Wayne said:
Hi Jack.
Could anyone tell me which plants are ancient woodland indicators?
i had a interesting chat on the topic but have forgotten the plants.
cheers,
Here you go Wayne, this may help you in your understanding of ancient woodland indicators:
Reading The Signs In A Wood
The local wood that you like to walk in of a weekend holds far more clues to its past than you may realise. Once you have learnt how to decipher these clues you can learn a great deal about its history and even estimate its age and once you can do that, a whole new world will be opened up to you.
Clues to a coppice.
One very ancient tradition was to manage wood as ‘coppice with standards’. When most broadleaf trees are cut back to the ground they sprout new shoots which grow to about 6ft in the first year and then begin to thicken. The resulting plant is then called a coppice. The butt from the old tree is then called a stool and these stools can be harvested on regular cycles, the average age for hazel coppice is 7 – 10 years, it is cut at this young age because it is then the ideal size for hurdle making. Scattered throughout the coppice are standard trees, mainly oak trees but some ash. These trees had a different market which was mainly used in the ship and tanning industries so were left to grow a lot longer, between 70 – 150 years.
The most obvious sign of past coppicing is the presence of ‘multi-trunked’ trees growing in the woodlands. But there are more subtle indicators. First, it was important to keep livestock out of the woods, as they will destroy all of the young re-growth, so the woods at great expense had a ‘bank and ditch’ running right around the perimeter of the wood no matter how big the wood was. Have you ever noticed when you walk into a wood you usually walk down into a ditch then over a bank, next time you walk into a wood have a look for it.
Another important clue to woods that were coppiced is the abundance of wild flowers, especially in the spring. The regular cutting of the coppice allowed plenty of sunlight to reach the floor of the wood, and this encourages the growth of plants. Some of these plants are normally slow to spread, or seed poorly so their presence in large numbers on the woodland floor is an excellent indication that the wood is ancient and once coppiced. Take, bluebells for an example, they spread very slowly on most soils so if you see them in a woodland it is a strong indicator that it is ancient, but beware, they spread quite quickly on sandy soils, so they may be picking out a patch of sand in the wood!
The more plants you have in the wood the stronger your case will be on deciding if the wood is ancient. Below is a list of some wild flowers to look out for and they are indicators of ancient woodland.
Bluebells
Wood anemones
Dog violets
Primrose
Yellow Archangel
Stitchwort
Red Campion
Euphorbia
Celendine
Wild Daffs
Ransomes Garlic
Early Purple Orchid
TwayBlade Orchid
Bugle
Ground Ivy
Foxglove
As you can see there are many wild flower indicators and the list above is a very small selection, if you can’t identify them, get your book out and start to learn! And if you see any of the above plants in hedgerows in large numbers, take a closer look. And ask yourself. Is the hedgebank rather thickset? Are there any veteran trees on the bank? Does anything look out of place? Does the hedge look significantly older than the surrounding hedges? If the answer is yes to any of the above, then there is a strong possibility that you are looking at a woodbank, which is the only physical feature we have left to tell us that there was once woodland here, and it is has survived the destruction of the wood that it once protected.
Other clues to look out for.
There are many other ancient indicators in a woodland to look out for apart from wild flowers (these obviously only really detectable in the spring and the summer) you have to find the oldest tree in the wood and find out what age it is. You can do this quiet easily by measuring the girth of the tree with a tape measure. Put your tape right around the tree at about four and a half foot from the ground, read the measurement in inches and this will give you the rough age of the tree.
Here’s one example; If your measurement is 100 inches, then the tree is about 100 hundred years old, and if the crown (the bushy bit on top of the trunk sometimes called the canopy) is crowded by other trees which will mean it isn’t receiving the maximum amount of light, you can double its age as it will be growing at a slower rate through the lack of light. How does this work ? Well, trees, on average put on an inch in a year in circumference. simple really !
Once you have ‘guestimated’ the age of the oldest tree, you can then, with confidence, say that the woodland is at least ‘x’ amount of years old.
Are there pollards (trees that have been coppiced at about 10 foot from the ground, usually used as a boundary marker) on the woodbank?
Is there another woodbank in the interior of the wood? Demonstrating that wood was once a lot smaller and has been expanded at some time, so once again another woodbank has had to of been built, leaving the first one within the interior of the wood.
Are the main wood banks big and strong? Do they look out of place amongst the straight hedges of the surrounding fields, as opposed to the small and straight wood banks of 18th / 19th century woodland, or no bank at all, as in the case of 20th century woodland?
But a word of warning.
What is the name of the wood? The word ‘bere’ as in Bere Regis, is Old English, in other words, it is Saxon for wood.
What is the name of the local village or Hamlet? Does it end in -ley or
–hurst, do you live in a place with such an ending? These again are Old English, and are seen as meaning a cleared area of woodland for the building of a new settlement from which our villages have descended from.
Or is it more blatant than that, does in fact have ‘wood’ in its name, as in Verwood in East Dorset or Wilkswood on the Purbecks, Woodcuts in North Dorset and Marshwood Vale in West Dorset.
I have an Aunt called Hazel, I have a Cousin called Holly, I have a Nephew called Ashley, my old school Mistress was called Mrs Birch, I live down the end of a lane called Aller lane and my mother’s Maiden name was Oakley! Does that mean that I am half Saxon? Now, tell me I am I being paranoid, was I destined to become a hurdle maker, was I in fact, a tree in earlier life. No I don’t think so either. But it does reveal quite clearly how we are touched by the woodlands in one way or another in our everyday lives. How many associated names can you think of?
There are many wonderful things in an ancient woodland to look out for, the above are just a few examples. The woods still hold many secrets yet to be unlocked and understood. But a word of warning before you embark on your expedition into the woodlands. Even though all of the above, and more, will be found in ancient woodland they will also be found in softwood plantations that may only be thirty years old. How can this be? I am going to let you discover the answer to that one and then you can tell me! (the answer is on these pages, somewhere!)
Cheers.
Jack.
