The dusty East Anglian desert that became a forest
Take a walk (and maybe even a swim) in the pines, valleys, groves and streams of the largest lowland forest in Britain.
Take a walk (and maybe even a swim) in the pines, valleys, groves and streams of the largest lowland forest in Britain.
THERE ARE SOME AMAZING places where you suddenly have to stop and think to yourself, ‘hang on, this used to be something completely different’. Walking through the upper galleries of Tate Modern, for example, and suddenly remembering it used to be a power station. Cooling your toes in Haweswater and realising that 20ft beneath your feet is a village.
But when it comes to fast and absolute transformations, Thetford Forest is pretty hard to beat. It’s not just that a forest was planted here – that happens a lot, all over the world. It’s what it was planted on, and the scale and speed of the transition. Here, everything changed.
The forest straddles the Suffolk-Norfolk border, with the town of Brandon on its western fringe and Thetford to the east (curiously, Thetford, which is further south, is in Norfolk, while the more northerly Brandon is in Suffolk; geography is just weird sometimes).
Today my walk is taking me from the tiny hamlet of Santon Downham, which is virtually the dead centre of the forest, deep into the pines of Thetford, out to the fringe at Brandon, and back along the gorgeous Little Ouse Valley. It’s a journey through a few hundred years of rapid change.
As I look at it now, Thetford feels like almost any large-scale forest, especially those in the care of Forestry England: it’s well managed, with dedicated walking and cycling trails, a Go Ape adventure site, picturesque picnic and play areas, and a remit to balance commercial forestry with conservation and leisure.
But what separates Thetford from other ‘newborn’ forests like Dalby or Grizedale is the way it over-wrote what was here before, and how that former landscape was itself an over-writing.
To get the bigger picture, we need to zoom out a bit, and see that we’re walking in the heart of a much more ancient region called the Brecks. Originally a continuous sandy heathland, this landscape had already been heavily worked from Neolithic times – mostly flint-mining. But in the Middle Ages it was broken up (the word ‘Brecks’ means ‘broken land’) into tithed parcels for cultivation: rabbit warrening , sheep grazing and yet more flint mining.
This higgledy-piggledy exploitation completely changed the fabric of the Suffolk-Norfolk borderlands. Soils were damaged, irrigation went unmanaged, woodland was stripped away, and flint shafts collapsed at random.
And into every gap came sand. Blown by the wind, with no obstacles in the way, the sand that once underlay the heathland of the Brecks became so dominant that it could block out all visibility when the wind was up. It was an English version of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl; the Brecks were slowly transforming from heath to dune. When the writer and cleric William Gilpin passed through in 1769, he wrote: “Nothing was to be seen on either side but sand and scattered gravel without the least vegetation; a mere African desert.”
Eventually the land became almost completely unprofitable. Farms fell into ruin and the Brecks returned to barely-managed heathland.
So what began the transformation that has led to this green and well-tended landscape I’m walking through now? Ironically, war.
In 1918, at the end of the First World War, Britain needed trees – and fast. England’s supply of timber had been utterly drained in the production of trenches, aeroplanes and buildings. Not only was there a patriotic feeling that England’s nature as a ‘green and pleasant land’ was at risk, but there was also a fear that if another war were to come along, we’d have nothing left to fight it with.
The area around Thetford was immediately identified as a prime planting zone, partly because of low population and a ready workforce, but also because most large rural estates were facing bankruptcy, and could be snapped up cheaply. Planting began in the Twenties, and by 1938 there were over 30 labour camps around Thetford. This was forestry at warp speed.
Sure enough, there was another war. And Thetford was able to provide for it – mainly thanks to the Women’s Land Army (‘the Land Girls’) who stepped in to work and manage the forest when the male workforce was called up.
They trained at a camp at Wordwell on the southern edge of the forest. Officially they were part of the Women’s Timber Corps, but they became known as lumberjills, and they handled every part of timber production. They assessed areas for planting and felling, and carried out felling, snedding (stripping side shoots from a trunk) and crosscutting. They drove tractors and trucks, and ran horse teams and sawmills. Like lumberjills everywhere, they faced prejudice from older farmers who had not been conscripted – but even they had to begrudgingly concede that the lumberjills were just as good at the job as the men they’d replaced.
Lo and behold, today we have Thetford Forest – mature and proud and dripping with history. Fair enough, it might not be the original wild heathland, but it’s the next best thing: a place where wildlife can thrive, kids can play and walkers can walk.
And although it feels dense and close when you’re deep into it, it’s actually full of light: year-round trimming and clearing programs mean the trees have the space they need to thrive, while walkers will happen upon idyllic pockets of open space no matter how deep they venture. The clue is the forest floor: it’s rich and alive, despite that primeval heathiness, and sunlight can get down to it. An over-dense forest has a dead floor which muffles all sound and turns your footsteps into weird, dead thuds, and all you’ll see is pine needles. Thetford’s floor has flora and fauna galore.
My walk takes me up to High Lodge, which as the name suggests is one of the highest points in the forest – although don’t get too excited, as it barely scratches the 50m contour line. High Lodge is the hub of Thetford’s visitor offering, with its café and playgrounds and picnic areas and performance spaces. (Thetford’s open-air gigs have hosted the likes of Madness, Pulp, Steps and Ed Sheeran.)
But if all the hubbub isn’t to your liking, it doesn’t take long to walk away and re-immerse yourself in the trees. But do get an ice cream first, especially if it’s a day like this.
Navigation in the forest is easy; there are waymarked trails for one thing. But if you’re doing a longer walk like mine, it’s pretty clear where the rights of way are, and even when there aren’t any,
“The Little Ouse is a gem of a river, and its clear skies and open waters make it the perfect contrast to the close, whispery trees.” world of the
you can follow the forest’s block-like system of firebreaks to get to where you want to be.
And at some point, just stop. The Japanese call it shinrin yoku, or forest bathing, but whatever you decide to call it, the experience of stopping and lying still in a forest, staring up at the canopy
(or just closing your eyes) is something special. Overhead, you’ll see that the treetops stop short of each other, just as they do in a ‘natural’ woodland, to allow the sunlight in to where you are.
For the return leg, I want to explore the biggest natural feature of the forest’s 47,000 acres: the Little Ouse Valley. This great scythe in the forest carries its titular river north-westwards from Thetford to Brandon. While still part of the forest, the valley is far less densely planted, and its clear skies and open waters make it the perfect contrast to the close, whispery world of the trees. A riverside path accompanies it all the way.
The Little Ouse is an absolute gem of a river, and it’s magnificently swimmable. A calm, shallow river with a soft, reedy bed, it’s perfect for a cooling dip when summer’s at its height. (Another one for fans of geographical quirks: the Little Ouse rises right next to the River Waveney near Redgrave, but while the Waveney runs east on an obvious course towards the coast, the Little Ouse goes west, meandering inland until it joins the Great Ouse at Littleport near Ely.)
It’s the perfect end to a walk in this transformed landscape, which was once described as a desert and has gone from heath to Breck to dune to forest, and which today, in all likelihood, looks prettier and healthier than it ever has before.
The writer Alan Watts said: “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
In the wonderful world of Thetford Forest, that’s exactly what you should do.