most active fields of ecological research; a recent book (Buckley 1992) is devoted to its effects.
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Timber and underwood in ancient buildings Much can be learnt about woodland history from the materials of medieval buildings. Timber frames are mostly oak, except in buildings of low social status in which other species may be used. The infill between the timbers is commonly wattle-and-daub made of underwood rods. The rods are the product of coppicing at about seven years' growth (as we would expect from the documents), and are of species such as sallow, hazel, aspen, ash, and maple. There is generally good agreement with the underwood of surviving woods today, even to the extent (for example) of lime underwood in a building in Lavenham, where the local wood still has lime. There is a tendency for aspen to be over-represented in wattlework. Timber shows a discrepancy from woodland today. Medieval buildings were built from large numbers of small oaks: each beam was hewn from the whole of whatever tree was just big enough to furnish it. Oaks were commonly felled at no more than 50 years' growth, and there was no problem of replacement. A medieval wood evidently looked very different from a typical ancient wood today, with big oaks which are seldom less than a Century old. A county like Suffolk, rieh in timber-framed buildings but with relatively little woodland, probably drew much of its timber from non-woodland trees or from elsewhere. There was an active trade in oak boards from eastern Europe, recognizable by their straight grain and narrow annual rings, very different from the small, crooked, fastgrown, very hard English oaks. Excavations of waterlogged sites in which organic materials are preserved reveal the produets and methods of woodmanship in earlier periods going back to the Neolithic. Wood Pasture Wood-pasture is not equivalent to woodland. It does not preserve the fßll ränge of wildwood trees; for example lime very rarely survives. Nor does it usually preserve a distinetive woodland ground Vegetation; wood-pastures tend to consist of grassland or heath plus trees. However, the trees usually last much longer than in woodland, creating a distinetive category of ancient trees which preserve many associated animals, bryophytes, and lichens apparently derived from wildwood. Wooded commons A common is a piece of land on which certain people have common-rights independently of the owner. Usually the rights are of pasture, but if trees are present the same or a different set of people might have rights to cut wood, or less often to timber. Wooded commons, like other commons have a complicated shape, unlike that of woods, with a concave outline which funnels out into the verges of the roads that cross the common. There is no perimeter earthwork other than the hedgebanks of the adjacent fields. Around the margin are the houses of the commoners, fronting on to the common and backing on to their private fields. Wood-pasture commons typically have pollard trees, which are cut like coppice stools but at a height at which the grazing animals could not reach the young shoots. (Pollarding is much more laborious than coppicing per ton of
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wood produced.) Often woodcutting has been discontinued and the pollards have grown up tall. For example, the immense beech pollards at Feibrigg in Norfolk were last pollarded in the early eighteenth Century; significantly, they have been preserved within a later landscape park. Burnham Beeches is perhaps the best-known wooded common. Originally its pollard beeches and oaks were scattered in grassland and heath, forming a kind of savanna. It is now woodland as the result of trees that have grown up between the original ones over the last 150 years. Parks In Anglo-Saxon times wood-pastures consisted of wooded commons. From the mid-eleventh Century the fate of woodpasture was transformed by the Norman habit of treating deer as semi-domestic animals. In Domesday Book there are about 35 parks. Their numbers proliferated after the introduction of fallow deer, an Oriental beast, in c. 1100. In the heyday of parks, about 1250, there were at least 3000 in England. The medievals thought of the fallow deer as a woodland animal. Parks are closely correlated with the distribution of Domesday woodland; the depredations of deer are likely to be one of the causes of the decline of woodland between 