Returning to the theme of beech trees as mentioned in post/blog 14 of this series I was amazed to discover that in some mountainous parts of Bulgaria are forests of ancient beech woodland that are thought to have been there since post-Ice Age colonisation. Presumably these will be in the foothills as beech is not as tolerant to increasing cold weather experienced further up mountain sides.
A further explanation for this survival is that there has been little colonisation by Man, initially hunter-gatherers and beyond.
This in turn led me to think about the recent British legislation changing, to some extent, the focus of British farming. In England there is no land untouched for the last 6,500 years, the very opposite in fact. This makes the study of landscape history far more detailed and diverse but all but obscures an answer to the question ‘What was the land like before the onset of man’s influence?’. The centuries that saw the rapid retreat of the Devensian icesheets between 8,000 and 6,000 years ago witnessed variable rates of climate warming and it was this warming that determined the succession of flora and fauna that moved north to colonise land freed of permafrost. It is, of course, also to compare what was happening at the same time in the Tigris and Euphrates and on the banks of the River Nile at the same time, unaffected as they were, directly at least, by the late Ice Ages. These thoughts are relevant to discussion of the new Agriculture Act where some are speaking of ‘re-wilding’ – but re-wilding to when?
(to be continued).