Richard Fortey is one of my favourite authors. An eminent British geologist and television presenter, he has appeared with David Attenborough, and written a number of best-selling books on geology. But his latest book is different. Called The Wood for the Trees: The Long View of Nature From a Small Wood, it concerns the small block of beech forest he was able to buy in the Chiltern Hills, west of London, and the interest and pleasure he has gained from it. Reading his account, I was struck by the extraordinary similarities and contrasts with my own family’s experiences of owning a bush block in Tasmania, near Cradle Mountain, and how these differences and similarities reflected so much about our land, our history and our people.
Fortey’s block is of 1.6 hectares (about 4 acres), and was purchased with “the proceeds of a television series”! Our block of 120 hectares (about 300 acres) was purchased by my son John for $1000 per hectare. Fortey says that just a brief visit to his block was sufficient to clinch the deal – that exploring the wood “felt like coming home”. In our case, my wife Sib and I went to check out the block when John said he wanted to buy it. I was sceptical – it was a lot of money for a young man, not yet married.
It was pouring with rain and very wet when we visited. We sloshed around the land in our gumboots, but when we got home we rang John to say, simply, “Yes, we have to have this place.”
Its beauty was evident even in the worst conditions.
Fortey’s block is in southern Oxfordshire, close to the Thames, some 50km west of London. It is part of the larger (74ha) Lambridge Wood, recently subdivided and sold off in small parcels. He lives nearby, in the town of Henley-on-Thames, and so can access the block with just a short drive. The triangular block is bounded by public paths and riding tracks, and there are some issues with trespass. Lambridge Wood is classified as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) for ancient beech woodland, meaning trees can’t be felled without permission, and bluebells can’t be dug up.
The Corbett’s land is 15km north-west of Cradle Mountain, close to the Vale of Belvoir, and a five-hour drive from Hobart. It is accessed by rough, four-wheel-drive tracks, and bounded by two similar private blocks and a Conservation Area. We camp on the block, but visits are relatively sparse. The place is mostly enjoyed in summer, when most of the family is with us, with irregular visits at other times. The block is a delightful mixture of open grassland, heathland, herb fields, eucalypt woodland with tall gum trees, and rainforest, with a river and small creek running through it in different valleys. The rainforest is dominated by our own version of beech, the myrtle (Nothofagus cunninghamii). At about 900 metres altitude, the area is sub-alpine.
The low Chiltern Hills are made of chalk, the distinctive rubbly limestone formation, of Cretaceous age, which also forms the cliffs of Dover. The chalk is impregnated with hard siliceous nodules known as flints, formed originally from the tiny spicules making up the skeletons of the millions of sponges in the warm Cretaceous seas. The flints are almost indestructible, and as the limestone has weathered over time, the flints have become concentrated in a six-metre thick surface layer referred to as “clay with flints”.
Fortey has also found a scattering of exotic pebbles washed in to the area by meltwater streams as the great ice sheet melted and retreated at the end of the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago or so. Beech trees have always favoured the chalk hills, and the Chilterns remain one of the most forested areas of England.
The Corbett block is mostly underlain by bouldery glacial moraine, deposited by ice sheets and glaciers which scraped across the area from the Cradle Mountain direction, before melting and retreating, multiple times, during that last Ice Age. Below the moraine is Cambrian porphyry – part of the Mt Read Volcanics – and younger Cenozoic basalt, with two wooded hills of basalt projecting above the general land surface. Partly buried boulders of dolerite, basalt, porphyry, quartzite and sandstone project out of the flattish moraine surface in many areas.
The Chiltern block, as with all of Britain, has had a long history of human involvement and human-induced change. The forests, or woods, which grew across the land after the ice melted 10,000 years ago, began to be cleared by Stone Age humans about 6,000 years ago, and stone (flint) tools left by these Mesolithic hunters have been found in the hills. Neolithic farmers (3,000 to 4,000 BC) continued the clearing, and left burial “barrows” and an ancient track route along the chalk hills. Flint tools were replaced by bronze around 2,500 BC, and most of the forest clearance is thought to have occurred during the following Iron Age, with better axes, around 500BC. The wood itself was probably not present in Roman times, and Fortey believes it was probably planted in about mid-Saxon times, around 700-800 AD, meaning it is about 1,200 years old.
So this is not a natural forest, but was planted by man, and has been managed and used by man for many hundreds of years. Woods over this period typically formed part of large manorial estates, and were used as sources of timber and firewood by the processes of coppicing and pollarding. Beech (Fagus sylvatica), in particular, seems always to have been a working tree, and other species such as ash and hazel were also harvested. Fortey finds that the last harvesting of his beech wood was in the 1980s, leaving young trees which are now mostly 80 or so years old.
We have assumed that our Cradle block is largely “natural”, although there are some suggestions of clearing of forest in some areas, and an old wire fence surrounds the block. The previous owner ran some cows on the land, and we know that the Charleston family, which ran cattle on the nearby Vale of Belvoir for several decades, had owned our block and used it as part of their cattle run. The tradition of summer grazing of cattle on the natural grasslands of the adjacent Middlesex Plains and Vale of Belvoir area began soon after the Van Diemen’s Land Company (VDL) drove the first cattle through here in the 1830’s, this being the only feasible route from Deloraine to their land holdings south of Burnie. At that time, most of the north-west coast was covered by dense forest, with no roads and no bridges over the major rivers, so an inland route was necessary.
