This summer I visited the Sweet Track on the Somerset Levels for the first time – a Neolithic wooden trackway across the marshes that is 5800 years old. The area is still wet today and was in stark contrast to the parched and brown fields we drove past on the drive down from Cheshire. The visit made me think about continuity with our ancestors who first managed the land, but also the changes in climate and land use which have happened over those thousands of years.
The Neolithic (New Stone Age) saw the start of farming in Britain by the people who replaced the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. As well as finely shaped weapons like barbed arrow heads and spear points, they used axes and knives which allowed them to clear woodland for farming but also to manage it.
The Sweet Track was discovered in 1970 by Ray Sweet during commercial peat extraction. Some of the timbers are now in storage at the British Museum and can still be assembled into a track for exhibitions. Others have been preserved beneath the ground surface on site, and the water levels are managed to keep them wet. It’s a remarkable example of wood preservation in Britain where we usually lose ancient timbers to rot.
The pictures below show a modern reconstruction of the track along part of its route, which you can walk along. I suspect they used sticks to help them balance, especially in wet weather when the trackway would become slippery. The site is still wet, but has young woodland including wet-wood specialists like Alder. There are good walkways provided, and the sound of water flowing in small streams and pipes permeates the place. The surrounding fields were also still flushed with green – such a contrast to the brown pastures on the way there.
The timbers of the track have been studied in detail since their discovery. The tree rings show that the wood was cut over the winter of 3807/3806 BC, based on long sequences of annual tree ring patterns that have been painstakingly established by dendrochronologists. The wider Avalon Marshes area has over 40 wooden tracks of varying designs.
In 1977, Oliver Rackham analysed the shapes and sizes of wood from three of the other tracks, dating from 2510 – 2210 BC. He found that the Neolithic builders had been using coppicing to manage woodlands to provide them with a sustainable supply of timber and wood – mostly hazel. Interestingly they were using coppice selection or drawing: instead of cutting each hazel tree down near ground level and finding uses for all the different sizes of stems, they cherry-picked the stems of the size they needed and left the others to carry on growing. This produces less straight stems and isn’t the model of simple coppicing that is taught today, but it does work.
Back in 3806 BC, Britain’s summers were 2 or 3 C warmer than the late 20th century on average, and the winters colder by the same sort of amount. Those summers were quite similar to the peak of the heatwaves of 2026. People must have faced many of the same issues of drought, heat, and fire that we see ourselves now.
This year Britain was gripped by stories of wildfires, from the Cairngorms in northern Scotland to the New Forest near the south coast of England. It still seems to be the case that we are not getting true forest fires, in which fire spreads from tree to tree. Instead we have fires on open ground, due to species like grass, bracken, and gorse and sometimes these extend into woodland and bring the fire there. However, it’s striking how many photos and videos taken after wildfires show the fire being stopped by an area of woodland.
Rackham famously said that British broadleaf woodlands burn like wet asbestos – so not at all. I hope that stays the case and that we’re not living on borrowed time. Yet the debate about land management and fire isn’t helped by careless journalism, often inspired by videos of devastating forest fires in North America. The picture above is a good example, with a photo of a controlled burn by firefighters to destroy fuel ahead of an advancing forest fire in California. BBC Wildlife Magazine used it without explanation in an article which is mostly about wildfires in Britain.
It’s clear that water is becoming more and more important. It’s something we run short of in dry summers, and have too much of in winter flooding. It keeps forest and field healthy and growing even when temperatures soar, and wetter habitats, including native woodlands, are more resistant to wildfires. The archaeological record and the experiences of our ancestors provide some of the answers, and but equally there are innovations we should explore.
Pingback: Devon and Dorset – Century Wood – notes from a Shropshire woodland