Stay curious.

I'm Luke Barley.

I am an advisor with the National Trust on woodlands and trees.

The National Trust is a big landowning conservation charity in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

As well as working for the National Trust, I've just written a book.

So I've written a book called Ancient, Reviving the Woods that Made Britain.

And Ancient uses my experiences of managing a number of ancient woods as a ranger, so actually out on the tools, to tell the wider story of the past, present and future of Britain's ancient woodland as i started to write ancient one of the things i wanted to write about is the need in our ancient woods today in britain to manage them to make them as good as they can be for nature but if thinking about the need to manage them what it really got me thinking about is our woodland history and ultimately the fact that we are a woodland species We evolved in a wooded landscape before we started to farm.

Yes.

Yes, absolutely.

And there's a lot to unpack there.

So the first thing I would say is that slight...

It is a distinction, but it's probably more of a blurred distinction than it should be between woodland and wood pasture.

And obviously wood pasture is a form of ancient woodland where... it's retained that more open aspect and perhaps the grazing has persisted into more recent memory and places like Epping are absolutely perfect examples of that the old commons where you had grazing animals and pollards and it is a subtly different ecosystem to an ancient wood proper so to speak but just as important in lots of different ways and I talk about both in the book and I think it's really incumbent on us to restore the ecological health of our wood pastures where we've still got them.

And often they've either been overgrazed and turned to farmland or they've gone the other way they've been abandoned and they've filled up with trees and it looks like a wood but it's not as healthy as it should be in terms of ecology because it would have been that more dynamic open wooded habitat historically which again really closely replicated the pre-human landscape as far as we understand it with those grazing animals moving through it and driving that dynamism and the changes between open grassland, scrub, treed areas, so rich in wildlife.

What is it about lime?

Perhaps just briefly describe why it happened and how things can bounce back once they're removed.

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 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 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 coppicing 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 But another 30 or 40% 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 any sort of ground flora completely suppressed both by the shade and all of the needle litter 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 hearths 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 seedbed of native woodland species can spring back even after decades of conifer on top.

And might there be some opportunities from that?