We also have 1924 as the date for the beginnings of the plantation of exotic conifers by the early Forestry Commission, first named Vaughn’s Wood, after the new owners of the Nannau Estate. The estate sold some 19,000 acres of land, including what had been Penrhos Common to the embryonic Forestry Commission in order to reduce the liability for inheritance tax, (this plantation would be renamed Coed Y Brenin in 1935, to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of George V). Thus we have a period of some three centuries between these two dates and in this piece I’ll look in some detail as to what happened.

Interestingly, as mentioned previously, following the felling of Penrhos Forest from 1597 to about 1605, letters from nobles living in Llanelltyd, only a few miles-south west of that first forest, referred to the poor folk who had lived on the edges of those woods and were now deprived of their fuel wood and materials for their tools and tackle. So it’s clear that even in the times of the first forest, there were already some dwellings there with families living in them.

These were probably squatters taking advantage of the belief in the Tŷ Unnos. The Tŷ Unnos1, literally house (of) one night was based on a very strong folk belief that if you could construct a dwelling overnight on common land and have smoke coming from the chimney by the morning, you gained the right to live there. In fact there is no reference to this in law but so strong was the belief that squatting occurred in many parts of Cymru2.

above: a hovel or hofeldy.

The Tŷ Unnos was generally very basic, often described as a hovel (hofeldy), built from whatever materials were to hand. On Mynydd Penrhos with its complex landform and many outcrops, crags and screes, stone was readily available. These hofeldai (plural of hofeldy) usually consisted of two small gables joined by low walls with no windows. The framework of the roof was of branches of any shape or size, laid across the gables and each other, in turn covered with any available materials which could include heather, gorse, rushes or turfs, although the stony nature of much of the land on Mynydd Penrhos and the thin soil would make for poor turfs. Often better turfs were saved to go over the ridge line.

These early Tai Unnos did not have actual chimneys; the hearths were placed in the centre of the building and the smoke was left to escape through holes in the roof, of which there could be many. Descriptions of these dwellings by English visitors described them as primitive, dark, smokey and prone to many drips when it rained. However, they provided a home for the poor to raise their families and begin to garden and farm for their food.

As time went on a gable might be thickened to include a chimney and hearth in an inglenook with a beam supporting the gable over the hearth. Walls could be raised to include a small window or two, “glazed” with a thin animal skin or later, greased paper. The extra height gained allowed for a loft over half of the interior, on which the occupants could sleep; interestingly, lloft in Cymraeg refers now to a bedroom. Animals would be stalled in the half of the dwelling underneath the loft, allowing for a form of underfloor heating, with a simple partition of hazel hurdle dividing the livestock from the living area.

This marked the evolution of the Welsh Longhouse of which several examples appeared on Mynydd Penrhos, notably Penrhos Uchaf which with its large, rough, boulder walls, has a very ancient feel to it. Interestingly, these long houses often have a mound of stones at one end, possibly the original hofeldy, suggesting that the occupants built their new, improved dwelling next to their original Tŷ Unnos and then abandoned their first dwelling.

above: the substantial stone work of Penrhos Uchaf on Mynydd Penrhos.

The farms that gradually appeared on Mynydd Penrhos and beyond were small, known as Tyddynod in Cymraeg (singular tyddyn, the diminutive of tŷ). Later data extracted from the census in Llanfachreth in which Mynydd Penrhos came to lie, provides very interesting clues as to their size and the way of life.

From the 1935 census, there were 678 adults and children in the parish of Llanfachreth, with 113 families registered as farming. Given the average family might include two, three or more children, this suggests that some three quarters of the population or more lived in the countryside in tyddynod. The average size of these smallholdings in Llanfachreth was five acres but the total area of farmed land includes the Nannau estate’s several thousands of acres. If this is subtracted from the total land then the average size of a tyddyn falls to around three acres.

Some were much smaller. One example is a woman who farmed a single acre, divided into two and alternating each year between a hay crop and grazing for her single milking cow. She saved the cream to make butter, feeing the whey to two weaner pigs that she raised each year, one to slaughter for her meat over the winter and the other to cover her rent. She sold the butter in the weekly market in Llanfachreth to raise the small amounts of cash she need for supplies she couldn’t be produced locally, such as sugar for preserving.

For much of those three centuries between the first forest and the Forestry Plantation, the community of tyddynwyr (smallholders) of Mynydd Penrhos and beyond existed as a cashless society, depending upon the gift economy, exchanges, favours and traditional rights and values. I have written fairly extensively on the lives of the tyddynwyr here on Substack and elsewhere3 so I am not going to repeat that work here. Rather, I am going to focus on what happened during those three centuries that changed the community of tyddynwyr of Mynydd Penrhos and beyond from a low impact, practically cashless, low carbon, integrated, supportive community into one much reduced and based on tenancies under the rule of the Nannau Estate.

Its crucial to realise the fragility of the lives these of subsistence smallholders from 1600 to 1900; depending more or less entirely on the food they could grow on often poor ground, the tyddynwyr were living on the very edge of survival and could be easily tipped into destitution.

Malnutrition was not uncommon and left people more prone to an array of infectious diseases that broke out in waves throughout the three centuries in many areas, both rural and urban. Bubonic plague in the 1600’s was followed by typhus, small pox, measles, diphtheria and cholera. Without a full understanding of these diseases and limited medical services only available if you could afford it, it was the poor who suffered, often terribly.

Living at or barely above subsistence level, the tyddynwyr were entirely dependent on the weather and poor weather could drastically reduce their winter food supplies. The 1800’s were considered to be the worst century for the tyddynwyr with at times successive wet summers making it hard or impossible for them to harvest their staple food, oats. More general, widespread food shortages also occurred which at times led to riots. It should be said that it was the poor who suffered, often walking miles to a port on a rumour that a grain filled ship was due, only to find that the entire cargo had been bought by a wealthy landowner for his stables4.

There was an additional burden from the church tithe (y degwm), which required the tyddynwyr to give ten percent of their produce to the church. This was despite most of them not being able to understand the church service, which was conducted in Latin or the sermon, delivered in English. With the great religious Revival and the appearance of chapels, most of them attended chapel rather than the church anyway, unless their landlords demanded church attendance.

Some tyddynwyr were able to benefit from additional income, such as working for the local gentry as farm labourers or even game keepers (my great, great grandfather, Bill Irving, was a Cumbrian smallholder who also worked as a game keeper for the nearby Laughton Estate).

above: Great-grandfather Bill Irving, smallholder and Keeper for the Laughton Estate. This photograph was probably arranged and paid for by Mr. Laughton; it is the only photopgraph we have of this generation.

However, following the ending of the Napoleonic Wars with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, vast numbers of British troops were demobbed, often just dumped back in Britain with no pension or prospects; many of them were also wounded, some of them severely. This led to a great increase of tramps and beggars and wanderers who presented a cheap labour force. As it coincided with the gentry enclosing additional land, many were employed to build walls denoting the new boundaries of ownership, far up into and over the hills and mountains, thus depriving the tyddynwyr of additional income.

The tyddynwyr of Mynydd Penrhos were also able to benefit from additional income by working in the local mines that began to appear in some abundance during the eighteenth century. The main goal of these ventures was gold but silver and lead also featured strongly. Hills to the north of Mynydd Penrhos such as Bryn Coch and Moel Dolfrwynog and the eastern bank of the Afon Wen, contain a large number of shafts, levels and trial levels.

Without modern technology surveyors were limited to elaborating from what they found on the surface. The decision would be made either to dig down, opening a shaft, or to dig into a hillside with the surface of the tunnel inclined slightly upwards in order to drain water, a technique known as a level. A trial level might only penetrate a few dozen paces before being abandoned to try somewhere else. Shafts tended to fill up with water so a level might be driven into the hillside to meet the shaft and thus drain water. Only the mines that found a workable seam and proved profitable could afford to invest in water or later steam powered pumps. All this pick and shovel work required local labour.

Much of the gold ventures were speculative and investors often lost their money but some gold mines were extremely successful, if only for a limited times such as Glasdir copper mine and the Gwynfynydd gold mine5. The profitability of the gold mines tailed off during the mid 1800’s, rapidly in some instances and as the mines closed, that opportunity for additional employment also faded out.

It is likely then that during those three centuries the occupants ofthe tyddynod of Mynydd Penrhos changed over time, with some families leaving and in some cases, other families taking their place but no doubt some tyddynod were abandoned and fell into ruin. Mary Corbett Harris6, writing about the parish of Llanfachreth in the early 1900’s, mentions Ty’n Y Cae, a tyddyn on Mynydd Penrhos as being abandoned and no longer appearing on Ordnance Survey maps. On Moel Friog on the eastern flank of Mynydd Penrhos there are the remains of a walled field with a substantial mound of rubble in one corner. This might be the reminas of Ty’n y Cae (house in the field) that Mary Corbett Harris although there are several other ruins which are also possible candidates.

While recounting a local legend Mary Corbett also mentions the Gardens of Penrhos, located somewhere on the eastern flank of Mynydd Penrhos, a fascinating name for which I have been unable to find any other reference. What’s clear from talking with Nain Cyplau7, then living further up the valley at a farm called Cyplau, (hence the name), was that these folk had gardens and grew food as well as farming. Nain Cyplau lived with her family at Penrhos Uchaf on Mynydd Penrhos during the 1930’s, after the the first plantings of Coed Y Brenin had begun and grew vegetables to sell at the weekly local market in Ganllwyd.

From 1750 onwards, a series of acts of enclosure (sometimes given as inclosure) resulted in big changes to the lives of many of the tyddynwyr. These acts were passed to allow already wealthy landowners to lay a legal claim of ownership on common land, enclose that land and either expel the folk who lived there or require them to pay rents for the new privilege. These acts were put together to formalise a practice of encroachment that the wealthy had already been indulging in for several centuries. According to Bowen8

Enclosure was strikingly profitable to the principle owner of the lands within the parish and to the Lord of the manor.

The copies of each of the acts of parliament relating to each application for enclosure of common land are written on parchment and held in the Tower of London. Regarding claims in England, much work has been done by a dedicated few trawling through these legal documents and recording their details. This means that for England there are now extensive records available in books and on line, detailing the appellant, the acreages claimed, the dates and their locations with corresponding maps.

Unfortunately, this has not yet been done for Cymru. All we have are a scant few books containing the dates of the individual claims, the county in which they were made and the names of those who made the claim. However, details such as the precise location of the enclosed land and the maps are still entombed on parchment in the Tower. So although I have found several references to Nannau claiming common land in Meirionydd, I have as yet been unable to find a precise date for the enclosure of Penrhos Common.

above: from Bowen. An Act in 1809 relates to the parish of Llanfachreth in Meirionydd. But is it the Act that realtes to the enclosure of Mynydd Penrhos? Impossible to say from this alone. Note that the acreage is also not stated.

In some parts of Cymru these acts of enclosure met with considerable resistance. One of the most famous being Rhyfel y Sais Bach (the ‘War of the Little Englishman’) from 1820-6. Augustus Brackenbury, a wealthy Lincolnshire man bought 345 hectares (852 acres) of land in the Llangwyryfon, Cardiganshire area to the detriment of the several hundreds of poor squatters who already eked out a living there.

When Brackenbury began to build a mansion for himself on what had been common land, the tyddynwyr dressed in their wives’ clothing (like those rebelling against the tolls during the Rebecca Riots), with blackened faces proceeded to dismantle the building every night. On 14 May 1826 over 600 tyddynwyr completely destroyed the house and Brackenbury fled for his life back to England. Many of these tyddynwyr then applied for the right to enclose their own land and as a result, this area had the densest concentration of freeholders in Cymru for a considerable period.

This case was unusual in that the area enclosed included such a large population of squatters who were able to organise resistance. On the other hand, references in the court rolls for Meirionydd list only individuals and small groups being hauled before the Sheriff for interfering with the process of enclosure. Usually the squatters had made attempts to drive off the surveyors who would be employed to lay out and map the new boundaries. Sometimes this involved violence on one or both sides, with the poor being found guilty of riot. Bowen quotes an Arthur Young, 1801 as saying “by 19 enclosures out of 20, the poor are injured, in some cases grossly injured...” The poor were unable to go to London to take up their case, unable to afford counsel, produce witnesses or present claims to Parliament.

Sadly I have not found any records of the response of the tyddynwyr of Mynydd Penrhos, if any. From the final sale of the land to the early Forestry Commission, it is clear that there were at least 32 holdings sold with the land. Given Mary Corbett Harris’ assertions that many of the houses had already been abandoned and judging from the number of ruins I have found in my wanderings, the total was probably higher in the 1600’s and 1700’s.

above: the ruin of Ty’n y Mynydd on Mynydd Penrhos. A larger tyddyn farming some ten acres of fields. In this case the family was forced to leave by the forestry commission refusing to renew their lease. The roof was then pulled in to prevent reoccupation.

Following enclosure, the tyddynwyr now became subject to rents, in the case of Mynydd Penrhos, the rents were due to the House of Nannau. This additional burden, paid in cash or produce would be too much for some families who had squatted their land rent free for a century or more.

Once rents were established it was not long before the landowners would attempt to get the tyddynwyr to improve their land and increase productivity, so the owners could then increase the rents. For much of Mynydd Penrhos, clearing fields of stones was the best that could be done and was written into leases. It seems likely that Nannau took a hand in some of the building work, Penrhos Isaf and Friog, for example, being fairly substantial farm houses. According to Bowen, increased rentals produced increased tithes for hay and grain grown on the newly enclosed land after 7 years; these were substantial gains for tithe holders (the clergy).

Not surprising then the desire to find an alternative life and for the many who chose to give up the land there were various options. Considerable numbers abandoned farming for a different form of hardship in the iron works and coal mines of the Valleys in South Wales or the slate quarries of the Lord Penrhyn in the north. Others ventured into towns in England with Liverpool being a favoured option for its traditional welsh connections.

Emigration was an option open to some, to America, Australia, the nascent Welsh community of Patagonia or the promised Welsh Haven in Pennsylvania (a promise that was never fulfilled). The passage overseas for the poor was extremely challenging, travelling in the hold of a ship with unpredictable weather and limited food, its not surprising that people died on the way.

Suffice to say that in Wales (as in the rest of Britain) the plight of the tyddynwyr, (the smallholders, crofters and cottagers) became too hard for many who gave up their homes and land. This led to a large reduction in the rural population, a process which was made even worse in the twentieth century with the introduction of farming subsidies following the First World War which in turn led to further farm amalgamation and the end of the viability of smallholding. Indeed, Cymru has the dubious distinction of being the first urbanised country in Europe, that is, where the urban population outnumbers the rural at the end of the 1800’s.

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Thanks for reading. As with many of these pieces, the more I look, the more I find and the longer they get! A warm welcome to new subscribers. Please feel free to leave comments or otherwise steer this work. Take care all. Hwyl! Chris

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This period came to a final and bitter end with Owain Glyndŵr, often described as the Last Prince of Wales. The Glyndŵr rebellion of 1400–1415 is a remarkable story in itself1 that at times seemed close to complete success but ultimately ended in disaster. However, I am not going to go into the details of the rebellion here, being more concerned with the consequences of the failure for the people of Cymru and hence the landscape.

That the utter failure of the rebellion was a disaster for Cymru is more than just a bit of an understatement. Although times had been worsening before the rebellion, one reason why there was so much support for Glyndŵr, fifteen years of a war that saw armies raging back and forth across Cymru and living off the land caused huge destruction and disruption. Villages and some of the few towns were almost completely destroyed, farms, barns and more crucially, mills were razed to the ground. Without access to mills, farmers could no longer easily mill their grains, including their own staple diet of oats. They were for at time reduced to the far more ancient methods of grinding grain with quern stones. The economic life of the country was disrupted to such an extent that no revenues could be raised or courts conducted..

As well as the physical destruction, considerable numbers of people were forced not just from their own homes but from their homelands, fleeing before advancing armies to safer areas and many never returned. Others turned to banditry and raiding to survive and various gangs became established in Cymru who brought fear to travellers for the next century and a half. Much previously farmed land was abandoned and left to grow wild. It was even said that grass grew on the main square in Oswestry market.