These first drovers and explorers noticed Aboriginal bark shelters in the area, and there was evidence of an old Aboriginal trackway and of Aboriginal burning. The practice of regular patch burning of the grasslands was continued by the graziers, and is still continued by the new owners of the Vale of Belvoir blocks, the Tasmanian Land Conservancy. But it is also becoming clear that Aboriginal burning, in the context of land management, was widespread and was carried on over a very long period in many parts of Tasmania – possibly going back for 40,000 years. So I think it is entirely possible that the “natural” clearings on our block, and the rather complex relationships between them and the eucalypt woodlands and rainforest patches, may be largely a product of burning and management by the indigenous people over thousands of years.
I have found a single Aboriginal stone artefact on the block to confirm their presence. There are very serious questions, which may be impossible to answer, about what is actually “natural” in the Tasmanian landscape, and what is due to long-continued human practices.
The relationship between the owners, Richard Fortey and the Corbett family, and their blocks of land provide interesting comparisons. Fortey’s connection is intense. He has counted the number of trees: 180 mature beeches, 18 wild cherries, two oaks, three ash, two yews, some wych elms and a few old hazel coppices. The understorey is mostly holly and brambles (blackberry to us), but there is a fair amount of cover by bluebells, the classical and beautiful ground cover of English beech woods. Fortey is familiar with every tree!
He has also studied the fungi – more than 300 species – and leads “fungus forays” with a local group. Moths (more than 150 species), butterflies, flies and snails have been studied in detail, as have the bats (six types), birds, beetles and spiders. Animals mentioned are three species of deer (muntjac, roe, fallow), grey squirrels (introduced from America), and the dormouse. He has kept copious notes over the years, month by month through the year, in a special leather-bound notebook.
A special cabinet has been built by a local craftsman out of cherry wood from the block, to contain Fortey’s collection of found “things” from the wood (such as a dormouse nest, bird’s eggs, flints, pebbles, a ceramic tile made from the local clay). The man’s pleasure from studying and getting to know every aspect of this block is transparent and moving – and very English.
The Corbett’s relationship to their piece of Cradle country is, I think, equally strong and visceral, but is much more casual and recreational. Our deepest pleasures are perhaps just in walking around the place, savouring the variety of habitats and ecosystems, from cool rainforests to gum forests with waratahs and native peppers, to open daisy meadows, creeks and pools. We have made minimal walking tracks to connect most of the major “paddocks”, but off-track walking is equally enjoyed. There are numerous flowering plants to delight us in the spring and summer, including mountain rockets, snowgentians, trigger plants, moth orchids, orange everlastings (these cover several acres around the margin of the main valley, and are a truly spectacular sight in mid-summer), scoparia, and the larger waratahs and daisy bushes. A preliminary plant list shows seven tree species, including four eucalypts, 14 taller shrubs, nine small shrubs, and an impressive 50 or so groundcover plants.
We have no idea about fungi, moths, butterflies, bats, spiders or snails, but are reasonably familiar with the birds. These are dominated by that iconic bird of the mountains, the black currawong, whose ringing call serenades us through the day and evening, and wakes us in the morning. We have thriving populations of wombats and wallabies, as well as brush and ringtail possums, several resident echidnas, and occasional Tasmanian devils and quolls. Our equivalent to Fortey’s cabinet collection is perhaps the boy’s collection of wombat and wallaby skulls.
So what does the comparison tell us? In Britain, the amount of natural country remaining is minimal, but areas like the beech woods seem rich and diverse enough, and old enough, to be considered natural. There are arguments as to whether any of the original pre-human “wildwood” survives in that country. But the passion and enthusiasm which the English bring to their natural places, and to all of the living things, large and small, which inhabit them, is quite extraordinary and impressive. There are multiple clubs and societies for every aspect of British nature, partly due to the large population and relatively small physical area, of course, but also reflective of the traditional interest that many people have.
The Australian, and Tasmanian, bush has had a long history, quite different from that of Britain, in which fire, perhaps mostly man-made but also natural (from lightning), has been a dominating influence. The extensive eucalypt forests are here because of fire, and the “untidiness” of the bush reflects that. The rainforests, which are more like the European forests, are the remnants of the original Gondwanan vegetation, and are slowly being eroded by fire.
We have such an abundance of nature in this country, and such a small population, that we tend to take the bush for granted. It’s always there, and there’s plenty of it. Some scientists and groups such as the field naturalist clubs are starting to get a handle on the less obvious life forms in some areas, but for most people the bush is simply a place to relax and perhaps collect firewood.
How lucky we are.
Keith Corbett is a Tasmanian-born geologist who has spent most of his life working in the state’s mountains. This has included a PhD study of the Denison Range in the South-West, and a masters study of the Mt Lyell Mine area. His pleasures since retiring include showing people interesting geological places, and working with others to develop walking tracks around Queenstown.
Richard A Fortey is Research Associate at the Natural History Museum, London, where he worked for nearly four decades as senior paleontologist specialising in Ordovician fossils. For his research he was elected to the Royal Society, and has honorary doctorates from four universities. As a popular science writer he achieved distinction though nine books. Of these, Life: a natural history was nominated as one of the Books of the Year by the New York Times and shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize. His latest book is a memoir of the writer as a young naturalist, A Curious Boy. Richard Fortey's books are available through his publisher HarperCollins Australia.
