It may not sit well with the politicians who now seek to govern it, but Britain has always been a land of immigrants – our “native” fauna and flora among them. More than 10,000 years ago, in the wake of retreating ice sheets, trees from the warmer south began to re-colonise this chilly north-western fringe of Europe: first birch, then hazel, elm, oak and alder. By the time rising sea levels submerged the marshy lowlands connecting it to the rest of the continent, the new British mainland was covered in a luxuriant tangle of forest. In this primeval wildwood, a squirrel could leap tree-to-tree from north coast to south, east coast to west.
Or so one story goes. In Ancient, woodland expert Luke Barley sets out to tell a more complex and fascinating tale of our forests and the people that have lived with and made use of them. His title points back to the post-ice age woodland and its forerunners in sweltering or wintry deep prehistory, but it also holds a more specific meaning. Under classifications drawn up in the 1970s, a UK wood is considered “ancient” if it was already in existence by 1600 (in Scotland, by 1750), as shown on the earliest accurate maps. These are our last links to the wildwood, places where the undisturbed soil still supports a rich and intricate ecosystem that no human ingenuity can recreate.
The full term for these surviving fragments is “ancient semi-natural woodland”, a phrase that underpins Barley’s account of how the lives of Britain’s trees and people have been entwined since the bronze age. A chartered forester and former ranger, he writes of a gruelling intimacy with trees – sweat, sawdust, the skill to see usable forms in uncut trunks and boughs – that would have been familiar to almost everyone until the Industrial Revolution. Wood sustained all human life and technological progress: from firewood for hearths and ovens to the charcoal that enabled the smelting of metals to the timber that provided Britain’s tools, furniture and building frames (the great medieval cathedrals consumed more than 1,000 mature oaks apiece) and, eventually, fuelled its rise as a global naval power.
Wood was wealth, and tending and harnessing this resource took deep skill accumulated over generations. Ancient is rich in the now arcane vocabulary of woodcraft – treen, coupe, cant, hagg – as well as more familiar terms such as coppicing, cutting trees back to a base that rapidly regrows multiple, more readily usable stems. As Barley points out, the myth of the untouched “natural” forest is just that: most trees evolved at a time “when temperate woodland would have been crashed around, broken and browsed by megafauna: super-elephants, super-rhinoceroses and super-horses”. Through practices such as coppicing, humans play the role of the giant creatures of prehistory, creating the space and light a diverse woodland ecosystem needs to flourish.
But from the 18th century onwards came industrialisation, enclosure and the rise of fossil fuels, severing these old intimate links. The common rights to woodland that were protected in England, Wales and Ireland by the 1217 Charter of the Forest – such as pannage (the right to graze pigs) and estovers (the right to cut wood for fuel) – were lost. And as the pace of change accelerated, so did the destruction of the forests. Between the end of the second world war and the 1980s, Barley writes, “nearly half of Britain’s ancient woodland was cleared or replanted with commercial crops of trees”, most often dark, sterile plantations of conifers. It now accounts for only 2.5% of Britain’s land area.
This history of extraction, privatisation and disenfranchisement goes hand in hand with the intensification of the climate and nature crises. In 2023, researchers found the UK to be one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries; as part of the drive to net zero, the government now has a legally binding target to achieve 16.5% woodland cover in England by 2050. Ancient tells us why these numbers matter – and why protecting the trees we’ve treated so carelessly is no idealistic luxury. As our ancestors knew far better than us, we can’t survive without them.
• Ancient: Reviving the Woods That Made Britain by Luke Barley is published by Profile (£25). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
