The rise and fall of Britain's industrial forest

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The rise and fall of Britain's industrial forest

Millions of trees are being felled and left to rot, in the biggest deliberate destruction of forest Britain has ever seen. So why are conservationists rejoicing?

By Michael McCarthy

Of all the ideas that are impossible to shift, one of the most tenacious is that planting trees is a Good Thing. The very act seems self-evidently benevolent. Trees provide shade and shelter, wood for building, homes for wildlife; they give us the oxygen we need to breathe, and they soak up the carbon dioxide that is causing the climate to change. We also like them a lot. Perhaps a major reason we are drawn to trees is the idea of their apotheosis, forest. In the human imagination a forest has long been a special place, mysterious and secret. In Britain our template is the ancient wildwood: great oaks towering over dappled light and shade where badgers play and deer graze. We cherish a forest as a world apart, where the riches of nature are especially concentrated.

Yet in the 20th century in Britain, a new and entirely alien type of forest was to be planted in the uplands, a forest which nobody loved and which many people eventually came to hate, yet which for 70 years carried all before it. It strode over the hills in knife-edged straight lines, ignoring the contours of the earth, wiping out the singularity and variation of the landscape with great regimented, geometrical blocks. The trees, all conifers, came from abroad. They were all identical, same type, same shape, same size, and they were squeezed together like passengers on the London Underground in the rush hour, packed so tightly that little light penetrated between them: there was no dappled shade, no wildflowers on the forest floor, just darkness and sterility. This dark green army marched on and on, decade after decade, and it was not until myriad special places had been lost under it and the area of Britain covered by trees had increased by 100% that at long last it went too far, and it met its Waterloo.

The story of the great 20th century conifer afforestation of Britain is rarely told, but it was one of the biggest changes ever to the look of our landscape. It was extraordinary for the way in which the process proceeded unquestioned for so long, and even more for the dramatic way in which it ended, with the bitterest battle over conservation Britain has ever seen. When it was done the country's main wildlife watchdog body had been dismembered in what many saw as an act of sheer political spite, and much wonderful wildlife habitat had been destroyed; but the new forestry had at last been tamed.

It came out of the Great War, and the critical need for wooden pit props to keep the coal mines going, at a time when Britain ran on coal. We could not produce enough of our own, and the German submarine blockade of 1917 very nearly choked off imports. Never again, said the Government when hostilities finished: we will create a strategic reserve of timber for pit props and other essential uses; and in 1919 the Forestry Commission was born. The new quango was to build up a major British timber resource as quickly and as cheaply as possible. It could not do this by renewing the native forest of oak and ash and all the other shady, whispering broadleaved trees that had been beloved for centuries. They grew far too slowly and irregularly. What was needed were trees that would grow fast and straight in poor soils, so the Commission turned to conifers. Britain's one native conifer suitable for commercial forestry, the Scots pine, was too slow-growing and dependent on dry earth. For the damp climate of the uplands, where most of the new afforestation was taking place, the Commission looked to the conifers of the northern Pacific coast of the USA: above all, the Sitka spruce.

The Sitka spruces and their fellows did indeed push up quick and straight, and they made possible a forestry of an entirely new sort, industrial in style and scale. It was anything but a recreation of the diverse natural woodland Britain had known before. Rather, it was intensive tree farming, using alien trees. Over the hills of England, Wales and Scotland the great austere blocks of huddled conifers began to spread, 150,000 hectares by 1939, and then at a gathering pace after the Second World War: 310,000 hectares in the Fifties, 365,000 hectares in the Sixties. No matter that nobody liked it. No matter that much of our ancient broadleaved woodland, its value unrecognised, was being cut down at the same time. No matter that sites of beauty and conservation value were being swamped. The dark monoculture advanced remorselessly, until by 1980 the woodland cover of Britain, which in 1919 had been the lowest of any major European country, at less than 5% of the land, had doubled to over two million hectares. And then it hit the Flow Country.

Of a11 the candidates for Britain's most extraordinary landscape, the Flow Country - the peatlands of Caithness and Sutherland in the far north of Scotland - must be near the top of the list. This is a region beyond the Highlands, both geographically and in spirit, a true wilderness: a vast open plain of quivering peat bog, dotted with thousands of dark pools (dubh lochans in Gaelic), whose nearest equivalent is the Arctic tundra. Stretching for miles in every direction, it seems empty for seven or eight months of each year, but in spring it explodes into vivid life: flowers cover the peatlands, and a great pulse of millions of hatching insects draws in the most remarkable upland birds in all of the British Isles.

