A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside

BRITAIN’S REGAL FORESTS

Successive monarchs increased the number of Royal Forests, and at the time of the Magna Carta, in 1215, there were 143 in England, with equally as many in Wales and slightly more in Scotland. This equated to a third of the land mass, and they were run by a vicious system which had now become intensely unpopular and much abused. The final straw came in 1204, when King john, who was desperately short of money, announced that the entire county of Devon was to become a Royal Forest and only agreed to disafforest the region, with the exception of the existing Royal Forests of Dartmoor and Exmoor, in exchange for an enormous payment. This monumental piece of land grabbing contributed to the Barons’ Revolt and, ultimately, the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215 and the Carta de Foresta in 1217. Under the Carta de Foresta, much of the land that had been extended outside the royal demesnes during the reigns of King John, King Richard and Henry II was disafforested and many of the more draconian Forest Laws were relaxed. For example, all men who had been outlawed for offences against Royal Forests since the reign of Henry II were pardoned, and poaching venison ceased to be a capital or mutilating offence.

Apart from the venison and value of selling franchises, resources available to a monarch from his Royal Forests varied from region to region. He owned the mineral rights and the trees on roughly half the Royal Forests, but it must be remembered that Royal Forests were game parks, chosen for the habitat which provided cover and a diversity of grazing for venison. Some forests, such as the Forest of Dean and the New Forest, were heavily wooded, but a large proportion of the 25,000 hectares of physical Royal Forests was wood pasture, heath, hill and marsh. In the early years of Norman rule, timber from some of the forests was used for building the various royal residences that were spread across the country or donated as gifts, often to religious orders. For several centuries, efforts were made to coppice underwood and grow mature standards, in forests such as Cranborne and Grovely in Wiltshire, Wychwood in Oxfordshire, Hatfield in Essex, Rockingham in Northamptonshire and the New Forest on a commercial basis, but the Crown’s interest in managing them gradually diminished and many were sold off, or reverted to ordinary common and wood pasture run by the landowner.

SUCCESSIVE MONARCHS INCREASED THE NUMBER OF ROYAL FORESTS, AND AT THE TIME OF THE MAGNA CARTA, IN 1215, THERE WERE 143 IN ENGLAND, WITH EQUALLY AS MANY IN WALES AND SLIGHTLY MORE IN SCOTLAND. THIS EQUATED TO A THIRD OF THE LAND MASS …

Charles I disastrously attempted to revive the Forest Laws over land belonging to others, in the hope that they would pay to have them lifted, as King John had done 400 years previously with the people of Devon. This colossal act of folly hastened the Civil War and lost him the support of many landowners. William III introduced large-scale planting schemes in the remaining Crown forests to provide a future supply of oak for the Navy, with little success as the land was generally unsuitable for trees and, in the case of the New Forest, most of the saplings were uprooted in the great storm of 1703.

Many forests were transformed out of all recognition during the Acts of Enclosure in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when landowners were empowered to reclaim wood pasture and heath for agricultural purposes, regardless of the rights of the commoners or the Crown. In the ten years between 1779 and 1789, 4,000 hectares of Sherwood Forest were lost to enclosure and, in 1779, the larger part of Epping Forest. When Enfield Chase was also enclosed in 1779, a portion was allotted to the villagers of Enfield in compensation for the loss of their common rights, and even this was reduced to a measly ten hectares in 1803. The ancient Forest of Needwood in Staffordshire was enclosed in 1802, inspiring Anna Seward, otherwise known as the ‘Swan of Lichfield’, to write her poem ‘The Fall of Needwood Forest’ in 1808:

When Poesy, the Child of Zeal,Who soothes each Pang, that Earth can feel,Beheld, atwounded Nature’scall,That Scene of Horror, Needwood’s FallShe said, in haste to yield Relief,And calm the Mighty Mother’s Grief:

Nature! dear Parent! Power divine!Whose Joys and Griefs are truly mine!To you my sympathy devotesMy cheerful, and my plaintive Notes:

With Feelings not to be supprest,I view your lacerated Breast;This Waste of Ravages! where floodYour Sylvan Wealth! Tour graceful WoodI cannot from the rifled EarthCall intosudden, second Birth.

