Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Clear to see Exmoor not best place to grow trees
Bridgwater and West Somerset Conservative MP Ian Liddell-Grainger is not so shocked by a new survey as those commissioning it evidently anticipated, he tells Defra Secretary George Eustice
DEAR George, I daresay like me you find a pretty well-incessant flow of emails from various interest groups piling up in your inbox, all clamouring for a few moments of your valuable time.
I am particularly afflicted on matters pertaining to rural issues and while I welcome every opportunity to keep my finger on the pulse of life in the countryside and within its various activities, sometimes the slightest feeling of exasperation is allowed to cloud my view.
Such, indeed, was the case recently when I received a communication from OVO, the energy people, revealing the “greenest areas of the country to live” assessed on the basis of tree cover as observed in a recent aerial survey it carried out.
And which informed me that “surprisingly” Exmoor National Park is one of the least leafiest areas of the kingdom with a tree canopy cover of only 0.71 per cent.
Initially I was at a loss as to what to do. Should I reply and say the information has startled me because the last time I checked, the moor was one solid mass of trees from Stoke Pero to South Molton? Should I ring the police and report that someone has had it away with Exmoor’s arboreal assets in the vain hope (against what experience would suggest) that the matter would be investigated?
After all, OVO was apparently treating this as a serious matter.
“This is unfortunate for your constituency,” I was told (in tones with a faint undercurrent of menace of the kind I haven’t encountered since some of my school reports) “as trees are integral to improving air quality, promoting biodiversity and connecting communities with nature.”
Quite so. Couldn’t agree more. You won’t find a bigger tree enthusiast
than ILG even if you go hunting for one with a terrier and a torch.
On the other hand I thought I might just point out to OVO that the reason Exmoor has so little tree cover compared with the examples such as Surrey (31 per cent covered) I was offered by way of comparison is that most of Exmoor being high, wet, exposed and blessed with only poor soils, is a quite unsuitable location for trees to grow and thrive.
Which is why the trees themselves have naturally confined themselves to the valleys, those with the misfortune to be growing on the higher slopes only aspiring to stunted and deformed growth what with the wind whistling through their branches pretty well incessantly.
Aside from the beech hedges, most
of which have a 45-degree list to starboard as a result of the aforesaid wind, only conifers survive up there – and the last time there were any plans for large-scale plantations on the high moor the locals quite rightly got upset and formed the Exmoor Society (which survives and thrives, I am pleased to report) to stop it.
I’m surprised OVO didn’t produce further and better particulars for their accusation and point out that the old maps refer to ‘Exmoor Forest’ so obviously the place was wooded in the past: a point I would have rebutted by pointing out that ‘forest’ was the term for a royal hunting ground (e.g. New Forest) rather than an area which was wall-to-wall wood.
I seem to recall that it was always
held that there was but one proper tree within the ‘forest’, the so-called Hoar Oak which lay on the boundary line and was such a miserable, wizened, weather-beaten specimen that anyone encountering it was immediately gripped by an urge to go back and get a blanket to wrap round it.
Anyway I note that huge treeplantings are now being proposed as our latest gesture (for alas in a country of our size it can be no more) towards mitigating the effects of climate change but that the greens have announced that they have no wish to afforest the high moors.
Just as well, really, because the trees might have other ideas about growing there.