The word woodland creates a misleading impression of what the ecosystem of these hills would have looked like after trees returned in the early Mesolithic, and until they were cleared by farmers. From Scotland to Spain, the western seaboard of Europe was covered by rainforest. Rainforests are not confined to the tropics. They are places wet enough for the trees to carry epiphytes, plants which grow on other plants. A few miles from where I live I have found what appears to be a tiny remnant of the great Atlantic rainforest, a pocket of canopied jungle, protected from sheep, in the Nantgobaith gorge. The trees hanging above the water are festooned with moss and lichen. Polypody–the many-footed fern–slinks along their branches. Through the forest canopy move troops of long-tailed tits, goldcrests, nuthatches and treecreepers. Walking up Cwm Nantgobaith one autumn day, I noticed something unmistakable, but so unfamiliar that it took me a moment to process it. It shone like a gold sovereign against the brown oak leaves on the path. I picked it up.
It was a leaf of Tilia cordata, the small-leaved lime. Daffodil yellow, onion-shaped, it filled only the indentation in my palm. I looked up the path and saw another, then another. I followed the trail to two great trunks, forking from one stool and twisting up into the canopy above the path. I had walked beneath them many times but never noticed them: swaddled in deep moss, the trunks were indistinguishable from those of the oaks, and the leaves appeared only far above my head. Since then I have found several more limes in the gorge. This is a tree of the ancient wildwood which is now rare in Wales. Its presence there suggests that this fragment of rainforest might have grown without interruption since prehistoric times.
Heather, which many nature-lovers in Britain cherish, is typical of the hardy, shrubby plants which colonize deforested land. I have seen similar landscapes of low scrub in Brazil, Indonesia and Africa, where logging, burning and shifting cultivation have depleted the soil. I do not see heather moor as an indicator of the health of the upland environment, as many do, but as a product of ecological destruction. The rough grasslands which replace it when grazing pressure further intensifies, and which are also treasured by some naturalists, are strikingly similar to those whose presence we lament where cattle ranching has replaced rainforests in the tropics. I find these double standards hard to explain. I wonder whether our campaigns against deforestation elsewhere in the world, commendable as they may be, are a way of not seeing what has happened in our own country.
This is not to say that there was no open land. In some places the soil was too poor or wet for trees to grow. On the tops of the highest mountains the weather was too cold and harsh. But these open habitats were small and occasional, by comparison to the great tracts of wildwood which covered most of the hills.5 Nor is this to suggest that if human beings and their domestic animals were suddenly to vanish from Britain, our ecosystems would soon revert to those that prevailed in the Mesolithic. The uplands have been so depleted of nutrients*3 and their soils so compacted by sheep that they are unlikely to support continuous forest. For a few centuries after rewilding began, they would be more likely to host a patchwork of rainforest, covert, scrub, heath and sward.
The ancient character of the land, the forests that covered it and the animals that lived in them–which until historical times included wolves, bears, lynx, wildcats, boar and beavers–have been forgotten by almost everyone. The open, treeless hills are widely seen as natural. The chairman of a trade association called Cambria Active describes the scoured acid grassland it is trying to promote to tourists as ‘one of the largest wildernesses left in the UK’.6 The Countryside Council for Wales, the nation’s official conservation agency, calls its Claerwen nature reserve, a bare waste of sheep-scraped misery in the Cambrian Mountains, ‘perhaps the largest area of “wilderness” in Wales today’.7
Spend two hours sitting in a bushy suburban garden anywhere in Britain, and you are likely to see more birds, and of a wider range of species, than you would while walking five miles across almost any open landscape in the uplands. But to explain that what we have come to accept as natural is in fact the aftermath of an ecological disaster–the wasteland which has replaced a rainforest–is to demand an imaginative journey that we are not yet prepared to make. Our memories have been wiped as clean as the land.
