by Roger Deakin
I went up to Thorn that evening to look for descendants of the original tree. In its old hedges I found holly, furse, hazel, oak, ash: everything but thorn. In the fading light, a farmer stood calling his cat home across the lane.
The Forest of Dean and the Wye
Crossing over the Severn, even at Gloucester, still feels to me like going abroad, as crossing the Tamar into Cornwall does. I was on my way to the very rim of England, the wooded border country along the valley of the Wye, to meet the man who has done more than almost anybody else for woodland conservation in Britain: my old school friend George Peterken, author of Natural Woodland. I slipped along the far banks under the high woods of the Dean, past the mudflats off Lydney, where the elvers that swim up the Severn each year from the Sargasso have mysteriously diminished recently from hundreds of millions to mere millions, like the sperm count of Western man. Apple and pear orchards crowded up the steep meadows beneath the forest: immense, unruly trees of rosy-cheeked Robin pears, blushing teardrops, left unpicked by the pony or pet-sanctuary people who have moved in along here. Half-hidden winding roads climbed through the woods, and the houses and garden walls were soft dark-crimson sandstone. However you approach it, the forest feels fortified and secretive, exactly as in all the Dennis Potter plays. It has always had an uneasy relationship with the outside world, and there are still people in the villages who have never ventured even the twenty miles to Gloucester. Hoisting myself into the forest, I saw everything in crayon colours: a bright-blue British Legion hut, orange bracken, bright-red leaves of gean in the woods, the black shadows of yew. The road tunnelled through beeches, past Furnace Cottages, past diving squirrels and an old man on his knees raking acorns into a bag with the crook of his walking stick. Deeper into the forest it got darker, like a mineshaft.
As befits a woodland magus, George Peterken lives deep in some of the oldest, most interesting woods in Britain, down the bewildering lanes that run about St Briavel’s Common like the veins on the back of your hand. St Briavel’s lies on the high ground three miles to the west of the forest far above the wooded Wye Valley. The last time I saw George was at one of the last of the Beaulieu Road camps, when I was still at school and he was already at university but had come back to rejoin us. He was always deeply attached to the New Forest, regarding parts of it as the wildwood of his youth, and returned again later to do his doctorate field research there on the regeneration of holly in the woods. For George, as for me and others, Barry Goater is still the original inspiration for a life’s commitment to ecology and conservation.
George came out to meet me down the garden, medium tall, gangling and skinny in an athletic way. Bespectacled, with the loping stride of the seasoned walker, he was quite obviously a creature of the woods. Like anyone accustomed to trees, he used his arms a lot, swinging himself up stone walls by their overhanging branches, vaulting farm gates with an easy action, grappling his way up or down steep woodland slopes hand over hand, sapling by coppice, shoot by branch by rock. He wore the favourite dark-blue fleece he had found hanging from a branch in a wood and claimed like Excalibur.
Like true woodlanders, George and his wife Sue live perched 800 feet above the treetops of the ancient small-leaved lime woods that cover the south-facing bank of the Wye Gorge upstream from Tintern Abbey. Across the river on the other bank is Wales. We began with a tour of the Peterken domain: an astonishing maze of miniature enclosures separated by long piles of pudding stone, the conglomerate rocks the Ice Age left littered all over the hillside here and on St Briavel’s Common. Until about 1800 this was wood pasture where commoners of the forest grazed their animals and coppiced or pollarded the small-leaved limes, oak, beech, hazel and holly. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, squatters had begun to settle on St Briavel’s Common on the edge of the forest. There had been squatters before. In the previous century Cromwell had expelled nearly 400 households who had settled in cabins on the forest’s commons, and by 1680 another thirty cabins had sprung up, with enclosures, and were demolished. But the coal miners, charcoal-burners and iron-smelters had to live somewhere, and industry was booming in the Forest of Dean.
As in the New Forest, there is a long history of conflict between the Crown and the native commoners of the Forest of Dean, the foresters. But the presence of iron ore and coal made things different here. To become a free miner of the forest a man had to have been born within the Hundred of St Briavel’s and to have worked for a year and a day in an iron or coal mine in the Hundred. Strong traditions of independence have persisted among the free miners and foresters. From 1800 to 1820 there was something of a population explosion around St Briavel’s Common, and a large part of it was enclosed by squatters. George said he thought the cause was some sort of administrative breakdown, but this steep, remote boulder-strewn obstacle course would hardly have been of much interest for either farming or forestry. In just twenty years the landscape changed completely. Working cooperatively, the poor people of St Briavel’s decided they would take over this equally poor but beautiful stretch of land. With astonishing speed and determination, they cleared it of boulders, dragging them about by hand or with horses into giant lines of heaped rocks some three or four feet high with flat tops wide enough to drive a tractor along: medium-scale versions of Hadrian’s Wall. In fact they were not generally intended as walls, although many of them were faced with dry-stonework to create a haphazard-looking system of little paddocks, some no bigger than a modest back garden. The effect was of wandering from room to room through the ruins of some bosky castle or Mayan ruins in a jungle. George likened it to parts of Highgate Cemetery, where you stumble through a dense wood to find ruined graves or mausoleums now and again. The pudding stones have been piled on top of, or around, huge old coppice stools of small-leaved limes, oak or hazel. They were also stacked against the trunks of pollards. The result is that trees over 200 years old are growing up out of the ferny rocks from coppice stools that were already well on in years in 1800.
