Once we had forests and children, like my dad, John, roamed them freely. One day in the 1950s, he encountered a forester (now an extinct species, like the free-roaming child) in a nearby wood. The old woodman showed him how to use a billhook; John slung his hook and gashed his knee.
I only learned this story when reading A Tale of Trees, a new book by Guardian country diarist Derek Niemann, who recounts a very human story of vanishing forests. It’s estimated that Britain lost more ancient woodland in the 40 years after the second world war than in the previous 400. There were still woods but many became industrial plantations of Sitka spruce – inhospitable to both children and other species.
Coincidentally, my three-year-old, Ted, this week brought home a lump of wood from his new forest school nursery. He had drilled holes and banged nails into this lump without any maiming because he was under close supervision, as I saw from photos – which hard-pressed nursery teachers now spend their weekends sending to parents.
A free-roaming childhood is gone forever, more because of the volume of traffic than the loss of open woodland, but this need not be a source of despair.
Forest schools represent the best of the present and are a sign that we are belatedly recognising woodland as a supreme setting for the learning that comes from free play outdoors. My father’s roaming made him a woodland ecologist.
Will a grammar school-obsessed government help more primary schools have a weekly woodland experience via the forest schools movement? Probably not, but more forest schooling will happen without them, from the grassroots up.
Ancient woods are still threatened – the Woodland Trust lists 633 at risk, its highest ever figure – but there is also a flowering of imaginative alternatives to planting spruces, such as the “new age wood pasture” of rewilded Knepp Castle estate in Sussex. We often try to save ancient forests by identifying their usefulness (as sources of rare species, sustainable fuel, flood allevience and carbon sequestration) but Niemann’s book is a timely reminder of “the magic, delight, solace and physicality of ancient woods” – for adults, as well as children.
Plastic passion
Australians must be laughing all the way to the bank about Britain’s “hi-tech” plastic fivers, which come into circulation tomorrow. They’ve had polymer cash for nearly 25 years.
When I worked in Sydney years ago, I was astounded to pull a pair of jeans from the wash and find a five-dollar note still intact in the pocket. Ironically, the first batch of Britain’s new fivers is being made in Melbourne. At least a native factory making plastic fivers and tenners has now opened in Cumbria, where debate currently rages over rewilding its sheep-grazed fells. Plastic tenners manufactured in a rewilded landscape: I love how the future’s weirdness is beyond our wildest imagining.
Bird-brained licence to kill
The future of driven grouse shooting will be debated in parliament after naturalist Mark Avery’s petition to ban it reached more than 100,000 signatures. Meanwhile Natural England is considering four more licences for gamekeepers to shoot buzzards to save non-native pheasants, on the eve of a State of Nature report, which will this week reveal the ongoing decimation of British wildlife.
The politest way of describing the government’s wildlife watchdog potentially endorsing further extermination of a wild bird to protect a farmed one shot for fun at this moment in time? Grim irony.