There is a name, coined by the fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly, for this forgetting: ‘Shifting Baseline Syndrome’.8 The people of every generation perceive the state of the ecosystems they encountered in their childhood as normal. When fish or other animals or plants are depleted, campaigners and scientists might call for them to be restored to the numbers that existed in their youth: their own ecological baseline. But they often appear to be unaware that what they considered normal when they were children was in fact a state of extreme depletion. In the uplands of Britain, naturalists and conservationists bemoan the conversion of heather into rough grassland, or of rough grassland into fertilized pasture, and call for the ecosystems they remember to be restored–but only to the state they knew.
The main agent of these transformations is an animal which, like the flayed hills, we have come to accept as part of the fabric of British life: a woolly ruminant from Mesopotamia. No wild animal resembling the sheep has ever existed in Britain or western Europe. (The musk ox, which belongs to the same sub-family as sheep and goats, probably comes closest, but it has a different ecology and set of habitat preferences.) The mouflon, the ‘wild’ sheep of Corsica and Cyprus, is in fact one of the earliest examples of a feral invasive species: a descendant of animals which escaped from domestic herds during the Neolithic.9
Because they were never part of our native ecosystem, the vegetation of this country has evolved no defences against sheep. In the uplands they rapidly deplete nutritious and palatable plants, leaving behind a remarkably impoverished flora: little beside moss, moorgrass and tormentil in many places. The sheep has caused more extensive environmental damage in this country than all the building that has ever taken place here.
The horses watched as wild animals watch, ears pricked and turned towards us, eyes locked, occasionally tossing their heads and snorting, ready to flee. But when we squatted down and waited, they began to move towards us. A careless movement scattered them. They swirled away then stopped a little distance off, regrouped, edged towards us again, chewing, snorting, stamping, tossing. So powerful did their curiosity seem, so much more powerful than their evident fear, that it was almost as if, like us, they craved this contact with another species.
A wisp of wind blew over us towards them. They twitched and flared their nostrils, tubes of muscle flexing all the way up their long faces. I was struck by this thought: that if you landed on an unknown continent and saw the mammals or birds that lived there, you could tell immediately whether they were predators or prey. The eyes of the eaten are on the sides of their heads, as they need a wide range of vision. The eyes of the eaters are at the front, as they need to focus to catch their quarry.
Ritchie had brought me to the land on which he had once lived, and where, with others, he had shut out the sheep and begun replanting, twenty years before. It was a cool, still morning, the first day of autumn, a year after my dispiriting foray into the Desert. On the other side of the fence the birch and ash still held their paling leaves. The hawthorns and rowans were already bare. Far below us, in the remnant stand of mossy oaks that grew beside the stream in the sheep pastures, jays screeched like football rattles.
Ritchie Tassell is the person to whom I have most often turned when trying to feel my way through this story. He has a voracious appetite for reading, and made some of the key discoveries in the literature that feature in this book. More importantly, he has an engagement with the natural world so intense that at times it seems almost supernatural. Walking through a wood he will suddenly stop and whisper ‘sparrowhawk’. You look for the bird in vain. He tells you to wait. A couple of minutes later a sparrowhawk flies across the path. He had not seen the bird, nor had he heard it; but he had heard what the ot
her birds were saying: they have different alarm calls for different kinds of threat.
He was brought up in a village in Northamptonshire–its burr still lingers–the county whose wildlife and human life were celebrated by the poet John Clare, who died a century before Ritchie was born. His grandfather often took him out into the fields and woods, teaching him about birds. ‘He showed me how to summon owls out of the trees. It’s been a party trick of mine since I was about eight.’
His grandfather studied at Kettering grammar school at the same time as the author H. E. Bates; they both came from humble shoe-making families.
‘My grandad and my father avidly read his books, which often recalled his childhood in the Northamptonshire countryside. Listening to them talk, I began to realize the great losses my grandad’s generation had witnessed in their own lifetime.’
