From the Forest (32 page)

During the ‘locust years’, in addition to the destruction of ancient forest to accommodate this brutal planting programme, the Commission, in what could be described as imperialistic enthusiasm, managed to do some other pretty terrible things to the landscape – a sort of collateral damage: polluting watercourses and changing drainage systems; ploughing in antiquities without proper documentation or research; seriously degrading limited and precious habitats like blanket peat moor; destroying habitat, particularly for birds. The Locust Years radically altered our rural landscapes for ever.

As yet another complication, the Commission holds, on a single mandate, at least three different sorts of land: the industrial plantation forest, which was explicit in its original remit and which was always – and still is – meant to be commercially viable; assorted parcels of ancient woodland or semi-degraded ancient woodland – some of them, like the New Forest, large – which need protection, management and development; and large stretches of land on which no trees can be grown at all, because they are too high, too stony, too peaty, too boggy or too steep. The original purchasers of the Commission’s estates did not take this last element properly into account. Apparently believing that, in earlier times, the whole country was solid forest which had been stripped away by mismanagement, they seem to have thought that it could be re-planted without much difficulty. The Commission now owns a huge acreage of what are often the wildest parts of Britain despite the fact that these areas have nothing to do with forestry at all. In addition, more recently there has been considerable pressure on the Commission to provide access and organised leisure facilities for large numbers of wildly assorted visitors, from hill walkers to primary school groups. In short, the Forestry Commission as a whole has a more or less impossible task.

I came to Kielder to try and understand the goings-on of contemporary commercial forest. I was of course especially curious because, as I have suggested, the fairy stories tend to represent anyone who works in the forest, who has proper legitimate business there, as being ‘good’ rather than ‘wicked’, and I wanted to see whether this might still be true and what it would mean if it were.

We saw little of the forest, though, as we arrived. It was dark by the time we left the village of Bellingham and turned westward. The only indication of the changing environment was the strange striped carpet that the headlights picked up on the road. In the autumn the larch needles turn brown, like deciduous trees – a fairly unexciting colour while they remain on the branches – but when they fall, and especially when they are lying on road or track, they turn an extraordinary shade of rich red. You do need a fair number of larch trees to generate enough needles, and this is one of the compensations of plantation – those glowing stripes at the sides and down the middle of a road, with the two contrasting bands of black where car tyres have pushed the needles aside.

We reached our destination in darkness and settled in for the night, without much sense of where we were – but the bright morning revealed the wide stretch of trees, and before long we found ourselves in Max McLaughlin’s Land Rover, with Max McLaughlin and his spaniel, setting off to see the forest.

McLaughlin was a gift to me from the Forestry Commission. When I first wrote asking some questions for this book, they invited me to Kielder and provided me with a tour guide, and this was he. Max McLaughlin has a job with a fairy-tale title: he is a Forest Harvester.
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Forest Harvesters work on the commercial (rather than the leisure and amenity) side of the Commission, deciding about the felling schedules and organising them. In particular at Kielder, McLaughlin is the Forest Harvester in charge of ‘continuous cover’.

Continuous cover forestry husbandry is an attempt to square a circle: to create woodland that serves the new amenity and ecological agenda without totally abandoning commercial timber production. The basic idea is that you select and fell enough trees from within a patch of standard forestry to create space between the trees and allow sunlight in, and thus encourage seeding and forest-floor regeneration, but leave enough trees standing to maintain the overhead canopy, both to generate new seeds and to provide more complex habitats.

In a 1999 study of harvesting management techniques, the Forestry Commission concluded:

The current attraction of continuous cover forestry lies in the belief that this approach is suited to an era of multi-purpose forestry where environmental, recreational, aesthetic and other objectives are as important as timber production. In particular, continuous cover forestry is seen as a means of reducing the impact of clear felling and the associated changes that this produces in forest landscapes and habitats.

