Ancient Woodlands with Luke Barley

Tree Lady Talks: Ancient Woodland, Coppicing, and the Future of British Woods

This episode explores how Britain’s ancient woodlands evolved from bustling, managed landscapes into the darker, neglected woods many people know today — and why restoring woodland management could be key to biodiversity, timber security, and human wellbeing. It works because it pairs nostalgia with hope: listeners get a vivid sense of loss, then a practical path forward.Episode summaryTree Lady talks with Luke B, author of Ancient and Senior Advisor for Trees and Woodlands with the National Trust, about the deep history of British woods and the urgent need to bring woodland management back. The conversation covers ancient woodland definitions, coppicing, wood pasture, selective felling, deer pressure, ash dieback, plantations on ancient woodland sites, and the cultural value of reconnecting people with woods.

Key topics covered

• What qualifies as ancient woodland in England, Wales, and Scotland

• How wood pasture, coppicing, and pollarding shaped historic woodlands

• Why today’s dark, dense woods are a relatively recent development

• How coppice restoration creates vital habitat for butterflies, birds, and other wildlife

• Why coppicing is culturally important but economically difficult at scale

• The role of continuous cover forestry and selective felling

• Horse logging and low-impact timber extraction methods

• How plantations on ancient woodland sites can be restored

• The impact of deer browsing on woodland regeneration

• Ash dieback, ecological change, and opportunities for regeneration

• Why native lime trees are a living link to deep woodland history

• The future of woodland culture, local timber, and human connection to nature

Notable moments

• Luke shares how stories like Robin Hood, Star Wars, and The Lord of the Rings drew him into the woods as a child.

• The discussion explains that many ancient woods were once open, busy, and highly managed rather than dark and untouched.

• Coppicing is described as a habitat engine: different regrowth stages support different species at different times.

• Luke explains that most coppice products are likely to remain luxury items, so broader subsidy and support are needed.

• The episode highlights the value of restoring neglected ancient woods and removing conifers to let native woodland life return.

• The conversation closes on a vision of woods that are alive with people, wildlife, and new woodland culture.

GuestLuke B — Senior Advisor for Trees and Woodlands, National Trust; author of AncientTakeawayAncient woodlands are not museum pieces. They are living systems that need active, sensitive management to support wildlife, people, and the next generation of woodland culture.Suggested quote

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“The wood is the special thing — the trees come and go, and it’s the woodland ecosystem that we need to look after.”

Resources mentioned

• Ancient by Luke B

• The Wood Age by Roland Ennos

• Kathy Willis, Good Nature

Keywordsancient woodland, coppicing, wood pasture, selective felling, woodland restoration, biodiversity, ash dieback, deer management, native lime, timber security, nature connection

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Transcript

Speaker 4 1:03

And if she came back to the house and she said to me, I want to do another podcast. And I said, Yeah, why not? Why not? Let's do it. Let's do it. And so here we are doing it. And here she is, and here he is, Luke Barley.

Speaker 5 1:17

So welcome back to Tree Lady Talks. It's been a while, and I didn't think I'd hung up my microphone. But I stumbled across Ancient by Luke Barley, and it's fantastic. And then I saw Luke, senior advisor for Trees and Woodlands with the National Trust at the Green Symposium by the Aurora Cultural Association recently, and he kindly agreed to come on the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 1 1:46

Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's really exciting to be here.

Speaker 5 1:49

Tell us about young Luke playing in the woods.

Speaker 1 1:54

Um gosh. Well, I actually think that it was stories that drew me to Woodland in the first place. I wasn't the sort of Chris Packham type kid who was obsessed with ecology and burying foxes, skulls, you know, and that kind of thing. I was I was into reading. I was into Robin Hood and um Star Wars, that's not reading, obviously, but you know, things like that, the Ewoks, King Arthur, um, Lord of the Rings, and I think it was those things that took me to the woods. And where I grew up is uh just where South Manchester meets the Peak District, and there's lots of lots of ancient woodland I know now, and lots of hidden valleys full of woodland, right on the edge of the town as it bleeds into the Peak District, and that's where we spent our youth as kids, me and my brother and our friends, firstly at primary school, but you know, on into secondary school, we were always roaming the woods, making dens, climbing trees, doing that classic childhood stuff, and it always meant so much to me. And um I never left it behind, I suppose, in some respects. I never wanted to leave it behind. I didn't know how to turn it into a career. I sort of followed a sort of fairly conventional academic route and probably left the woods for a short period, really, in hindsight, just a few years, and then realised as I left university, actually, I want to be outside, I want to be in the woods in the most naive sense possible. I wanted to help save the planet. Didn't really know what that meant in Britain as a conservationist at all, and just sort of took the leap and tried to find my way with it. And you know, here I am 25 years later or whatever it is.

Speaker 5 3:43

I think that's such a typical story of so many of us who work in nature conservation. We played in the woods, we played with trees. That was certainly my experience. So this book, Ancient, tell us for those who don't know, what is a definition of an ancient woodland?