1086 and 1350. Suffolk, a less-than-averagely wooded county, had about 100 parks. Venison was not just an ordinary meat, but was priceless - it was never sold - and was eaten at feasts. A park was a status symbol of the entire upper class; it symbolized a higher status than a moat, but lower than one's own gallows. The essential feature of a park was the pale, the special perimeter fence which confined the deer. Fallow deer are stronger than pigs and more agile than goats. Maintaining the pale was an expensive matter, and hence early parks usually have a compact shape with rounded corners, different from the shapes of woods or of commons. Some parks were undivided, the trees being pollarded to put the regrowth out of the reach of deer. Others were compartmented: they were divided into coppices, demarcated woods which could be fenced after felling to keep out the deer until the trees had grown up sufficiently not to be harmed. Some of the compartments were launds, permanent grassy glades, the trees in which, if any, would be pollarded. Suffolk has one of the finest examples of an uncompartmented park at Staverton near Woodbridge, an eleventh- or twelfth-century park with thousands of medieval pollard oaks and the giant birches, hollies, and rowans which have grown up since. (Staverton is private.) There is also a classic example of a compartmented park in Monks Park, one-third of which survives as part of the Bradfield Woods. Internal banks mark the limits of the coppices and launds. Parks were revived by Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth. Henry supplemented the royal parks which he had inherited by others taken from convicts for high treason, from monasteries, from Cardinal Wolsey and Archbishop Cranmer, or constructed by himself. This started a fashion which continued through the sixteenth and into the seventeenth Century. Whereas medieval parks had been deer-farms, Tudor parks were used for hunting. A relic of this is 'Queen Elizabeth's Hunting-Lodge', really an Observation tower built by Henry in a
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short-lived royal park in Epping Forest. A Henrician hunt had a predictable outcome, like a Spanish bullfight, which the king and distinguished guests could watch from the tower. Suffolk contains several parks from about this period, such as Polstead and Shrubland near Ipswich. These display the beginnings of designed landscape in a succession of ancient pollard oaks at intervals round the perimeter. Polstead even has remains of an ancient oaken pale. The next period of emparking is the eighteenth Century, well known for its picturesque landscapes designed by Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, Humphry Repton, and others. They were designed around the features remaining from previous, workaday landscapes. Suffolk has two magnificent early examples, Ickworth and Sotterley, both of which preserve many pre-existing hedgerow, field, and orchard trees, as well as trees planted when the park was made and afterwards.
Wooded Forests William the Conqueror had ambitious ideas of kingship. The kingdom was his and all that was in it, and he introduced the Continental doctrine of Forests, designated tracts of land on which the king claimed the right to keep deer, kill and eat them. The deer were protected by special bye-laws and a special bureaucracy; they gave medieval kings scope for collecting fines for breaches of Forest Law, and for promoting henchmen to honorific sinecures among Forest officialdom. Forests were the supreme status symbol of the king, and were aspired to by a few very great nobles and prelates. A Forest was normally centred on a large common. Some were wooded Epping Forest), others not (Dartmoor Forest). The king's deer were normally added to, and did not displace, the pre-existing activities of commoners and landowners. Some wooded Forests were compartmental (Wychwood in Oxfordshire), some non-compartmental (Epping). Suffolk, a county with few royal connexions, had no Forests; but not far outside lies Hatfield Forest near Bishop's Stortford, the best-preserved of all the wooded Forests. It was compartmental, and nearly all the features survive: coppicewoods (with woodbanks round them), plains (non-woodland areas) containing pollard trees, ancient hawthorns and maples with mistletoe, the only medieval Forest lodge to survive above ground. The National Trust has recently revived the management in fĂźll detail.
