Greening the Desert - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 66

It is seen as disloyal, especially in this patriotic nation, to talk the
landscape down. Some people say they find it beautiful. The Cam-
brian Mountains Society celebrates its emptiness. It describes the
region as a 'largely unspoiled landscape', 1 and approvingly quotes the
author Graham Uney, who claims, 'there is nothing in Wales to com-
pare to the wilderness and sense of utter solitude that surrounds these
vast empty moorlands'. 2 To which I say, thank God. What he extols as
wild, I see as bleak and broken. To me these treeless, mown moun-
tains look like the set of a post-apocalyptic film. Their paucity of birds
and other wildlife creates the impression that the land has been poi-
soned. Their emptiness appals me. But I also recognize that it is a
remarkable achievement.
For the Cambrian Mountains were once densely forested. The story
of what happened to them and - at differing rates - to the uplands of
much of Europe is told by a ine-grained pollen core taken from
another range of Welsh hills, the Clwydians, some forty miles to the
north. 3 A pollen core is a tube of soil extracted from a place where
sediments have been laid down steadily for a long period, ideally a
lake or a bog in which layers of peat have accumulated. Each layer
traps the pollen that rains unseen onto the earth, as well as the carbon
particles which allow archaeologists to date it.
The Clwydian core was taken in 2007 from a mire in which peat
has settled for the past 8,000 years. At the beginning of the sequence,
the plant life was still affected by the cold, dry conditions following
the retreat of the ice. Trees - hazel, oak, alder, willow, pine and birch -
accounted for about 30 per cent of the pollen in that layer, grass for
much of the rest. As the weather became wetter and warmer, elm, lime
and ash trees started to move in. The woods became deeper and
darker. By 4,500 years ago, trees produced over 70 per cent of the
pollen in the sample. Heather pollen, by contrast, supplied around
5 per cent. 4
Farmers began to colonize the hills in the Neolithic period (between
6,000 and 4,000 years ago). Over the millennia, they gradually cleared
some of the land for crops, ran their sheep and cattle on the hills and
burnt the remaining trees. The clearing and burning and grazing
stripped the fertility of the soil, encouraging heather - which thrives on
poor land - to grow. Until some 1,300 years ago the peat still contained