Large parts of Windsor Forest were enclosed in 1817; in 1857 Wychwood Forest was enclosed, and within two years over 800 hectares had been converted to farmland. The Forest of Dean and the New Forest suffered from a different form of enclosure. In the Dean, 4,500 hectares were enclosed for planting in 1814, denying owners of common rights access to their historical grazings and causing extreme hardship to those whose livelihoods depended on them. The situation became nasty in 1831 when around 2,000 commoners started to tear down the enclosure and troops had to be summoned from the garrison in Doncaster to quell the riot. Resistance soon crumbled, and although their leader, Warren James, was transported to the harsh penal colony in Tasmania, the commoners’ action led to their rights being ratified under the Dean Forest Act in 1838.

In Hampshire, thousands of acres of oaks and Scots pines were planted in the New Forest, from 1808 until 1877, in an attempt to develop commercial woodland. The New Forest Act 1877 put a stop to the damage that had previously been done to the forest and decreed that no more old natural woodland trees were to be felled, they regulated common rights, and reconstituted the Court of Verderers. The Court of Swainscote and Attachment of the New Forest, better known as the Verderers’ Court, meets roughly once a month at the Verderers’ Hall in the Queen’s House at Lyndhurst and is open to the public. The Court comprises the Official Verderer, a statutory appointment made by Her Majesty the Queen, who acts as chairman. Five elected Verderers represent the Commoners, and four appointed Verderers represent the Forestry Commission, DEFEA, the National Park Authority and Natural England. Five Agisters, who wear a livery on formal occasions of green hunting coat, breeches and boots, are employed by the Verderers; their role is to watch over the Forest and ensure, by regular inspection on foot, vehicle and horseback, that the owners of common grazing stock, and others, meet the requirements of the Verderers in respect of stock welfare and payment of making fees. In addition, they must inform the Verderers of any possible breaches of the Verderers’ byelaw; attend road accidents and other incidents involving commoners’ stock; deal with injured animals at the scene and humanely destroy them if necessary; arrange and manage the seasonal rounding up of ponies and cattle, and organise the construction and maintenance of stock pounds or layerages within their area.

Delightfully, court proceedings start exactly as they have done for the last 800 years, with the senior Agister rising to his feet, holding his right hand aloft and bawling:’ Oyezf Oyezf Oyez! All manner of persons who have any presentment or matter or thing to do at this Court of Swaincote let him come forward and he shall be heard! God Save the it yeen!’ The Verderers of the Forest of Dean meet every forty days or so in the courtroom of the seventeenth-century Speech House. This beautiful building in the middle of the forest which was originally a hunting lodge and, later, the administrative centre for the forest is now a hotel. The Steward of the Forest and three Verderers who make up the court are appointed by the Crown, retain administrative functions and act as intermediaries between the commoners, the local public and the Forestry Commission – who manage the woodland.

The impact of Royal Forests on Anglo-Norman society and their significant place in the history of Britain has created the false impression that these islands were covered in woodland from Cornwall to Caithness. In fact, although the Saxons probably increased the area of farmland as their population increased and managed the woodland fairly intensively near settlements, the landscape remained largely unchanged during their 600 years of occupation. In 1086, about 15 per cent of England was woodland managed as mixed coppice and standards of different ages or pollarded wood pasture, 65 per cent was farmland, and the remainder was mountain, moor, heath or fen. An aerial view of Britain in the eleventh century would have shown bare mountains above the tree line, especially in the north and in Wales. There were miles of scrubby sessile oaks and birch trees, sparsely wooded heaths and wood pasture, marshes and wetlands, and coastal fishing communities and wooded river valleys with clusters of settlements and farmsteads appeared where woodland had been cleared. Across the Midlands, there was a great band of coterminous woods, sufficient, so it was said, to enable a red squirrel to cross England from the Severn to the Wash without once setting foot on the ground.

