Myths of the Forest

Myths of the Forest Tim Little & Pete Byfield It’s a well-known fact that most of the older trees in Epping Forest are pollards. Stretching back into Anglo-Saxon times, pollarding was universal under a system that has been called wood-pasture. Fuel wood was lopped, supposedly on a cycle of around 14 years, well out of reach from cattle and deer grazing on the rough pasture below. Before this regime became established, the Forest was lime wildwood. When the Corporation of London became responsible for the Forest in 1878, they promptly suppressed all further pollarding and went on to thin many ‘mops on sticks’ with the ambition of achieving, eventually, a ‘proper’ forest of regular trees; naturalists and forest managers alike regarded pollards with distain. But then, a hundred years later, at a pioneering and persuasive conference held in the new Field Study Centre at High Beach, a fresh generation of naturalists proclaimed that pollarding was an essential prerequisite for restoring the Forest’s fast-falling biodiversity. A display panel from the Epping Forest Information Centre (above) sums up the current Received Wisdom - coppicing in Epping Forest was, at most, a marginal activity. Pollarding prevailed. 1 For some years, the Corporation of London studiously ignored these claims until, eventually, they saw the light. After a few false starts, when veteran beech were given perfunctory and often fatal military haircuts, arboricultural science has prevailed. As such, the Corporation has carried out a careful program of wood-pasture restoration, accelerated of late by substantial Lottery funding. This is now one of the largest and most ambitious habitat restoration programs in the country. While celebrating the achievement, this paper suggests a few quibbles with the underlying history. These can be summarised as follows: 1. Pollarding in Epping Forest on a substantial scale was a Tudor innovation. Coppicing was normal until coal, legislation promoting longer coppice enclosures and the decline of royal forest institutions brought about gradual change. Even so, large parts of the Forest were routinely coppiced well into Victorian times. 2. Provision of browse for deer and cattle was a primary purpose of royal forest management, along with the production of fuel wood. This was achieved by the disciplined enclosure of coppices after cutting, followed by access for cattle when the springwood became sufficiently robust. Live browse in the form of leaves and buds complimented rough grazing outside the coppices and rich lammas meadows in the river valleys below. 3. Epping Forest was deliberately re-stocked with beech and hornbeam in the early Roman period to sustain Londinium’s fuel requirements. Today’s legacy of complex multi-stemmed clonal groups is the result of coppicing these planted trees over many centuries 4. The notion that pre-Roman Epping Forest Tilia cordata represents ‘wildwood’ is highly improbable. Reasons for Revising Epping Forest History Leaves on The Trees For folk fascinated by woodland history, but appalled at prospects of deciphering hieroglyphs on remnants of dead sheep in silent, sunless rooms, there’s good news. The most useful piece of historical research in relation to Epping Forest is a pleasant stroll through picturesque beech woods on sunny days in springtime; accompanying dogs, human friends and picnics are optional. All that’s needed is observation. Epping Forest beech trees change from winter senescence to full summer leaf at different times. The transition itself is a matter of a few days, depending on the weather, but individual trees have widely varied start times. During the past three years commencement of ‘leaf break’ has varied from mid- March and on into early May. Synchronous leaf-break tends to be clustered and these clusters stand out in sharp distinction to others around. There can be coincidence whereby adjacent clusters happen to be at almost the same stage, but absolute synchronisation is quite exceptional. Very quickly, it’s possible to establish a close link between synchronous leaf break and proximity of the kind that might be expected from former coppice stools. 2 Left: Leaf Break on one small multi-stemmed cluster well ahead of neighbours. Right: Subtle nuances of green suggest separate clonal groups. There are, literally, thousands of these clusters to be found in Epping Forest and the only likely explanation, in all but a small percentage of aberrant examples, is genetically identical clonal groups. This congruence between clusters of multi-stemmed beech, synchronous leaf break and single genetic identity has been confirmed by Tim Little. DNA was extracted from dormant buds on a large potential beech stool near Dulsmead Hollow; a typical community of ancient beech. Analysis using microsatellite markers enabled the identification of multiple stems as clonal. For ease this specimen was affectionately named “Belinda”. The reason for emphasising a personal presence is the difficulty of capturing on camera what’s obvious to the naked eye. It’s easy to stand in