Speaker 1 4:03

Well, the definition in sort of strict conservation terms is really simple. It's woodland that's been in existence since the year 1600 in England and Wales. It's uh slightly more recent in Scotland because of the different histories of land use and map making, because it's all about those maps. So around that period we find the earliest accurate maps, so we can see whether the woodland was there in the year 1600. So if it was on that first map in the year 1600, or the the maps that came soon after that, and it's still there now, we know that it's been there for at least 400 years. Now, lots of ancient woodland will have been there a heck of a lot longer than that. Some of it will have never not been wooded, and those are the most important bits. Even if the trees came and went, some of it might have been much more open previously than it is now, but it still maintains some sort of wooded habitat, and the soil hasn't been disturbed by ploughing or fertilisation or pesticide use or any of that, so it maintains this incredibly rich ecosystem. And we know now, sorry, just to say that some ancient woods were cleared before that, which we that was, you know, 40 years ago, we thought that they'd all been wooded forever if they were there in the year 1600 or so. But now we know using LIDAR that there are old field systems under some ancient woods, so they have come and gone over sort of the a much longer period of time, but still the really important bits like their soils, even 400 years of ecosystem continuity is really, really important and special. So, although they always have really different, very braided histories of the trees coming and going, if it was there 400 years ago, it's very, very important for nature now.

Speaker 5 5:55

Tell us about our oldest woodlands. I mean, I'm thinking of Whisman's Wood in Dartmoor, where I've been and seen all these beautiful mosses and lichens and just hanging down because it is our own rainforest. Can you think of any of our ancient ancient woodlands and can you describe those?

Speaker 1 6:15

Sure. So that's really interesting, isn't it? So Whisman's Wood is often held up as the archetypal ancient wood because it's so characterful and beautiful, and it's it is really important as a fragment of temperate rainforest, so it's got that lichen and lower plant interest that's unique to the west coast of Britain, really. In some respects, though, it's probably not one of our real oldest wildest woods, because we do think that Whisman's wood was managed. So, like most of our ancient woods, it would have been managed by people, typically copists, so the trees would be cut down and left to grow back, and people would take that produce and use it for the things they needed. And Whisman's was in that system, we think, although it feels very remote today, it's not actually that hard to get to with a horse and car in the grand scheme of things. So the very, very oldest woods, and the ones that are the closest to wild in this country are even more remote. And they're the woods where basically we we, as in people, couldn't get there to manage them to take the things we needed. So the only influence they've had over centuries or more is basically where we've grazed livestock and changed the way we've grazed livestock. So if you get up into the steepest and most remote parts of the White Peak ravines in Derbyshire, or you know, right up the sort of in the corner of a crag halfway up a fell in the lake district, if you find a wood in those places, they're the real, real special remnants that have probably never been influenced by people except by grazing pressure.

Speaker 5 7:54

That's fantastic. So take us for a walk in a pre-enclosure woodland, you know, back in the 1600s. Who might we find there and what might we see?

Speaker 1 8:05

Great question. So we will see a very different woodland scene than we will see today, and we will see a lot more people than we would see today, and there'd be a lot more light, actually. So, I mean, the first thing to say is there are a couple of types of woodland. Um, so we have sort of what we think of as more conventional woodland today, so where livestock would be excluded and it's it's just trees, sort of what anyone would think of as woodland. But then there was also a lot of wood pasture, so this is a very different type of woodland where grazing animals roamed amongst the trees, and though lots of the trees were polarded, so they were cut at about head height, so that the regrowth was out of the reach of the animals, but people could still get that crop from the animals. So, quite different scenes in those two places. So, in a coppice wood, we'd still see a lot more light than we would today. We'd see um huge areas that had been recently coppiced, recently cut, um, and probably lots of the produce being bundled up to be taken away for all kinds of uses. Almost everything people needed came from coppice woods and pollarded trees, whether it was thatching spars, pegs, cutlery and crockery, the wattle for wattle and orb walls, all this is from the underwood, and then from the standard trees, so the bigger trees over the coppice, timber for buildings and ships and all those bigger materials. And it would have been an industrial place. Because coppicing was so important, it would have been bustling with life. There would have been all sorts of people in there, people cutting the coppice, people stripping bark from the fallen oak trees, which went into the tanning process, um, people making the wood into different products, some of which they would have done on site, all kinds of different things going on. So it would have been really alive with human life, and likewise in the wood pasture, it was a real living and breathing place because most of the wood pasture was common land, so the people who lived on it or around it had very long-standing rights to take the things they needed from it. So there would have been people there every day gathering firewood, cutting the pollards, grazing their animals, exercising all kinds of other rights to get the things they needed. These places were really living and breathing places, and uh we think that um wood pasture commons were almost everywhere, they were so um so prevalent that they almost go unrecorded in lots of records. So um, if even when I was researching and reading people like Oliver Rackham, you get to this point where you're like, how much wood pasture was there? And Rackham sort of says, Well, from the records in the Doomsday book, I think about I think the majority of the woodland in the Doomsday book was wood pasture, but that was something like 15% woodland cover. But then you realise from reading other books about the commons that common land was everywhere, and most of it would have been wooded commons, you know, and it's just that the records don't exist. But it everyone, all our ancestors relied on those wooded commons. So I was so fascinated by that history of direct connection of all our ancestors to the land on which they lived.