‘IMPROVING’ BRITAIN’S NATIVE WOODLAND

The idea of planting specifically for timber only occurred in the late seventeenth century and was largely influenced by the publication in 1664 of Sylva, A Discourse of Forest Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions by John Evelyn, the diarist, keen horticulturist and founder member of the Royal Society. Evelyn had been horrified by the wanton destruction of woodland during the Civil War and the mismanagement during the years of Cromwell’s Protectorate, when many Royalist landowners, such as the Reresbys of Thryberg, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, were forced to destroy extensive stands of hardwood to pay fines imposed by Cromwell. Evelyn believed, erroneously, that woodland in Britain was in terminal decline due in part to the depradations of the previous twenty years, but also from the demands of various industries, such as iron, house and ship building. A Discourse of Forest Trees was addressed primarily to the Lords of the Admiralty as a warning of impending timber shortages and advocated an immediate policy of woodland planting. It is surprising, considering his family fortune was based on charcoal and the manufacture of gunpowder, that Evelyn failed to recognize the historical evidence that industry had been responsible for sustaining our woodlands, rather than destroying them. Nor did he appear to appreciate that felling broadleaved trees does not kill them, and provided they are protected from browsing, areas of clear felled woodland will self-regenerate in a matter of years.

EVELYN BELIEVED, ERRONEOUSLY, THAT WOODLAND IN BRITAIN WAS IN TERMINAL DECLINE DUE IN PART TO THE DEPRIVATIONS OF THE PREVIOUS TWENTY YEARS, BUT ALSO FROM THE DEMANDS OF VARIOUS INDUSTRIES, SUCH AS IRON, HOUSE AND SHIP BUILDING.

Throughout history, nearly all clearance of woodland has been for agriculture and, up until the industrial revolution, industries relied on coppiced woodland for fuel. The great woodlands of the Weald had already been supplying fuel for the local iron industry for a thousand years before its heyday in the sixteenth century, when over fifty blast furnaces and sixty forges were churning out cannons for the Tudor wars, and could never have survived unless they had been managed as coppice. The same was true of the other mining areas, such as the Merthyr and Ebbw valleys in Wales or the Forest of Dean. It was in the agricultural areas such as East Anglia, the Midlands, the flatlands of north Humberside, the Vale of York or the coastal lowlands of Scotland where woodlands were almost completely destroyed. To quote Dr Rackham, ‘the survival of almost any large tract of woodland suggests that there has been an industry to protect it against the claims of farmers’. A Discourse of Forest Trees influenced many landowners, including King Charles II, and is now regarded by historians as being responsible for much of the disinformation about trees that is still current today.

In contradiction of the accepted policy of mixed woodland management, John Evelyn advised landlords to make extensive new plantations of only one or two species together. Beech was widely planted throughout Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the beech plantations in the Chilterns are an example of traditional coppice woodland and wood pastures being sacrificed to the needs of the furniture industry. In other areas, landlords greatly increased their oak woods or followed the fashion for sycamore, hybrid poplar, wych elm, hornbeam or conifers.

Evelyn was a great supporter of ‘exotics’, as conifers were referred to, and considerable quantities of Norway spruce, silver fir and European larch were planted in the eighteenth century. The plantation movement was very active in Ireland, where plantings were ordered by statute, and in Scotland. Between 1738 and 1830, successive Dukes of Atholl – ‘the planting Dukes’ – planted X] million conifers, many of them European larches grown from seed sent over from the Austrian Tyrol, in the bare hills of their estate at Blair Atholl, in Perthshire. So obsessed was the fourth Duke with plastering the countryside in trees that he is reputed to have established conifers on the inaccessible slopes of Chreag Bhearnach, a jagged mountain overlooking Dunkeld, by firing canvas bags of seed at it through a cannon. One of the original trees grown from Tyrolean seedlings has survived – the Parent Larch, planted near the west end of Dunkeld Cathedral, which is the ancestor of many of the trees seen today on the Atholl estates.

During the Parliamentary Enclosure Acts, passed between 1750 to 1860, the landscape changed out of all recognition when 21 per cent of land in Britain was enclosed, thousands of miles of stone walls were built and quick-set hedging planted as stock-proof field boundaries. It was common practice to plant saplings of oak, ash, beech, elm or other hardwood species, which were allowed to mature undisturbed among the body of hedging plants. These were deliberately left either as a source of future timber, as boundary markers or, in some cases, to act as a pointer which ploughmen could use to make a straight furrow, and it is in old hedgerows that some of most impressive native hardwoods can still be found.

