Guy Shrubsole

The campaigner saving the rainforest.

Britain’s rainforest, that is. Temperate rainforest, which thrives in the damp climes of the nation’s west. Its most famous example is Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor (pictured), where you walk among ancient twisted oaks velveted with moss and spun with lichens, and polypody ferns spring from the branches. It’s so green, so lush, it’s like stepping into a bottle garden.

It’s estimated 1.5 millions acres of this magical habitat once grew in Britain, but most of it fell to Bronzeage axes, later industry and the march of conifer plantation. What’s left is precious and last year Guy Shrubsole launched a campaign to crowdsource locations of the surviving fragments. The response was phenomenal – see the map at lostrainforestsofbritain.org

Once identified, the idea is they can be protected, and expanded too, by implementing measures like ending overgrazing on the surrounding land to encourage natural regeneration.

Lustleigh Cleave, also on Dartmoor, shows how what was once bare rock – captured in a painting in 1820 – can turn to dense forest.

But the success of those measures depends on who owns the land, which is another subject Guy has spent years researching. In 2019 he published Who owns England: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back, and he calculates that half of England is owned by 1% of the population, and that just 124 people own 60% of the deep peat, and 1000 landowners a third of the woodland – two of our biggest carbon sinks. It matters, because it leaves the fate of climate mitigation policies in the countryside, and also our access to that land, in the hands of a very small cohort. Find out more at whoownsengland.org

WALK HERE: Download routes at Wistman’s Wood and Lustleigh Cleave from walk1000miles.co.uk/ bonusroutes