Speaker 5 11:35

I love that. I really, really love that, and it reminds me of um an earlier guest on this show who you also quote, Professor Roland Dennis, in his book The Wood Age, and he beautifully chronicles how it takes us through from our own evolution, how being amongst trees enabled our our brains to grow by sleeping safely and using firewood to cook meat right the way through to the current age. So that's a big plug for that book. But tell us about our ancient woodlands now. I mean, what is the picture? What happens when you do nothing? What happens you just leave it be?

Speaker 1 12:13

Yeah. So we are experiencing shifting baseline syndrome on an enormous scale in our experience of woodlands. So most of us who've grown up any time in the left last few decades know the woods, and particularly ancient woods, ancient woods as dense, dark places. They're shady, they're quiet. We go there for respite and for an escape from the world. But that is such a recent phenomenon, as I said. You know, before enclosure, before the Industrial Revolution, there was lots more variety in their structure, which would have led to lots more wildlife, and they were full of people and they were busy places. And it was with enclosure, the Industrial Revolution, the development of the market economy, the woods fell into decline. We had alternative materials, um, alternative sources of materials with globalized trade, and people didn't need to manage the woods in the same way. Lots of the wood pasture was enclosed, so which meant that the rights were ended, the landowner could do what they want with it, and they converted them to uses that were more profitable for them to the detriment of the people who relied on those common rights. So huge changes, and basically it all fell into neglect. And as we see today, you know, lots of our woods are dark, lots of the wood pasture has either become dense and dark if it's still there at all, or it's been cleared to become farmland. And that the effect of that has been huge declines in woodland wildlife. Because counterintuitively, I suppose, most woodland wildlife, or a large proportion of woodland wildlife, doesn't want it dark and shady, it relies on the light areas in woodland, or it needs a combination of light areas and dark areas, or dense growth and open areas to feed and you know, shrubby bits to nest, the whole mix of a healthy wood. And even though our ancestors were managing the woods to get the things they needed, unwittingly, they were providing the right conditions for all our wildlife to continue to thrive. And that was because, to the best of our understanding, that dynamic, varied landscape replicated the pre-human conditions of the woods and the wider landscape. Yes. Where rather than being dense, dark, wall-to-wall trees, as we might imagine, those the pre-human woods and landscape were smashed around by prehistoric giant herbivores. Woolly rhinoceroses, wood elephants, most of them extinct, a few things still hanging on in different parts of the world, like bison in Europe. They crashed the woods around before people came along. So you have this variety and dynamism, and that's where all species evolved. So our ancestors continued to provide the same conditions, basically, and we've lost it in just the last couple hundred years.

Speaker 5 15:15

Fascinating, absolutely brilliant. And you described coppicing. And tell us about how you might manage a woodland for coppice and a sort of mosaic habitat and uh the effects that you personally have seen as a result of coppice restoration.

Speaker 1 15:32

Sure. So um a typical coppice wood. Um, if we restore the coppice today, we typically cut coops of about a quarter of a hectare. It sort of depends on the species. Um you need your coop to be twice as wide as the trees are tall next to it to get enough lighting to benefit wildlife. And then once you've cut the whole of the understory, basically clearfeld the understory, all the hazelstools or whatever species there are, you need to get the standard trees, so those bigger trees growing above the coppice, down to the point where there's less than 20% canopy cover. Otherwise, we don't get the light and warmth to benefit wildlife. And some really amazing um ecologists, Rob Fuller, um Martin Warren, who were studied the effects of coppicing on butterflies and birds quite early on in the 80s when interest um began again. They demonstrated, you know, the detail of what you need to achieve. You really do need to make quite a big impact in getting light and warmth into your woods. So we have this coop, like half the size of a football field, potentially, maybe slightly smaller, where we've basically clearfelled the understory and we've got a few standard trees still going. So, year one, we've got quite a sparse looking area, although there is a real beauty in it, I think, once you start to understand the process of coppicing. But we cut a different one each year. So across the scale of the wood, we've got coops at all different stages of growth, some just springing back, and the you know, it can grow more than a metre in a year, things like hazel, willow can grow twice that in a year. So you get these giant bushes straight away in the first summer. In the coop next door, you might have some mature coppice that's ready to be cut the next winter, the next one after that, you've maybe got some somewhere in the middle. So you've got this real range of different habitat types, and um, as I said, the different species rely on different bits. So, for instance, some of the rare woodland butterflies, for instance, um, rely on subtly different stages of the coppice cycle, which are quite extraordinary, actually. So, um, the small pearl-bordered butterfly needs the violets that grow beneath the coppice in the first summer after cutting, and it needs the specific microclimate of when the grass sword and the coppice growth is just at that point that it'll reach in the first summer in order to find its own habitat. Once it gets any older, it's no good for the small pearl-bordered anymore. And there are other wood woodland butterflies that find a different microhabitat, so some really extraordinary niches, and then likewise, lots of um birds that we think of as woodland specialists, like the nightingale, they need the quite early regrowth, maybe in year two or three, when you just start to get the bushy growth touching again and get a real dense shrub thicket, that's where they nest, but they want to go and feed on the insects that are using the real light and warmth in a freshly cut bit. So they need to need it all together. And there are other species that are even more uh choosy and that might use the veteran features in an old oak as well. So we've got to provide all those.