It does not mean abandoning stand management or timber production. Indeed the felling of trees and the harvesting of their timber is essential in continuous cover forestry to manipulate the stand structure to promote natural regeneration and to provide revenue to offset costs of meeting multiple objectives.
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Although there had been some discussion of continuous cover husbandry in Germany in the 1920s, the predominant method of timber management in Europe throughout the twentieth century has been ‘patch clear felling’:
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cutting all the trees in a given patch of forest down to the ground at the same time; leaving the site to rot down for a bit, and then replanting it with the trees close together and in straight lines. All the trees within the patch will be the same species and the same age, which makes harvesting them relatively straightforward. Clear-felling provides some clear advantages – a large volume of timber available at a single place at a single moment offers economies of scale; the felling process does not endanger remaining trees because there aren’t any; and the ground disruption of the heavy modern felling machinery is reduced because they do not have to go into the given area very often.

However there are also real disadvantages. The principal one, now that amenity access has become so central to the Commissions vision, is that stands planned for clear-felling do not make attractive woodland. The visual impact of recently clear-felled ground is even less charming – it tends to look like a scene of protracted trench warfare, littered with dead wood and ragged weedy vegetation; moreover, it is very difficult to walk through, so forest visitors do not like it. The whole clear-felling cycle is antipathetic to natural regeneration and therefore to the variation of species and age, which is one of the most attractive elements of ancient woods; and the system is destructive of natural habitats. Many woodland birds, for example, are extremely picky about nest sites; lots of wildflower species need time to establish and particular conditions of sunlight or wetness to flourish, but clear-felling creates a very abrupt change in the local environment.

Continuous cover is designed to avoid these problems. In Kielder they are starting to re-develop stands of trees originally planted for clear-felling. McLaughlin’s job, just like the Lord’s Steward or the Verderer in a medieval Royal Forest, is to decide which trees should come out and which remain, seeking a balance between commercial viability, aesthetics and ecological diversity. Indeed, this must have been the way that the ancient woodlands were managed, where maiden trees stood proud of the coppices below them and were selected for harvesting according to the need for timber of particular sizes or kinds.

McLaughlin was generous and enthusiastic – he wanted to show us the full cycle of his work and a rich variety of forestry activities. In consequence, this was a forest walk that never turned into a walk. To cover the ground efficiently we spent a good deal of the day hopping in and out of the Land Rover and manoeuvring our way up rutted back tracks to see different phases and types of forest management in action.

First he took us to see some selective felling in action. The lumberjacks could have been, like the Free Miners in Dean, characters from fairy stories – huntsmen, woodcutters, carters; father and sons, heirs to several generations of forest workers. Watching them at work, it was easy to remember all the workers in the forests in the fairy stories: the woodcutter who rescues Little Red Riding Hood from the wolf, or the old huntsman who generously adopts the impoverished twins in ‘The Two Brothers’: independent, self-employed, highly skilled. But this was not old-fashioned axe and or even power-saw felling. The lumberjacks were working with something that seemed as fantastical as a fairy story might be, but a very hi-tech, ultra-modern fantasy: a state-of-the-art woodcutting machine (rather confusingly also called a ‘forest harvester’).

This wondrous and strangely beautiful piece of machinery is of course one of the reasons why forestry has never been able to supply the number of jobs predicted in the early years – the machine, computer controlled, and surprisingly compact, does everything: mounted on huge wheels like a tractor, its ‘arms’ reach out and hug the selected tree in a fierce embrace; then it strips off the branches with its integral delimbing knives; and then, without having to lay the tree down and so damage its neighbours or disturb the forest floor, it delicately and precisely feeds it through its arms into an electric saw which cuts the trunk off in preselected lengths and stacks them neatly, so that another machine – called a forwarder – can cart the pre-measured logs to the track side for removal. McLaughlin can thus select which trees will be removed with considerable freedom and without risking any damage to the trees he wants to keep. The elegance, the economy of labour, and of course the extraordinary skill required to use it at all generated a riveting fascination, a deep mixture of awe and laughter. Delighted, we admired the removal of several trees. Adam was enchanted, and devised a wonderful contemporary version of Little Red Riding Hood in which the woodcutter was replaced by a modern forest harvester, which would capture the wolf in its own even more enormous jaws, strip off its fur, cut its bones into tidy lengths and stack them by the roadside. Even the commercial activities of the forest felt rich with imaginative possibility.

