Month: November 2019

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Renaturing vs rewilding

For several years rewilding has been one of the influences on how I manage Century Wood. It’s never been an entirely comfortable fit though, since “wild” is quite an extreme goal. I’ve contented myself with encouraging elements of wildness but now I think it would be more productive for me to talk about “renaturing”, and I imagine a spectrum with wildwood at one end and very controlled plantation forests at the other.

Rewilding started to enter the public consciousness in Britain about the time I bought Century Wood in 2008, and in 2013 George Monbiot’s book “Feral” gave it a lot of publicity and provided a popular manifesto. I was already thinking about ways to encourage large scale reforestation, and Monbiot’s book crystallized the way in which British uplands are kept bare by sheep, deer, and EU Common Agricultural Policy basic payments.

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Flood information sources

This is now my third post about flooding, and it is raining again. First I posted about flooded lanes near Mill Meece and the ditches by Century Wood almost bursting their banks, and then two weeks later when the water level was much lower. During this time I’ve gathered some useful links with live information and predictions about water levels in England, which I describe in this post. I hope this will be useful to other wood owners and woodlanders in general. There are similar resources in Wales and Scotland.

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After the Flood

Earlier this week I visited Century Wood for the first time after the flooding at the end of October. There has been a lot of rain since, but the water level on the ground was down significantly. I didn’t see any standing water inside the wood and the level in the ditch was well down. The first photo shows the current situation, compared to the usual low level and at the height of the flood last week.

I spent most of the time cutting up dead trees and branches that either threatened to fall on the rides or already had. I normally encourage deadwood, but when it threatens to fall across a ride I sort it out. Some of this standing deadwood was still usable as firewood, and I piled logs from a dead hazel loosely in the Barn for now and I intend to restack it properly in a frame with the ends all exposed. I didn’t set aside any wood for drying last winter, and so this was the first wood to start drying in the Drying Barn.

One trunk I didn’t save had fingers of fungal growth right into the wood, and I also photographed fungi on standing dead poplars which I have left alone for now.

 

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Beavers in the city of Lyon

Last year I went to Lyon in central France and although I didn’t see the beavers that now live there I did see the trees felled and their distinctive tooth marks. The signs of beaver activity were in a park by the River Rhone about 3km from the very centre of Lyon. Beavers were hunted for their fur throughout Europe and became extinct in most of France. However in the lower reaches of the Rhone south of the Lyon they survived and have been recolonising the river northwards.

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