4 things you didn’t know about Forestry England
It turns out there’s plenty more to entice a 1000-miler than decent tracks and the smell of pine needles…
AS YOU PLOT ideas for beautiful spots to rack up your 1000 miles this year, a good place to start might be the country’s largest landowner. Forestry England have 1500 forests in which you’re free to walk, explore and remove yourself from a world of noise, concrete and chaos for a while.
And if you believe once you’ve seen one forest you’ve seen them all, you may be surprised to discover how different perception and reality can be, especially when you read facts like these...
1 Forestry England plant more broadleaf species than conifer species
Gone are the days of single-species forests. Last year Forestry England planted 35 broadleaf species, compared to 30 types of conifer. Much of this is to do with future-proofing and finding species more suitable to the warmer conditions we’ll expect over the next 30 or so years.
Therefore, you’ll see more redwood, maple and cedar on your forest excursions, as well as native species that are tolerant to pests.
In Alice Holt Forest in Hampshire, for instance, they’re growing oak trees from seeds sourced in the Loire Valley in France which can withstand warmer temperatures. Pleasant Forest in Kent, meanwhile, is an entirely new woodland featuring a whole range of conifers, broadleaves shrubs, wildflowers and ponds.
At the other end of the scale, Forestry England are also responsible for ancient forests, such as Savernake in Wiltshire and Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire. In the part of Sherwood Forest known as Birklands there are more than 200 veteran oak trees, some of which are 1000 years old, and Forestry England take care of these too.
2 A fifth of Forestry England land isn’t forest at all
Almost 20 percent is ‘open habitat’ – land primarily for wildlife, such as heathland, peat moors and wetland. Compared to a 43 percent national average, 89 percent of Forestry England’s lowland heathland is in the best state possible. And 77 percent of their upland bogs are also at this level, compared to just 11 percent nationwide.
This means if you venture to the likes of Delamere Forest in Cheshire and New Forest in Hampshire you’ll experience places that are not just lovely, but also thriving ecosystems. In Delamere, bogs that had been around since the Ice Age are being restored to their original state and, subsequently, the wildlife is returning. In New Forest, the natural bends in streams are being restored, creating bogs where rare plants can thrive.
In fact, Forestry England’s land is home to more than half of England’s most threatened species, including red squirrels and water voles – creatures that might be the highlight of a walk, if you’re lucky enough to spot one.
3 Forestry England have reintroduced wildlife not seen for hundreds of years
It’s not just rare species that are well looked after, but new ones too (or old ones, depending on how you look at it!). Forestry England forests are often selected as appropriate rewilding sites. If you walk around the Isle of Wight, for instance, you might see a white-tailed eagle soaring above your head – a sight that was lost for 240 years until the Forestry England helped reintroduce it in 2019.
If you keep your eyes peeled in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, you could spot a pine marten – previously as good as extinct in England. And if you
wander through Northumberland’s Kielder Forest, you might be lucky enough to spy an osprey swooping down to the surface of Kielder Water to catch a fish, after the species returned in 2009 following a 200-year absence.
4 They help to save critically endangered conifers
You could be forgiven, when seeing the vast forests of Scandinavia and northern Canada, that conifer trees are doing just fine. They’ve been around for 300 million years, after all. But a third of species are actually threatened in the wild – and in some cases there are just a handful left.
Forestry England have an amazing place in Kent called Bedgebury National Pinetum, which has the largest collection of conifer species in the world. It also germinates conifer seeds in its tree nursery and grows more than 2000 trees and shrubs each year, helping to keep some of the world’s rarest conifers alive. Serbian spruce is one such example – staff at Bedgebury abseiled down cliffs to grab cones from wild trees before planting more than 200 at the pinetum. Wollemi pine, meanwhile, was only discovered in 1994 in a remote Australian canyon. The few that exist in the wild were almost wiped out by wildfires in 2020, but luckily Forestry England have planted specimens at Bedgebury and in Westonbirt, The National Arboretum in Gloucestershire.