Ritchie is obsessed with birds and for that reason, he says, he can seldom watch a television drama. ‘There’s this hideous habit in which British films are overdubbed with American bird tracks. They’re obsessive about the setting, the period costumes, the hair, the vehicles, the horses, but they always get the birdsong wrong. I’ve got to the point where I have to leave the room. I cannot stand it: it’s a measure of how disengaged we are. We could probably as a nation lose all our birds and there’s an increasing number of people who wouldn’t even notice.
‘As we become more urban we’re losing our attachment. Many of our summer migrants could just slip away and most of us wouldn’t know it. To me that’s shocking.’
When Ritchie was a small child, Dutch elm disease reached the land around his village. ‘We had 300-year-old sentinel elms which dominated the landscape for miles. I remember the gangs of timber cutters turning up and felling the trees and burning the roots. What I considered to be the permanence of the countryside suddenly wasn’t.
‘I managed to persuade myself that it was a natural tragedy. But soon afterwards, in the 1970s and early 80s, something even worse happened. The mixed farms started going down the pan, and agribusiness began to take over. The farmer next door was one of the last to go, he still had cattle and sheep and arable crops in rotation. A week after he sold up to a big pension fund this fleet of bulldozers arrived. They completed the job that Dutch elm disease had begun. They stripped the hedgerows, the remaining parkland trees, walnut trees two or three hundred years old: the whole lot was gone in a day.
‘That’s where I got my environmental consciousness from. I was about twelve at the time. Seeing how it can all disappear at our whim, the shock of seeing this entire landscape being erased. The old farmer probably had half a dozen full-time staff. You could see them every morning walking across the fields. It all went almost overnight. From then on everything was done in fleets of big tractors. As the combines left the field, the subsoilers would move in, then the ploughs. It was like a military operation.
‘That was the worst of times in terms of habitat destruction, almost the final nail in the coffin of what John Clare was writing about. He was there at the beginning of the process, I was there at the end. It was a permanent loss. It’s all gone.’
As part of his first degree, Ritchie took a placement at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth.
‘It all came together in my head: the care for the land and our impact on it, the importance of minimizing it. After working in London, I moved back to Wales in the early 90s and got a job as a carpenter on the cliff railway at the Centre. I started working as a contractor managing small-scale woods. I fairly quickly realized that if I was going to pursue that I’d have to go back to college–I took a masters in environmental forestry. After that I got a job as a woodland officer and I’ve been doing it ever since. It didn’t take me long to see that the most radical thing you could do round here was to put fences around the woods and keep the bloody sheep out.’
The land to which he had brought me belonged to a communal house in which he had once lived. It had its own hydroelectricity supply and a plan, which had been hatched before he moved in, to buy some of the surrounding land and plant trees.
The Cambrian Mountains must be among the most unpromising places in northern Europe for a rewilding experiment. Grazed and cleared for thousands of years, infertile, naturally acid and further acidified by pollution from power stations, scourged by wild Atlantic storms and almost constant wind, they look as if they could sustain no more than the mangy pelt with which they are now clothed. But, starting with a treeless sheep pasture high above the estuary, Ritchie had begun to discover what worked and what failed.
As we moved through the young woods, a troop of blue tits, coal tits and long-tailed tits followed us, working through the branches, grating and cheeping, picking tiny insects from the cracks in the bark. The trees, Ritchie told me, had not taken easily. When the sheep were shut out, bracken and coarse grasses had sprung up, through which the seedlings had struggled to establish themselves. To accelerate the process, in some places he and his friends had turned the turf over with mattocks. In others he had cut the bracken every summer, so that it would not flop over the seedlings as it died, smothering them.10 Now the trunks of the trees were as thick as my calf, and they towered over us: the tallest were perhaps twenty feet high.
‘Somehow,’ Ritchie told me, ‘I didn’t think I’d live long enough to see this.’