Greenshanks, dunlins, golden plovers; black-throated and red-throated divers; scoters and skuas, eagles, harriers and falcons; curlews and snipe; oystercatchers and sandpipers; wigeon, wheatears and ring ouzels, with meadow pipits and skylarks in their thousands: a litany of rarity, beauty and diversity that is matched nowhere else. When the tide of Sitka spruce got to the top of Scotland, it ran smack into this amazing aggregation of birds, and started to destroy their moorland nesting sites.

It was not directly the Forestry Commission's doing. Private companies had come on the
Scene, attracted by the realisation that investors in forestry could claim not only planting grants but also substantial tax reliefs, at a time when personal tax levels much higher than now. These forestry management companies bought and planted forest blocks on behalf of investors never saw the trees, but took advantage of the reliefs. One of them, Fountain Forestry based in Perth, realised in the late Seventies that it could buy up large parts of the Flow Country very cheaply - as the land was no good for agriculture - and turn it forest. No trees grow naturally on the Flows: in the nutrient-poor waterlogged peat, tree roots cannot establish themselves. But advances in technology changed things. Foresters had discovered if you ploughed the peat deeply - and new wide-tracked ploughs made this possible - you could, with liberal use of fertiliser, get trees established in the plough "throw", the peat thrown up to the side of the furrow, and you could then help them by draining the peat with a network of ditches.

Fountain Forestry turned out to be a particularly assertive company. Between 1979 and 1985 it bought and planted, mainly with Sitka spruce, no less than 40,000 hectares of prime peatland. The effect on the breeding birds was immediate: their moorland nest sites started going under the plough. When the Royal Society the Protection of Birds (RSPB) eventually raised the alarm conservationists were outraged, and battle began.

It was an acrimonious public fight, enlivened by the revelation that some of Fountain Forestry's wealthy tax-break clients were famous names - Terry Wogan, Cliff Richard, Phil Collins. It was intensified by the feeling of Scottish politicians that this was an inference by English busybodies in Scottish affairs. That came a head in 1987 when the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC), UK-wide wildlife watchdog, published a report entitled Birds, Bogs and Forestry, which criticised the foresters in unusually outspoken terms (and was launched in London rather than Edinburgh). The Scottish establishment was furious and prevailed .)n the Government in 1989 to break up the NCC, so Scotland could get a wildlife agency a11 its own. But by then the battle had been won. The Government had realised that a tax break for rich investors which did damage to wildlife was a classic example of perverse subsidy, and terrible publicity. In his 1988 budget Nigel Lawson scrapped the forestry tax reliefs. That halted the planting. The Forestry Commission, to its credit, began to see that conservation could no longer be sidelined, and turned to a much broader approach which respected Britain's landscape and native species.

But what of the Flow Country itself, where the issue was decided? Journey north, far past Inverness, until you come to Forsinard with its tiny railway station, then venture boldly off the road: you will see one of the strangest sights of your life. Around you are millions of chopped-down young trees, lying where they have fallen in the long straight plough furrows which form vast grids across the naked land, This is not a harvesting, as the trees are far too immature to harvest: this is destruction, probably the biggest deliberate destruction of trees Britain has ever seen. They are mostly Sitka spruces, Christmas-tree size or a bit bigger. Now their greenness has all gone and they are fusing into each other as a knee-high thick mix of dead branches and needles and thin bony trunks which has a name of its own ("brash") and covers the landscape in a great sad ash-grey littering.

"It's not pretty," murmurs Norrie Russell, who has supervised the destruction. "You would never call it pretty." But it is strangely moving. The RSPB is trying to put things right. Helped by EU money, in a partnership that involves Scottish Natural Heritage, the wildflower charity Plantlife, and yes, the Forestry Commission, it has bought and is removing more than 2,000 hectares of Fountain Forestry's unhappy plantings and trying to restore the underlying peat bog to what it was. More than four million trees have come down, but the restoration isn't easy or quick. Experiments showed that the best way of removing the spruces was to fell them into the plough furrows and let them rot down (the wood has no commercial value). But the process will take decades. "How long will it take till it's an active bog?" muses Norrie, the RSPB's Forsinard site manager. "It could take 30 to 100 years. It's quite hard to predict. But as long as the climate remains the same, this landscape wants to be covered in an open bog, it doesn't want to be a forest. It will happen."

We walk out on to the still untouched peatlands, where the flowers are starting to bloom: the cottongrass, the sundew, the bog asphodel. The gaze stretches away unimpeded to the far horizons, and suddenly a greenshank takes flight, the elegant, nervy wader, seeming to embody in its melancholy call the very essence of wildness. Planting trees is only a Good Thing, sometimes.

This article first appeared in The Independent.

June 2006

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