Forestry Commission

Woodlands have also suffered, especially younger trees which haven't had time to get fully established, which can take up to five years.

According to the Forestry Commission, in twenty twenty-four to twenty-five, five thousand seven hundred hectares of new woodland were established in England.

They estimate that's just over ten million individual trees.

But how many of those have died? And what can farmers do if they've planted trees using grant money but now have thousands of dead saplings on their land? Nick Phillips is the lead for forestry policy at the Woodland Trust.

... absolutely great names.

Um, so that's been a really good, uh, initiative, and that sort of also, uh, leads me onto a Forestry Commission England Lepidoptera strategy.

There's been a rapid decline of, uh, butterflies, woodland butterflies and moths, and Butterfly Conservation is working really closely with the Forestry Commission England to reverse these declines on key sites.

Um, woodland provides breeding habitat for three-quarters of all English butterflies, and the majority of larger moths thrive in woodland if those woodlands are appropriately managed.

So the Butterfly Conservation's been working with Forestry Commission on 136 Forestry Commission sites known to be important for particularly threatened butterfly and moth species.

Example of woodland butterflies would be a number of the fritillaries, Duke of Burgundy, White Admiral, Purple Emperor, wood whites, checkered dingy and grizzled skippers, which I love the sound of, and moths like drab loopers, argent and sable, lunar yellow underwings, gray carpets, Barbary carpets, netted carpets-

So many carpets

The local community itself has never quite been able to shrug off the incident, turning Rendlesham Forest into a tourist curiosity.

The Forestry Commission has erected information boards, and several local businesses use the name Rendlesham UFO for marketing.

That kind of public engagement gives the story a life beyond what the official documents record.

There are also stories about alleged physical traces left behind, small footprints that don't match any known foot shape, and a metallic scrap found near a clearing.

it's kind of nice and it gives people there's so much choice right yeah and we know i think during winter especially you know we know sean woods can you know can be affected by the wind because it's enough you know it's in the forest and ice at white cliffs so we're hoping that we will be kind of the course that potentially stays open because because of the track and it's like it's not it's not going to be muddy it's

quite open it's not too many overarching trees obviously it's a community woodland so there's your community woodland which has just opened up in York funnily enough yes and they've got little trees and it's hopefully going to be looking something like this and i'm guessing again this has still got space to grow so millie which is off in the background hello millie over there from forestry commission um i did a little bit of reading up on you guys before you guys started oh sorry don't have to go and do some stuff over there so are we still in the process of this this community woodland growing is there still like bigger trees to come it's all established yeah so

it's been we've we've had this site it used to be um farmland had this site for over 15 years now I saw that on

Wikipedia.

So it's fantastic to then hear and see that it didn't fall into the hands of property developers, but went instead to the public space.

So it's one of John Prescott's last acts as the head of the Office of Deputy Prime Minister.

Money from the ODPM, Sustainable Communities Fund, was given to the Forestry Commission to buy the land and turn it into a community woodland.

What a great way to spend money.

But the debt would have suffocated them.

So instead, they partnered with the UK Forestry Commission, who already owned millions of acres.

They leased the rights to string ropes in the canopy using existing roads and parking lots and shared the revenue.

They launched a highly profitable business with near zero real estate overhead.

So the Wye Valley, which is just down the road from us, effectively, for the purposes of access rights, is Scotland.

It has huge swathes of access land because you've got the Forest of Dean, Forestry Commission, all of that land has been dedicated as access land under Crowe.

Large parts of the valley sides are open access land.

The river, very unusually actually for England and Wales, has statutory rights of navigation.

This kind of thing has gone on all over the world.

In Britain, the ancient broadleaf forests were cut down and then the Forestry Commission planted all those spruce forests, which are not going to be fire resistant.

The spruce is not a native tree.

The only needle trees we should have in Britain are the larches and the yews.

The most famous one happened in 1694, which took over a, a lot of the area around Culbin, and for the next several hundred years there were large sand dunes which drifted across the area.

In the 1920s the Forestry Commission bought much of the area, and part of that was to stabilize the sand dunes to stop the impact on neighboring agricultural land and communities, and also to attempt to, to grow a, a timber crop after the First World War.

While, um, Britain had used much of its timber supplies during the First World War, so there was a real push to plant more forests and have a more robust timber industry within the UK.

Am I right in thinking that this was known as Scotland's only desert?

it? There's a bunch of...

English Heritage, Forestry Commission.

Forestry England, sorry.

Forestry England, they asked to make it a bit more accurate as to where they are.

By the time of her death, however, Wendy and David were once again living together under the same roof.

Wendy worked as a typist and legal secretary for the forestry commission on King Street in Bakewell.

Within the small market town, she was well known for her extramarital relationships.

Locals would later recall that, after her husband left for work each morning, Wendy would sometimes leave the porch light on as a signal that the coast was clear.

On the 12th of September 1973, the little picturesque village of Bakewell would become forever haunted by a vicious and brutal unsolved murder.

17-year-old Stephen Downing arrived at the cemetery for his usual shift, carrying out his routine duties with nothing out of the ordinary to mark the morning.

Meanwhile, 32-year-old Wendy Sewell had arrived at the forestry commission offices on King Street and was working away as normal.

At around 12pm, Wendy received either a phone call or a visit to the office.