Round here in the Marches Scots pines are often said to have been planted by the drovers, who carried pine cones with them from North Wales and planted them in clumps near inns so that drovers in the future would know that there had been a welcoming inn there thirty years before. This myth – and I’m not saying myths can’t be true too – contradicts what was the consensus until recently, that Scots Pine died out in Britain 5,500 years ago except in Scotland. And begs the question, where did the drovers get the pine cones from if the pines were long extinct in Wales? (The other question, which will have to continue to beg until I get round to it, is who built the drove roads? I suspect the drovers and their cattle were such a nuisance trampling everywhere and stealing grass that the farmers built the drove roads themselves to hurry them on their way).
The Scots Pines of the Highlands are integral to forests that are rare, precious, beautiful, ecologically rich and interesting, an important part of our natural world, inhabited by red squirrels, crossbills, crested tits, pine martens, wild cats, capercaillies and other specialists. Having spent a lot of time in Scottish and Scandinavian forests, I have always been aware that our uplands in England and Wales, when not trashed by sheep farming or by Sitka spruce plantations, often have most of the understory plants and shrubs of the ancient Caledonian and Scandinavian forests. And all ecologically sound forests are a combination of trees with the shrubs and plants and fungi that make up that ecosystem.
If you cut down the trees in a wood it remains essentially a wood. If you plant trees in a field it remains essentially a field for the foreseeable future. So there is an issue for many of our tree planters. Sure, planting trees is good, but it isn’t the same as creating a wood.
For years, as a lover of the southern Swedish ‘granskogar’ and the Highland pine forests, I have wished that we could use the ready-made pine forest understorey that grows on many of our open moorlands. Add pines there and you would have a proper forest, not just pine trees on a hill.
Rewilding is theoretically diverse – there are different schools of thought on how you do it, and I have always been more in favour of trying to restore and reconstruct ecosystems that we know existed or that still exist in a damaged state. I am less in favour of the ‘see what happens when you let nature get on with it’ school of thought exemplified by Knepp. Either way, though, the fact that the Scots Pine was considered in the UK to be unique to Scotland was until now likely to rule out support for the recreation of pine forests anywhere else. But all that has now changed and the way is - or should be - open for the creation of magnificent pine forests in other parts of the UK.
The story starts in Ireland, where they have discovered that there are pines growing on the Burren in County Clare that are survivors of the original native pines of Ireland. Scots Pine is native to Ireland as well as Scotland. The presence of a microrefugium of the native Irish Pines that once covered the Burren has been confirmed by scientists at Trinity College, verified by pollen analysis and published in a peer reviewed paper. The Burrenbeo project, which encourages farmers to have ‘hare’s corners’ in their fields to shelter precious plants and animals, is now propagating these precious pines.
I have always wondered about pines in Wales, partly because the drovers’ pines stories could hardly be true if there were no seed sources in Wales, and I started searching the internet. I discovered a couple of scientific papers which demonstrate that there are almost certainly relict populations of Scots Pine in the Welsh Marches. In their cautious scientific language ‘the consistency of available evidence corroborates the hypothesis of a local Scots pine refugium in the Welsh Marches.’
The two sites investigated, using the analysis of pollen deposits, are at Breidden Hill north of Montgomery and at Nesscliffe Hill north of Shrewsbury. The pines can still be seen, though ironically conservationists, assuming they were not native, cut down some of the trees on Breidden Hill in order to encourage the local flora beneath them. There is also corroborating evidence in this area of insects that are typical of ancient pine forest, and references to pines in old Welsh texts.
And then, blow me down, if that isn’t an inappropriate choice of phrase when writing during Storm Eunice about trees, I spotted a piece in the Guardian the other day about a pine blown down by Storm Arwen, one of a group of seven pines that are believed to be the last descendants of remnants of post-glacial pinewoods in Northumberland. These are now being propagated.
It may seem unimportant to you whether pines are classified as native to particular countries. After all, the borders are recent human constructs, and Pinus sylvestris grows all over Europe. But organisations like the Woodland Trust, with their focus on the restoration and expansion of native woodland, are more likely to encourage the development of pine forests elsewhere than in Scotland now that it can be shown that these beautiful trees can be classified as native in England, Wales and Ireland. It may open the way for forests like those of the Highlands to develop further south, and for pine to be included in the approved mix of species used when planting for biodiversity.
There is still, I think, controversy about how pines came to be so scarce south of the border. Some think they were out-competed by broadleaves, or that climate variations in prehistoric or historic times disadvantaged them. But the UK has a long and destructive record when it comes to loss of biodiversity and we are very near the bottom of the UN backed Biodiversity Intactness Index 2020. My money is on man and grazing livestock being the cause.
One of the golden rules of ecological restoration, I am convinced, is the importance of complexity. The addition of Pinus sylvestris to planting mixtures will bring with it extra beauty, extra variety, more associated species and in general more of the complexity that increases ecological stability and resistance. The importance of complexity for me is an article of faith. Complexity is life, monoculture death. Compare the Caledonian forests with a Sitka spruce plantation or a sterile weed-free wheat field doused in glyphosate.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-60419337.amp
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0959683621994654#
... and! drove routes were bringing Welsh cattle eastwards for centuries. Sheep in any quantity from the foundation of Cistercian sheep walks. Perhaps the drove ways made the most of non-taxable common land?
I think the drovers would have had to go quite slowly and let the cattle graze as they went, and would have tended to stick to the hills and commons where possible and avoid turnpike roads at all costs. They must have been a serious nuisance to farmers, I think.