On the Wildside: The glorious bluebell woods  help lift the spirit in trying times

Oak-hazel woodlands with clouds of blue in a sunlit evening are glorious reminders for many of the wonderful natural world on our doorstep. However, single-species swarms of woodland bluebells also tell us other things about landscape and the countryside. These are ‘indicators’ of ancient woods which go back to before the year 1600 AD, and we believe, to the time around Domesday which was 1086 AD. This is the point in history when many of our coppice woods were being established by enclosure from the common wood-pastures of the manorial estates. With population increases and pressure on resources throughout the 1200s and 1300s, timber and wood (underwood or coppice used for fuel) became increasingly in short supply.

The answer was to grow tall trees for timber and fell them every 80 to maybe a 120 years, with coppice trees for fuelwood. The latter sprang younger shoots or poles from their cut bases, the stool, and these were harvested every 15 to 25 years. The ‘woods’ as they were now called were vulnerable to grazing by livestock from the common, and therefore had to be ring-fenced by a hedge, a wall, a bank and ditch, or a fence to keep the animals out. This management continued in some cases to the 1800s, and occasionally well into the 1900s, and these are our ancient woods today.

However, plants like bluebells don’t do well with trampling by people and their beasts of burden that worked the medieval coppice woods. The spring flora would have been much more of a mosaic of woodland flowers with wood anemone, wood sorrel, greater stitchwort, dog’s mercury, dog violet, and ramsons. The magnificent swarms of bluebells carpeting woods today result from abandonment of working woods, and increased shade from the closing of the tree canopy.

Professor Ian D. Rotherham, researcher, writer & broadcaster on wildlife & environmental issues, is contactable on [email protected]; follow Ian’s blog (https://ianswalkonthewildside.wordpress.com/) and Twitter @IanThewildside