The English Crown’s punishments for the rebellion were particularly harsh. All public offices in Wales were denied to the Cymry which meant the imposition of English judges, magistrates, chancellors, justices etc. As very few of the Welsh population spoke any English, this meant that justice through law was now beyond their reach. Further, a Welshman could not serve on a jury and any statement by a Welshman could not be used in court to implicate an Englishman. Intermarriage with the English was also forbidden by law.

Many of the noble families who had supported the rebellion were reduced to poverty due to severe fines, others were exiled or fled the country. Large fines and war reparations were inflicted upon Burroughs and towns, even when sone of those towns had suffered considerable damage themselves. The once great Welsh kingdom of Gwynedd was reduced to a Principality of the English Crown and ruled by an English Prince of Wales. The powers of the Marcher Lords were extended and they were allowed to claim more territory.

This did little to reduce lawlessness and banditry; the Marcher Lords, wielding immense power in their own lands were often as guilty as anyone of raiding, promoting violence and sheltering bandits. An example are the Gwylliaid Cochion (the Wild Reds), based in Mawddwy, an area lying to the south west of Dolgellau. In the 1500’s these bandits were able to exploit the boundaries between the Marcher lordship of Powys and neighbouring counties including Meirionydd as different laws applied in each area. The Gwylliaid would raid widely, gathering herds of cattle often numbered in hundreds and retreating beyond the county boundary into the Marcher lands, thus evading the law. It is interesting to note that this raiding reflects the much earlier society of the Britons with the emphasis on cattle, rather than farming2. This physical, economic and social disruption meant a century and a half of deprivation for much of the country and its people. One consequence was the abandonment of large tracts of formerly farmed land and no doubt the same was true for much woodland previously managed for timber and particularly coppice. We can imagine forests becoming denser and darker, extending into fields and smothering ruins. Coupled with forests being traditional refuges for bandits of all sorts, it is perhaps from these times that the idea of the wild wood really begins to emerge.

It was the increasing unrest in Cymru that led Henry VIII to enact the so called Acts of Union3 of 1536 and 1542. His solution was an attempt to erase any idea of Cymru as a separate nation and bring order to the country. The Acts imposed English law, eradicating the Marcher Lordships and divided the traditional kingdoms into counties along English lines. Each county had its own appointed Sheriff and other county officers, as in England, along with nine Justices of the Peace. More to the point, all courts in the counties were to be conducted in the English language. With a largely monoglot population, speaking Cymraeg, justice became almost unattainable for the average person.

Henry VIII, with some Welsh blood in him, felt strongly that these county officers and representation on the English Parliament should be drawn from the old aristocracy and wealthier families who had not supported the Glyndŵr rebellion. The result was considerable and sometimes violent4 competition between the gentry. These families claimed descent and hence the foundation of their right to authority, from the previous princes and even further back to legendary figures such as Beli Mawr. Thus the older practice of raiding was transformed into a political rivalry and estate building.

The gentry, riding high on their newly gained access to power, resorted to a number of other methods to increase their wealth and local dominance. The first being to acquire as many of the available official roles as possible and hang on to them, ideally in perpetuity, passing them down through their kin. The second was to increase the size of their estates, initially by unofficial seizure of lands and subsequently through legal enclosures and thirdly by entering into various money making schemes such as exploiting the natural resources of their land through for example, mining or, as in the case we have here, providing fuel for an iron works venture to be set up close to the village of Ganllwyd.

During the sixteenth century, iron works moved towards simple blast furnaces, a more energy intensive method for heating the ore until the iron melted, rather than the earlier Bloomeries, where the ore was heated only enough to burn off the impurities and leave the crude iron. The necessary energy source at the time was charcoal and iron working in England had led to severe deforestation hence English speculators began to turn their attention to other areas, such as in Cymru.

The requirements were to find a source of iron ore, a nearby forest from which to produce the charcoal for the smelting and timber for the buildings plus an abundant water source to provide the power. The English speculators then had one further requirement, a land owner willing to provide the timber. The iron would be smelted on site and then transported to manufacturing centres in England where it could be worked into finished, high value products. This became a familiar pattern of local exploitation that was to be repeated many times over in many different industries in Cymru- English speculators, a squire anxious to develop the resources of his lands, the importation of skilled labour from England, and the use of local part-time peasant labour for the unskilled jobs.

above:John Speede’s map of Meirionethshire. The Mawddach estuary runs in almost at the centre with the scatter of trees in the middle marking Penrhos Wood.

In 1588 two English speculators, John Smith of Newcastle under Lyme in Staffordshire and William Dale, a London grocer, decided the Ganllwyd valley provided all the physical requirements; They also found a local landowner, Huw Nanney Hên (Old Huw Nanney), of the Nannau Estate who was establishing himself as one of the most prominent men of Merioneth. Huw was persuaded that the Ganllwyd valley contained the iron ore and that he could provide the timber for the charcoal by felling the Penrhos Wood named on John Speede’s map of Meirionydd, one of the very first to be produced.

So between March 1st, 1588 and March 25th, 1594, Huw and his son Gruffydd Nanney sold all the trees growing on Mynydd Penrhos to the two Englishmen, Smith and Dale and the felling began. Local labour was used for cutting the timber, such as John ap Howel of Llanfachreth. He was hired for a day’s work felling trees at the rate of a halfpenny per tree and during the day he cut down 28 oaks, ‘not choosing the lesser oaks to be Cutt but taking them as they hapened to be next to hym.’ The speculators found the timber to be of very poor quality and were forced to turn their attention to neighbouring woodlands as well. Thus was the first Penrhos Forest felled.

However, unfortunately for Huw Nanney, it was not his timber to sell and in fact belonged to the English Crown5. Huw was brought before the Star Chamber, the highest court in Britain and was convicted of theft of the King’s trees. He spent several years incarcerated in the Tower of London and was fined £1500 before eventually being released on compassionate grounds with the fine reduced to £800. This didn’t stop him entering into yet another iron works venture with the same speculators...

There are a number of interesting points about this story. Speede’s map of the very early sixteen hundreds quite clearly shows a forest in the right place, which matches the names found in the Norman Forest Lists, those of Penrhos Forest or Penrhos Wood. However, there are a number of contemporary reference to the land as Penrhos Common and also, similar evidence that there were already folk living on Mynydd Penrhos, as squatters (sgwatwyr).

Much of this comes from the transcripts of the Star Chamber proceedings of the case. One of the witnesses was Richard Nayler, Master Carpenter for the building of the ironworks (hence not local), who claimed that the timber on Penrhos Common, was not suitable for charcoal (partly because the complex, rocky topography of Mynydd Penrhos made extraction difficult6). However, in the same witness statement he does go on to talk of “the saide Wood of Benrhos”.

above: enlarged section of Speede’s map with intersting spelling of various places. From the bottom moving up through the centre, Dolgellau, Cymer Abbey, Nannau, Llanfachreth and Benrose Wood.

Further, with regard to commons and previous occupancy, Hugh ap Edward of Llanelltyd, told of “the great hinderance, of a great number of poore people which dwelled aboute the saied Comons which Comons lay very Conveniently for the said Countrey”. Another witness, Hugh ap John of Dolgellau, added that he had heard ‘diverse of the poore neighbours adioyninge to the said Comons oftentimes Curse the said Nanneys for cutting the said wood downe.’

So there is some confusion as to whether Mynydd Penrhos was seen as a common or a forest, or indeed both, which might be the root of Huw Nanney’s mistake in selling the timber- or he just thought he could get a way with it. What is clear is that from the felling onwards, Mynydd Penrhos is described as Penrhos Common and gradually folk began to move onto the land and take up residence through squatting, most likely using the folk belief of the the Ty Unos to establish their first, simple dwellings (more of this in the next episode).

Suffice to say that for the next three centuries, until the planting of a new forest of exotic conifers by the early Forestry Commission in 1924, Mynydd Penrhos became home to a thriving community of Tyddynwyr, who created the first fields and gardens here, lived simple, subsistence lifestyles and whose farm names appear on the first Ordnance Survey maps of the area.

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Thanks for reading. Comments welcome. Not sure what is coming next which is not that unusual! Please feel free to make suggestions for what you’d like to see. Till then, take care. Hwyl! Chris.

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I’ve used a wide variety of sources for this latest piece (there are a considerable number of books on the Glyndŵr rebellion) but this reference I found particularly fascinating as it includes extracts from the transcript of Huw Nanney’s case in the Star Chamber. Amazing that we have witness statements from local folk of 400 years ago!

Bryn R. Parry. Dolgellau, A Sixteenth Century Meirioneth Ironworks. Journal of the Meirioneth Historical and Records Society. Volume IV

I don't intend to provide a complete history of the next period but merely outline very broadly how the early societies based on kingship and bloodlines effected the environment and how changes to that society, from external invaders or otherwise, in turn changed the environment. In this section I am aiming towards the first appearance in recorded history of the name Penrhos, referring to the area which was to become Coed Y Brenin, as Penrhos Wood or Forest.

So after the Romans, in the land that was eventually to become Cymru, there was a return to something very similar to the tribal land divisions of pre-Roman times. Without the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace which was of course enforced by the Roman Sword, the previous stability of most of Britain rapidly turned into a politically chaotic period often referred to in Cymru as Oes Y Tywysogion, the Age of the Princes. This saw petty and not so petty chieftains fighting amongst themselves as they strove to gain territory and control over ever larger areas but never really succeeding for long, for reasons which I'll look at below.

These internal struggles for power were in turn affected by external aggressors such as the Irish and the Danes but more severely, the Normans and later the English. During these conflicts it was not unusual for various Welsh forces to be fighting on both sides, such was the rivalry between different families.

From the perspective of the aristocrats who headed these blood lines in Cymru, whether tywysog, arglwydd or brenin, (leader/prince, lord or king, the titles being used almost interchangeably), life revolved around building prestige through maintaining control of their own territory, raiding other territories for material goods (loot and plunder, particularly cattle but also captives who were ransomed or enslaved), attempting to enlarge your own territory by conquest of other areas and distributing largesse (goods and property) to your followers and supporters in order to try to ensure their continued loyalty.

Its not too harsh to say that many of these leaders were a right lot of vicious, murderous, scheming rogues, to put it mildly. This behaviour was exacerbated by the practice of partibility whereby on the death of a father, his property, land and goods were divided between all the sons, including any illegitimate ones (and there could be a fair few of those). The divisions were made by the youngest son and then the sons chose which share they wanted, in turn, beginning with the eldest and working down to the youngest; thus it was in the interest of the youngest son to make the divisions as equal as possible.

One consequence of this was that despite a leader conquering other tribal lands and securing sometimes large parts of Cymru under one rule, on their death the land was once more broken up into smaller units and the process begun again. This is one reason why Cymru only very occasionally came close to being a single, unified nation and also struggled to unite against a common, external foe.

A second consequence was that it tended to set the sons against one another as each tried to reunify their Father's territory and achieve ascendency by defeating their brothers. It was not that unusual for them to imprison, murder, blind or castrate one or more of their own brothers in this struggle for supremacy.

Should the sons remain relatively peaceful towards one another, perhaps recognising the eldest as the penteulu, (the head of the family), each son generally wanted to live with his own household on his own bit of the tribal land and much preferred hunting (and raiding...) to farming. Hence the importance of extensive woodlands and scrub as both forage and cover for wild game and large, open grazing lands for the herding of the tribal cattle. Thus the natural wooded but open environments that Vera describes in his book Grazing Ecology and Forest History, were well suited to this sort of society.

Agriculture was generally left in the hands of the taeogion (basically serfs who were the property of the ruling class and tied to the land) and caethion (roughly slaves who had either been captured in raids, bought, exchanged or were members of another family or tribe being held as hostage to ensure good relations).

This resulted in the scattering of the dwellings of the men of the blood across the tribal lands with agriculture concentrated in particular areas. Dolgellau, for example, on the rich alluvial flood plain of the Mawddach, is thought to be originally the serf village and centre of agriculture while the aristocracy occupied the pleasant, south facing hillsides above Llanelltyd.

The main wealth of the tribe was measured in cattle, a tradition that extends way back through history and into prehistory where there is considerable archaeological evidence for huge gatherings and feasts with the principle food being beef1. The importance of cattle also extends from here far into the future and was still the main measure of property for the Tyddynwyr (smallholders) up until the early 1900s.

While cattle might be owned by individuals within the family and the penteulu might reward family members by giving them beasts, the animals were kept as a single herd on the tribal lands and moved by herdsmen according to the availability of grazing. This preponderance of herds of cattle being moved through the landscape will obviously influence both grazing ecology and forest development. If we imagine a ffridd-like mixed environment of wooded and open areas, as I have described previously in various places,2 moving cattle regularly will serve to maintain grassland and restrict tree growth, thus taking on the role of the aurochs and deer from the earlier environments.

The concentration of sometimes large numbers of cattle on particular areas also prefigures the mob grazing techniques of contemporary times. The often considerable inputs of dung will be concentrated along areas of the better grasses, thus fertilising the soils and leading to improved grass growth. Also, the compression of soils from the many hooves of heavy beasts would severely impede the spread of bracken.

Sheep were also kept though not in the numbers we see today and again were herded. As well as providing wool for textiles and meat, sheep were often milked, a practice that has largely died out. The presence of upland sheep folds with multiple compartments could be evidence for this practice.

The movement of animals was closely related to the weather and seasons. Animals were moved to higher grazing during the summer with folk moving into temporary upland dwellings, hafodydd (plural of hafod or summer dwelling, preserved in many place names), a practice known as transhumance.

This emphasis on cattle herding and the regular moving of beasts to fresh grazing within the larger landscape meant little emphasis was given to boundaries (other than tribal ones) or even the idea of enclosed fields. Agriculture, concentrated as it was in relatively small, scattered locations was practised on open field systems3. In a society where tasks were allotted to all, including quite young children, labour was available to keep flocks of sheep, geese, ducks or hens away form crops, meaning there was little need for boundaries.

However, the clawdd (earth banks, plural cloddiau) seem to have been used from a very early age to denote land use, dividing more intensive areas, such as crops or winter quarters for some stock, from more extensive grazing and forage. Indeed, Carwyn Graves in his seminal book Tir4 quotes research using luminescence dating5 showing some of the cloddiau in Pembrokeshire to be up to 3,000 years old. This is a truly remarkable age for human made landscape features which are often still in use today for their original purpose.

I'll mention here two other natural landscape features, if anything to emphasise their survival in the landscape through long periods of time, namely dolydd or dolau (meadows, dôl is the singular) and elltydd (steep wooded slopes, allt is the singular).

Meadows on flood plains were hugely valuable resources; flood plains tend to occur following a narrowing of a river which increases the force of the flow during flood and deepens the bed. When this narrow channel opens out on reaching more level ground, the river in flood will burst its banks, flowing out on either side and spreading across the flatter land. The force of the water is distributed over a larger area and the flow slows, allowing sediment carried down from above to settle. This sediment includes both organic and mineral components and effectively fertilises the land it settles on6. This led to rich grasslands, grazed by native deer and aurochs and more latterly valued for hay crops and grazing.

Vera argues that steep slopes being unsuitable for larger herbivores, developed naturally as woodland and this landform is captured in the Welsh term allt, meaning a steep, wooded slope. At some point in history, these steep slopes became managed for coppice wood, some of which is still in evidence to day, though long unused. When this occurred, whether it is from this medieval period or represents a much more ancient practice, is not clear.

Overlapping with this age of the princes were the Normans, arriving in Britain with the well known battle of Hastings of 1066 which resulted in Norman Kings ruling England for several centuries. The Normans as proto-fascist capitalists (a terrifying combination...) attempted to place a value on everything, in order to extract tax from the indigenous population. Hence the so-called Doomsday Book which strove to list everything of value in the lands under Norman control down to the last pig and goose; even the cats get a mention and a job (guardian of the granaries) with strict rules for their upkeep and if they failed to catch mice, woe betide them!

Norman control of Cymru was limited, largely to the coast where they build castles and the North and South where they created settlements and populated them with English and Dutch settlers. From the point of view of Cymru, the worst of the Norman kings were the Edwards, I and III, the latter waging particularly bloodthirsty and ruthless campaigns and launching major incursions in the north. Edward III's armies including several hundred axemen who cleared the woodlands to either side of the main route along the north coast to reduce the cover for ambushes, something the Cymru had excelled at.