This was the era of the great agricultural improvers, such as Coke of Holkham in Norfolk, Bakewell of Dishley Grange in Leicestershire, Christie of Glynde in Sussex and Graham of Balgowan in Perthshire, all of whom had travelled extensively in Europe and studied farming practices in Holland and Flanders, the most agriculturally advanced countries on the Continent at the time. The Dutch and Flemish were experts at planting woodland to protect crops and livestock or to prevent soil erosion, particularly on exposed sandy ground. Hundreds of acres of Scots pine ‘hedges’ were planted in the Brecklands of East Anglia with Scots, Corsican or maritime pine woods planted around the Norfolk coast and parts of Lancashire, to consolidate the sand dunes and reduce soil erosion in the adjacent farmland. Establishing shelterbelts or small areas of mixed woodland became an additional part of the hedge-planting policy on virtually every farm in the country and there were now species which would grow at almost any altitude and soil type. Behind the steading here at our farm there is a shelterbelt, presumably planted in 1825 when the buildings were put up, containing larch, Scots pine, oak, ash, Norway spruce and beech, which is fairly typical of this part of the Borders.

During the agricultural depression which followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars, more woodland was planted as long-term investments on poor-quality arable areas. These woods and wooded strips provided an ideal habitat for a whole range of wild bird life, and pheasants in particular, where trees had been planted to protect crops. By 1830, the percussion cap – fulminate of mercury contained in a small brass cylinder – had replaced flintlock and priming powder as the ignition system in shotguns. This enabled sportsmen to shoot game on the wing for the first time and in any weather. It was only a matter of time before guns discovered that pheasants were most effectively shot when driven from one cover to another, and within ten years landowners were developing existing woodlands and sighting new ones specifically for driven shooting. In those days, woodland bare of underbrush was often planted with snowberries, laurels and rhododendrons, still seen in many old woods, to provide cover for game birds.

FOR A NUMBER OF REASONS, COPPICING BEGAN A GRADUAL DECLINE FROM THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY. ONE WAS THE TREND TOWARDS GROWING MORE STANDARD TREES FOR THE PRODUCTION OF TIMBER … ANOTHER WAS THE DEMANDS OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION FOR A MORE EFFICIENT FUEL SOURCE.

For a number of reasons, coppicing began a gradual decline from the early nineteenth century. One was the trend towards growing more standard trees for the production of timber, following the fashion for new plantations which had been started by Evelyn’s Discourse of Forest Trees. Another was the demands of the industrial revolution for a more efficient fuel source, with charcoal and firewood rapidly being replaced by coal and coke. Without a market for charcoal, commercial coppicing continued, but on a reduced scale, with many woods neglected or coppiced on a much longer rotation.

The plantation movement did little to meet Britain’s timber requirements, and with our industrial cities sprouting like mushrooms, we became increasingly reliant on timber supplies from overseas. By the beginning of the twentieth century about 90 per cent of all timber and forest products were imported softwoods from Scandinavia and Canada. The danger of an island depending on such a high percentage of any commodities became apparent during the First World War, when the German naval blockade prevented imports of food, fuel, timber and other necessities getting through. Over the four years, about 200,000 hectares of assorted domestic woodland had to be felled to meet the requirements of the mining industry and to supply materials for the trenches. The perceived need to rebuild and maintain a strategic timber reserve led to the Forestry Act 1919, and the establishment of a Forestry Commission responsible for woods in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The Commission had wide-ranging powers to acquire land, develop afforestation and encourage private landowners to plant trees by offering grant aid. Land was cheap during the post-war agricultural depression, and by 1939 the Commission had acquired 38,000 hectares, about a third of which had been planted with blocks of fast-growing, closely packed, single-species conifers. These hideous plantations, sprawling across the landscape with no regard for variations in terrain or local features, were only the beginning of the greatest act of vandalism ever perpetrated on these islands.

Much more damaging to the landscape and remaining semi-natural woodlands of Britain were the ridiculous agricultural and forestry policies implemented immediately after World War II and in the following forty years. In 1939, the Commission forests were still too young to provide workable timber and a further 200,000 hectares of private woodland was cut down to meet demand. Much of this was hardwood which would have regrown if left to its own devices, but the overall shortage of domestic timber and the threat to ‘peace in our time’ posed by communism led to a blinkered policy of conifer planting on a massive scale. ‘Large-scale systematic forestry,’ enthused the government, ‘is necessary for the welfare and safety of Britain.’ Simultaneously, there was assumed to be an urgent need to increase food production and grants were directed at hedgerow and small woodland clearance to maximise agricultural land use.