We left them, clambered back into the Land Rover, and drove ever deeper into the forest; looking at different sorts of felling, at new plantations and natural regeneration sites. And eventually we jolted up a tiny rutted grassy track, then left the car and walked in to see the results of McLaughlin’s endeavours in a section of older continuous cover – or, more precisely, the beginning of the results, since trees take a very long time to establish new patterns.

I had not been prepared for how lovely – even at this early stage – it would be. The piece we went to see was being developed from an older plantation of conifers, so the trees had originally been planted very close together and had grown very tall, with few lower branches and long thin trunks. They were spruces, with their dark-coloured needles, and the day was bright so that light was working its way in through the roof cover, despite the thick shade. This combination created a weird luminous effect. The mossy, ferny ground appeared brighter than the overhead cover of needles, so the light seemed to rise up from under our feet rather than pour down from the sky. In winter sometimes, when there is fresh crisp snow on the ground under a heavy grey sky, this same eerie visual effect can occur, but here, in greens and golds rather than tones of white, it was somehow oddly more fey. There was a lot of jewel green moss, humped up, presumably over the bases and roots of the now-removed trees, a few last blackberries and the beginnings at least of a complex ‘floor’ – baby spruces, some only a few inches high, huddled in overcrowded groups underneath the trees that seeded them. With so many of the old trees taken out, smaller, scrubbier bushes and little birches and rowan seedlings had found their own way into this new space. The dank drainage ditches that fill with black peat-slimed water between the rows of mass plantation spruces had vanished and been replaced by a sparkling little stream, and it was easy to imagine that when more people had wandered through, avoiding the blackberry thorns and the green humped remains of the trees, there would be a little winding path curling round the trees and away into the distance. Of course it is not, and is never going to turn into, real ancient woodland, and it would be foolish to pretend it was. But it was beautiful, and curiously reminded me of the pictures of forests in children’s fairy-story books – the sort of faux naive forests that Disney enshrined in our consciousnesses with the animation of ‘Snow White’ in 1937: the trees wide spaced, the grass very green and flowery with small paths running across it and large numbers of highly anthropomorphised animal and birds scattered about in unnatural association with each other and the human characters.

This memory from childhood was enhanced by McLaughlin’s big brown and white Springer spaniel – my father had a very similar spaniel when I was small, although this one was rather better behaved. He ran happily around us as we explored and talked, coming when called, and sitting at McLaughlin’s feet, grinning as they do. Like most large spaniels, his had an extremely expressive face, and he watched his owner apparently intelligently and understandingly before loping off about his own business, snuffling about the green floor of the wood. There are surprisingly few dogs in the fairy stories, but there are a very large number of talking animals. They fall into three categories. There are the humans who have been enchanted into animal forms: the little fawn of ‘Brother and Sister’; the swan brothers whose sister served the seven years of silence to liberate them; the bear in ‘Snow White and Rose Red’; or the Frog Prince who rescued the princess’s golden ball and was restored by her rather savage attempts to get rid of him by throwing him at the wall.

There are the stories in which animals themselves are the protagonists, like ‘The Four Musicians of Bremen’, a donkey, a dog, a cat and a cockerel, and whose story I shall tell my version of at the end of the next chapter; or ‘The Wedding of Mrs. Fox’, in which Mrs Fox has a Cat for a maid, and is courted by other animals after she becomes a widow; or the improbable story of ‘The Fox and the Horse’, who conspire together to capture a lion so that the horse’s owner will continue to feed and stable him in his old age. There are a surprising number of these stories in the Grimm brothers’ collection, but they seem to have fallen out of fashion and are little known now. They tend to be short and humorous, indeed rather silly, tales which do not easily fit into our more elevated approaches to the fairy stories as journeys towards adult self-knowledge.