Conservation Medieval Woodland conservation is illustrated by the woods of Bury St. Edmund's Abbey. The abbey, one of the greatest landowners in England, had 221 estates in 1086 a hundred of which possessed woodland. (Of those without woodland, 23 were in the woodless Breckland, and most of the others were very small.) At this time, coppicing was widespread but not universal. In the next 250 years, there was a period of great pressure on land, cultivation was extended to its utmost at the expense of woodland. Coppicing was extended in the remaining woodland. Of the hundred places possessing woodland in 1086, 36 lost their woodland at this time. These are not randomly distributed. Most
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estates near Bury kept their woodland; estates in Norfolk, east Suffolk, and Essex mostly lost it or had it survive only as wood-pasture. It is possible, therefore, that the monks had a definite woodland policy. They were big users of wood and timber themselves; they had a market for wood and timber in Bury town, the woodless Breckland adjacent, and the prosperous, woodless Fens close at hand. They developed woods such as Bradfield as coppices; they allowed, at least for a time, their outlying woods to become wood-pasture or to disappear. Post-medieval By the time of the Black Death (1349) the position of woodland in the landscape stabilized. At the Dissolution in 1538 the Abbey owned about 150 separate woods, which then passed into private hands. Although woodland on the whole was stable, sometimes in minute detail, there were some changes. About 17 Abbey woods (or the equivalent in fractions of woods) were destroyed between 1538 and 1700, about 30 in the eighteenth Century, and 23 in the nineteenth. Twentieth Century By 1900 more than half the Bury Abbey woods still existed, including many of the big ones. The next half-century, contrary to what is often asserted, was a time of quiescence. The woods often feil into disuse - the railways had brought cheap coal to Suffolk and undercut the market for renewable fuels - but they were still there, as aerial photographs taken by Hitler prove. In the 1950s the notion prevailed that every inch of Britain ought to be seen to be doing something useful; ancient woods, like all roughland, were the victims of this habit of thought. Some were grubbed out and made into farmland; others feil into the hands of modern foresters, were felled, poisoned, and made into plantations. Among the Abbey woods, nearly one-third of the number remaining in 1950 had been grubbed or replanted by 1975. Destruction feil more on the bigger woods. At the Dissolution Bury had owned 13 woods of more than 100 acres (40 ha). By 1950 six were reasonably intact. Today the only one remaining intact is Felshamhall Wood, nearly the smallest of the 13. Against this depressing background bodies such as the county wildlife trusts, and later the Woodland Trust, began to acquire woods, both to prevent them from being destroyed and to restore the management which is part of woodland as an ecosystem. Especially after the Bradfield Woods public inquiry in 1969, the importance of protecting ancient woodland gradually became recognized. Times have changed, and plant-breeders have taken the pressure off land. Both the chief enemies of woodland are in retreat. Woods grubbed out cannot be recovered; they now swell the acreage of Set-Aside farmland. But replanting of ancient woodland is a rarity, and many woods once thought lost to modern forestry are recovering. It has been learnt the hard way - through repeating the mistakes made by Victorian foresters - that the worst place to create a plantation is where there are trees already. Existing trees recover from the poison and gradually overcome the planted trees, especially if there is a run of dry summers. Deconiferization is one of the conservation issues of the 1990s; the Suffolk Wildlife Trust has gone many years down this path at Reydon (near Southwold) Wood.
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Conservation questions - coppicing Coppicing has now increased to the point where complaints begin that there is too much coppicing, to the detriment of animals and plants that do not tolerate it. In my view this is not yet justified. Recent coppicing is nearly always in woods with a previous history of coppicing, from which (by definition) intolerant and immobile species disappeared long ago. It seldom encroaches on woods that have never been coppiced. Even if conservationists were to extend coppicing to one-quarter of surviving ancient woodland (which would require the most strenuous effort) this would still leave 75% of the area in an unmanaged State. Unmanaged woodland has virtues, especially for the creatures that live on deadwood; nobody should be ashamed, as they might have been 30 years ago about leaving woodland 'derelict'. However, we must not suppose that woodland left unmanaged turns into wildwood - either the wildwood as it was in 4000 BC or the wildwood that might have developed had it survived for the next 