With productive land at a premium, Forestry Commission planting focused on marginal upland districts, hill and moorland, most of it totally unsuitable for growing trees. Vast areas of beautiful, wild open spaces became filled with dark, regimented, forbidding conifer plantations, displacing isolated farming communities and engulfing many semi-natural woodlands. I remember being taken by my father, on one of his monthly visits to the family farms in Northumberland, to watch the planting of a big area of hill above Stannersburn and thinking how strange it looked, as a caterpillar tractor dragging a huge Cuthbertson plough gouged black lines through the green fields in front of an abandoned farmhouse. Today the Forestry Commission manages 7,720 square kilometres of land in Great Britain; 60 per cent is in the hills of Scotland, particularly the Highlands, western Borders and Galloway; 26 per cent in England, including Kielder Forest, which covers 650 square kilometres; with the remainder in Wales. Dr Rackham estimates that in the thirty years between 1945 and 1975 nearly half the remaining ancient woodlands of England, Wales and Scotland were seriously damaged or destroyed, more than in the whole of the previous 1,000 years.

Active commercial coppicing survived in a small way through the twentieth century, mainly in the sweet chestnut coppices of Kent and East Anglia, with the principal outlet being the fencing industry. In the last decade the wheel of history has turned slightly and there has been a revival of coppicing, especially of hazel in Hampshire and other southern counties, oak in the North West and beech for bodging in the Midlands. This is due to conservationists appreciating the importance of coppicing in maintaining traditional woodlands, and the growth of interest in traditional crafts. A new generation of coppice workers and woodsman have developed markets for chestnut paling, wattles, baskets, faggots for river bank stabilisation, barbecue charcoal, greenwood furniture and garden ornaments. It is encouraging to reflect that the demand for good-quality coppice now exceeds the supply.

PRESERVING OUR ANCIENT WOODLANDS

Although landlords with an interest in hunting or shooting preserved their woodlands for game cover, the overall damage to small broad-leafed woods, copses and spinneys through afforestation and agricultural reclamations inspired Kenneth Watkins, a retired farmer in Devon, to start the Woodland Trust in 1972, with the aim of preventing further loss of ancient woodland.

REMARKABLY, THERE ARE STILL OVER 22,000 SITES OF ANCIENT AND SEMI-NATURAL WOODLAND IN ENGLAND, AROUND 14,570 IN SCOTLAND, 850 IN NORTHERN IRELAND AND OVER 100 FOR WALES. ONLY 3,000 SQUARE KILOMETRES OF ANCIENT SEMI-NATURAL WOODLAND SURVIVE IN BRITAIN – LESS THAN 20 PER CENT OF THE TOTAL WOODED AREA.

The early 1970s saw the beginning of conservation awareness among the general public, and by the end of the decade donations to the Trust had enabled them to acquire woodland across England. In 1980, they obtained Coed Lletywalter, a 38-hectare ancient woodland site in Wales, and in 1984, Balmacaan Wood in Scotland, overlooking the banks of Loch Ness. In 1996, they began working in Northern Ireland and by 2009 the Trust was involved in the conservation management of around 13,000 hectares of woodland. Conservation soon became part of the political agenda, and the example set by the Woodland Trust was picked up by the Nature Conservancy Council, the government department responsible for designating and managing National Nature Reserves and other nature conservation areas in Britain, between 1973 and 1991.

During the 1980s and 1990s the Nature Conservancy Council and its successors, which in 2009 were Natural England, Scottish Natural Heritage, the Countryside Council for Wales and the Northern Ireland Environment Agency, compiled inventories of ancient woodland sites in their respective regions, with the Woodland Trust providing the information for Northern Ireland. Remarkably, there are still over 22,000 sites of ancient and semi-natural woodland in England, around 14,570 in Scotland, 850 in Northern Ireland and over 100 for Wales. Only 3,000 square kilometres of ancient semi-natural woodland survive in Britain – less than 20 per cent of the total wooded area. More than eight out of ten ancient woodland sites in England and Wales are less than 200,000 square metres in area, only 500 exceed one square kilometre and a mere 14 are larger than three. This is a fraction of what there once was, but a great deal more than any other European country, and what we have, mainly in the remains of old Royal Forests, chases and the parkland of great estates, is now fiercely protected.