Speaker 5 19:00

I mean, this spring my daughter and I were walking in a beautiful woodland truss woodland near West Burgold in Essex, and we heard our first nightingales. Oh, it was just incredible, and it was exactly that habitat. It was in a coop that had been copied a few years ago, it was dense and shrubby, and oh it was just incredible. That's wonderful. Now, what about the products today? What sort of market is there for coppicing? I mean, does it cost to copice? Is it break-even, or is there a market that makes a labour worthwhile?

Speaker 1 19:38

I think the headline is that it's not economically viable. There are brilliant copice workers who make a living from it, um, but it's really dependent on where you are in the country, so what your cost of living and subsistence subsidence subsistence is like. So, for instance, people find it really hard in the south east to make enough of a living from coppicing just because the cost of living is so high there, whether you're paying rent or paying a mortgage. In other parts of the country, that's a bit different, so those dynamics are at play. The quality of the material, so um, unless copice is already in rotation, so it's never been neglected or it's been restored previously, it's hard to make a living from those first couple of cuts. You have to cut each coop a couple of times before you get the quality where you can make meaningful products from it that'll make you money. So there's a long lead time before you start seeing a return as well, if you're just heading to a neglected wood. And then a huge part of it as well is in the skill to process the material.

Speaker 5 20:41

Yeah.

Speaker 1 20:41

So making the products really quickly and to a very high standard, and then as well as being a brilliant woodlander and a very practical person to really make it pay, you also have to be a fantastic entrepreneur and very good at marketing, so that you're able to find the market, sell it to the right people where you can get a premium from your product. So, as I say, there are people doing it, but it's not easy. Um, and I think we need to find other ways to subsidize copic for all its wider benefits for nature and for people, really.

Speaker 5 21:15

I totally agree with you, and it also does create those um opportunities for really niche marketing. So um using volunteers as well as part of a programme which I know you've done, but in this day of understanding the importance of biodiversity and also wanting something homemade, you know, people using wood for good, people who live in urban areas, seeing the beauty and the inherent value in something local and woody. And let's hope that it attracts a premium. But um, it isn't always easy to get copies to regrow, is it? Because we've got a big deer problem. What how do you what are your thoughts on different types of deer management?

Speaker 1 21:57

Yeah, it's a big challenge. Just before I Talk about dare. Can I just build on that last point a little bit? Because there's there's something a couple of really interesting things there for me. So the first is in terms of COPIS products, I think we need to be realistic, sadly, very sadly, that most copice products are only ever going to be luxury items, you know, beautiful hazel hurdles. So important that we keep those traditions alive because they are integral to our history, and I think you know there's definitely a place for them, but we're never going to do them at scale, you know, enough to support um the restoration of woodland management we need. So part of that is about subsidising coppicing. But um the other thing that I emphasise in the book that I think is really important actually is that the good management of our ancient woods isn't just about copice restoration. As much as I love copicing, and I think it's got a really fascinating history and all these beautiful crafts associated with it, I'm actually just as excited as a naturalist about continuous cover forestry and the potential for really sensitive selective felling to punch holes in woodland to benefit wildlife. And actually, in some places, with a bit of thought, that might pay a bit more easily as well. And I think we might see the scale through really sensitive selective felling that we might not see through copice restoration. So we need to keep an eye out for that.

Speaker 5 23:27

That's so good. So I'm also an advocate of continuous cover forestry as well, because at the moment in the UK, we import 80% of our timber. And well, number one, it's bad for timber security, but it's also a massive lost opportunity to bring our ancient semi-natural woodlands back into management and our other woodlands, our younger woodlands into management by really sensitive targeted felling. So two things spring to mind. I mean, how can you take out a fallen large? Oh, you've felled an oak for whatever reason, you've selected it, you've agonised over it, and you've worked out the route. But we know that the soil is the most important thing in our ancient woodlands. And a single passage by machinery can squash it all down and you know, create a problem for a while. What other methods are there that you've used?

