Basic HTML Version
As a child growing up in one of the most thoroughly
rural spots in the London area I played in the woods.
And what woods they were! Our 1950s estate, built
on old market gardens just 10 miles to the east of
Trafalgar Square was hemmed in by woodlands.
Gloriously free range and unfettered children of the
60s and 70s we could slip into the wildwood and run
and climb and dig and dam beneath its canopy all day
long before slumping home, on jelly legs, for our tea.
I had match boxes stuffed full of sharks teeth
fifty-million years old dug from miraculous sandpits
and grazed knees from the sharp, flinty ruins of
12
th
century Lesnes Abbey where the woods cleared
to reveal the silvery Thames across the marshes.
We built dams across the stream that once fed stew
ponds where the monks grew fish for their Friday
table, played Hide & Seek in the cave where Dick
Turpin hid and dangled upside down from the wooden
Roman bridge. The ancient ocean floor, the ancient
ruins and the ancient forest. Later I was able to sort
the wheat from the chaff but as a child I believed it all.
Two years ago a Government attempt to sell off half
of all Forestry Commission woodlands was thwarted
by a huge public outcry and a petition signed by half
a million people and as we go to press with this issue
of
The Kettle
the Environment Secretary has
announced that there will be no sell off after all.
Also this past month ladies in their sixties, some
rather unlikely eco-warriors with cut-crystal accents,
have been skipping bridge afternoons to camp out in
the trees with the Combe Haven Defenders hoping
to save ancient woodland threatened by the new link
road from Bexhill to Hastings. We are a nation that
loves its trees, woodlands and forests and yet Britain
is the least forested country in northern Europe.
The British people have an innate affinity with trees:
they touch us deeply in ways we don’t completely
understand. Researching the history of woodland and
forest in Britain I was fascinated to come across a
theory put forward by a Cambridge archaeologist and
landscape historian that we may have inherited the
very essence of our Britishness, the British way of
doing things, from the relationship between our
ancient ancestors and the woodlands. As the story
of the forests unfolds it could also pinpoint the start
of a stubborn antipathy to all things French that has
endured for a thousand years.
We have had a huge impact on our ancient
woodlands. And in turn our woodlands have had
quite an impact on us too.
How The Forests Helped Forge The British Character