Greening the Desert - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 67

pollen from most of the trees of the ancient wildwood. The ash and elm
disappeared from the sequence soon afterwards, then the lime and pine,
then - but for a few relict stands - the other species.
As the trees retreated, the heather pollen began to rise. The pollen
core marks a brief recovery of forest during the plague and economic
collapse of the fourteenth century, and the turmoil caused by
Glyndwˆ r's revolt in the fifteenth century. But the regeneration did not
last long. By 1900 the proportions of 1,000 years before had been
inverted: trees supplied just 10 per cent of the pollen in the core, hea-
ther 60 per cent. The forest had been replaced by heath. Over much of
the British uplands today, particularly the Cambrian Mountains, the
heath has now given way to grass.
Heather took longer to dominate the Clwydian Hills, where the soil
is relatively fertile, than most of the uplands of Britain. Where the soil
was thinner, it became the dominant vegetation as early as the Bronze
Age, between 4,000 and 2,700 years ago. I think of the Bronze Age as
the period in which the hills turned bronze.
This record, and similar evidence from the rest of the country,
shows us several things. It shows that the open landscapes of upland
Britain, the heaths and moors and blanket bogs, the rough grassland
and bare rock which many people see as the natural state of the hills,
which feature in a thousand romantic films and a thousand advertise-
ments for clothes and cars and mineral water, are the result of human
activity, mostly the grazing of sheep and cattle. It shows that grazing
and cultivation have depleted the soil. It shows that when grazing
pressure eases, trees can return.
The word woodland creates a misleading impression of what the
ecosystem of these hills would have looked like after trees returned in
the early Mesolithic, and until they were cleared by farmers. From
Scotland to Spain, the western seaboard of Europe was covered by
rainforest. Rainforests are not confined to the tropics. They are places
wet enough for the trees to carry epiphytes, plants which grow on
other plants. A few miles from where I live I have found what appears
to be a tiny remnant of the great Atlantic rainforest, a pocket of cano-
pied jungle, protected from sheep, in the Nantgobaith gorge. The trees
hanging above the water are festooned with moss and lichen.
Polypody - the many-footed fern - slinks along their branches.