LAVENHAM WOODLAND PROJECT
Notes from Dyehousefield Wood, 8th August 2021.
Submitted by John Knight
It was a dull day when we six assembled for routine maintenance work in the woodland. Yet in a month a new lushness had sprung in the vegetation along the footpath edges which the shears and hook and strimmer cut away. The nettles and thistles and ragwort, grass and new branches fall easily and we were able to expose the willow bursting out along the railway track. The speed with which it has grown since 2014 is astonishing. It seems effortlessly to produce the foliage to catch the energy offered by the combination of sun and soil and wetness. The trees planted there reflect the growth resulting from the coppicing opposite, which we are already harvesting. We had set out to reduce the camouflaging effects of the head-high nettles where visitors seem to have the heaviest footprint. Our aim is to maximise the attractions of walking in a young woodland.
We have been seeking to further cultivate the interest of Lavenham school children in their woodland. On a visit to the school our chairman, David Jones requested that they produce a logo for the woodland and they have responded with energy and creativity and we expect to display their impressions in the next edition.
English culture expressed in nursery rhymes and stories often features wolves. Think of Red Riding Hood and the threat she faced, and how we dread a wolf at the door. Even today in continental Europe, wolves are still perceived and treated as a threat to farmers. In England in 1281, king Edward 1 put a price on the heads of wolves and tasked huntsmen such as Sir Peter Corbet to clear English woods of this pest, or as we might put it “this threat to our profits”. By 1291 there was no more eery howling or eyes in the darkness to frighten such as little Red Riding Hood. The success of this policy meant not only an absence of wolves, but also the appearance of huge flocks of sheep. By Tudor times sheep outnumbered humans three to one. With England’s favourable geography and climate, those unguarded flocks and the wool they produced meant an accumulation of capital in settlements such as Lavenham. The wealth of our town expressed in its timbered buildings and immense Gothic church, the new-build of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, is testament to our ability to interfere with nature to our perceived advantage.
Our re-wilding experiment in Lavenham, small-scale thought it is, is an attempt to re-set the clock to the advantage of present and future generations by encouraging the re-appearance of a native woodland. While we lack top predators like wolves, we do bear in mind the words of Geoffry Chaucer that “an ok cometh of a litel spir”. As you can see, they had an idiosyncratic approach to spelling even then but the idea of little oaks and something bigger is an ambition worth encouraging.