I recently saw a BBC news article that made me groan. It talks of the vandalism being caused by an influx of people visiting Wistman wood, in Dartmoor. Basically, people have been camping, making fires and stripping moss from the trees there.
According to a Dartmoor National Park ranger: “We had 400 people on one day along the path through the woods…People have got nothing else to do in the lockdown, but it’s pressure that the woods cannot stand.”
Like many people, I’ve visited Wistman. It’s a beautiful bit of forest. If you don’t know of it, it looks something like this.
Beautiful, gnarled trunks. Cushiony moss underfoot. Epiphytes and lichens clinging onto the branches. It’s the literal definition of a fairytale forest…
At least within the 3.5 hectare area inside its borders.
Beyond that the area looks something like the photos below. So monstrously denuded that to really get an impression of the degree of degradation–and the extent to which the forest is a sliver of green in a deadscape of farmlands–you have use satellite imagery.
A few thoughts on the BBC news article.
- Obviously, people causing purposeful damage to the woods and setting fires and stripping moss should stop doing so.
- Is there any other country in the world that has so few remaining areas of old forest–with those areas being so small–that human footfall is considered an environmental calamity?
- Perhaps most importantly, when are we going to have a frank conversation about the true vandals of Wistman (and much of the UK, for that matter), the sheep?
To me, Wistman wood is everything wrong with environmental policy in the UK in a nutshell. Here, we have a truly beautiful speck of ancient forest. It’s a forest with a very clear story. The only reason it has stuck around over the past few millennia is because of a bundle of boulders which block access to roaming livestock. Past the bounds of those boulders, there are no trees, only barren fields.
It’s a forest that could act as a natural nucleus for the restoration and regeneration of forests in the surrounding area. Yet not only do we throw away money and make grandiose promises to plant millions of trees in plastic tubes across the country in our bid to plant 35,000 hectares of trees a year by 2025 . But we do so while simultaneously extolling the virtues of livestock, and allowing them to chew up the nascent stages of forest recovery around the handful of old-growth patches, like Wistman Woods, that we do have left.
And lastly, it’s a forest that at a time of adversity and disconnection from nature, some people have flocked to in seek of respite. Beyond the small number of irresponsible actors who have not respected the area, I imagine most of those visiting Wistman just want to see some nice woodland, which is not an easy task in England.
But flocks of people are easy to chastise. Flocks of sheep are another story.
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