Small-leaved limes have a tendency to layer their outstretched lower branches when they touch the ground. As if weary of resisting gravity, they stoop to nuzzle the earth and hunker down, soon burying themselves in enough leaf mould and scuffed soil to sprout roots and send up new shoots. Thus the tree spreads and creeps along through the stones of the rocky bank or wall. But what may eventually come to look like a row of independent trees is really still a single organism. George showed me how to look at the distinctive habit and shape of each tree, even the exact shade of its leaves, and to recognize how different each one is from its neighbours of the same species. So the limes that towered above us as we went were often single beings that had reproduced themselves repeatedly as clones over 200 years of layering, shifting along many yards of the bank like the walking wood in Macbeth. The surreptitious way these trees had crept across St Briavel’s Common, gaining new land for themselves by slow degrees, exactly mirrored what the squatters did. In Cotters and Squatters, Colin Ward describes how the commoners and squatters of the New Forest would enlarge their holdings by an organic and cunning process that almost exactly mimics the small-leaved limes of St Briavel’s: ‘The inside of the hedge was cut, and the briars and stuff thrown outside. These shot out and formed a sort of rolling fence, and so the would-be squatters kept trimming the inside and adding to the outside.’
I kept thinking of Colin Ward and William Cobbett as George unveiled this small-scale people’s landscape created by a combination of hard work, mutual support, and the stubborn, often courageous assertion of the rights of the foresters and commoners to shelter and a share in the land. In his books about allotments, squatters, and the Essex and Sussex plotlanders of Arcadia for All, Ward has always championed the virtues and productivity of the self-sufficient cottager for whom Cobbett originally wrote Cottage Economy, with its insistence on the possibility of the riches of happiness and independent well-being for the labourers who had always been degraded as ‘the poor’. Cobbett was a rural idealist, but
he was a practical one, and his little book, published in 1821 at exactly the moment when the squatters of St Briavel’s Common were asserting themselves as free woodlanders, is full of ‘Information relative to the brewing of BEER, making of BREAD, keeping of COWS, PIGS, BEES, EWES, GOATS, POULTRY, AND RABBITS, and relative to other matters deemed useful in the conducting of the affairs of a Labourer’s Family’. Cobbett’s aims in writing this practical, polemical book are at heart political: ‘It is abundant living amongst the people at large, which is the great test of good government, and surest basis of national greatness and security.’ In his chapter on pigs, Cobbett might have had St Briavel’s in mind when he writes: ‘much must depend on the situation of the cottage; because all pigs will graze; and therefore, on the skirts of forests or commons, a couple or three pigs may be kept, if the family be considerable.’ In an aside a paragraph further on, Cobbett is careful to let his readers know whose side he is on:
I once, when I lived at Botley, proposed to the copy-holders and other farmers in my neighbourhood, that we should petition the Bishop of Winchester, who was lord of the manors thereabouts, to grant titles to all the numerous persons called trespassers on the wastes; and also to give titles to others of the poor parishioners who were willing to make, on the skirts of the wastes, enclosures not exceeding an acre each. This I am convinced would have done a great deal towards relieving the parishes, then greatly burdened by men out of work … Not a single man would agree to my proposal!
When Cobbett has the good sense to ask, as he rides through the New Forest, ‘What are these deer for?’, the answer to his implied question, ‘What are these forests for?’, is consistent in its support of the commoners and squatters:
The only good purpose that these forests answer is that of furnishing a place of being to labourers’ families on their skirts; and here their cottages are very neat, and the people are hearty and well, just as they do round the forest of Hampshire. Every cottage has a pig or two. These graze in the forest, and, in the fall, eat acorns and beech-nuts and the seed of the ash; for, these last, as well as the others, are very full of oil, and a pig that is put to his shifts will pick the seed very nicely out from the husks. Some of these foresters keep cows, and all of them have bits of ground, cribbed, of course, at different times, from the forest, and to what better use can the ground be put?
The Ordnance Survey map of St Briavel’s Common looks very like the ‘newtake’ land around villages like Chagford and Throwleigh on the north-eastern fringe of Dartmoor: land reclaimed in the past by small farmers and commoners an acre or less at a time from the open moor and enclosed, so the farms grow by cell division. The tiny fields at St Briavel’s appear like the creases round an old lady’s mouth: tiny enclosures of a quarter to half an acre at most, with a hay meadow here, a grazing paddock there, a pightle, or just a stone pigpen. George showed me a walled enclosure on his land no bigger than a couple of average living rooms, possibly a place for enclosing free-grazing pigs at night or even a tiny hay meadow. Going from room to room like this in a landscape evolved on a modest, human scale could logically be called ‘homely’. The containment of this landscape in miniature creates endless surprises, invites you at every turn to settle down in some mossy corner or beckons you to discover more of its secrets. I thought of the ‘hornbeam rooms’ planted by eighteenth-century gardeners, little hedged enclosures for quiet repose.