Again, the internal divisions and conflicts within Cymru served to help the invaders and it was not unusual for there to be Welsh princes and their forces serving under the Norman and later English kings against their rivals.

Rather than the Normans, it was the Great Plague of 1346 through to1353 that began a period of social upheaval. It is thought that up to a third of the population died in some areas, a truly massive depopulation and one that provoked considerable social change.

The labour force of the various royal families was severely reduced leading to a reduction in the area of managed landscape. This in turn would favour the growth of trees. It also began to break up the traditional relationship between the ruling families of the blood and the taeogion or serfs, many of whom now began to farm for themselves, paying rent to the ruling family. This then can be seen as the beginnings of the rise of both the gentry and the dependent tyddynwyr.

There was also an increasing wealth in the church and growth of monasteries. Many of the princes who had lived violent lives attempted to secure their places in heaven on their death beds, by donating land to the church and/or monasteries. This resulted in both becoming owners of large tracts of land. Coupled with this was the increasing value of wool as an export market, a market which effectively paid for the armies of several English kings in their exploits on the continent.

This combination of land and a good market for wool meant that monasteries in particular moved into sheep ranching at increasing scales, hence causing major changes in the landscape. In particular, the grazing of large numbers of sheep in the uplands would severely restrict forest growth, leading to a far more open landscape.

It is with the Normans that we find the first actual mention of Penrhos, not as a mynydd, (a mountain) but as a forest. It appears on several Norman lists of forests in Cymru from around 1200 AD, on one as Penrhose Forest and another as Penros Wood. That the Normans are referring to the area which is now known as Mynydd Penrhos is supported by one of the earliest actual maps of the county of Meirionydd, made by John Speede and first printed in 1610 which gives the name Benrose Wood and locates it in the right place7. These are the first actual mentions of the area by name in the historical record, even if the spelling is somewhat variable8. What is also interesting about Speede's map is how little forest is marked, not just in Meirionydd but throughout Britain and I'll be offering some of the reasons for this together with the continuing changes in the landscape in the next chapter of The Real Coed Y Brenin.

above: an enlargement of part of John Speede’s 1610 map of Meirionydd, showing a Benrose Wood (at this time, an “s” is written similar to an “f”) in the right place for Mynydd Penrhos. Note the interesting spellings- just below Benrose Wood is modern day Llanfachreth.

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Many thanks for reading. As always, comments are most welcome and useful.

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above: mixed open woodland forming after excluding large herbivores. The intricacies of the landscape provide multiple niche space hence great variety. Is this a microcosm of the early landscapes of Cymru?

Last time in the story of the Real Coed Y Brenin I described the retreat of the ice and the warming climate which allowed animals and plants to recolonise the mineral rich surfaces of Britain. This influx of species would have slowed as sea levels rose and become more severely restricted by about 6000 BC when its thought that any remaining land bridges to the continent were submerged.

I described the two main theories of forest development in Britain, often seen as competing and how I believe that both probably applied, according to local topography and environmental conditions, particularly rainfall. The result was a complex, dynamic environment of wooded hillsides, broad alluvial flood plains, upland blanket bogs, areas of dense forest and broad open sweeps of grasslands and scrub gardened by a great diversity of grazing and browsing animals, in turn predated by bears, wolves, lynx and others.

In Cymru this mixed forest environment is currently described as Celtic Rainforest which sounds quite romantic but is problematic, primarily because its evolution began long before the Celts actually appeared on these shores and also due to the label “Celt” in the first place. I'll look at the term “Celt” further on but I believe a much more accurate description would be Temperate Rainforest. I first heard this term being used by old friend Dr. Martin Garnett, back in the early nineties and I use it in preference to Celtic Rainforest.

above: fridd remnant perhaps giving an indication of what a more open prehistoric landscape that developed in the presence of large herbivores might have looked like.

After the ice, along with the trees and animals came people, small family groups or bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers from around 8,000 BC who favoured the western seaboards1 where they could take advantage of both the rich seafood of the shorelines and the mixed forests and grasslands of the interior2. At this time the population of Britain in general and Cymru in particular would have been extremely low and consequently interactions with the environment would only have small, local effects. However, its worth saying that in certain places these interactions continued over several centuries or even millennia and even just a few folk can make quite a big difference over such long periods of time.

Middens, for example, where our early ancestors sat and ate their fill then chucked the shells, animal and bird bones over their shoulders, built up in favoured places to mounds of considerable size; one at Limfjord in Northern Jutland was 140 metres by 20 metres up to a depth of 2 metres and had accumulated over a period of 800 years3. Middens also provide an excellent testament to the great variety of foods on their menu4.

The practice of farming began in the middle east, spread up the Danube and through Europe at a speed of about one mile a year, arriving in Britain around 4,000 BC. These neolithic farmers would have to have come by boat from the continent, either across the channel or up the Irish Sea.. There is some debate as to whether this spread was the result of the large scale movement of people or the adoption and transmission of the culture and, perhaps as usual, it's probably a bit of both.

Its this neolithic period that sees the beginnings of quite major deforestation for a variety of reasons though primarily to clear land for growing cereals and grazing domesticated livestock. This was particularly apparent in the south east of England and led to the species rich grasslands of the South Downs. It also meant that at a later date (55-54 BC) Julius Caesar's tentative invasions could be menaced by scores of Briton chariots exploiting the more open landscape. Although the evidence for crop production is clear, there's also considerable evidence for continued hunting and wild plant exploitation, notably hazelnuts and wild fruits.

The food production of farming prompted a radical increase in the population of Britain with some estimates suggesting it had reached about a million by 1400 BC. Farming required settled communities and more permanent homes than the temporary camps of hunter-gatherers. Permanent settlements with slowly increasing populations meant more impact on the local environment around each settlement. Round houses were the favoured architecture, each round house requiring considerable resources; a round house reconstructed at Hadleigh Country Park for example, required the following materials;

• 12 tonnes of locally sourced timber, including 45 straight 11 metre lengths for the rafters

• 22 tonnes of daub

• 1000 lengths of hazel

• 4 km of sisal rope to tie 1200 square-lashes

• 1000 bundles of reed

There's an obvious problem here in that sisal originated from Mexico and was not exported from there until the nineteenth century...There is very early prehistoric evidence for string and rope making from impressions left in clay and its pretty obvious that both would be extremely useful, essential even, for the making of textiles, bags and the like as well as for tying stuff together but very little in the way of organic material survives from so long ago.

More likely candidates than sisal in the British context would be plants like nettle or split bramble. Also, willow bark strips easily when green and long strips have good tensile strength. No matter, the gathering of these materials, particularly timber, inevitably required changes in practices and altered the dynamic of the local environments.

above: Hut circle foundations on Tre’r Ceiri.

Admittedly the Hadleigh round house is a very substantial construction and the 11 metre rafters were sourced from Chestnut. Here in Cymru, judging from the foundations of the round houses at Tre'r Ceiri (Town of the Giants) or more locally, Moel Offrwm, (more on that below), the spans were nowhere near as great at only some five or six metres. Even so, the point to make is that considerable amounts of coppice wood were required, resulting in the need to manage woodlands for the necessary products. It is possible that in Cymru this led to the practice of coppicing the elltydd (steep wooded slopes). Today such slopes will often have overgrown, formally coppiced hazel or oak on them, suggesting a continuous practice reaching back over several thousands of years.

above: formerly coppiced sessile oak on an allt (allt being traditionally a steep wooded slope) below Bryn Merllyn on Mynydd Penrhos. This coppice has been unused for now for at least a century, a break in a practice that may have extended a millennia or more into the past.

From about 1250 BC the climate changed with higher rainfall and much lower summer temperatures leading to the restriction of the spread of trees into the uplands and an increase in peat formation. This has been linked to a withdrawal of the population from many upland settlements and may have led to conflict and and changes in social organization. Large enclosures began to be constructed on hills about this time which have in the past been interpreted as hill forts, suggesting a military purpose though for many of these enclosures there is no actual evidence of any conflict.

above: Moel Offrwm, very bald. One group of hut rings lies on the shelf on the left.

Moel Offrwm, the remnants of a volcanic plug of the great volcano, Rhobell Fawr is the site of several such enclosures and groups of hut rings thought to date to this period, though they have never been excavated. One cluster of huts is on a shelf to the south west of the summit from which there are clear views up and down the main river valleys and the various passes. However, a clear view would require that the hill had been cleared of trees. I've mentioned before that the prefixing of a hill name with “Moel” (bald, derived from the proto-Celtic word “mailo”) would suggest that many other hills were still “hairy”, as in covered with trees or bushes.

Other European immigrants appeared from some 1000BC onwards, including the various peoples who are lumped together today as Celts and later named tribes such as the Belgae and other Gauls, although it is unlikely that they thought of themselves as Celts5. In his “Blood of the Celts”, Jean Manco6, gathers DNA evidence from European and British human remains found in prehistoric and historic burials to trace the movement of the people who were to become the Cymru. These folk appeared to have wandered about through Northwest Europe for several centuries, crossed first to Britain then over to Ireland for a few more centuries before finally returning to Cymru where they settled and stayed remarkably insular for the next two millennia.

As the human population increased, so too did the number of native animals diminish. It is notable that the bigger animals tend to go first with moose hunted out by about 3600 BC and Aurochs, the very large, wild cattle, by 1000 BC. Due to the eradication of the larger herbivores and consequent reduced grazing pressure it is likely that forest cover would increase in some areas as it was in turn reduced in other areas due to deforestation by humans for wood products and land clearance for farming. Perhaps this is when the denser forest cover develops in less populated areas that leads to the idea of the Wildwood.

I’m skipping through the centuries now as the Romans pop over to Britain for four hundred years, leaving a substantial mark on what was to become England, especially the south east, but save for a limited network of roads and forts, particularly along the north and south coasts where access was easier, having little impact on the more mountainous interior of Cymru, including Mynydd Penrhos. However, lead charms believed to be of Roman origin have been found in a nearby pool, though these have not yet been officially identified or dated.

The arrival of Angles and Saxons on the southern and eastern coasts of Britain was more radical in some ways. Interestingly, in English text books, the Saxons are presented as bringing an advanced culture with fine metal working to a rather rural Britain, completely ignoring the fact that the Britons were largely peaceful Christians, some of whom could read and write, whereas the Saxons were illiterate, aggressive, land-grabbing pagans...As the Saxons proceeded to push further north and west, finally overcoming the British Northern Kingdoms, Cymru became one of main refuges for the Britons, staunchly maintaining its independence.

Mention should be made here of the Irish who had close links with the Cymru, sharing some blood lines and established themselves in some of the coastal areas until they were pushed out, reputedly by Cunedda and his sons, who came down from the Northern Kingdoms in the 5^th century to aid their brethren and establish the kingdom of Gwynedd.

The so-called Vikings had some impact, in particular the Danes who established colonies on Ynys Môn (Anglesey) and some coastal areas and largely controlled trade in the Irish Sea. Old Norse names occur on all prominent coastal features around Cymru, such as headlands and bays. In the area around Dolgellau, the name Garth, from Old Norse, is prepended to a number of houses, the original meaning suggesting a clearing and later becoming synonymous with a yard.

All these arrivals would have had some influence of the landscapes they occupied or wandered. Major changes are generally limited to the North and South coastal areas where level land allows the relatively easy movement of goods, materials and armies The Romans in particular were efficient road builders and these roads or at least their routes, would no doubt be reused in later ages (some still are today). The coast in general offered opportunities for sea-going folk like the Vikings and later the Normans built many coastal castles, taking advantage of the ability to sail supplies to them without needing to control the interior.

above: a mix of trees, grazing, bogs and pools- the interior lands of Cymru. In fact his is Llyn Garnett Uchaf, enhanced by the work of old friend Doc Martin who arranged to raise the water level enough to create a patchwork environment of varied habitats.

Yet that rugged interior of hills, mountains, forests and bogs remained largely beyond the reach of any organised invasion, a haven for retreating nobility and a relatively stable home to a rural population and its this that I will look at in the next part, including the Normans and the first appearance in the historical record of the name Penrhos.

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Thanks for reading. I'm still not 100% satisfied that this piece conveys what I intended but sometimes you just have to release stuff into the wild, hope for the best and move on. Its high time to move on! Please feel free to comment, as always. Hwyl! Chris

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In the previous chapters of The Real Coed Y Brenin, I looked at the very early, geological history of the site and in particular the great volcano, Rhinog Fawr and how it shaped the structure of the landscape. I then skipped a few hundred million years to the Ice Ages and especially the last one, that ground up rock in its glacial progress and deposited sands, gravels, rocks, stones and boulders wherever the topology of the landscape and the flow of water directed. Here I take up the story with the return of vegetation to land that had been covered by glaciers, ice sheets or permanent snow for millennia.

above: ffridd (see below) or is it something like the original ecology of Britain?

After the Ice.

As the last Ice Age ground to a close some 12,000 or so years ago, the ice and snow gradually began to melt and Britain, an island again, starts to warm up. The climate didn't simply recover to its present level, but underwent a series of fluctuations, at times becoming warmer and drier than at present, and then again approaching glacial conditions1.

Here in Cymru, after tens of thousands of years under glaciers and ice sheets, the melt revealed a landscape rich in minerals but lacking organic material. Plant life returns to this once frozen land, moving through first lichens and mosses into arctic willow and other cold tolerant species like birch and silver fir, to shrubs, bushes and the trees common in the last century, such as oak, ash, elm, lime, hazel and the like. These ecosystems, dominated by trees, were seen as a climax and end point to development and occurred alongside soil building and increased water storage.

Until relatively recently (2000), this theory of forest development, from next to nothing to climax forest was generally accepted and supported the idea of Britain being covered for many thousands of years by the Wildwood. The Wildwood was thought of as a dark and forbidding place beneath the continuous canopy, only the occasional clearing where a forest giant had fallen providing some brief opening to the sky, soon to be filled as young saplings race towards the light. The wildwood made much of the land impassable and dangerous, the haunt of wild beasts like wolves and bears.

above: a closed canopy, here on Argel after the cull of the deer removed the grazing pressure on trees.

However, even before the turn of this millennium these view was being challenged. As Britain warmed up it moved from an arctic climate, through sub-arctic, a boreal period and on into the present temperate climate (how long will this last, I wonder?). Through observations of similar climatic zones, we find that tundra is home to huge numbers of large herbivores such as Reindeer and Caribou, who migrate in sometimes vast numbers and exert a tremendous grazing pressure on landscapes at particular times of the year.

Given that Britain supported several different species of deer, aurochs (huge wild cattle) as well as wild boar and beavers, it seems likely that they would have some not insignificant influence on the development of forest systems.

It was also clear that the spread of forest slowed radically in the uplands when the climate became much wetter at times which favouring peat formation in blanket bogs over trees. There is also some argument that the summit climate of British mountains can approach subarctic conditions and so doesn't favour tree growth2.

More recently, parts of the south east of Britain seemed to have been clear of trees for several thousand years. Julius Caesar, for example, on his brief excursions to Britain relates in his Bello Gallicum (the Gallic War) how the Britons he encountered there used chariots extensively and effectively; for a chariot to be usable at all, let alone in warfare, a relatively smooth, open landscape is required.

I became more doubtful of the standard model following my own observations of re-vegetation on the experimental site here at Penrhos that I called Argel3.

Here, with a large, feral population of fallow deer eating out all the tasty young saplings, a much more complex and interesting environment appeared. The pressure of the grazing and browsing by the deer favoured the growth of spiky plants, notably gorse, which sheltered young trees, including birch, willow, oak and hazel and meant that open areas between gorse clumps were maintained as grass pathways and small clearings, preserving the previous sun loving, pasture species. This led to a complex topology and a patchwork environment presenting many niche spaces for other species.

It was only after the very large cull of the deer in the early 1990's4 that tree growth proceeded as described in the theory and a closed tree canopy rapidly developed. This in turn led to the loss of the sun-loving pasture species and an overall reduction in species diversity.

above: Argel after the cull. Note the density of tree regeneration, hazel and birch, after the deer cull; the canopy rapidly closed and shaded out the sun loving plants.

So where did this theory of climax forest come from?

