Greening the Desert - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 73

managing small-scale woods. I fairly quickly realized that if I was
going to pursue that I'd have to go back to college - I took a masters
in environmental forestry. After that I got a job as a woodland officer
and I've been doing it ever since. It didn't take me long to see that the
most radical thing you could do round here was to put fences around
the woods and keep the bloody sheep out.'
The land to which he had brought me belonged to a communal
house in which he had once lived. It had its own hydroelectricity sup-
ply and a plan, which had been hatched before he moved in, to buy
some of the surrounding land and plant trees.
The Cambrian Mountains must be among the most unpromising
places in northern Europe for a rewilding experiment. Grazed and
cleared for thousands of years, infertile, naturally acid and further
acidified by pollution from power stations, scourged by wild Atlantic
storms and almost constant wind, they look as if they could sustain
no more than the mangy pelt with which they are now clothed. But,
starting with a treeless sheep pasture high above the estuary, Ritchie
had begun to discover what worked and what failed.
As we moved through the young woods, a troop of blue tits, coal
tits and long-tailed tits followed us, working through the branches,
grating and cheeping, picking tiny insects from the cracks in the bark.
The trees, Ritchie told me, had not taken easily. When the sheep were
shut out, bracken and coarse grasses had sprung up, through which
the seedlings had struggled to establish themselves. To accelerate the
process, in some places he and his friends had turned the turf over
with mattocks. In others he had cut the bracken every summer, so that
it would not flop over the seedlings as it died, smothering them. 10
Now the trunks of the trees were as thick as my calf, and they towered
over us: the tallest were perhaps twenty feet high.
'Somehow,' Ritchie told me, 'I didn't think I'd live long enough to
see this.'
Though he is a little younger than me, I understood that. Walking
in the Cambrian Desert, it sometimes seems impossible to imagine
trees returning there: the emptiness stands as an incontestable fact, as
if it were a matter of geology, not ecology. Yet here, where local farm-
ers had told him that trees would never grow, this sedimentary law
had been reversed. The habitat through which we ducked now