History of woodland and wood-pasture

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Suffolk Natural History, Vol. 32

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.

Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc. 32 (1996)


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