Nor are they all only in rural settings; the London Borough of Haringey contains no less than five ancient woods. Highgate Wood, Queen’s Wood, Coldfall Wood, Bluebell Wood and North Wood were once part of the great Forest of Essex, and during the medieval period, the hunting estate of the Bishops of London. Here, between Muswell Hill and East Finchley, eight kilometres from St Paul’s Cathedral, are 70 hectares of original pedunculate and sessile oak, hornbeam, beech and holly woods with the occasional wild service tree. There are several other ancient woodlands in the Greater London area: Dulwich and Sydenham Hill Woods, Epping Forest North, Lesnes Abbey and Bostall Woods, Ruislip Woods and Poors Field.

MYSTERIOUS AND MYTHICAL TREES

Uniquely to Britain, we have amongst our ancient woodlands, in churchyards, on village greens and parish boundaries, a number of trees of immense antiquity. When we think about preserving our ancient woodland heritage and debate the importance of doing so, it is vital to remember that since time immemorial trees and shrubs have all had religious and cultural meaning and usage.

The Celts were extraordinary people; tribal, quarrelsome and addicted to mead, but also highly organised agriculturalists, industrious miners, and successful traders in iron ore, gold, silver, lead, tin, copper, grain, skins, slaves and hunting dogs to the Continent. They were deeply religious nature worshippers, whose lives were ruled by superstition and the seasons, and it was they who bequeathed us a heritage of folklore, much of it centred round their veneration of trees.

All species were believed to have magical powers and to be inhabited by a deity or spirit, especially oak, ash, yew, crab apple and thorn, and of these the oak trees were considered the most sacred. No one has stood before the critical gaze of an ancient oak with its gnarled trunk and great twisted limbs and not felt a sense of awe. The sight of one of these majestic trees rearing up out of a glade in the underwood, or a grove of them standing alone on the edge of a heath, bare, gaunt and terrible through the winter then bursting into life again in the spring, symbolised all early man’s polytheist beliefs in life, death and rebirth.

THE ANCIENT OAK

Oaks were particularly revered by the Druids, because then oak trees were the main woodland host for mistletoe. Imagine the impression on an Iron Age Celt, trudging homeward from a day’s coppicing during the winter solstice, believing all plant life had ceased and suddenly glancing upwards to see a clump of green leaves and white berries glowing in a shaft of sunlight, high in the bare branches of an oak tree. This was the ‘Golden Bough’ of folklore and legend; an assurance that all the Druidical incantations, ritual bonfires and sacrifices were doing their stuff; that spring would come again, bringing warmth, fecundity and new life.

To the Greeks, Romans, Celts, Slavs and Teutonic tribes, the oak was foremost amongst venerated trees, and in each case associated with the supreme god in their pantheon – sacred to Zeus, Jupiter, Dagda, Perun and Thor respectively. Ancient kings presented themselves as the personifications of these gods, taking on the responsibility not only for success in battle but also the fertility of the land, which relied on rainfall. They wore crowns of oak leaves as a symbol of the god they represented as kings on Earth. Successful Roman commanders were presented with crowns of oak leaves during victory parades, and oak leaves have continued as decorative icons of military prowess to the present day. Spiritual appreciation of oaks did not cease with the advent of Christianity; although many oak groves were supplanted by early Christian churches, St Columba was said to have had a fondness and respect for oaks and was reluctant to fell them – though his chapel on Iona was constructed using timber from the nearby Mull oak woods. St Brendan was inspired to use oak boards instead of traditional hides to cover his coracle, which legend says floated him across to the Americas some thousand years before Columbus.

YEWS

Yews, being evergreen and producing red berries, were of particular significance to the ancients. Again, a splash of colour in the stark winter landscape would have been an emblem of hope and a symbol of the enigmatic power of nature. Yew trees symbolised both death and immortality, being poisonous but immensely long-lived, and able to re-root their branches to produce fresh saplings. A grove of yew trees was considered by the Druids to be particularly holy and so they preferred to make their wands from yew, rather than oak or crab apple, the other favourite wand-making woods. A rod made of yew, called a fe, was used to measure corpses for burial, and the pagan habit of placing a piece of yew foliage in a coffin persisted until the eighteenth century.