Speaker 1 24:28

Yeah, well, the the most exciting method that I've used is horse logging, which I think is yeah, it's just such a lovely thing to do. Probably my favourite times in the woods, you know, that I've experienced was working with the horse loggers. It was just absolutely brilliant. Um, and in the right places, um, the right woods, the right surrounding access, that can work financially, so that's exciting, but it doesn't always work financially. I think we have to be honest about that. Um, but there are other ways to get the timber out sensitively, and as you say, we must treat the woodland soil with great care. But even things as simple as thinking about the timings of our operations, so you know, traditionally we avoid nesting season, which means we do all our woodland management and extraction in the winter, but obviously that's when the ground is most wet. Um, but it's just been that binary decision. You know, you can't extract in the summer, so you do it in the winter. Well, we've got lots of places in the National Trust now, thinking with a little bit more sophistication about that. Um, you know, maybe failing in the winter but doing their extraction in late summer when they feel confident that the birds are fledged, but the ground is still firm. Um, there are some really, really good um more lightweight forwarders as well, which again, obviously, because they don't bring the scale of timber out, the economics can be more challenging. But again, they can pay off in the right place um and then work with winches and skylines and that kind of thing. So it's kind of all there for the taking in terms of the method methodologies, as long as we think hard about it. I think the bigger challenge is what and this is something you just alluded to in terms of timber security, is that we don't have the markets for the products of our ancient woods beyond firewood at the moment. So even in those few woods where we've got really nice straight oak, it doesn't go into the supply chain for oak beams because it's just too niche a market, the sawmills aren't interested, people don't get it graded, you know, it's this vicious circle, and then people don't ask for it, so they just go to Travis Perkins and get French oak, which has been graded, it has come through the industrial system. So we've got to change a lot of things about the whole supply chain in order to drive the management of our ancient woods, and I think part of that is growing more decent timber, so that means the managers of ancient woods tending their woods correctly to grow better timber in some cases, some trees, but then also people asking for English timber, the sawmills being willing to grade it, all that every bit of that vicious circle is reversing into a virtuous one. So the real challenge there. But what I'm even more excited about in some ways is the potential for innovative and novel uses of the woods from ancient woods, which I think is a really exciting proposition, actually. So, um, you know, in the book I look at this uh seven-story office block that has been built in East London called the Black and White Building, which has been made from laminated beach. Um, and that came from Germany, like most of the engineered timber does today, but that's okay because it's the principle that we could have used British beach to do that. So we use much shorter lengths of tree.

Speaker 5 27:52

It's really interesting to think about these uh laminated timber structures, and there's a really large one that's supposed to be built in Switzerland as well. So these niche markets, I mean, there's quite a lot of work being done by Grown in Britain as well, isn't there?

Speaker 1 28:09

Yeah, Grown in Britain doing some brilliant work, and you know, people like uh Jez Ralph at Evolving Forest, who's closely involved with Groning Britain, and um the Architectural Association and their Woodland Campus at Hook Park, where again they've done some really interesting work, like using the wonky wood from the crowns of trees, which you know, again historically would have been really important. What they call the knee timber, so the crooked branches of oak would have been harvested for the specific use of the angle of the branch. So whether it was for crook barns or for the foot, the the curved ribs of ships, they came from the curved timber uh in ancient woods. Well, at the Hook Park, they've used some of that to make the roof of a structure, but rather than just sort of bodging it together, they scanned all the pieces and the computer figured out how to fit them together quickly. So it's this lovely sort of mix of old technology and new technology to make it much more efficient and to you know to give us the certainty and the structural integrity of it and all that stuff. So I think that combination of using innovative technologies to get more products from ancient woods could be really exciting.

Speaker 5 29:23

Oh, that is so exciting. Well, we live in a medieval house, and so we've got crooked timber everywhere, and we've got exposed beans, which is wonderful.

Speaker 4 29:59

Um because I can tell you, uh, if I had a pound for every time I'd hit my head on a cooked timber, I'd be a very rich man. I I really would, and um, it's not always cracked up to me, although my head is now. Enjoy this second half.

Speaker 5 30:12

But um there was a lot of change within some of our ancient woodlands implemented by the Forestry Commission called a plantation on ancient semi-natural woodlands. Um we still have many in the UK. But just briefly describe why it happened and how things can bounce back once they're removed.

