Near Buckholt Wood, Birdlip, Gloucestershire

I rushed up to this extension of Buckholt Wood this morning, so as not to miss the turning of the leaves. It is a wonderful, ancient woodland, probably dating from way, way back and lies right on the edge of the Cotswold escarpment, close to Birdlip.

I came walking here about four years ago, after I started learning about ancient landscapes through the writing of the notable Oliver Rackham. His book The History of the Countryside, unveiled the complex nature of our landscape to me, explaining details which as a geographer I could not always relate to each other.

This predominantly beech wood has been managed as a 'working wood' for most of its life. It is only in recent decades that it is becoming untended and left to an unknown fate. I would like to explain about their management, but Mr Rackham does it far better than I ever could. Try his marvellous Woodlands book too.

On my first visit here, I met an elderly man who was cutting up timber. We chatted and he told me he had bought this wood as a part-settlement, when he sold his neighbouring farm. He had known this wood all his life and now he was retired he could think of nothing better than coming there to work with and within it. As it happened, he turned out to be a relation of the Dickenson family, who now farm and run the Stancombe Beech Farm and shop, which I featured yesterday, which is just a few miles further down this track towards Stroud.

I wanted to show you the scale of the trees here. This view is looking along the eastern edge of the wood, while to the right about one hundred and fifty yards away, is the steep slope of the escarpment, dropping down the hillside towards Gloucester and the River Severn, with Wales in the far distance. This track in the foreground, is the remnants of one of the old tracks or ways, running along the edge of the Cotswolds. If you were walking towards me, you would reach Birdlip in less than a mile, at the point where the Roman road from Cirencester dropped over the edge and still runs down to Gloucester. Almost certainly Roman legions would have walked along this track.

Beside the visible remnants of the stone wall here, is a massive stool, the technical name for the base of a tree, which has a massive underground network of roots that supports the continuous growth of its underwood and timber. This tree as you can see has multiple trunks growing out of the stool, reaching out for the canopy. Traditionally all the trees trunks here would be cut back to ground level for harvesting, at regular intervals, when they reached a certain height and girth that would be suitable for use as timber in buildings. The tree would then be allowed to regrow; in fact it is nearly impossible to stop it growing; that is what trees do.

I think there are about ten trunks growing from this one stool, which is about fourteen feet across at the base. When the tree is cut back or falls, a new stem starts from the stool and carries on growing. I don't think anyone has been harvesting this woodland systematically for many decades, such that the trees are now growing and then shedding their branches at there own behest. I find it so sad, as there is such wealth of resource here, which traditionally would have benefitted the community, but now is lying fallow. I hope its time comes again. This wood is like a listed building and luckily no-one will be able to grub it up. Hooray.

There are hundreds, nay thousands of trees in this and adjacent woods, that run along the top of the Cotswolds in this area. Some of the woodlands are still managed, and there is a sawmill within a mile of here. I could write on for pages about the trees, what happens when the trunks fall, their regrowth and the spread of the adjacent undergrowth, patches of which you can see here. This was always managed by man. Oliver Rackham eloquently describes one Hailey Wood, in Essex, where his and other's research has shown that the life-cycle of that wood was about 70 years. They have evidence (from pollen analysis from ponds in situ) that there has been at least seventy (YES - 70) continuous cycles of the woodland in that one place. This means that mankind has managed that wood for about 5,000 years, non-stop. That is about the time that Stonehenge might have been erected.

Majestic and marvellous. I salute you.