the centre of these clusters and take an upward canopy shot, but although this will, almost invariably, show surrounding stems at the same leaf- break stage, this doesn’t depict the sharp contrast with surrounding clusters. Once again, Tim Little has organised overhead pictures using a drone; they portray the situation to perfection. In our opinion, the only probable explanation for this phenomenon is that the multi-stemmed clonal groups are derived from ancient coppice stools. Typically, the stools vary from 3 to 6 meters at their longest diameter; there’s a tendency towards a lozenge shape rather than a circle but this isn’t invariable. There are numerous instances of what we’ve termed ‘elephants feet’ around the base of some single-stemmed trees and there are many more to be found in and around large clonal groups. We believe these are derived from thinning and ‘storing’ operations carried out by the Corporation’s earliest conservation programme. Many single beech trees exhibit epicormic growth of a kind rarely, if ever, seen in maiden trees. Various alternative theories, other than derivation from ancient coppice stools, have been put forward to explain the multi-stemmed beech in Epping Forest. One young researcher, Rosy Mansfield, proposed fairies as a causal mechanism but she has now revoked this promising theory. ‘Bundle planting’ was advocated until recently, but this doesn’t stand up against synchronous leaf- break. Very recently, some expert opinion has suggested clonal groups created by individual veteran trees that have expanded via suckers or self-layering growth habits; while admitting that layering is theoretically possible in exceptional cases, we don’t believe such explanations are consistent with the sheer number of clonal clusters, their distribution or the separate archival evidence for ancient Epping Forest management. 3 Left: An exceptionally early leaf break at Dulsmead Hollow; surrounding clusters still dormant. Right: A drone shot of “Belinda”, the multi-stemmed cluster at Dulsmead Hollow used for DNA analysis. Above: This is “Belinda” (see above right) at ground level. DNA analysis suggests these stems constitute a single genetic individual. 4 Thinning Mops on Sticks In the early 1880’s, the Conservators embarked on a vast programme of thinning the ‘mops on sticks’ they had inherited under the 1878 Epping Forest Act. The instigators were Thomas Fowell Buxton and Edward Buxton, with energy and impetus from the second Forest superintendent, Major Alexander McKenzie. In the mid-1890’s, it was suggested that a quarter million trees had been felled, and this wasn’t disputed at the time. The programme tapered off into the new century, but wood gangs were still doing less systematic thinning in the 1970’s. After a torrent of criticism in press and at public meetings, early thinning was moderated and divided into successive stages; most parts of the Forest received three visitations in the 19thC. Hornbeam were a special target and the survival rate for multi-stemmed hornbeam is considerably lower than beech. The Conservators were concerned that these ‘mutants’ not only inhibited ‘healthy new growth’ but also harboured disease. Beech didn’t escape the attention of Major McKenzie and his men, but thinning was more constrained. The overall ambition of thinning was to eradicate the worst excesses of former lopping and provide a long-term framework for a ‘proper’ high canopy forest without blemish in the future. For a while, the Conservators had the opposition of the Essex Field Club, but there emerged a consensus between Conservators and Naturalists, based entirely on aesthetic grounds. Left: An exceptional hornbeam stool that escaped “storing” (singling) by the early Conservators; proximity to Ching Brook probably preserved it. Right: “Elephants Feet” legacy of former thinning and subsequent browse suppression. Boundaries Epping Forest is a recent innovation; the name wasn’t recorded until the 17thC. By then, what we know as Epping Forest was half of Waltham Forest; the other half being Hainault Forest, on the east side of the River Roding. Waltham Forest was a single legal entity; although sub-divided into smaller parcels known as ‘Walks’, there was only one Verderers Court. This Waltham Forest shouldn’t be confused with the modern London Borough of that name! Neither should be confused with another Waltham Forest that existed up until Forest reorganisation in the 15thC. In medieval times, what became Waltham Forest was administered as three distinct and separate legal entities, corresponding to the Hundred boundaries of that time. They were 5 Waltham Forest, Becontree and Ongar. Each of them had their own Verderers Court and most of the other paraphernalia of a medieval royal forest – juries, regarders, agisters, court stewards and a tribe of other officials who may, or may not, have done useful things. The only apparent exception was that The Forest of Waltham, by far the smallest, seems in practise to have shared the offices of ‘Regarder’ with Ongar.

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