Speaker 1 30:35

Sure. So this plant the restoration of plantations on ancient woodland sites, often called pores, is a conservation priority, really, because we can bring the life of those woods back relatively easily. So, although coppicing basically completely died off, almost completely died off, by the start of the 20th century, there was then a bit of a coda to the story of ancient woodland in the two world wars. So lots of them were harvested ad hoc because we were so desperate for timber during the two world wars. Um, but then a couple of things happened after the second world war. The first was that there had been this um developing trend for what was called scientific forestry, and this was part of that wider movement for improving the land and making it more efficient and productive and profitable, importantly. Um, and this was all about plantation forestry as we know it today, the invention of growing monoculture trees in rows that are more uniform, easier to harvest, easier to process, easier to market. And also, the ancient woods were dismissed as scrub. Lots of them had just been hammered during the Second World War, and foresters visited them and just saw the bushy regrowth and just thought this is useless. You know, nobody really understood coppicim by that point, or very few people did. So the woods fell into complete decline at that point. So 1945 was a real bad moment for ancient woodland, and obviously, we also had rationing and the need to massively increase food security. So lots of ancient woodland was considered useless and was cleared. We think about 10% of the ancient woodland that remained in 1945 was cleared completely and converted to agriculture. Um, but another 30 or 40 percent was cleared and replanted with conifer. So 30 to 40% of our ancient woods were replanted with conifer species. And what we see in those conifer woods is really to the untrained eye, they look like a typical conifer plantation. We get the trees in rows, very densely planted, very shady, very dark, um, any sort of ground flora completely suppressed, both by the shade and all the needle litter. Um, but in lots of them, if you start to look and you get your eye in, you can see these remnant features of ancient woodland. So whether it's the wood banks and the charcoal hearth as a sort of archaeology, or sometimes you do find some of the more shade-tolerant woodland flora hanging on, some of the ferns can hang on under the conifers, and you can start to spot that this was an ancient woodland, and then obviously you can confirm it from old maps. And actually, if we sensitively remove all that conifer, the life of the ancient wood comes back. Yes, we only get young native tree species, but the seed bed of native woodland species can spring back even after decades of conifer on top. All the fungal diversity is often still there. So the health of the soil can be restored really quickly. It's it's clinging on under the conifer. Um, and by removing the conifer and either allowing native tree species to establish or even planting somewhere appropriate, we can restore that ancient woodland habitat relatively quickly in woodland terms. It's still there, ready to be restored.

Speaker 5 34:08

It's so hopeful. And a few weeks ago, I was privileged to visit an old paws, which uh has been in the same ownership now for 26 years. And when the owner bought the woodland, uh their objective was to restore the woodland. And when you can see, we walked through this area of uh oh goodness me, 10 meter high, 15-meter high native natural regeneration where the conifers have been felled. And this particular woodland I'm taking the listeners to because we're gonna go for a walk in there with the two great woodsmen around and we're going to hear how they did it and the ecological benefits just extraordinary. So it's really reassuring, isn't it, that nature can bounce back given a chance. But it also leads me to think about this tension. Um, so we're aware we're in a climate emergency, we're in a biodiversity emergency. People care, people care about trees. But I wondered if you'd experienced um public perception about differences between when you're managing a publicly owned or charity wood, when you're going in there, when you're doing some coppeting or you're doing selective felling. Um, what have you come across in the range of attitudes and is it changing?

Speaker 1 35:34

That's a really good question. I I do think it's changing, but very slowly, and I really hope actually that the book can have some small influence in helping more people understand the need for woodland management and that it is a positive um for nature and for people. Um, because yeah, there there is still a big misconception that felling any tree is bad, um, and that we just have to keep them all upright. And you know, I'm here in Sheffield where we've obviously had a real drama around street trees, a genuine scandal about unnecessary felling of street trees. So I can really sympathize with that perception that cutting trees down is bad, um, and it is it's a nuanced argument to explain to people that this is different in a wood. The wood is the special thing, really, and the trees come and go, and it's the woodland ecosystem that we need to look after. It would be wrong to clear the wood, but felling individual trees within the wood is normal, it replicates natural processes, and we're actually improving its health. But that I recognise that you know it's hard to convey a nuanced argument, isn't it? People like the sound bite, the third.

Speaker 5 36:44

Yeah, they do, they do.

Speaker 1 36:46

Um, and it is a new as well.

Speaker 5 36:48

I I do wonder though, I think use of volunteers appropriately can really help with that discussion because you've got lay people coming in, getting their hands dirty, and actually experiencing and looking at the benefits of managing woodland and actually seeing how the woodland changes. But there are so many other benefits to volunteering in Woodland as well. I mean, have you learned anything that's or seen anything that surprised you from working with volunteers in woods?