The theories of forest origins were largely based on observation of abandoned farmland on mainland Europe during the twentieth century. In these cases, re-vegetation occurred without pressures from large herbivores. The result is a simple progression from grassland through taller herbs and shrubs and on into complete tree-cover which will assume the appearance of a climax ecology. These observations became the basis for the general theory.

My own thoughts of the limiting effect on tree development by the grazing pressure of large herbivores were confirmed in much greater depth and detail by the work of F W M Vera in his excellent book, Grazing Ecology and Forest History5

Vera describes how the pressure of mixed species of large, grazing and browsing herbivores favours the growth of thorny plants like gorse and black and white thorns which then provide protection for trees. His description of blackthorn is particularly striking as the tree grows outward annually through suckers, forming dense thickets. Jays tend to stash (plant) acorns on the edges of blackthorn thickets, many of which go on to germinate and grow and are then engulfed by the ever expanding thorn.

These trees, protected from grazing animals by the thorns, grow on and upwards to shade out the blackthorn, creating oak groves in grasses surrounded by the blackthorn boundary which continues to expand, engulfing and protecting yet more trees. There is a good argument here that these eventually huge blackthorn thickets are the basis for the hunting parks of the aristocracy.

Vera also talks about steep sided slopes being less accessible to the larger herbivores, thus favouring the growth of trees. This is something that is confirmed in the Welsh language and culture; as I have mentioned before. An allt in Cymraeg originally referred to a steep sided, wooded hillside and the term abounds around here, such as Allt Fridd Goch, Allt Moel Dolfrwynog, Allt Pen Y Bryn and the like.

above: Allt Mynydd Penrhos. Here the allt was not cleared and planted by the early Forestry Commission (unlike some ridiculously steep slopes) so the original species, here oak, have grown on. Allt, originally a wooded slope, would have been managed by tyddynwyr for small scale coppice such as sessile oak and hazel. Here, the formerly coppiced oaks have been ignored for a century and grown away freely, vying for space and light with each other, producing many long, thin, winding branches.

So rather than climax forest cover, Vera argues for a much more complex landscape of groves, copses, thickets interspaced with open, grazed areas, parts turned over by wild boar, allowing annual species to flourish in the bare earth, no doubt areas laced with the pools and channels of beavers and areas of denser forest along steeper valley sides. Hence a very rich and varied, dynamic landscape, a tapestry or patchwork of ecological niches.

This landscape that Vera describes is very like the ffriddoedd (plural of ffridd) of Cymru, and most particularly of western Meirionydd. Here, ffridd appears between the fields of a farm and the mountain wall. It is an in-between zone, an edge zone, edges being most significant in permaculture design; edges span two zones, such as field and forest and hence incorporate species from both, so being more diverse than either zone alone.

Ffridd.

above: a composite picture of a fridd remnant running across the side of the hill, with just a scatter of trees remaining, thorn (flowering white) and some gorse (yellow/brown). The land is now being grazed exclusively by sheep with the fridd incorporated into the mountain grazing. Interestingly, the mountain wall includes a clawdd or earth bank, indicating a very old land division. The lower, fridd wall is more obvious where the trees stop and the fields begin.

Carwyn Graves in his excellent recent book, Tir6, gives a detailed description of ffridd and you can find my own work on ffridd here[. Interestingly ffridd was not originally a Cymric term but is borrowed back from the French before becoming thoroughly part of the tradition and culture of Cymru. There is no direct English translation and suggestions such as Tree Pasture or Field Trees come nowhere near to it. I have used the term Celtic or Cymric Agroforestry at times but again this is insufficient. I have also described it as permaculture design's Zone 4, Fuel and Forage Forest which is closer to the actuality but still does not really convey the species rich beauty of it.

Imagine a complex mix of trees, shrubs, herbs, grasses of varying ages, sizes and heights with a highly varied topography, a complex mosaic of species which was dynamically managed by the tyddynwyr (smallholders) through the grazing of limited numbers of a variety of animals (cattle, sheep, horses) at certain times of the year. If trees showed signs of becoming too dominant, the tyddynwyr would harvest some for building materials and fuel and perhaps leave some of the livestock on for longer. If the pasture within the ffridd looked like it was spreading too much, then they would reduce the stocking rate or move animals off earlier.

Ffridd was then very much a conscious management of a landscape through livestock which resulted in something which sounds very much like the original landscape of Britain that had developed in the presence of large herbivores after the ice. So if we imagine that something like ffridd was the more general appearance of the British landscape several thousand years ago, then we could consider that the ffridd remnants we still have in Cymru today, especially in western Meirionydd, might represent survivals of this original landscape.

Vera's theory of grassland ecology and forest development is still contested (quite vociferously by some!). In particular, oak is a problem as the pollen record shows it grew in proliferation with other trees, suggesting a climax forest, yet it does not regenerate well in woodland unless it has a good amount of light, suggesting a more open landscape.

Whatever, as is often the case, I think its more likely that examples of both theories of forest development would have been found in Britain. So after the ice age, I can imagine the re-vegetation of Britain including large numbers of herbivores and their predators to create a highly mixed environment that no doubt did also include very large, dense stands of climax forest, possibly where humans had hunted out the larger animals, as happened on other continents and at other times. The landscape would also include often extensive open, grazed areas with more scattered trees and shrubs growing out of the protective spikes of black and white thorns and gorse with steeper hillsides favouring denser tree cover.

above: a closer view of the first photograph, showing denser clusters of trees with a closed canopy, scatters and clumps of trees and bushes, with thorns displaying white blossom and many open areas, now, in the absence of heavy browsers (cattle and horses) are giving way to bracken. Is this something like the early landscape of Cymru looked?

As human occupation of the island increased, forest development and tree cover was further modified (steered) by our activity. Considerable quantities of coppice hazel were required to construct roundhouses, hurdles, trackways and the like. There is a suggestion that a sudden decline in the number of elm, evident from the pollen record, was the result of coppicing branches for leaf fodder for livestock and hunting would gradually reduce the numbers of the larger herbivores, allowing for more tree regeneration.

above: looking into the closing canopy at Argel, after the cull. Note the use of sticks and branches through the first wet bit- a very ancient practice.

But the Wildwood is an idea that is rooted as much in legend and imagination as in reality and over the last few decades there has been much argument and heated debate surrounding alternative views of forest development in Britain. Further, Vera's book has provoked considerable interest in Rewilding, usually to the exclusion of humans and without consultation of the original occupants of the landscape, notably the Summit to Sea Rewilding Project, imposed on the people and landscape of Pembrokeshire and then withdrawn due to the considerable local resistance.

From a permaculture design perspective, the complex, mosaic landscape suggested by Vera and modelled by the friddoedd of the Cymric tyddynwyr, presents an enormously varied and dynamic landscape, rich in species diversity and hence offering harvests of many types; in short, capable of providing us with all our basic needs.

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Thanks for reading and a very warm welcome to new subscribers. Not sure what will appear next yet… The Real Coed Y Brenin moves on to the the appearance of Penrhos Forest, mentioned in the Norman forest lists (very organised, those Normans), that covered Mynydd Penrhos and the surroundings for centuries before it was felled illegally by the local gentry to fuel an iron smelting venture- capitalism, eh? Long roots. Also, we’ve got further episodes of Heads At The Little Big Farm, a second strand from the meta-pata-fiction Konsk. And no doubt something else will catch my consciousness unawares and demand attention, so who knows? Till we do, take care. Hwyl! Chris.

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above: Mynydd Penrhos from Bryn Merllyn, looking south. The wind smoothed plantation of exotic conifers conceals an underlying complexity of land forms.

To get an idea of the geology underlying Coed Y Brenin, we have to go back in time, a long way back, a long, looong way back! So this is also an exercise in getting a feeling for deep time, that puts our human existence on Earth into just a short blink that in comparison to geological processes, has only just happened. In the case of the geology underlying Coed Y Brenin, we need to go back nearly half a billion years, about 480 million to be a little more precise, to the Great Volcano, Rhobell Fawr1, gulp!

To call that “quite a stretch” is a radical understatment; the first dinosaurs didn't appear until about 240 million years ago. Yes, we could go back still further but while fascinating, the (even) earlier development of the Earth's form and surfaces add little to our particular understanding of Coed Y Brenin today, whereas the repeated eruptions of the Great Volcano, Rhobell Fawr and the massive lava flows and ash deposits that were then eroded over millions upon millions of years, together with the massive faulting, the shattering of the surfaces, their upheavals, folding, overthrows and uplifting and the glaciations that followed much later, provide the structure of the complex landscape that exists today.

Around 490–390 million years ago the continent which would become North America (Laurentia) collided with a much smaller microcontinent (Avalonia) that included parts of modern day Europe along with the landmass that would become Britain. The collision resulted in intense compression, folding, and faulting of the Earth's crust and among other features, produced the Harlech Dome which extended out into what is now Cardigan Bay. The circumference of the dome was volcanically active and produced the huge stratovolcano, a conical volcano composed of alternating layers of lava2 and ash, Rhobell Fawr.

above: Rhobell Fawr looms above Llanfachreth in a photo by Myfyr Tomos. The sign pointing to the left indicates something of the rich deposits of metals.

Estimates of the maximum size of Rhobell Fawr vary at around 30,000 feet (say 9,100 metres) following repeated eruptions of immense magnitude. Over millions of years, the volcano has been heavily eroded, leaving behind the remnants of its volcanic core. Rhobell Fawr now stands at 2,408 feet (or 734 meters). The volcanic core is surrounded by sedimentary rocks, which were deposited after the volcanic activity ceased and is one of the oldest volcanic structures in Wales.

The tectonic forces that shaped the region, building the volcano and other mountains during this collision also resulted in complex faulting. The faulting includes several major faults that criss-cross the region including the Bala, Tanygrisiau and Migneint Faults and a range of smaller faults of various types.

Types of fault.

• Thrust Faults: Caused by compressional forces during the Caledonian Orogeny, where rocks are pushed over one another.

• Normal Faults: Formed during later extensional events, where the crust is pulled apart.

• Strike-Slip Faults: Where rocks slide past each other horizontally, often associated with shearing forces.

This faulting has created a highly broken up and rugged landscape, with steep valleys and ridges running in various directions together with uplifted, rotated or inverted blocks which have in turn influenced the drainage patterns and groundwater flow, with rivers and streams often following fault lines. Its also worth pointing out here that all this intense tectonic and volcanic activity resulted in a wide range of metals being deposited along the rim of the Harlech Dome, including copper, arsenic, molybdenum, manganese, lead and silver althought its normaly known as the Gold Belt3.

above: coinciding with writing this piece, Natural Resources Wales are continuing to fell all the larch on Mynydd Penrhos and as they do so, something of the complexity of the landscape is revealed again, as with the dips, stepped crags and folds here.

What follows all this is a huge expanse of time during which whole mountains (and volcanos) were eroded away. This simple statement conceals the enormity of the process; consider that Rhobell Fawr lost something like 25,000 feet (7,600 metres) of lava and ash. This continues until we arrive in the relatively recent past, a mere 2,580,000 years ago and the Quaternary or Pleistocene glaciation, an alternating series of glacial and interglacial periods that is ongoing, although another glaciation is looking unlikely at the moment...

above: previously hidden crag once more exposed. Interesting to consider that the heather, birch and rowan here are survivals from times long before the plantation.

If we skip to the Last Glacial Maximum, around 26,500 to 19,000 years ago, the ice sheet was thick enough to bury many of the lower hills and valleys, with figures for its depth (or rather, height) estimated at over half a mile (2,640 feet or about 804 metres). If we consider the weight of that thickness of that ice as it grinds its way over the bed rock, its easier to imagine the massive potential to erode and shape the underlying structures of rock and stone, even more so given that each glaciation lasted thousands of years.

So the glaciers can carve out U-shaped valleys and cirques, sculpt complex smaller features like grooves and shelves, smooth and round hilltops and ridges. However, on Mynydd Penrhos and its surroundings those alternating layers of lava and ash were broken up by faulting into blocks that were displaced, some ending up with the bedding planes almost vertical. The softer stones and minerals that formed from the ash are more easily eroded than the lava, granites and basalts, and these harder materials remain as narrow, steep sided ridges like prominent spines.

above: successive steep sided ridges run like spines through the area in a variety of directions, each providing unique aspects and hence habitats.

As the ice melted, it left behind a wide variety of glacial deposits, including clay, silt, sand, gravel and boulders. Some boulders are of considerable size, known as erratics they could be transported on glaciers and ice sheets for considerable distances from their places of origin; my son, Sam, lived in Wolverhampton briefly and showed me an erratic which had been carried there during the ice age from Arenig, a mountain only a dozen miles to the north of us here in Cymru, a distance of about 100 miles (160 Km).

above: erratic in Wolverhampton, delivered from Cymru by Ice (more reliable than Evri…)

Following the thawing of the last ice age about 12-10,00 years ago, further modification continues to take place through what are called periglacial processes, such as freeze-thaw cycles, which contributed to the formation of scree slopes and further erosion of cliffs, crags and outcrops. The vast quantities of water from the melting glaciers carved out deep, irregular valleys and led to the formation of lakes and rivers, which continued to shape the landscape through erosion and sediment deposition.

As a result of melting glaciers and ice sheets, global sea level rose by more than 120m, flooding Dogger Land to become the North Sea, drowning the continental land bridge to form the English Channel and submerging the river systems between Cymru and Ireland. Interestingly there are possible recordings of this last event in the Cymric culture; in the Mabinogi, Branwen's Tale, Ireland is described as at that time only being divided from Cymru by two rivers and there are also tales of the "Drowned Hundreds", Cantrefi that were inundated by rising sea levels and now lie beneath the Irish Sea.

A further consequence of that vast weight of ice in glaciers and sheets was that the crust of north west Europe which is in effect floating on the molten magma beneath, had been considerably depressed. As the ice melted, the land mass slowly rose began to rise again. This rebound or isostatic adjustment as it is termed continues today, with the north west rising by about 1.5mm a year and the south east sinking by about 1mm.

This uplift can be considerable, measured in tens of metres and results in streams and rivers cutting back deeply and steepening their decent, creating gravel and bolder trains that deliver vast quantities of material to the lower regions and leaves it often neatly sorted into gradations from fine to course, in layers and banks or in clay deposits in depressions, such as here at Penrhos.

The result of all this very ancient geological activity and the much more recent glaciation and uplift, is a remarkably complicated geological landscape of steep sided valleys and ridges, crags, shelves, lumps, bumps, hollows, screes, cliffs and clefts. The cloak of forestry today largely conceals this complexity, hiding it beneath the wind smoothed crowns of exotic conifers. Walk under the trees however, where that is possible and you will lose yourself in a labyrinth like landscape of repeated, irregular forms that will continually appear both familiar and unique.

above: Mynydd Penrhos before the plantation of Coed Y Brenin. Detail from an a post card showing something of the rocky complexity of the landscape.

Mynydd Penrhos forms a great fist of rock that now marks the southern boundary of Coed Y Brenin and contains examples of all that complexity squeezed into a restricted form. Here then is the structure upon and within which soils and environments form and in the next piece on The Real Coed Y Brenin I'll look at the proliferation of life that took place as the last ice age came to an end and Britain starts to warm up.

Many thanks for reading. This has been quite a dense piece for me, requiring a fair bit of research to try to fill in some detail to the broad-brush image that I had painted for myself over time and it took a while to get the structure right, hence the delay. There are still some interesting gaps; for example, I would have liked to find out how much weight per square metre a half mile thick ice sheet would apply on the surface, also the temperatures that might be generated there, nor have I found an easy answer to how much uplift has occurred so far and whether it was continuous or sporadic; looking at the cliffs beyond Arthog on our coastline, Lyn has pointed out wave cut platforms that are now at least 40 or 50 metres above current sea level. Anyone have pointers to more detail? Comments always welcome. Till next time, take care. Hwyl! Chris.

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above: pretty view of the forest over dead larch (phytophthora ramorum).

NRW was formed on 1st April 2013 (the date itself is a bit ominous!) by amalgamating the Countryside Council for Wales (CCW), the Forestry Commission Wales (FCW) and the Environment Agency Wales (EAW). On paper this has some logical sense in terms of cost savings. For example, all three bodies had their own marketing, accounting, translation and human resources departments. By unifying these and other departments in a single organisation, considerable savings could be made.

