The Larch Descending

Woodlands and forestry estates must be managed - fact.  One expects to see logging work going on in the vast tracts of commercially grown forests of our country. That is, after all, why the trees were planted in those horrid serried ranks in the first place - to be grown and eventually harvested for their timber value.

It came as a shock to me however as I rode along the woodland tracks from Wootton Courtenay into the Holnicote Estate a few weeks back, to find that I suddenly no longer recognised where I was. The ancient oak, beech, holly and birch-filled woods give way to about 20 hectares of larch plantation just above Luccombe. Lovely quiet timberlands full of flora and fauna and wild things of all kinds - but it has all gone.

I'd heard the sound of the logging operation and thought little of it until I saw for myself the absolute devastation of the forest all across the hillside.  Great trees, forty years old, 50 metres tall, had been felled in their hundreds: no thinning out here, this was total wipe-out. The woodland tracks were now heathland rides, out in the open, exposed to bright sunlight and high wind and rainfall that used to be filtered by the branches of the larches.

I rode the tracks carefully, letting Hoss pick his way over stripped branches and matchwood chippings, hunting for landmarks, for turnings and undulations I used to know so well.  Here one would let Hoss gallop on, here one must slow down as the corner is too sharp, here one can leave the track to jump a fallen trunk.  The pine-forest scent of the resins and sap from so many felled trees was overpowering.

All the familiarity had been cut down or uprooted and dragged away to towering logstacks. The paths had been churned to black mud by the weight of the vast logging vehicles as they plundered through the plantation. It looked like irresponsible annihilation of an area of outstanding natural beauty. It looked like commercial vandalism.

It was, in fact, a desperate attempt to eradicate a dreadful tree disease - phytophthora ramorum - that has swept across the country allegedly from Cornwall, killing larches and devastating plantations in its own right.  It could be as destructive, unchecked, as the Dutch Elm Disease of the last century.

So, awful as it looks now, this ravaged, scarred landscape has been made so for a clear purpose. Only by destroying the infected trees might the disease possibly be contained and controlled. The National Trust apparently has plans: eventually to replant the area as mixed woodland or maybe to leave it all open to the elements and let heathland rule again.

Either way, all is not lost. Nature will help, of course, working her magic on the ruin of the plantation.  By next spring, all sorts of new growth will have pushed up through the blasted heath, beetles and bugs and birds will have made homes from the new flattened habitat. Life will go on - just a different life from the one before. And where there is life, there is hope.