Ancient forest lands

[Peter Pedant]

Does anyone knows which sort of forest was growing after the last glaciation?

Does any still exist and is it possible to go and see it?

Is this the same as any Royal Forest before William I or were they replantings?

In England, it seems pretty obvious the primeval forests in Scotalnd were pines.

 

Thanks

[New Forester]

First of all, remember that we are still in the middle of the "Ice Age" (global warming permitting).  What we see is just one interglacial in a long sequence of glaciations and interglacials over the past few hundred thousand years.

 

We know quite a bit about the species present at various stages of the current interglacial, from fossil deposits of pollen, snail shells etc.

 

During what you correctly call the last glaciation the land cover in Britain and Ireland was of course mostly ice, with tundra-like vegetation in the south -- low vegetation growing over permafrost (trees cannot grow in permafrost).  The sea level was very much lower, so the land was bigger.  The the land to the south-west of Ireland and Cornwall may have been rather warmer.  The climate was not exactly the same as modern tundra, because the day-lengths through the year and the amount of sunshine would have been as it is now here, not as it is now in the far north.  Mammals included mammoth, musk ox, woolly rhino, reindeer, lion, hyaena, bear, wolf etc.

 

As the ice retreated, it left a lot of mud, but was still too cold for trees.  The first vegetation would have been grassland, perhaps calcareous because the ice released many minerals from the rocks (later these minerals leached out and the soil became more acidic).  Britain and Ireland were of course joined to mainland Europe.  As the permafrost thawed further, trees could colonise -- mainly birch and pine at first.  This woodland was probably quite like the Caledonian pine forest is now.

cont...

[New Forester]

...cont

Then oak, elm, hazel, lime and other broadleaved woodland trees colonised, together with smaller temperate plants such as our familiar grasses and flowers.  Pine retreated northward, though probably survived in what is now moorland well south of Scotland.  Animals included bison, wild cattle, wild swine, horse, giant deer, moose, beaver, wolverine, bear, wolf, lion, hyaena etc.  In previous interglacials there were also European species of elephant, rhino and even jaguar.  However, the different thing about this interglacial is much larger numbers of humans than in previous ones (oooh, perhaps as many as several thousand in Britain...), and these prevented recolonisation of the larger animals, and of course wiped out the surviving mammoths and woolly rhinos.

By now it was what is often called the "wildwood".  However, even many ecologists get misled by our modern woodland.  Nowadays we have fields with animals or crops in, and woods without any animals.  The woodlands now grow very dense and thick -- but look at the list of large herbivores above.  They all lived in the wildwood, and the "woodland", though full of trees, must also have been quite open in many places.  We can also see this in the long lists of native plants of open meadow, heath and down -- they lived in the wildwood too.

cont...

[New Forester]

...cont

As the sea rose, the Channel developed from a river valley into an arm of the sea, and any colonists which had not got across by then stayed the other side.  This is why so many plants and animals are native in Normandy, but not here.

Over the past few thousand years the wild animals have been replaced by domestic ones, and the more open areas have been ploughed for arable crops.  Gradually the larger animals were hunted or competed out -- some (beaver, wolf, bear, wild swine) lasted into historical times.

Much of the country remained as rough common pasture until the Inclosures (especially in the 18th and 19th centuries), which stole the land from the people -- sorry, I mean which allowed the land to be farmed more efficiently.  After that time land was divided as now mainly into open farmland and dense woodland, although the species in the open land remained much the same until the coming of industrial agriculture in the 20th century, and the arrival of "green desert" everywhere.

Is it possible to go and see the wildwood?  Well, why do you think I live in the New Forest?  This is about as close as you can get to it.  It may not have bison and giant deer, but the ponies and cattle (including my own) do much the same job.  There are quite dense woodlands, separated by open grassland, heathland and bog.  Probably it's quite a bit more open than the wildwood, but there are plenty of parts where you'd be hard pressed to say what might have been different five thousand years ago.

cont...

[New Forester]

...cont (last bit...)

 

There are a few other places where similar "wood-pasture" habitats survive in the south -- for example, Ashdown and Epping Forests, and many ornamental parks.  These are all places where extensive grazing still occurs, usually because of particular historical or legal peculiarities.  The lowland commons were similar too until the grazing went, but most are now becoming very overgrown.

The continuity of the habitats of the New Forest and similar places with earlier, similar ones mean that large numbers of species survive there which have disappeared elsewhere -- for example, insects and fungi living in "veteran" trees.

Sorry for the long post -- something of a passion of mine I'm afraid.

[FP]

Thanks New Forester, you continue to educate me! 

[FP]

We found a 'tusk' like object in our garden (North Norfolk) which, we are reliably informed by our local museum, came from a wild boar (tusk or tooth?) When did wild boar disappear from our countryside, NF?

Thanks.

[2nosey]

i don't think new forester missed anything out in that question. just joking!

[New Forester]

FP -

 

Generally the wild "boar" or swine disappeared in Britain by about the 14th century, though it was reintroduced later at various times for hunting.  It survived longest in parks.  Not sure when it would last have been wild in Norfolk -- probably quite a bit earlier.

 

However, I do wonder how easy it is to tell a domestic boar tusk from a wild one (it is the males which have the tusks -- a pair of big canines on each side, sharpened against each other).  Before the introduction of the Far Eastern type of pig around 1750, English domestic pigs were much more like the wild ones (like a Tamworth or Wessex, but more so).  I suspect the tusks from a big domestic boar before then might have been much like a wild boar's.  Domestic pigs could be very big -- for example I've found a picture in a book of an 1809 Yorkshire hog which was 12.2 hands (130 cm) tall and weighed well over half a ton.

 

How big is your tusk?  Is it a proper tusk, sharpened on one edge, or just an ordinary tooth?

 

In practice, I'm not sure you'd notice much difference between the two if you were standing in the way...

 

Excitingly, wild swine are now recolonising nicely, with a strong population in Kent and Sussex, and another in Somerset.  I wonder whether they'll get to Hampshire from the east or the west?

[FP]

I think it might be a tooth more than a tusk.  Its only about 4".   Its flattened along one side.  It looked identical to one exhibited in the Castle Museum Norwich when we took it in to show them.

Thanks for your great answer NF.

[New Forester]

4 " does sound like a tusk, though if it's got its root it sounds a bit small for an adult male of either type.

[FP]

It doesn't seem to have a root - it looks broken at the root end, NF.

[Peter Pedant]

Great! Thanks NF

I kinda thought the New Forest couldnt be like the old one.

I tried the excitingly titled The History of british vegetation, but found it too detailed, and definitely needed a shorter answer.

Many thanks: I think I can go back to pennington and understand a bit more.

[New Forester]

Peter -- I've just been reading The History of British Mammals by Derek Yalden (Poyser 1999) -- excellent -- it's my source for the pig stuff.  Now I too need to go back to The History of British Vegetation -- it's many years since I read that and I need to remind myself about it.  There have been some more recent developments of course, especially using snails to understand past climates.