So what happened? First, a quick look at the responsibilities of those three separate bodies.

The Environment Agency Wales.

Responsibilities included reducing industry's impacts on the environment, enforcing pollution legislation and reducing the harm caused by flooding and pollution incidents. It also oversaw the management of waste, water resources and freshwater fisheries, cleaning up rivers, coastal waters and contaminated land and improving wildlife habitats.

By influencing others to change attitudes and behaviour, it aimed to make the environment cleaner and healthier for people and wildlife. That's a pretty broad remit to begin with.

The Countryside Council for Wales.

Responsible for wildlife conservation, landscape and countryside access in Wales. the Countryside Council for Wales claimed to have 'championed the environment and landscapes of Wales and its coastal waters as sources of natural and cultural riches, as a foundation for economic and social activity, and as a place for leisure and learning opportunities'. Its aim was to 'make the environment a valued part of everyone's life in Wales'. Plenty to do then.

Forestry Commission Wales.

Responsible for the management of publicly owned forests and the regulation of both public and private forestry in Wales, also tasked with promoting forestry and the production of timber for trade and conducting research. The decline in timber sales since the mid-1990s forced the Commission to focus on research and recreation more than ever before, something that was encouraged by the government and initially supported by European funding.

Before I go on to the amalgamation of these three bodies to create NRW, its worth making a mention of the problems inherent in large organisations that are divided into departments. Basically, an organisation or body such as those above, receives some form of funding, in these cases from central government (originally London, more latterly the Welsh Government) and in some case additional funding for specific areas of work, such as from Europe (until Brexit cut off that source).

That funding is then divided between the various departments, each department then having it's own budget. Its easy to see how this can create competition between departments as they all attempt to grow themselves, their budgets and workforce. This is true of any organisation such as national governments or the Permaculture Association Britain. How this sharing out occurs, whether it is an amiable, collaborative process based on practicalities and shared priorities or rather a cloak and daggers, clique ridden back stabbing coup, will depend upon the ethics and morality of the organisation and its individual members. As an example, a friend who worked for CCW described how individuals in the organisation would seek to steer funding towards their favourite plants or animals (such as a dormouse).

Natural resources Wales: 1st April 2013

Interestingly, the first board appointed by Environment minister John Griffiths did not include any representatives from the forestry sector, and concerns were raised at the time that the forestry industry's voice would not be adequately heard in the new organisation. This was reflected in the chaos of the first three years as individuals and groups from the three separate organisations jostled for limited roles and budgets within the new body.

Firstly, there seemed to be a complete lack of understanding of how complicated and drawn out such an amalgamation would be. The whole process of uniting the very different organisations, producing new contracts, transferring staff, making redundancies, designing and producing new logos (obviously crucial to the whole process...) and signage (for more on the grand signage redesign, see here) etc. etc. took some three years and was fraught with difficulties, challenges, inertia and bad feeling.

Within each of the three august bodies, you had individuals and teams that had built up over many years, had fought hard to maintain or increase their budgets and grow their organisations. Now they were being asked (told) to make decisions on what and who would be transferred to the new body.

On the ground here in Coed Y Brenin, the result was that nothing was done. Further contraction of the forestry workforce meant more work going to private contractors who had no links to the local community, resulting in increasing problems during and following forest operations like clear felling (debris on roads, blocked drains and culverts etc.). My local community council had great difficulty finding out who was responsible for what due to staff turnover and changes in roles. Foresters, for example, became more ominous sounding Operations Managers. We invited one to our meetings on various occasions to give us the low down and they were visibly and vocally depressed about the chaos of the amalgamation- I ended up feeling sorry for them...

So NRW took on the responsibilities of the three organisations and also assumed other roles formerly performed by the Welsh Government. I would need several newsletters to provide a complete list (see NRW's website for more details) but the following, summarised from Wikipedia, will give you an idea.

• Adviser: principal adviser to Welsh Government, and adviser to industry and the wider public and voluntary sector, and communicator about issues relating to the environment and its natural resources.

• Regulator of the marine, forest and waste industries.

• Designator for Sites of Special Scientific Interest, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty and National Parks, as well as declaring National Nature Reserves, and describing Marine Character Areas.

• Responder to environmental incidents.

• Statutory consultee to about 7,000 development planning applications a year.

• Manager/Operator: managing seven per cent of Wales’ land area including woodlands, National Nature Reserves, water and flood defences, and operating visitor centres, recreation facilities, hatcheries and a laboratory.

• Partner, Educator and Enabler: collaborator with the public, private and voluntary sectors.

• Evidence gatherer: monitoring the environment.

• Employer of almost 1,900 staff with a budget of £180 million.

If we take just one of those areas above, the regulatory responsibilities and look in a little more detail, you'll get an idea of how huge the remit is. NRW is responsible for more than 40 different types of regulatory regime, for example:

• major industry (refineries, chemicals, cement, power stations, iron and steel, food and drink etc.).

• waste industry (storage, treatment, disposal).

• Sites of Special Scientific Interest - consents and assents.

• radioactive substances (nuclear and non-nuclear).

• European protected species licensing.

• marine licensing.

• tree felling licensing.

• water discharges (surface and groundwater).

• water resources (abstraction, impoundment, drought).

• packaging regulations and EU/UK trading schemes.

• commercial fisheries (eels, salmon, shellfish).

• Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 – access restrictions, open access land.

You get the idea, NRW's remit is indeed massive, broad and extremely fine detailed.

An obvious problem here is that while one arm is a manager and operator, actively involved in physical stuff in the environment, such as forest operations or flood defences, yet another arm of the same organisation is the regulator, that is to say, NRW has to regulate itself. This is evident in public notices in local papers where NRW are undertaking some operation, like altering a flood defence and they state that in this instance an environmental report is not considered necessary. At least in the days of the Environment Agency Wales there was a separate body you could go to if you felt some operation of Forestry Commission Wales was detrimental to the environment.

Clearly, NRW's responsibilities and activities are so large that I could fill multiple newsletters and still not get to the end of it. Similarly if I attempted to detail all the difficulties and problems they have faced or created. As one example I could mention the failure of their design to protect the sea defences in Fairbourne, a multi-million pound operation that made the situation worse, until several more millions were spent to put it right (or at least, right-er). Rather than go on and on, I'll end with this salutary tale.

above: a stand of spruce, planted in the mid nineteen eighties never thinned hence over-tall with limited root space and very susceptible to wind throw.

NRW and departmental carbon budgets. A good thing, surely?

Each department in the new body was set a carbon budget which they were told not to exceed. My source (we shall call them Brithyll, disguising both identity and gender), lived in the Dolgellau area and found in their new role they had to travel down to the NRW Headquarters in Cardiff most weekdays. With no north-south rail links within Cymru (blame Beecham) Brithyll drove, a road distance of approximately 129 miles. This meant that by Wednesdays, towards the end of the month, the department's carbon budget was almost used up.

So, work from home, you would think but no, Brithyll still had to go to the office. The NRW solution was to require them to rent a car as the carbon cost of a rented car was not included in the department's budget, it was externalised2 to the rental company. In order not to make this too obvious, a non-local car hire company was used, so this might be in Shrewsbury, about 56 miles away. The car would be delivered to Dolgellau by a driver and of course, a second car and driver had to accompany the first, in order to take the first driver back to Shrewsbury.

On Thursday, the department carbon budget was still under threat, of course but using the same hire car again was not possible, as that would make it "regular use" and the carbon cost would then accrue to the department. The solution? To hire another car, from a different company, perhaps from Llandudno, about 50 miles away. Repeat the delivery process, two cars, two drivers. Come Friday and yes, the department budget is still threatened so yet another car is hired from yet another company with a repeat of the delivery process.

The hire cars were generally not collected until Sunday, by which time there would be three of them sitting outside Brithyll's house. Then, three cars would turn up with two drivers in each, from the three different hire companies, collect the cars and they'd all drive off, back to their various, disparate locations. Next month, the same thing was just as likely to happen and the whole process be repeated but, hey, the NRW department always kept within their carbon budget- a success then!

Brithyll, previously employed in one of the three former bodies, described moving into NRW, as going from the best job in the world to the worst in just three years. He resigned the post, unable to bear the hypocrisy.

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Thanks for reading and a warm welcome to new subscribers. Comments always welcome as are suggestions for topics, in particular here, things to do with forestry and Coed Y Brenin. Still to come in The Real Coed Y Brnein, the Minerals and Mines of Coed Y Brenin, (Thar’s Gold in them there hills!) and The Great Volcano, plus much more. Hwyl! Chris.

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I have mentioned before the mismatch in the translation of the names; In the Cymraeg we have Cyfoeth, usually translated as Wealth, whereas in the English we have Resources, usually translated as Adnoddau. Various folk have pointed this out recently and used the discrepancy in different ways. So Rhys Llywelyn, chairman of Caru Coed Cymru, the community group set up recently in an attempt to save the Coed Y Brenin visitor centre which NRW are threatening to close, speaks of wealth as something to manage carefully and invest wisely, whereas resources get used and gobbled up.

above: protest at the Coed Y Brenin visitor centre, organised by Caru Coed Y Brenin. Some great signs: NRW- Not Really Working.

I've mentioned here in previous pieces on The Real Coed Y Brenin the critical change that occurred in the management of the plantation in the mid nineteen nineties. This was the result of a combination of factors which I'll mention again here, briefly.

above: the endgame for all plastic signs.

Firstly, a flood of timber onto the market coming from eastern European countries that had formally been part of the Soviet Union and were keen to generate capital, one way of which was to cash in their forests. This flood of timber meant it was cheaper for UK mills to buy material from the docks rather than from local forests.

Secondly, the drying up of traditional markets for UK forestry products, such as the need for millions of pit-props for the coal industry; these had gradually been replaced by hydraulic jacks and this was followed by the dismantling of more or less the entire industry by the Conservative Government under Margaret Thatcher.

above: a relatively early Forestry Commission sign; simple design and font and just two colours hence easy to maintain.

Having begun with a very open mind, trialling many different species, the Forestry Commission had narrowed its focus onto a very limited number of softwoods that grew quickly in the mild, wet climates of parts of the UK, notably Cymru. These fast growing species produced poor quality timber and were really only suitable for pulp for paper. However, as time went on, UK paper mills became liable to accept a certain amount of recycled paper each year, meaning their demand for pulp wood was greatly reduced.

Hence the Forestry Commission found itself in possession of large acreages of poor quality, softwood plantation, requiring regular management in terms of thinning, with very little value as product.

Faced with this dilemma, the decision was taken by Comisiwn Coedwigaeth, Cymru, that is, the Forestry Commission, Wales or FCW1, to switch away from production to recreation, tourism and conservation. The principle reason for this was to open up the organisation to benefit from European funding, in particular the Access Grants and to a certain extent, the European Social Fund, Cymru being classed as a deprived country. Coed Y Brenin was in some ways the first plantation to implement this new direction at any scale.

above: introduce a computer controlled router and switch from production to people and you get access to European funding for your infrastructure. Very pretty but consider the need for regular repainting to keep it looking that way…

The radical nature of this change cannot be overemphasised. The plantation that had originally been seen as a factory where visitors were actively discouraged and footpaths were largely ignored with many completely overgrown, changed into one that actively welcomed visitors. Over the next decade a completely new network of mountain bike tracks (the first in the UK) were implemented rapidly, public footpaths were cleared, repaired and signposted as well as new paths, including access for wheelchair users being constructed. This culminated in new toilet blocks at various locations and a new visitor centre with extensive car parks in Coed Y Brenin.

In consequence, actual management of the plantation was largely forgotten and stands were just left to grow on, whatever their age or condition, giving rise in the future to a whole new set of challenges which I have written about in previous pieces. Over the next two decades, apart from very small areas of clear felling (to keep some expertise alive within the workforce) the only tree based operations were to simply cut through wind blown trees where they blocked roads, tracks, trails or footpaths, leaving the cut lengths to either side, as "habitat" (more accurately known as “fuel for forest fires”). Within a few years, the numbers and expertise of the work force had also switched from trees and forestry to path and trail creation and mountain bike rangers.

Here we get to the crux of this piece, namely, infrastructure, that is the paths, tracks and trails plus the fencing, signage and support structures such as toilets and car parks. A certain amount of infrastructure is necessary on any site, from an allotment garden2, through to a farm scale system, for the simplest of reasons, such as easy access. However, too much infrastructure, which inevitably degrades, rots, breaks down, requires repair or replacement, can easily become an increasingly expensive and unsustainable burden.

above: now change the body managing the forests to NRW and you’ve got a good excuse to completely redesign and replace all the signage! Every one of the many hundreds of ladder boards like this one needed that fancy bottom board and colourful logo routing on it and painting….yawn. The above cost about £700 at the time.

During those heady days of European funding, as the money flooded in, the FCW was able to implement a truly massive growth of infrastructure over two decades and I was in an interesting place to notice this transformation. Apart from living in the forest, I also worked at the signs unit responsible for creating signage for all the FCW's districts and later for Natural Resources Wales (NRW), on three occasions.

During my first stint at the unit in the late 1980s, prior to the switch away from production, the brief for signs from the Forestry Commission (FC) was very simple and clear; all signs were to be of wood, produced from the plantations, namely Douglas fir boards and posts; the signs were engraved (routed) with a plain font (sans serif, that is, no pointy bits, something like Arial); lettering was to be white with the background and posts in a standard FC green. The signs were routed using a pantograph router, a lovely old machine which required a fair bit of skill to control3.

above: a pantograph router. A lovely machine to operate, once you got the hang of it!

The signs themselves consisted of a head board routed with a crown in the centre and Forestry Commission below4, then a lower board with the name of the forest district on it. That was basically it, although there might be a third board with a few symbols on it for parking or a footpath. The idea was to keep the work "In House", with the design and colours simple and easy to touch up; the signs would go out with small pots of paints, FC green and white for that purpose. The Forestry Commission had two sign units, the one I worked at, in Coed Y Brenin and a second unit in Scotland and between them they produced signs for the all the forest districts in the UK.

When I next did a stint at the signs unit in the early nineteen nineties, I was pretty gobsmacked to find the pantograph router had been replaced by a considerably larger computer controlled machine. This beast with a moving bed something like two metres by one metre, was steered by numerical code5, produced on a sophisticated Computer Aided Design (CAD) software, running on a, at the time, top of the range PC6. This set up cost well over £80,000 and at the level of production the unit ran at, only a big organisation like FC Cymru could possibly afford such an investment. Incidentally, the machine is still working today, nearly thirty years on, having undergone several upgrades to its memory and electronics.

above: once you’re past the NRW entrance boards, get your head round this lot! The Signs Workshop charges by the letter and symbol so add a good few more grand for this lot. We’re a long way from the simple, two colours of the ol’ Forestry Commission!

The workshop manager had no experience with computers and had received just enough training to produce simple signs and worked from a single page of handwritten instructions. I already had some experience of computers and quickly picked up on the instructions and he gratefully turned the machine over to me. So I sat happily by myself in a little control room, drawing out the signs on the CAD software, turning them into NC programmes and feeding then through to the Great Router. I could watch the monster's bed shunting back and forth through a window and keep half an eye on it in case anything went horribly wrong (it did, very occasionally)7.

This upgrade in machine almost coincided with the change from production to recreation, tourism and conservation. Pretty quickly the designers somewhere in FCW's HQ down in Cardiff began to realise the potential of this combination of CAD design and NC router and the signs became increasingly sophisticated and complicated, emblematic of the increasing infrastructure appearing in the forest.

Over the next decade, each and every forest entrance in the Coed Y Brenin Forest District entrance was given its own headboard sign with its own unique animal, plus additional boards those indicating footpaths, trails of various types, with symbols for difficulty. As visitor numbers increased, the remit for signs drifted further and further from its original, sustainable origin and new types of display boards appeared, laminated in plastic with far more detail than could be routed; these were mounted on wooden lecterns. Increasing use of plastic was also made for markers for the growing number and types of paths, trails, tracks etc.

above: plastic signs abound and are rarely, if ever, collected so you can usually find them discarded on the sides of your well publicised path.

On my third period of employment at the Signs Workshop, further changes had occurred. For one, the unit had been taken over by a local workers cooperative and freed of the Forestry Commission control, was a much more efficient and profitable place to work.

