The Fight for Beauty by Fiona Reynolds

Author:Fiona Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2016-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

We love oak woodlands today but even these caused controversy when they were planted in the Royal Forests to grow timber for ship-building in the eighteenth century. (Courtesy of Latitude Stock/Alamy)

These oaks were planted too late, of course, because demand for timber from the shipbuilding industry collapsed in the mid-nineteenth century as wooden ships were replaced by iron ones, well before the oaks reached maturity. However, the demand for timber was by then growing exponentially to meet the demands of a growing population and the industrial revolution. Wood had fuelled Britain’s early industrialisation, providing (as it had since the fifteenth century) pit props for the mining industry and charcoal to fuel lime kilns and other industrial processes, particularly iron smelting. As the nineteenth century progressed wood was still in demand and home-grown supplies were inadequate, so imports expanded. By 1914 the UK was importing 400 million metric tonnes of timber.

But the most dramatic event of the nineteenth century was a silent one: the collapse of woodland management. As cheaper foreign imports replaced home-grown timber, and coal, which could be transported cheaply by the canals and railways, replaced coppice wood as a fuel, the demand for the products of intensively managed woodlands fell. Local markets for wood products such as rakes, hoops and hurdles collapsed in the run-up to the First World War and finally perished in the agricultural depression of the 1930s. Coppice-with-standards was replaced by plantations of single-aged trees on the continental model. The skills of continuous management for multiple products involving the entire local community were replaced by experts focused on a single, long-term product: high-quality timber. So woodland management as a community process all but disappeared, and with it the woodland culture that had shaped so many generations. Thomas Hardy captures this transformation in The Woodlanders (1887), whose small community is disrupted by the arrival of an ambitious newcomer, one of the woodlanders noting phlegmatically ‘She’s the wrong sort of woman for Hintock – hardly knowing a beech from a woak [sic].’ Planting and forestry became the preserve of the few, mainly large landowners.

By the early nineteenth century, too, new trees were appearing. Around 1790 Scots pine and larch were introduced into the Keswick area by the Governors of Greenwich Hospital and to Windermere by the Bishop of Llandaff. Step in Wordsworth, whose beloved Lake District was already beginning to suffer from the indignities of industrialisation. To his horror, and to add to railways, suburban villas and ore extraction, a new species of tree was invading the uplands:

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