Though he is a little younger than me, I understood that. Walking in the Cambrian Desert, it sometimes seems impossible to imagine trees returning there: the emptiness stands as an incontestable fact, as if it were a matter of geology, not ecology. Yet here, where local farmers had told him that trees would never grow, this sedimentary law had been reversed. The habitat through which we ducked now qualified as a wood, and it was already hard to picture the sheep pasture that had preceded it.
They had planted trees, but soon discovered that, in much of the fenced land, this was unnecessary. Where they had turned over the turf, the exposed soil was colonized by birch seed, which blew in from a few surviving trees further down the valley, which had themselves returned, Ritchie explained, as a result of an agricultural depression around a century ago.
‘Almost every tree we planted has now been overwhelmed by native birch. It grew so densely it looked like the cress you grow on your windowsill. Even when the trees we planted survived, the local birches did much better. They’re genetically suited to this site. Seeing the way the birch recolonized was a real awakening. I saw that nature is far more adept at doing these things than we are.’
Ritchie’s experiments, which became the basis of his master’s dissertation, demonstrated that birch could be sown, with the help of some scraping of the soil and hacking of the ferns, into dense bracken, without the need for herbicides.
‘It’s all about soil disturbance with birch. It’s designed to chase retreating glaciers and ice sheets by seeding into the exposed soils before the coarse grass gets a foot in the door. It’s also good at recolonizing burnt sites and places where the conifers have been felled. You just need to prepare the site with a tractor or a rotovator. Or you could use cattle or pigs or wild boar to break up the bracken and disturb the soil. If we’re serious about getting forests back in the uplands as quickly as possible, this has to be a way to go. It could work out a lot cheaper than planting and weeding nursery stock.’
In the acid hills, he told me, birch, with its slightly alkaline leaf litter, prepares the soil for other trees. At the foot of the twisted black and white trunks, orange toadstools–birch boletus–grew. They looked like soggy bread rolls, or, in the green rockpool light beneath the trees, like sea sponges. They pushed their way through dead leaves, deep moss, bilberry and little ferns. In some places the big soft leaves of foxgloves flopped over the ground. It was hard to grasp that this land had belonged to the Desert just twenty years before.
We scrambled across the slope until we reached a treacherous band of exposed rock, over which grew algae and slimemold, like the first land plants to colonize the Earth. Ritch
ie told me that there had been a landslip here ten years before: the thin soil had slid off a sheet of polished rock. Now alder, sallow and birch had colonized the exposed earth, and their roots were fingering across the stone, gathering soil, stabilizing the slope. He had planted an aspen on the edge of the slip: it was suckering up around the rock. Its leaves, the shape of the domes on a Russian Orthodox church, never quite still, shivered in the cool bright light. Brown leathery flanges of cup fungus grew in the flushes developing around the exposed stratum. Jays screeched among the trees. They will become, if the land is defended from sheep for long enough, one of the agents of reforestation. Jays can each bury 4,000 acorns every autumn, sometimes miles from where the mother tree grows. While, astonishingly, they can remember where they put every one, some of the birds will die in the winter, allowing the seeds to germinate.11
We crossed the fence again, and stepped up into the adjoining pastures. Ritchie explained that the farmer had stopped running sheep here, instead keeping horses on the land, which appeared to have been left to go wild. He had found the skeleton of a foal in the grass: the animals seemed to be looking after themselves. A few small rowans had slowly begun to establish themselves on the hillside. Their silvery trunks caught the light. We stood above the young wood in its early autumn colours, looking down the valley whose bluffs interlocked like the fingers of two hands, falling away to the estuary, beyond which Snowdonia rose into that crystal day.
From behind us, like a dark bolt fired through the back of our minds, a peregrine appeared, high against the wisps of cirrus. It swept across the sky without moving its wings, in one smooth, swift glide which seemed to follow the curve of the earth. It turned above the far hill, whereupon a kestrel appeared, sliding down a column of air to attack. With a flick of its wing, the larger falcon swung away, soon diminishing to a speck high above the estuary.
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