Secondly, as part of further devolution of powers from Westminster to Cardiff, Llywodraeth Cymru (the Welsh Government) had amalgamated the Countryside Council for Wales, the Environment Agency Wales and the Forestry Commission Wales into one behemoth of a body, known as Natural Resources Wales (NRW), with a truly massive remit, of which management of the existing plantations and their Forest Districts was only a small part.

Of course, this meant replacing all the FCW signage with new NRW signs, throughout Cymru... The Signs Workshop won the initial contract and over the next three years, well over a million pounds passed through the business. The designers in Cardiff had a field day, changing the shape of the headboards, the lettering, details, introducing a whole raft of new symbols and colours. The workshop tackled each forest entrance in turn and it wasn't unusual for costs to be well over £10,000 per entrance. And remember, this was just the signage; when you consider the costs of new visitor centres, toilets, car parks, fencing, board edging to grassed areas, steps on steeper routes, management and upkeep and given that the life of a painted wooden sign is only about ten years, at the most, it is easy to see how infrastructure maintenance and replacement costs can spiral out of control.

above: Coed Y Brenin visitor centre; pretty, impractical in terms of use of space and maintenance neither easy or cheap, if you can be bothered to do any; a million pound plus needed so far.

Which is exactly what has happened. Along with funding cuts as we continue the movement towards slow growth, stagnant or shrinking economies, NRW are now facing a fifteen million pound shortfall this year, expected to rise to seventeen million next year and are looking at shedding 265 jobs and closing their visitor centres as well as severely curtailing many of their actual operations.

Wooden signs require regular maintenance in order to last. They need a careful wash at least once a year and more often if the sign is close to a road, followed by touching up of any damaged paintwork before it gets worse. Yet it is this idea of regular maintenance that seems to have been completely neglected, not just in terms of signage and other infrastructure but in pretty much all aspects of the forest, from the periodic thinning of stands within the plantation to removal of fallen or hanging trees. Even the visitor centres seem to have suffered from this neglect; Coed Y Brenin's supposedly "flagship" building, an admittedly pretty timber design but far from practical, is reported to require over a million pounds of renovation work and its only twenty years old!

Where this will all end is up in the air at the moment. A local community group has gained funding for a feasibility study looking into taking over and running the visitor centre in Coed Y Brenin but working with NRW is not easy, to say the least. The different layers of management within NRW appear to be unable to communicate with one another so no one in the organisation really knows what is happening, resulting in different answers to the same question coming from different people. This problem of management within NRW is itself a major issue which I will address separately here on Substack as there are important lessons to be learned from it.

So for now, think very carefully about existing infrastructure on your projects; do you really need it? If so, have you allotted resources, particularly time and money, for regular maintenance? And consider equally carefully before you introduce any new infrastructure, lest it become such a burden in the future tha it breaks your system.

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That's it for now. Many thanks for reading and a warm welcome to new subscribers. Comments always welcome. Take care and mind how you go on your hopefully well maintained path. hwyl! Chris.

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Covering the origin of an intricately complex landscape and subsequent development from the earliest times to the present day, its existence on medieval rolls, listed as Penrhos Forest or Penrhos Wood, its illegal clear felling in the late 1500's, its gradual occupation by squatters, the tyddynwyr, (smallholders) prior to their evictions in the early to mid 1900’s, with especial emphasis on Mynydd Penrhos, where the first and most interesting plantings were undertaken, that came to be known as the Core Block.

I have had the great privilege to have lived and worked in Cymru (Wales) for going on for fifty years, managed a patch of land in Coed Y Brenin for thirty eight years and lived on it for over thirty years; having immersed myself in the local culture, folklore and history and having studied both British history and more specifically the history of Cymru; having studied, spoken, read and written Welsh, Cymraeg, during most of that time and occupying a strange place, an in-between space between y Cymreig and the English, aware that I do not entirely fit in either camp, I feel myself to be in a unique position from which to tell this remarkable tale.

This story is appearing over time in parts that are not regular in either their occurrence or order, yet hopefully will at some point become a more or less coherent whole. Until then, these are the links to what we have so far, here on Substack, together with inklings to some of the missing pieces, yet to be completed.

Many thanks for reading. Hwyl! Chris.

The Early Forestry Commission and the Erasure of Social History.

1. The tyddynwyr or smallholders of Mynydd Penrhos

2. The unique landscapes of the tyddynwyr

3. The evictions of the tyddynwyr and the erasure of social history

What future awaits Coed Y Brenin?

1. The Three Fates- fire, wind, plague

2. Fire or Wind

3. Plague. Phytophthora ramorum and pluvialis

How do we get out of this mess? The Great Escape

1. The Great escape: fuel, timber and fungi

2. The Great Escape: sawmills and the Tree Cycle

3. The Great Escape: phytophthora and accepting the inevitable

Forest Hydrology.

1. Rain, rain, rain!

2. Bogs, floods and gravel trains.

3. Trends and how they tend to disappear

above: Morag, a Scottish pine marten, No. 13, reintroduced to Coed Y Brenin by the Vincent Wildlife Trust. The picture is taken from a VWT trap camera film.

The Many Species of Coed Y Brenin

1. Oak: Every Tree Tells a Story

2. Oak: and every story is different

Western Hemlock: Today, Coed Y Brenin, Tomorrow, the World!

Corsican Pine, pinus nigra or Black Pine

Douglas Fir: basically, just Good Wood

Bele'r Coed, the Pine Marten: A Tale of Poo...

Latest News Hot from the Forest

Various other aspects

Latest News Hot from the Forest

The Once (Very) Wetlands of Coed Y Brenin: Actions and Inactions in Bogland Restoration

The Coed Y Brenin Arboretum: Or is it a Forest Garden, or just a Picnic Site?

Joined Up Thinking: Would be a Good Idea...

Bryn Merllyn: Druids Sacred Pool Versus NRW Aggregate Quarry

Tree planting, carbon offsetting and commercial forestry: sapling versus seed.

Fire! Coming your way, soon...

above: looking west from Moel Dolfrwynog. Clear fell, conifers and a rampart of mountain, Dyffwys, the Rhinogydd and Eryri.

And still to come:

The Very Early years: the Great Volcano, Rhobell Fawr (Iawn, iawn) and complex geology

Industrial Archaeology: the Mines. Thar's Gold in them thar hills! Sadly not but plenty of worrying minerals- arsenic, lead, cadmium...featuring one of the most contaminated picnic sites in Britain, probably.

The Rise and Fall of the Modern Panners. Destruction of River Beds and Hefty Fines

The Glory Days of the Great Experiment that somehow got forgotten...

Signing it all. How good, wooden ideas became elaborately expensive, the reappearance of plastic and then the the money dried up.

The Many Miles of the Tracks of Coed Y Brenin and how the army used up surplus explosives.

And more.

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Many thanks for reading. Comments always welcome, including requests for topics relating to Coed Y Brenin, forests and forestry.

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Western Hemlock, tsuga heterophylla

I've mentioned western hemlock in a number of previous pieces about Coed Y Brenin but as its making such a big impact over the whole of Mynydd Penrhos and beyond and is likely to become even more omnipresent I thought I'd pull together all the various observations in one place plus more recent stuff.

Native to north-west America, western hemlock was introduced to Britain in 1852 by botanist John Jeffrey, and is now one of the most common conifers found in the UK. It is best suited to moister climates and although it starts quite slowly, the growth rate accelerates rapidly and it regenerates very freely in a wide range of environments, growing to 50–70 metres (165–230 feet) tall. The species is long-lived, especially at higher elevations, with trees over 1,200 years old known.

The closely spaced branches droop, producing layer upon layer of dark green foliage, pale on the underside. The density of the branches and flattish needles means it can intercept most of the available light and hence casts a very deep shade. During the peak growing season the new growth shows as a bright green fringe on the ends of all the foliage and the growing tip tends to flop over, a feature that makes it fairly easy to spot against other conifers.

above: young western hemlock. Note layer upon layer of flattish foliage reaching to the ground, darker green with brighter growing tips. Underneath, darkness!

The wood is quite course and the grain can twist a bit, making it difficult to work and it rots quickly if exposed to damp. However, if kept dry it can be used like most softwoods in indoor furniture and joinery. In commercial forestry it is usually used for pulp in the paper industry.

The species forms ectomycorrhizal associations with some edible fungi including chanterelles and we have also noticed it in close association with hedgehog fungi, hydnum repandum, (very tasty). We've found the hedgehogs growing along buried, fallen branches, something which we've been trying as a means of propagation, though no success as yet.

In the late 1990s we got a contract with the then Forestry Commission Wales to clear conifers from the sides of the various streams (the riparian zones) and some of the old bogs on Mynydd Penrhos. In most cases the streams banks were full of conifers, varying in height from seedlings to young trees, shading them completely and the water had taken on scary colours like bright orange, blue or yellow. Letting the light in provided the opportunity for native species to get going both in and around the streams and water quality has greatly improved over the past two decades. As we were in effect improving our own watershed, we did a really good job removing the conifers.

above: a strong contrast- some ten years after we used hand tools to clear western hemlock from the area on the left, it now shows predominantly native species. On the right and outside our contract, a planted stand of Corsican pine (invisible!) completely engulfed by self seeded western hemlock.

Just above our own holding, we encountered huge numbers of conifer seedlings between 5-10 cms tall. We pulled up literally thousands of them every ten metres of so. We identified a stand of big trees on one side of the stream as the source of most of these seedlings, as, you've probably guessed it, western hemlock.

Despite repeatedly informing the Forestry Commission of the irony and ultimate futility of weeding out seedlings without felling the trees that were responsible for the seedlings in the first place, the trees never got felled. I often heard former Foresters and their now rather ominously renamed Natural Resources Wales (NRW) replacements, “Operations Managers”, complaining about the prevalence of western hemlock regeneration throughout Mynydd Penrhos, as it is non-native (this despite the fact that 95% of the species in Coed Y Brenin are non-native!) yet that one, single, small sub-compartment of trees that are causing the problem is still there!

above: the culprits! 80 mature western hemlock, now 80 years old, responsible for upwards of four billion wind blown seeds during their lifetime and still counting…

Western hemlock produces small cones that open on the tree and the tiny, light seeds blow easily on the wind. A mature western hemlock can produce upwards of a million seeds per year. (I am afraid I have been unable to re-find the reference for this- can anyone help?). The stand in question is one of the few to have seen actual management over the decades and has been thinned at least once in the early 1990's (we witnessed the thinning), leaving just eighty fine specimens (I counted them). If we say that at a conservative estimate a western hemlock is mature at 30 years old, (Wikipedia says 25), then these eighty trees are producing say a million seeds each per year and have been for the last fifty years (at least).

That's 80 trees x 1,000,000 seeds each per year x 50 years = 4,000,000,000 seeds.

That's a conservative estimate as I am not counting the seeds produced by the trees that were thinned out aged 50 and also they would all have been producing some seed before they got to age 30. Whatever, its a lot of seed to blow in the wind and its no wonder that western hemlock is now the most numerous species on Mynydd Penrhos, probably.

above: fallen western hemlock cones. Along with the steady drop of needles, the debris from conifers that accumulates on the forest floor can be considerable.

Western hemlock will grow in 95% shade- that's more shade tolerant that rhododendron at 90% and so it will grow under pretty much any native vegetation, out compete it and shade it out. The needles are flat, more like thin leaves and grow on either sides of closely spaced twigs. The many branches layer one above the other, in more open spaces or on the sides of tracks, often reaching to the ground, creating an extremely dense shade; nothing grows beneath it.

As an example of its tenacity as a species, in the late 1980s, a mixed stand of already mature Norway and Sitka spruce to the east of us was given a further thinning, leaving well spaced, sizeable specimens with an understory of heather, bilberry, ferns and mosses and the occasional young birch, hazel and oak. Underneath all that, a carpet of western hemlock seedlings kicked off at just a few inches tall yet due to their density, creating a closed canopy at only a couple of years old.

Year after year. this low level closed canopy rose up, faster as the trees became more established, rapidly overtaking the bilberry and heather and shading them out. Not many years later it had overtaken everything else except the actual crop and now stands at about ten metres. Underneath, in perpetual shade nothing else grows. Initially impenetrable due to the closeness of the stems, it has more latterly become a strange space, filled with the debris of dead and dying western hemlock, shaded out by their own siblings in the ongoing rush for light, with the occasional much larger trunks of the mature spruces. How much water they are drinking is difficult to say but the Norway and Sitka spruce they're gradually catching up with do not seem to have grown much since they were thinned.

above: the thin stems of a western hemlock understory with the larger trunks of the actual crop, mature Sitka and Norway spruce. The hemlock forms a complete canopy at about ten metres and has shaded out everything below, including considerable numbers of itself.

This self-seeding of western hemlock has occurred throughout the Core Block (the oldest part) of Coed Y Brenin and beyond, perhaps not at such a ridiculous density but the darker, dense foliage is visible pretty much wherever you go. Its remarkable how just a few of these trees, looking quite innocuous in their early years, can reach up and spread out to completely dominate a sizeable area, shading out everything else.

In their native environment they typically grow under the canopy of other conifers such as Sitka spruce and Douglas fir, so the older plantations of these very same species here in Coed Y Brenin suit the western hemlock perfectly. In this situation they can persist for decades then exploit any gap in the canopy to eventually replace the firs or spruces which are far less shade tolerant. The western hemlock will then grow on to become climax forest, so that's where much of Coed Y Brenin is headed without some serious intervention.

With its small, wind blown seed it is also able to rapidly exploit larger areas following clear felling or wind-throw. Given that the current, largely unmanaged state of much of Coed Y Brenin has led to heavily overcrowded stands of over-tall conifers with very little root space, severe winter storms could well bring down considerable numbers of trees, opening up yet more opportunities for this tenacious species.

Intervention is easiest when the hemlocks are young and can be easily pulled up (minimum effort, maximum effect) but given the numbers, this takes time and is obviously going to be ineffective if the mature trees are not removed at the same time.. For larger trees, ring barking is effective, so long as the ring is made below any lateral shoots. Cutting should similarly be made below any trace of shoots. Unlike most conifers, when cut, western hemlock seems capable of regrowing if even a single green needle remains.

above: guerilla forestry…a ring barked1 western hemlock, the previously shaded area giving way to some ferns and, uh oh, self seeded western hemlock. Follow up of any intervention involving clearance of a species, is essential is there is to be any hope of long term success. At this size the young hemlock are easy to pull up.

During our contract to clear young conifers we reported a dense stand of western hemlock of about five or six years old and too well rooted to pull up. Rather than spend considerable time cutting every single stem (numbered in the hundreds) with a bow saw or long handled loppers, we reported the stand to the Forestry Commission expecting someone to come in with a chainsaw. However, instead a gang appeared with brush cutters and simply cut the stems where it was easiest, leaving plenty of branches below the cuts. The result was an even denser thicket of trees with multiple leaders. Duh!

More generally, NRW are beginning to manage Coed Y Brenin again after, in some cases, half a century of neglect but they are already dealing with the consequences of phytophthora ramorum which means felling and extracting several million larch trees (dead or dying or killed deliberately in advance of the disease), a considerable operation in itself and hence have limited time and resources. So far they have used a harvester to make cuts through some of the unmanaged stands and do some limited thinning on either side of the cuts. However, the risk here is that the cuts allow the wind into the stands, increasing the livelihood of wind throw.

I've talked before here about the high risk of fire in these dense, unmanaged stands and although this year has, so far, proved relatively cold and wet, fire will no doubt loom inevitably at some point in the future. Western hemlock has a relatively thin bark and shallow roots which does mean that it does not readily survive a ground fire.

What may well end the increasing dominance of western hemlock is one of the other varieties of phytophthora, namely pluvialis, to which it is very susceptible. We've already had one outbreak, two years ago, on young western hemlock growing under Norway spruce just above us which was spotted and NRW were served with a notice to deal with it. This involved felling the infected trees and the neighbouring hemlocks and chipping them, although larger stems were left lying. How effective this action will be remains to be seen.

above: self seeded western hemlock, here dominating a planted stand of Sitka spruce- there are a few spruce just visible in this picture! Note the density of the hemlock and the floppy tops, making them fairly easy to spot against other conifers, if you can actually see the other conifers for all the hemlock…

So if neither fire nor plague take it out, then western hemlock remains a much greater challenge to both native and exotic species than even rhododendron, as its light seed can carry so much further and currently, no one seems to really notice it, as its “just another conifer”.