6000 years. For example, it shows no sign of ever regaining lime. The restoration of wildwood is out of reach - we do not know enough about wildwood to know when it has been restored, let alone how to do the job. Trusts, nevertheless, should begin to weigh the pros and cons before reviving coppicing in newly-acquired woodland reserves. Existing coppicing programmes should be continued, but extending them needs thought. The menace of deer The commonest counter-indication against coppicing is the presence of deer. There are more deer running around the general countryside than there have been for a thousand years: the native red and roe, the anciently-introduced fallow deer, and the recently-introduced muntjac and Chinese water deer. Deer devour the regrowth of underwood and herbaceous plants such as oxlip. Dealing with deer (or, in highland woods, with the incursions of sheep through derelict boundary walls) is the greatest problem in woodland conservation in the 1990s. Pollarding, instead of coppicing, protects regrowth but not ground Vegetation, and is very laborious. Neither shooting nor fencing answers the problem by itself; in combination they may achieve some success. Ancient trees Since at least the time of Shakespeare, the English have loved ancient trees as objects of beauty and veneration. We remember Herne's Oak and the Oaks of Reformation; kings are portrayed under them or in them; we portray the trees themselves and invest them with railings and plaques. Famous trees in Suffolk include the Culford Oak, the Albana Oak and Tea-party Oak in Ickworth Park, the Haughley Oak, and the Queen's Oak at Huntingfield - most of these now preserved in later parks. It is now appreciated. as other contributors to this volume point out, that ancient trees, especially if pollarded or hollow, are the specific habitat of many animals and plants. Much of the wildlife associated with trees requires old and 'decrepit' trccs Where are ancient upstanding trees to be found? Not normally in woodland. Ancient woods are not lacking in ancient trees, but these are of specialized Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 32 (1996)
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kinds, namely giant coppice stools and boundary pollards. Ancient upstanding trees within a wood, except on banks, usually indicate that it has not always been a wood. In Suffolk, with its rieh history of hedgerow and field trees, it often happens that groups of ancient trees survive in what is now woodland or parkland. Ickworth and Sotterley Parks preserve whole seventeenth-century landscapes of trees. Thornham Park (which belongs to the little-known nineteenth-century period of designer parks) preserves a fragment of the extraordinary landscape of mid Suffolk, in which—as a document of c. 1742 reveals - there were 32 pollards and other trees to the acre on ordinary farmland. Ancient non-woodland trees, albeit of shorter-lived species, are to be found on flood-plains. Land liable to flooding was too valuable as meadow to be left as woodland, but has a tradition of black poplars and pollard willows. The Breckland, too, had no woodland, but had fields thickly set with pollard oaks, and black poplars in its fenny Valleys; examples of these survive in the oak 'pins' of Risby and the black poplars at Icklingham Plains. Ancient trees (along with coppice-woods) are a particular strength of England. They form part of a tradition of savanna (of tree'd grassland or heath) which used to be widespread in Europe but now survives chiefly in the south. In Europe ancient trees have long fallen from fashion and usually have been swept away: one can travel from Boulogne to Athens without seeing an old tree. Outside England they survive best in Greece, Crete, the mountains of Sardinia and in certain of the savannas of Spain and Portugal. Excursion to the Bradfield Woods The Bradfield Woods are a classic site in woodland conservation. Here in 1969 a group of local residents sueeeeded in using a Tree Preservation Order to halt their destruetion. For the first time it was demonstrated at a Public inquiry that ancient woodland was worth conserving against the Claims of expanding agriculture. This was the first of many causes celebres which have made it increasingly difficult for ancient woodland to be destroyed, even for causes more important than agriculture and forestry. The woods were given to Bury St. Edmund's Abbey by the Anglo-Saxon kings. Felshamhall Wood was a normal coppice. The adjacent Monks' Park was established as a deer-park; in the twelfth Century. After a short career as a park It reverted to being a coppice-wood. The woods were privatized in 1537t. They were listed as a potential National Nature Reserve in the 1930s, apparently on their entomological interest, and afterwards forgotten. Two-thirds of Monks' Park were grubbed out In the 1960s. In 1971 most of what was left was acquired by the Royal Society for Nature Conservation, and transferred to Suffolk Wildlife Trust in the 1980s. The woods finally became a National Nature Reserve in 1994. Coppicing The Bradfield Woods are among the very few sites outside southern England where coppicing has never lapsed. They are now managed on two coppice cycles. Areas with abundant hazel are cut on a 10-12-year rotation to make thatching wood, wattle hurdles, etc., in which much of the value comes from work done on the material. The rest of the wood is cut on a cycle of about 25
