★★★★★
Living in the city of trees, forester Luke Barley’s Ancient: Reviving the Woods That Made Britain is evidently essential reading for the Sheffield student. Barley spent a lot of time in woodland growing up, but the idea to work with trees seemed a distant dream. It wasn’t until age 23 that he became a ranger. This route has led him to many of England’s most beautiful landscapes, to the position of senior advisor for the National Trust, and, on Friday, to the Millennium Gallery to talk about his book with Tony Ryan for Off The Shelf.
65 million years ago, ancient woodlands were “diverse, untamed kaleidoscopes” of open spaces, wetlands – just a giant, beautiful mess, in which both the species we know today, and those we have forgotten, evolved. Flash forward to the Bronze Age, and humans started sustainably managing the woods for extracting materials to survive. Three thousand years later, this sustainable relationship collapsed with industrialisation, and from the Victorian era to the early 20th century, we neglected to manage these woodlands at all. It is in recent decades that management plans have come out of the woodwork again.
You probably think of woods as being shaded areas. Barley clarifies that this phenomenon is a recent one: woodlands used to be bright and open and thriving. Shifting baseline syndrome leads many to accept the degraded state of the natural world as the norm. It is this same syndrome that has caused us to perceive private ownership of woodland as standard, rather than the historical, symbiotic relationship we all used to have with the land.
Barley is hopeful about the future of ancient woodland. If we sensitively utilise innovative forestry and building techniques, our ancient woods will flourish. In his work, he has already come across positive initiatives, such as the experimental building projects coming out of the Architectural Association’s woodland campus at Hooke Park in Dorset.
Ryan comments that the care and love that Barley has for ancient woodlands shines through the book. Admittedly, I have not yet read the book, but if it’s anything like the talk last night, it was surely made with love. As much as I liked learning about big-picture ideas, it was the stories and minute facts that got me: the resilient native lime trees of England, the theorised origins of the idiom ‘underdog’.
In particular, it’s uplifting to know that, up until a couple centuries ago, human management of woodlands recreated similar environmental conditions to the prehuman landscape, which allowed seven ancient butterfly species to flourish. One of these is the heath fritillary, known as the “woodman’s follower”.
When Barley set out to write his book, his primary aim was to spread the message that ancient woodland in Britain need human intervention to thrive again. He has come out of his research and writing process with the profound knowledge that “we are a woodland species, and the woods are home.”