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Thanks for reading. Next, a minor change in plan and a switch back to the patafiction, Konsk. Then we have net users' energy use- that's us folks, driving climate change! Is there anything we can do about it, apart from just stopping using the internet? Well, as it happens, there is. Till next time, hwyl! Chris.

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[continued from the previous piece]

above: dead oak, shaded out by conifers, in this case both an overstory of mature Norway spruce and a rapidly growing understory of western hemlock.

In the mid 1990s the then Comisiwn Coedwigaeth, Cymru (Forestry Commission Wales) formally abandoned any sort of management of the older part of Coed Y Brenin, including the Core Block of Mynydd Penrhos. The only work that was carried out (apart from the new mountain bike trails and footpaths, funded by European Access grants) was the clear-felling of relatively small patches of conifers in order to keep some experience in the workforce.

This meant that some of the almost smothered oaks were suddenly liberated and once more surrounded by light. Unfortunately, this meant that for many, deprived of the shelter they had grown used to and with roots compromised for decades by the growth of the conifers, the first strong gale brought them down.

above: the lower branches of this oak tell us it started as open grown tree. From the fact that they have died back we know that it then experienced dense shade as the conifer plantation grew up around it, forcing it to grow ever taller for the light. Then, the conifers were clear felled, leaving a top heavy tree with roots that had been restricted by the conifers. All too often this is the result.

As a fallen tree they do struggle on as new branches grow upward from the trunk, triggered by the newly available light but It would seem much better to coppice them while the clear-felling was going on and avoid the enormous root damage wind blow causes. No matter, some do survive and their responses are recorded in their changing form and growth patterns; suddenly exposed to light all round, dormant buds on branches and trunk are triggered into growth and the tree takes on a hairy appearance.

above: an oak, again previously open grown, then surrounded by conifers planted in 1967, the lower branches shaded out and dying back, growing tall towards diminishing light. Then the conifers clear felled and dormant buds triggered by the new light, producing twigs and small branches over the entire surface of the trunks, giving a hairy appearance. This one has so far survived the gales.

There’s a hedge remnant quite close to us, reaching up for the light between two stands of conifers, some already dead, some dying. These represented old stock, the oak probably descended from the trees that made up the original forest of Penrhos before it was felled in the late 1500's. It seemed a great shame that these trees were doomed to die out, the seed they produced, if any, simply falling into deep shade. Then, amazingly, both sides were clear felled, the dying trees recovered, putting out more branches and leaves. Then wind blown seed of western hemlock swamped the area and within ten years they were again struggling to reach the light. There is only so much a guerilla forester can do...

above: a hedge remnant of hazel and oak that survived the dense shade cast by the first generation of forestry only to then be threatened now by the even denser shade of self seeded western hemlock.

A fairly unique characteristic of oak is that it has two growth phases, one in the spring, as most other trees but then a second phase in the autumn, coming around the beginning of August, hence the name, Lammas growth. This is very noticeable by a colour change in the stem and leaf, often red but can be yellow or orange before gradually turning green and the hardening to regular looking bark.

above: Lammas growth on oak, coppiced (probably accidentally) during clear felling of diseased larch. The Lammas shoots burst out in August, their colours, ranging from reds through to oranges, as here, making them both striking and obvious.

Lammas growth can be considerable, sometimes much greater than spring growth. An acorn lodged on the edge of my polytunnel, a privileged position, having the benefit of additional water running off the tunnel, its roots penetrating the cover and reaching into the rich beds inside and the outside surface being a mown path. In its third year it grew 45cms in the spring and a whopping 95cms in August. And people say oaks are slow growers!

above: oak growing in a very favourable position on the side of our polytunnel. The green marks drawn on show the spring growth (between the two marks) and the Lammas shoot (beginning above the top mark). Similar, slightly lesser Lammas shoots sprout from the other branches, though I haven’t marked these.

One other characteristic worth mentioning which is very visible on oak here, is the vast numbers of lichens they will support. At certain times of year, like the early spring, before the leaves are out, they can look like they are shrouded in snow or have sprouted some strange, abundant flower.

above: large oak showing a considerable growth of lichens. In the foreground is blackthorn showing similar quantities of a different lichen. Note that the conifers behind generally do not present any surfaces suitable for lichens although occasionally they do.

Last words on oak, literally; the word oak in Cymraeg (Welsh) is derwen which gives rise to names such as the river Derwent in Cumbria and in Cymraeg is very close to derwydd or druid. From various classical accounts (notably Julius Caesar) oak is mentioned as the sacred tree of the druids. Stumbling through the dense, dark thickets here in the 1980's and suddenly coming across these mounds surmounted by clusters (groves?) of oak was a magical experience.

above: every tree tells its own story. A hedge remnant, in this case a single oak, previously laid in a hedge, presumably with other species such as hazel which have now vanished, very heavily shaded on the side the picture is taken from by Norway spruce planted in 1927 and now coming up to 100 feet tall (say 30 metres) with a dense understory of western hemlock at 40 feet tall (about 12 metres).

Looking to the future, some of the small patches of clear felling that were carried out each year were left to regenerate with whatever seed was in the ground. The result was more interesting mixed stands of conifers and native hardwoods, including cherry, no doubt spread by birds; as yet I have been unable to discover the source of the cherry seed.

These mixed stands are moving into the thicket stage and present tremendous opportunities to develop and trial the sort of recombinant ecologies that David Holmgren discusses1. However, without selective intervention these regenerating stands can all too easily come to be dominated by the more tenacious conifers, in particular western hemlock which seems to be able to outcompete and shade out pretty much anything, including rhododendron in some situations. I've mentioned western hemlock in a number of previous pieces but as it is now apparently the commonest conifer in Britain and is likely to become even more of a challenge to native species than rhododendron, I will be covering it in some detail in a separate Many Species of Coed Y Brenin article.

Finally…a picture that I forgot to insert into the first half (my bad!). I was talking about the tendency of oak branches to split through twisting in high winds.

above: a split on a lower branch of the barn oak, weakened by being shaded by branches above and being remarkably long (over ten metres) and hence very prone to movement in gales. The branch at the split is about 18 inches in diameter (450mm).

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Thanks for reading and a warm welcome to you new subscribers. Next up is something about art and in particular fiction; what's all that about then? Is it useful, helpful? Can it influence us? Change our opinions? Plus a chapter list of Konsk the Patafiction, all the episodes so far here on Substack, so new subscribers can catch up easily but only if you should want to; nothing is compulsory! Feel free to bin the stuff that doesn't interest you but I do hope to hook some of you in...And that will be followed by several more episodes of the epic. Take care all. Hwyl! Chris.

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Oak. Every Tree Tells a Story.

[I have split this piece into two halves as it came out rather picture heavy (every picture tells a story). The second half will follow almost immediately]

above: Penrhos in 1987 with two large, open grown oaks in the centre. The one behind the barn showing the classic dense, hemispherical crown. The one in front is already slightly more open. Both feature in later pictures below.

On the seminal Advanced Permaculture Design Course I attended at Ragman's Lane Farm in 1990 (or was it 1991?) led by Bill Mollison, co-originator of Permaculture Design, Bill spoke of how life evolves in flow. To be more precise, life evolves in the flow of energy and nutrients and each species preserves records of those flows in their various forms.

Trees present good examples of this and we can read their individual histories through studying their unique forms. From seed they grow under the influence of gravity, reaching towards light, conform to predominant winds, respond to increases or decreases in the availability of water and nutrients, adapt to damage and so on.

As well as the shape of the tree providing a record of its experiences in flow, the tree rings within can show with accuracy the variations of growth each year and through both simple measurement and precise, scientific analysis can inform us of their age, variation in growth each year, temperature changes, the presence of isotopes, amount of rainfall and the like.

In such a way, the older oak in Coed Y Brenin preserve a record that extends back before the coming of the plantation, informs us of their adaptation to being surrounded by conifers and in some cases, their responses to increases in light following clear felling around them.

Oak is prevalent in the Britain as two species, quercus robur, English or pedunculate oak (because the acorns grow on stalks or 'peduncules') and quercus petraea, Welsh or sessile oak (the acorns have no stalks), though the species hybridise readily. The branches of the Welsh oak are often more twisted and bent than the English oak and was favoured by shipbuilders particularly for use as knees, a wooden support brace with its angular bend designed to fasten ship parts together. Many thousands of these were required to build the British navy of the Napoleonic era.

An open grown oak will respond to the availability of light by producing wide spreading branches all round and upward and can result in a crown of an almost perfect hemisphere with the leaves concentrated at the very tips of the branches. When we first arrived here at Penrhos, our largest oak had such a form and once fenced off from livestock, its lower branches extended almost to the ground. Dipping under these branches you entered a shaded, protected dome with excellent acoustics, making it an ideal place to teach; its no wonder that historical and legendary teachers and prophets would often address their gatherings from under trees.

As the oak ages and the branches continue to grow outward and upward, the lower branches have to become longer and longer to stay in the light and a point is reached where they will be shaded out by branches above or they make break. On our oak, lower branches were about 18 inches (45cms) in diameter at the trunk and got to about 40 feet in length (12 metres) before this occurred.

above: the oak behind the barn in 1999. Some of the lower branches have been shaded out and died back- you can see a cut on the left where I have removed a “widow maker”. Some of the lower branches have probably been removed in the past to leave a clean trunk up to about 10 feet (3 metres). Note the widely radiating branches and the dense shade produced by the tight, closed canopy of leaves.

A word about these branches. At one time our temporary bedroom was close to the trunk of this oak. We'd used double glazed sliding door panels on their sides at the end and on both sides of the narrow room, just big enough to squeeze a bed into the end. The panoramic view out was roofed by the radiating lower branches of our oak and early one morning we awoke to a major storm with extremely strong winds. We opened the curtains and sat back in bed to watch, thinking that if the oak comes down on us, we probably won't know about it!

The leafy ends of each branch described circles which increased in diameter with the strength of the wind. This movement was transferred down the forty foot length of each branch, reducing as it reached the trunk and throughout the storm the trunk did not move visibly. The branches themselves however writhed like snakes! How can a foot thick piece of wood be so flexible? There is no way that anything made by humans could possible mimic the almost unbelievable strength of these limbs. This flexibility in strong winds leads to a common occurrance on oak, that of splitting of the branches. Anyone who has used an axe to split oak logs for firewood will know how easy it can be and in the past, when an oak was felled or windblown, the butts were often split into stakes, the heartwood lasting up to eighty years in the ground.

above: the oak in 2010.as the main branches continue to lengthen, the spaces between them at the crown increase, allowing more light to pass through, striking the branches and trunk below and also the floor.

Also, as the tree ages, the perfect crown begins to break up into individual clusters of leaves, very like a perfect cauliflower crown left to grow on - the individual florets separate out with spaces around them. In the tree, this allows more light to penetrate through the crown and strike the branches below which triggers dormant buds and leaf and twig growth. So an ageing oak will have many more twigs and leaves growing on its branches and trunk, sometimes forming a lower crown. As ageing progresses, the upper parts of individual branches will begin to die giving a 'stag's head' appearance to the tree.

above: the second oak from the first picture, this one taken today, 2024. The crown has opened, light has hit the branches and trunk below, triggering dormant buds to grow. The die back of some of the branches begins the “stag’s head” appearance.

So that's roughly the story of the development of the form of an open grown oak. To go on to the oak of Coed Y Brenin, some background is needed. Using old, large scale ordnance survey maps from the late 1800's, (6 inches to one mile or 1:10,560 and even 24 inches to one mile or 1:2640), which show every wall and almost every tree, it is possible to begin to imagine what the landscape of Mynydd Penrhos and beyond might have looked like in the time of the tyddynwyr (the smallholders) before the plantation replaced them. The ruins of their dwellings, often originally no more than hovels, can be found along with the fallen walls which they laboured long to build to enclose their few, small fields.

above: Ordnance Survey map from 1880 at a scale of 1:2640 showing two of the tyddynnod (smallholders dwellings) on Mynydd Penrhos, walls, footpaths (no roads yet at this time), a few cleared fields surrounded by rough grazing with areas of fridd, woodland, a marsh (peat bog) and several field clearance cairns in or on the edges of the fields, surmounted by trees.

The landscape at the time, before the coming of the plantation, would have been quite varied, ranging from the neatly walled, small fields, through areas of bog, steep slopes, probably wooded with hazel or more diversely as ffridd (you can find more information about fridd on my web site, here) as well as areas of managed coppice for fuel wood and hurdles and of course, hedges of mixed native species which were laid, including oak.

One of the simplest forms of land improvement which required only labour (only..), was the clearance of stones from land and the creation of fields through the building of walls. This was often included in the tenancy agreement as a requirement for so many hours a week, The work was usually carried out by the wife and children of the tyddynwr. The stones were piled in heaps and their number and size here on Mynydd Penrhos gives some indication of the rough, boulder strewn landscape the tyddynwyr began with.

The numerous field clearance cairns would have been quite obvious as mounds in the landscape and it was often on these that oaks became established, as marked on the old maps. The maps also depict individual, open grown trees in some places, hence growing at first in full light with low, wide spreading branches. However, when the plantation was begun, little thought was given to them and conifers were planted almost up to their trunks1.

above: 1988. A field clearance cairn with oaks struggling in dense shade from Sitka and Norway spruce planted in 1967. The spreading branches tell us that previously they grew in the open with plenty of light. The size of the stone pile indicates the amount of effort that went into creating the fields in the first place2.

In the 1980's, much of the plantation was unmanaged and in a prolonged, dense, thicket stage, almost impenetrable. Where there were old walls or hedges, there was a very thin strip of sky above where the branches of the conifers on either side hadn't quite met. Using the old maps, I was able to follow these old wall and hedge lines and found the hedge remnants of dead and dying oak and hazel struggling in the dense shade, reaching up ever higher towards the narrowing strip of light.

Following the old wall lines and finding in the midst of a dense stand of conifers, a field clearance cairn surmounted by a ring of oaks with the feel of a grove, was an eerie experience. It was plain to see from their forms a similar story had unfolded as the conifers grew up around them and cast more and more shade. The lower branches of the oaks were shaded out and died and they grew taller and taller, racing for the diminishing light. Not all of them survived.

above: the same cairn in 2023. Unusually, the stands of conifers have been thinned, allowing more light in, too late for some of the oak. Note how the lower branches have died during the lengthy time of shade and the oaks have had to grow tall and thin to reach for the light.

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The second half of this piece on the Oak of Coed Y Brenin will follow almost immediately but feel free to comment on this half here if you like.

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Part one.

Part two.

To begin, in my previous pieces on forest hydrology I mentioned the dangers associated with extracting trends from short term studies and how longer studies usually completely invalidated those apparent trends. I then went on to talk about how here in Coed Y Brenin we were experiencing a move towards drier spring and early summers. Then along came 2024...

above: temperate rainforest. An old oak surrounded by conifers. Note the prevalence of mosses, a testament to persistent high humidity.

First, apart from the rainfall data I collected, evidence for the apparent trend towards drier spring and early summer was apparent in the consequences of that lack of moisture at critical times of the year. Most notable, as in most noticed, was a considerable reduction in the number of midges. Previously appearing in vast hordes, usually in two waves, the insatiable demand of these tiny terrors for mammalian blood was so overwhelming as to drive both people and animals to shelter at certain times of the day. Visitors and students from Scotland who were familiar with these fearsome creatures often remarked that ours were worse than theirs...

As a small clearing in a large forest, we provided one of the few open areas with mammalian occupants for some distance (that's us as well as the various livestock) and hence we were well liked. One consequence of this vast, flying cloud of protein was swallows, two or three pairs nesting every year, raising two and occasionally squeezing in three broods of midge devouring chicks- the more the merrier. The reappearance of swallows each year was greeted with glad shouts of recognition as they darted and dived through their aerial landscape of currents, eddies and temperature gradients1.