The way George put it, we were walking through a 200-year-old landscape superimposed on a much older one, that of an ancient woodland, a wood pasture common for cattle, sheep and pigs. We scrambled steeply downhill through the woods, parachuting down on low branches as far as a clear line about 700 feet above the River Wye, defined by a wall beyond which the land had been neither squatted nor cleared. Beyond, all the way down to the river, was a steep woodland common where foresters ran pigs and grazed cattle and sheep. The Badgers, the landless itinerant shepherds who still lived in the forest, also exercised their right to graze their animals where they pleased.
Elm, ash, gean, the wild cherry, and the rare native large-leaved lime, Tilia platyphyllos, also grow in these woods, and stripes of alder wood follow the swampy seepage from springs and wells higher up. There was plenty of water in the stone dip wells we encountered, and George said they never seem to dry up. Most of them lie on the course of winter-bournes like the one that runs through his garden and invariably floods his swimming pool. Uniquely, the small-leaved limes of the Wye Valley are relatively gregarious. Lime woods are normally unmixed with other species. In many other parts of Britain they vanished a thousand years ago with the Romans from former strongholds they dominated like Epping Forest and the New Forest.
Deeper into the woods, we followed part of the network of old tracks and came to one of the square stone-walled enclosures they link together. These are the assarts, where sheep could be penned for the night, often in barns. Near by was ‘Laurel Cottage’, a ruined squatters’ dwelling, cloaked in dense ivy, jungled in the laurel that once stood tame and trimmed before it, with an oak lintel supporting the upstairs stone wall and a pigpen at the back. The place was so overgrown it was almost invisible to us as we approached. Some of these isolated houses along the side of the valley were used by the boatmen who used to navigate the Wye, carrying goods in and out of the forest. George said there are so many footpaths all over St Briavel’s Common, it would take at least a day to walk them all. We followed one uphill to the top meadow George and Sue have reconstituted, fencing it off, clearing the encroaching hedge back to its original line and grazing it with sheep. Stone walls and hedge had become a single organism. Blackthorn, hazel and holly grew out of the crevices, armoured against the browsing animals. An oak had seeded itself on top of the wall, and in two wet, boggy patches George had planted black poplar cuttings from one of the original trees beside the bridge over the Usk at Crickhowell. There were now so many badgers in the woods, said George, that he and Sue had woken up one morning to find the entire field ploughed up.
The high woods along the Wye are ribboned with ancient green lanes. In the Coxbury and Wyegate Lane above the river at Lower Redbrook, George, Sue and I tramped uphill along a deep holloway scoured out by winter floods dashing down in torrents, washing away the earth year after year from the smooth limestone boulders. We walked between hedge banks of pollard limes and holly in a green tunnel. The lane runs south-east to St Briavel’s Castle, the medieval court and administrative centre for the forest, and continues all the way to the banks of the Severn via Hewelsfield, with its thousand-year-old churchyard yew. St Briavel’s Castle was also an arms factory and munitions store, where iron mined from the forest was made into huge numbers of arrowheads and cross-bolts, with shafts of yew or seasoned ash for the royal armies. These would have been carried by pack horse and pannier up and down the lane to boats on the Wye.
After a mile or so, we turned off the lane and climbed steeply to our left through the old limes of Highbury Woods, towards the great limestone bank of Offa’s Dyke running along the top of the hill. At the core of the wood here, an area of secondary woodland had regenerated out of the earthworks of the dyke bank and a string of limestone quarries. Huge old yews grew along the dyke, their roots exposed in the cliff walls of the lime quarries immediately beneath it. In the artificial limestone pavement of the quarries, native whitebeam had sprung up, and we found a lime kiln hidden in the trees. The far older primary woodland of limes and holly surrounded the more recent woods, so the effect, as George saw it, was of a monk who had allowed his tonsure to grow back.
Lime grew fast here on the limestone and conglomerate rock, and a good many of the old pollards were top-heavy. We came across a gigantic triple-branching pollard like a wine glass that was about to crack and split itself in two. George estimated that the base, although monumental, was no more than 200 to 250 years old, with another eighty or ninety years’ growth on top. He said there had never been so many trees in the Wye Valley. Coppicing and pollarding were now things of the
past, and the trees were constantly spreading, recolonizing old meadows and grazing enclosures. Much of the land along the valley is owned by the Woodland Trust, which is sensibly maintaining some of these meadows as grazing, as well as allowing others to run to woodland. Another pollard lime, collapsed on a bank, had already sent down roots into its own detritus and was growing vigorous new shoots. Having come to know this place intimately, George said that what struck him was its mutability: a flower you knew was there one year wasn’t there the next, but something new was there instead. The dynamic ways of nature impressed him more and more.