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years for less specialized products: stakes, logs, sea-defence faggots. The visit was in October, when coppicing plants are not at their best, but the party saw some, such as Cow-wheat (Melampyrun pratense) which comes up from buried seed. Both woods contain many giant coppice stools, especially of ash, dating back to the time of the monks. These can often be shown to be one genetic individual - not several trees which have coalesced - by all the stems sharing some peculiarity of shape or pigmentation. Archaeology Felshamhall Wood, a normal coppice-wood, is surrounded by a massive bank; and external ditch which follows the sinuous outline. In the north-east, where a small area was lost from the wood probably in the eighteenth Century, there is a length of straight bank with a much weaker earthwork. Monks' Park was apparently adapted out of a pre-existing wood in the twelfth Century. The perimeter bank varies according to whether or not lt follows the outline of the previous wood. On the north side, where a new bank was evidently made, there are remains of an internal ditch, as is characteristic of some early park boundaries. Monks' Park has remains of a system of internal banks and ditches which divided it into four coppice compartments and three launds. One of the launds survived as 'Hewitt's Meadow' until less than a Century ago. This has recently been restored as a permanent open grassy glade. New woodland The northern tip of Felshamhall Wood has grown up since 1945 on land which had previously been a field. It is now a well-developed oak-ash wood, without the coppice structure and many of the species of the old wood adjacent. The beginnings of another addition are to be seen next to the eighteenthcentury boundary, where a neighbour has stopped cultivating a piece of land in order to create woodland. Deer Over the last twenty years the Bradfield Woods have been increasingly attacked by roe-deer and smaller numbers of muntjac. Roe browse newly-cut stools according to their tastes, birch being the most preferred and alder usually rejected In the later stages of the coppice cycle there is a pronounced, though not extreme, browse-line: by crouching to below the level of a deer's head, the observer suddenly sees a long way. Without deer control commercial coppicing would be almost impossible. There is now a combination of shooting (by a properly qualified stalker) and fencing 'Dead hedges' of unwanted underwood, constructed by volunteers with great labour, successfully keep out roe for the first three years of the coppice cycle.
Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 32 (1996)
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Conservation versus access The Bradfield Woods illustrate two types of conflict in nature reserves: (1) between the conservation of one aspect and the management of another; (2) between conservation and public access. Coppicing calls for tractors and other vehicles to get out wood, often when the site is wet. This conflicts with maintaining the rides as woodland grassland, containing a large part of the wildlife of the wood. Visitors were shown part of the Solution at Bradfield, where a new track has been made through the coppices to take some of the traffic away from existing rides. There is also the problem, common to all Trusts, of balancing the claims of conservation against those of visitors. The National Trust stoutly maintains that conservation must prevail over access. However, many Trusts find it difficult to resist pressure to adapt their properties to the needs, or supposed needs, of visitors, without fully investigating the effects on what they are supposed to be conserving. The matter is complicated by insistent (but not always wellresearched) claims on behalf of public safety and of disabled visitors. For example, there is the temptation to drain or harden paths instead of telling visitors to bring gum-boots, and the temptation to make part of the reserve into a car park instead of acquiring adjacent land. References Buckley, G. P. (1992). Ecology and Management of Coppice Woodlands. Chapman & Hall. Hamber, C. P. & Speight, M. R. (1995). 'Biodiversity conservation in Britain: science replacing tradition'. British Wildlife, 6, 137-47. Oliver Rackham, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 32 (1996)
Plate 11: Wild Service-tree, Sorbus torminalis (L.) Crantz, blossom at Bentley (p. 119).
Plate 12: Fruits of Wild Service-tree, a good indicator of ancient woodland (p. 119).
Plate 15: Oxlips, Primula elatior (L.) Hill, at Bulls Wood, Cockfield, a Suffolk Wildlife Trust reserve with a rieh ancient woodland flora (p. 119).