Many yews of great age have survived in churchyards because of their sacred associations, both before and after Christianity. The habit of planting yew trees in churchyards is open to dispute; one theory is that they were planted to deter graziers from turning sheep into graveyards to eat the grass. However, this lacks credulity, as the parishioners wanted the grass in graveyards to be grazed and would peg cut brambles on the actual graves to keep the sheep off them. Another, which suggests that yews were planted to provide staves for the mighty bow of the Middle Ages, is also implausible; the yews would take far too long to grow to have been of any use, and in any case, most yew staves were imported from Italy. The last theory, and the one that I subscribe to, is that early Christian churches were built on sites of pagan worship and that the habit of planting yews near churches simply persisted. This is based on the instructions given by Pope Gregory in 597 to the Benedictine monk, Augustine, as he departed on his mission to convert the pagan Britons. Gregory insisted that Augustine should not destroy the heathen temples, but only remove the idolatrous images, wash the walls with holy water, erect consecrated altars and try to convert the sites to Christian churches.

HOLLY

Holly was revered for the same reason as miseltoe-bearingyew; it was an evergreen and the fact that a crop of bright berries appeared to coincide with the winter solstice could only suggest deeply mythical connections. Furthermore, to add to the mystique, holly most commonly grows in the understorey of oak woodlands, and where few plants can survive the overhang of a mature tree, holly can be found gleefully growing in scrubby clumps around the base of big oaks. Uniquely to Britain, there were once forests of pure holly in Scotland, as it had long been an essential element in pagan winter solstice festivals, which were the most prolonged and widespread celebrations honouring the unconquered Sun. The first recorded usage was by the Romans, who used it for decoration at Saturnalia. This festival was held in mid-December, and was a time of uninhibited celebrations. Houses and streets were decorated with holly, ivy and other evergreens, and ‘Strenae’ twigs of evergreens – laurel or holly – to which were fastened sweetmeats, were a popular gift. The Celts believed holly had the power to ward off evil spirits and to protect houses from lightning, a superstition that persisted for many centuries. Holly trees and hedges were planted around houses in some parts of the country for their evil-deterring properties, and door frames were sometimes made of holly as a protection against lightning.

THE CELTS BELIEVED HOLLY HAD THE POWER TO WARD OFF EVIL SPIRITS AND TO PROTECT HOUSES FROM LIGHTNING, A SUPERSTITION THAT PERSISTED FOR MANY CENTURIES. HOLLY TREES AND HEDGES WERE PLANTED AROUND HOUSES IN SOME PARTS OF THE COUNTRY FOR THEIR EVIL-DETERRING PROPERTIES.

The belief that plants with red berries – holly and rowan – were a defence against a malign presence was particularly strong in Scotland. The Gaelic name for holly, Chuillin, appears across the country from Cruach-doire-cuilean on Mull, where the Mc Leans of Duart adopted holly as their clan badge, to Loch a’ Chuillin in Ross-shire in the north; the town of Cullen in Banffshire may also have derived its name from a local holly wood. In old Scottish myths, the Cailleach, a hag representing winter, was said to be born each year at the beginning of November. She spent her time stalking the earth during the winter time, smiting the ground with her staff to harden it and kill off growth, and calling down the snow. On May-Eve, the turning point of the Celtic year from winter to summer, she threw her staff under a holly tree and turned into a stone. The holly tree was sacred to her, and keeping a holly bough, complete with leaves and berries, in the house was believed to placate her and protect the occupants from an unwelcome visit. After the Battle of Dunbar in 1650, when Cromwell defeated the Scottish army commanded by Lord Newark, 5,000 prisoners were force-marched under appalling conditions to Norfolk to drain the fens. The 1,400 Scotsmen who survived the starvation and ill-treatment on the journey south were said to have stuck twigs of holly around the hovels they lived in on the marshes, as protection against any evil fen spirits.

As with several other native trees believed to have protective properties, there were taboos against cutting down a whole tree. Hollies were frequently left uncut in hedges when these were trimmed, and in 1861 the 8th Duke of Argyll even had a prospective road at Inveraray rerouted, to avoid disturbing a particularly venerable old tree. Taking boughs for decoration, however, and coppicing trees to provide winter fodder, was considered acceptable. Holly leaves proved to be particularly nutritious as winter feed for livestock, and some farmers even installed grinders to make the pricklier leaves more palatable. Folklore suggested that the wood had a mystical control over animals, especially horses, and coachmen traditionally had whips made from coppiced holly, which accounted for hundreds of thousands of holly stems during the great era of carriage driving in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

ASH