Speaker 1 37:19

I don't work with volunteers so much nowadays, slightly sadly, because I'm in a sort of advisory role. But yeah, I loved working with volunteers as a ranger, and what was so nice about working with the volunteers is that everyone brings a different dynamic to it. So, in some respects, some of them might have been learning from me as a ranger about woodland management, but some of them have been doing woodland management for longer than I have, and I was learning huge amounts from them. And you know, in the book I talk about a couple of volunteers who I work with who basically taught me to copice, you know, and they um they were one of them was a copice worker who also volunteered uh with the Rangers, which was quite extraordinary. That he did have a business as a copies worker, but he came out with us for fun and just to sort of give back. Um and another bloke who was a retired bloke who'd worked on the railways actually, but was had you know been retired longer than I've been working at that point and spent most of it copies him, you know. So it's a really amazing dynamic to learn to have that different learning experience is going in different directions, I think. So I'm not sure if that was surprising as such, but really valuable. Um volunteering experiences I had I enjoyed the most as well were where we had the most diverse range of people. So I think it's fair to say that the standard National Trust volunteer is the retired white man, you know, out in the woods. From you know, the vast majority, probably 90% of National Trust volunteer groups doing woodland work, are gonna be those retired people from a particular background, and that's great, and we really value their contributions, they're always lovely to work with, and it's brilliant. But I really loved it when I got to work with groups of young people from you know more disadvantaged backgrounds for whom this was a completely novel place to be and thing to do, and you know, that was completely eye-opening for me to get their perspective on things and to see how they responded to being in the woods, and you know, obviously it wasn't universal, but some of them go from being wild to focusing on the task at hand and really enjoying it and gaining confidence from doing this practical task really well because they've never had opportunities like that in school, and everyone's wired differently for those different types of things, aren't they? So um, I really took a lot from working with groups like that, um, and yeah, found that very inspirational.

Speaker 5 39:47

Brilliant, and we've talked about the why some woodlands have been neglected, um, but also let's talk about the threats to our woodlands. The first of all, in terms of pests and diseases and browsing.

Speaker 1 40:05

Sure. So um we do, yeah, we touched on deer earlier, didn't we? And we didn't get into it. So deer are one of the major threats, it's as simple as that, and that is another difficult message. Yes, it is, you know. The fact of the matter is that we need to kill a lot of deer for the health of our woodland ecosystems and other ecosystems as well, actually. Um, you know, there is an unnaturally high number of deer in this country now because they've lost their predators, except us. Um, and there are non-native species that have been introduced that are also, you know, breeding like bilio. So it's not even that it's just there's too many of the native deer, there are other species as well. And they eat the heart out of a wood. They will they will eat its future by eating all the saplings and all the young trees, so that when the existing trees die, there's nothing there to replace them. They eat the ground flora, they eat the understory species, you know, too many deer can just rep a wood. And we don't have any meaningful political sort of strategy to deal with that at the moment. There is a forestry commission have just released a new strategy, but you know, which is a step in the right direction, but um we need to beef it up big time in order to genuinely figure out a way forward.

Speaker 5 41:20

Yeah, it's it is really, really hard, isn't it? Because they look cute and yet what they're doing is far from it. But we've also got a problem with increasing pest and diseases, and the most prevalent at the moment is ash dieback disease. Um, describe to us a scale that you've seen in the northern woodlands, and might there be some opportunities from that?

Speaker 1 41:46

Yeah, ash dieback is a really interesting one, and I've definitely been on a big sort of emotional and professional journey with Ash Dieback, and I still have lots of different feelings about it, all of which can be true at the same time, if I'm honest. So um the first thing I would say is that its impact has been much quicker than we anticipated from experience on the continent in certain landscapes. So, particularly the calcareous landscapes, like the White Peak, where I were the Cotswolds, the Chilterns, places like that, they were dominated by ash, partly because of ecological factors, partly because of human history. So there's lots of ash there, but the ash were already stressed because they're nutrient poor and they're so free-draining. So they were hammered by ash dieback much more rapidly than we thought. And if you go to the White Peak today, and I was there last week actually for the first time in a while, there are whole woods where almost every tree is now dead, you know, and with bear in mind that ash dieback first arrived here, first identified in 2012. It's not a long time. No, and it was 2020 when we really started to see those trees kind of go off a cliff. So that in some respects, that's bad news. Well, in lots of respects, that's bad news, but in other respects, the woods are still there, as I sort of mentioned earlier about felling trees. You know, the understory layer has got much denser. Um, there are other tree species coming through. Um they're probably really, really good for woodland birds at the moment because the understory layer is so dense. There's more woodpeckers because there's so much dead wood. Um, it's all kind of a phase in some respects, but I do think we need to we need to apply a gentle hand to make sure that the end result is as positive as it can be. Because if we're not careful in woods like the White Peak, we might end up with too much sycamore and too much beech, which are obviously very shady species, and they would really change those ecosystems. And one of the things that's special about the ashwoods on calcareous landscapes is its ground flora or their ground flora, so we need to try to maintain similar conditions. Conditions to maintain that ground flora. So I think the bits of planting that people like Natural England and the National Trust and others have done in the White Peak recently to try to reintroduce missing native species to those areas is really important actually in avoiding the potential dominance of shade, really shady species. So we've reintroduced species like both species of native lime and field maple and others that are only missing because of the human influence on those woods. So I think that's really important. So that's one aspect of the story, and then really quickly, another, not the only other aspect of the story is that away from the calcareous landscapes, it still ain't that bad. Yeah. Like, you know, the process is still quite a slow one. Um and it is upsetting, but in some ancient woods, we're seeing a small proportion of ash dying as being fairly positive in opening up otherwise neglected woods and letting some light in. Um and ash as a species is very diverse genetically, so we will start to see tolerance develop through saplings in those gaps relatively quickly as well in woodland terms, just not so quickly in human terms. So yeah, I wouldn't say that I'm feeling sort of sanguine about it, but I it's it's not equally not a catastrophe. There's lots of different mixed messages around.

Speaker 5 45:25

I think there are. I mean, I walked through an ancient woodland recently in Hertfordshire where there were patches of large dead ash, but it was amongst many other different species, and the woodland have been neglected so long, it was an opportunity to create light. And there's some really great work being carried out at the John Innes Laboratory with rapidly growing disease-resistant seedlings as well. So there's a lot of hope for the future. Um we started off of you taking us for a walk through an old woodlands in pre-enclosure days. What would you hope to see when you went through a walk in the woodland in the future? Let's say 50 years' time, how might what is the next stage in the the our ancient woodlands?

Speaker 1 46:19

I'd like to see something similar. I'd like to see our woods repeopled um as lots more people earning a living there, taking the things we need, and enjoying being in them as well. And um, so what I think we need, and there are lots of different things we need to do to get there, is to restore our lost woodland culture. And it is only recently lost, you know. We our hot the whole of British culture was a woodland culture from the Bronze Age until enclosure and the Industrial Revolution. So it's the blink of an eye that we've lost it, and I think that by restoring it, we will see more wildlife in the woods and we will help restore nature, more carbon sequestered and happier people. So I would love to see more of our woods with people working them, creating those big gaps that allow the space for wildlife and all those niches for different species to thrive, taking more of the things we need, and probably lots of things we can't even imagine that we could get from the woods. Exactly. Innovative technologies, um, and that everyone is connected to woods and their management in a way that we've lost in recent years.

Speaker 5 47:35 Speaker 1 48:43

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Speaker 5 48:48 Speaker 1 48:52 Speaker 5 48:55

Yeah. We've talked about things on the macro scale, we've talked about woodlands, but I'd like to focus in on one of your and my favourite species, and that's limes. Often they're walking. What does that mean?

Speaker 1 49:12

Lyme. So lime is such a special species because it is, well, Oliver Ackham called it a living link to the Neolithic wild wood. So we're talking about small leaf lime in particular and large leaf lime to a degree. These are the native British lime trees. And unlike the common lime that we find on lots of Victorian streets, we only find them really in the deepest, darkest bits of the wood, in the corners that have been neglected the longest. Um and if we find lime in the woods, wild lime, we know we're in a really, really, really old bit of the wood. And the reason for that is that for the last at least five or six thousand years, they haven't been able to reproduce consistently by seed because our summers have been too mild, slightly ironically. So we are seeing more saplings now, actually, with climate change, but they've got this amazing adaptation for vegetative reproduction, so they almost considered immortal in some senses. So if a tree falls but it's still rooted, the side branches turn into a line of new trees. If it breaks, it just coppices naturally, really vigorously. Swooping branches often just touch down in the soil and set root and form a sort of sister tree to the original tree. So that's why we call them walking trees because they just move slowly over tree time through the landscapes in which they exist, unless we clear them, basically, or we have cleared them historically. So the places we find them are often those places where woodlanders chose to leave them for whatever reason. In some places, it's because they couldn't cut them down, it just wasn't worth their effort to do it. So uh one of my favourite woods, dodge some wood in the lake district. We find the line just on the steep rocky gills, and it was clearly just wasn't worth their effort to clear them along the gills when they actually managed the rest of the wood really industrially for oak, for oak coppice, for um charcoal and for tambark. In other places, we don't really know why they left them. So, Spring Park, another of my f favourite woods where I worked in South London, there's a big line of lime on a really, really ancient boundary and wood bank, but it would have been really easy to clear them, and they obviously made a decision not to, and we don't really know why. Um, and the reason they were cleared elsewhere was because they basically became useless to us. So as people started to manage the woods more industrially, they were clearing the species that were less useful to make more room for the ones that were. So lime was pushed to the edges, but where we find it, we know we're in the we've got that connection to deep time, basically. So really special.

Speaker 5 52:01

Wonderful. And so, really, lime is almost a metaphor for the evolution of our ancient woodlands through the various stages through our um ecological and then human history, and how that has changed in the blink of an eye. And let's hope we're moving towards a new era of woodland management, not only for products, not only for wildlife, but for people using innovation that we can't yet imagine. We think about the last 10 years and how things have changed, which is why I'm really confident about the future of our woodlands. But a big part of that is actually telling people what it is, why it matters, and why there needs to be management. So I urge people to read Ancient by Luke Barley. Luke Barney, thank you so much for joining us. Fantastic work, a lifelong work for you, and let's hope that this ripples through society. Thank you so much for your time.

Speaker 1 53:23

Oh, thank you,. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you.