The decline in swallow numbers corresponded to the decline in the midge population and about ten years ago we were able to be out at dusk with only minimal bites suggested something was changing. Six years ago, after going from three nests down to just one, the swallows turned up as usual, flew wildly about, in and out of their usual nesting haunts and then left. No swallow chicks that year because of insufficient numbers of midges and none since then.

One or two swallows, sometimes more, will appear as usual each year to make exploratory, open-beaked flights but presumably fail to find the requisite quantity of prey to rear young and sadly, they leave for midgy-er air spaces. The midge population continued to decline as the dry springs and early summers impacted on their crucial breeding periods. We have been able to work outside at any time of day, or indeed night, without suffering more than the odd bite. Then along came 2024...

above: rainfall figures for 2024 so far showing above average rainfall for the last four months.

Our rainfall figures for 2024 so far, up to the end of May, show clearly that apart from a slightly drier January, every month has been wetter than the ten year average, not a lot, but sufficient and at the right times during the year to produce a resurgence of midges, certainly not in the vast quantities of the 1980s but enough to once more make working outside at certain times of day at least mildly irritating and occasionally downright frustrating. Coupled with this, is the reappearance of a pair of swallows who have been hanging about for much longer than in the last few years. Whether they will decide the midges are in sufficient numbers to support a brood or not remains to be seen.

Looking at the figures, the quantity of rain above the ten year average has come down in May so it may well be that we will still see drought and an increased fire risk as the summer rolls on. For now I comfort myself with the thought that though the wet weather has been disappointing for gardening (as well as the midges, slugs have reappeared in destructive numbers) and other outside activities, at least the forest is very unlikely to burst into flames at the moment.

So, I raise my hands, I fell into a trap of my own making and judged that just because something had happened for a few years, this year would be the same. Duh! Its important to remember that here in the UK and especially in the north west of Cymru, we actually have weather, as in a constantly changing interaction of complex systems of climatic cycles, ocean currents and fluctuating jet stream, to name a few. All go then, with occasional periods of stability that lull you into a false sense of security. Ho ho! I forgot my own Taoist mantra, “change is the only constant”.

There are a couple more things I would like to draw out of the studies2 of Dr. Graham Hall3 relating both to Coed Y Brenin specifically and conifer plantations more generally.

Most water in the UK is stored in the soil, far more than in lakes, rivers and reservoirs and as part of his work Graham made several attempts to measure the movement of water in and through soil, including one such study here at our place. This involved cutting a face into a steep bank to expose the soil profile and inserting thin, rigid, plastic sheets at each change in soil horizon to intercept water as it sank through the profile after a rain event. Each sheet was angled slightly downwards and outwards from the face of the cut to feed into a sloping gutter that deposited the water into a rain gauge at the end of the gutter to record the timing of the flow. The whole face was then covered with plastic sheeting to stop any rain getting in and interfering with the results.

above: me looking very practical by the site of the soil through flow study.

above: cutting the profile. The photo doesn’t do justice to the quite strikingly different colours of the various horizons, marked as follows:

1. dark humus rich surface horizon (top soil)

2. brown earth, with some iron accumulation at the base

3. very rocky horizon, with open cavities which can carry a lot of subsurface flow during storm events.

4. orange clayey material with few stones, probably glacial till.

above: the profile with inserts, gutters and gauges fitted, ready to go. The whole thing was then shrouded in plastic to keep rain out.

Measurements were very interesting, in general confirming what many of us already knew or conjectured. Following a rainfall event it could take something like six hours for water to flow down through the various soil horizons and appear at the lowest capture site. However, the longest time was taken to soak through the top soil, something like five hours or so of the total time. Some of the lower soil levels, despite being much deeper than the topsoil, were incredibly porous and water more or less flowed straight through them. It is the top soil, filled with life and organic matter, that hangs on to water for the longest time and hence is the biggest temporary storage for water in landscapes. So the more we can increase the depth and life of that top soil, the more water we can store in the system.

A further interesting observation was that in heavy rainfall events, the water table rises sufficiently to impede the downward movement of water, resulting in increased flows through the soil at shallower levels. Here at Penrhos, this can result in issues, where water appears at the surface, usually on a slope, moving higher up the hillside. In extreme rainfall events we have even seen water on our hillside spurting up out of mole hills.

Graham mentions in his study that results from the Penrhos measurements are particularly interesting because the instances of high volumes of shallow through-flow correspond exactly with later periods of extensive flooding of agricultural land around the head of the Mawddach estuary, some 5Km downstream. Monitoring the shallow through-flow could then provide an early warning system for later flooding downstream.

Considering the significance of the top soil in water storage I'll mention a final piece of Graham's research, observations he made of the accumulation of organic material under over-mature conifers.

Its easy to get into the habit of dismissing exotic, coniferous plantations in Cymru and elsewhere as generally “bad things” in that they severely restrict or suppress native species. There's no real doubt about this, however, given that here we are surrounded by an exotic, coniferous plantation, its as well to have a good look at what there is as some of it is very interesting indeed.

The term over-mature is used in relation to commercial forestry where trees are generally harvested at around 30 or so years of age. Here in the “Core Block” of Coed Y Brenin, the oldest parts of the 19,000 acre plantation, many coupes or stands of conifers have been left to grow far beyond this commercial maturity, most notably the century old Douglas Fir to the south and many other stands are into there eighties now.

For example, almost bordering our own place is a stand of Scots pine planted in1942, one of the few evergreen, coniferous trees native to Britain. Apart from being beautiful trees, bark almost orange in the setting sun with trunks and branches that become more interestingly curved and bent as they mature, they don't form the same dense, closed canopies in the way many of the other, exotic conifers do. This means that the understory can be quite rich and varied and here includes birch, heather, bilberry, ferns and mosses.

Graham makes mention of a similar stand of over-mature conifers, planted in 1950 on a steep slope where the progressive rising and opening of the forest canopy as the trees age allows more light into the forest floor and promotes the growth of ground vegetation with mosses (polytrichum and plagiothecium) predominating plus ferns. What was particularly interesting about this study was Graham was able to make comparisons with two other sites on the same hillside, an area of sheep grazed pasture which had not been planted and hence acts as a control plot and an area of clear-felling.

Graham measured soil development beneath the grassland at a stable profile depth of around 90cm but under the conifers he found that the combined effects of trapping slope wash sediment and the addition of organic material over a 50 year period had led to the development of around 140cm of forest brown earth. He suggests that the limited depth in comparison to the conifer plantation may be due to less efficient trapping of downslope sediment wash by grasses and the accumulation of material from the understory. That's an addition 50cm of material under the trees.

With regard to the clear-felled area, he made the following observations:

“clear felling was accompanied by the die back of mosses and ferns through reduced humidity...Within one year of clear felling, severe erosion led to the removal of over a metre of forest brown earth to leave only 30cm of matted humus as a relatively impermeable hillslope cover above periglacial deposits”.

That is a huge amount of material sent off on its long journey downstream to the sea and really emphasises the importance of continuous cover in plantations, something that the British forest authorities (the Forestry Commissions in England and Scotland and Natural Resources Wales here is Cymru) still have not come to terms with. As I write this, NRW are clear-felling the top of Mynydd Penrhos.

I'll finish with a final quote from Graham:

"Mature conifer and broadleaf woodlands lying within the high rainfall zone are both able to develop the prolific moss and ground vegetation seen at Hermon [in Coed Y Brenin]. Moss growth maintains the humid conditions within the forest. Thus, the ecological system becomes self-sustaining and soil accumulation is promoted. Clear felling destabilises the moss-fern association, leading to soil erosion. The greatly altered nature of the hill surface produces a substantial increase in surface run-off during storm events”.

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Many thanks for reading and a warm welcome to new subscribers. This piece is the last for now looking at forest hydrology. As always, comments, suggestions, requests, critiques etc. are most welcome.

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Various pieces are coming your way in the near future. Delays recently have been due to a very intermittent internet connection (just come back on after two days without) and sloooow speed- currently 220Kbs, plus busy gardening time of year and still trying to finish firewood for next winter. Pah! Pathetic excuses!

Be prepared for more on the many species of Coed Y Brenin, plus internet and web site energy requirements (amazing how much carbon budget we users can tot up without really being aware of it) plus more of the Patafiction, Konsk together with chapter list and links for new subscribers and a justification for fiction as a means of passing on information. Wow, I am entering busy mode. Hwyl! Chris

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incidentally, we use an old diary to record the arrival or appearance of different species each year, such as swallows or the first cuckoo, simply writing the year and species on the appropriate date. This record has built up over nearly forty years and its fascinating to look back at the range of arrival dates over the decades and speculate on the reasons not only for the wide variation but also apparent favouritisms for certain dates.

above: old diary used to record annual appearances of various species, notably here, cuckoos and swallows but also a list of plants currently flowering.

More often though, as the warm, moist air moves over the land and rises up over hills, it cools. The moisture in the air nucleates around dust particles and bacteria and form rain drops which then begin to fall under the influence of gravity; it starts to rain. (I'm not really trying to teach you how to suck eggs, just establishing the scene. Now I've used that idiom, I realise that subscribers in other countries who may not share the idiom about teaching our grandmothers to suck eggs, will probably not have any idea what I'm talking about- sorry).

Trees and other plants draw water up from their roots and express it from stoma on their leaves, allowing the trees to lift water, against the force of gravity, tens of metres above the surface of the earth, a phenomena that is still not fully understood. Like our blood supply, the water is a vehicle for transporting nutrients up and through plant bodies and down again, as it happens. The process by which the water is expressed from the leaves is known as transpiration.

Apart from the trees transpiring water vapour, the other factor that can be very significant for air moisture content or humidity is evaporation. During a rainfall event the leaves (I'm including conifer needles as leaves here, which they are) of the trees become wetted. The surface area of a tree's leaves is enormous1 and can hold considerable amounts of water.

As all this water evaporates it adds to the moisture content of the air in and above the forest. During some rain events this can be clearly seen as mist rising up off the trees. The combination of evaporation and transpiration, usually referred to as evapotranspiration results in increased humidity in and above the forest.

above: evapotranspiration visible as mist rising up from trees shortly after and sometimes during a rain event.

In a forest system, such as here in Coed Y Brenin, some 19,000 acres (7689 hectares) of trees are actively transpiring during the day, releasing vast amounts of water back into the atmosphere. This means that the air in, around and above the forest contains more water than over surrounding land, whether agricultural or say moorland. When warm, moist air blowing in from the west meets already moist air rising up from the forest, the combined amount of moisture can reach a maximum, a saturation point and it begins to rain. So rain is more likely to begin over forest systems, something that is even more apparent in tropical rainforest, hence the name.

This phenomena of forests, sometimes called cloud catching, was demonstrated by work carried out by Dr. Graham Hall, our Dolgellau based, sane scientist. Graham, of Bangor university and Coleg Meirion Dwyfor, Dolgellau, conducted a number of research projects related to our area and in particular, a detailed study on the forest hydrology of Coed Y Brenin2.

Hydrology is the scientific study of the properties, distribution, and effects of water on the earth's surface, in the soil and underlying rocks, and in the atmosphere. Forest Hydrology relates the same to forest systems in general and with Graham's work, specifically Coed Y Brenin. Its a very thorough and highly detailed, fascinating study and forms the basis of many of the key points here.

As part of the study, Graham installed multiple rain gauges, thermometers and humidity sensors throughout Coed Y Brenin and beyond, including at our own site where he also conducted a number of other experiments, more of which later. The gauges measured and logged data at three minute intervals, allowing very precise monitoring of rainfall events. Every few weeks he wandered around the forest (good work if you can get it!) to download the accumulated data from each sensor onto a laptop. He was then able to use software to produce sophisticated, animated maps of rainfall events as they developed in the forest and beyond.

A number of interesting things arose from this mapping. For example, we learned that our own site, on Mynydd Penrhos, in the heart of the oldest part of Coed Y Brenin (known as the Core Block), receives up to 40% more rain than a site in Ganllwyd, only about a kilometre away as the crow flies. According to Graham, taken along with other, similar readings, this demonstrated, for the first time in Britain, cloud catching by temperate forests. That is, it is more likely to rain over forests than open land and the rain is likely to be heavier.

Another interesting (perhaps in the Chinese sense) finding was that our site was the wettest place in Coed Y Brenin during the summer... The epicentre3 drifts a bit further north and west for the winter so we can at least be thankful for that.

Graham's animations of rainfall events make interesting viewing. As I indicated at the start, the rain doesn't necessarily sweep in from the west, rather it can begin to rain over the forest first (usually over us...) and then the area of rainfall expands outwards and westwards. Sometimes the rainfall will begin in various places over the forest at more or less the same time, either going on to expand over larger areas or sometimes just dying out.

Here in Cymru, that combination of warm, westerly fronts already high in moisture, plus forests of native species, led to the development of what Dr. Martin Garnett called temperate rainforest back in the 1980s. More often these days the term used is Celtic Rainforest, which is nice in a poetic sort of way but not as useful or accurate as Doc. Martin's. Whatever, one consequence of this was the development of forests supporting a very wide diversity of lichens, liverworts, mosses and ferns, something that makes them fairly unique in Europe.

above: the high humidity of Coed Y Brenin is clearly visible in the abundance of mosses.

Of course, Coed Y Brenin “Forest” began in the 1920s as a plantation made up of pure stands of various exotic (that is, non-native) tree species, providing only very limited niche space for native plants. This is especially noticeable with lichens; whereas native trees here, such as oak or blackthorn can be more or less covered with lichens, they are generally sparse or absent on conifers. Under dense stands of conifers or ones that cast considerable shade, such as western hemlock, there is often insufficient light even for mosses to grow.

Graham's study looked at the source of the Afon Mawddach, (the river Mawddach), Waen y Griafolen, (meaning something like Wet Land of the Mountain Ash), a blanket bog covering a plateau basin of approximately 6 km2 in the Arennig mountains with an average depth of peat of 2.3 metres. The important point here is that despite the depth of old peat, (9,000 years or so!), it is the much shallower, living layer of sphagnum moss that provides most of the temporary storage of water, buffering the effects of high rainfall events or flash flooding.

With the prospect of less rainfall in the spring and early summer, keeping that living layer wet will be crucial and Graham talks about the possibility of putting weirs into the outlets as a means of slowing down the flow of water. I'd always thought of my fascine causeway design as applicable to both bog creation and regeneration, as rather than just blocking drainage ditches it provides the opportunity to gradually raise the level of water over substantial areas, while growing the materials (willow) to create more causeways. It also provides a dry access to bogs or wet land to allow observation and study4.

From this vast bog the Mawddach and her tributaries descend through steep, narrow, boulder filled valleys with many a waterfall. When in flood these rivers carry considerable amounts of stone downstream and Graham describes them as “gravel trains”. During our Great Flood of 2001, Merfyn, who lived in Ganllwyd with a garden backing onto the river, told me how he put a cup of tea on his table and watched ripple patterns appear; he could hear a continuous dull rumbling and feel vibrations through the floor as boulders were tumbled downstream. This flash flood saw a peak rainfall of 90mmof rain in a three and a half hour period5.

The effects were considerable, made much worse by the Forestry Commission, Cymru, having left stacks of timber on the river banks. This wood was swept away as the rivers burst their banks and carried downstream to a road or footbridge where it formed temporary dams until the accumulated weight and force of water was sufficient to sweep the bridges away sending a surge down to the next bridge where the process was repeated.

above: after the Great Flood of 2001. Note the debris piled up against abridge pillar- a packed mass of tree trunks, logs, roots, boulders, stones, gravel and soil. All the surviving trees on the riparian zones had similar masses of debris impacted on them. The river here rose some 24 feet or 7 metres and you may be able to make out bent railings on the bridge from the impact of debris carried down on the flood.

In all twelve footbridges were destroyed and three road bridges required major repairs and in one case, complete rebuilding. The height of the Mawddach was measured at 24 feet (about 7 metres) above its normal level and the banks of the rivers were swept clear of all vegetation, including hundreds of trees and stripped of soil, leaving bedrock that looked like it had been sandblasted clean.

above: after the Great Flood- many hundreds of tons of timber swept down the Mawddach accumulated at the bridge at Penmaenpool. Picture courtesy of the Cambrian News.

Interestingly, after the Great Flood of 2001, many trees that were torn form the banks ended up stuck in the narrow gorges of the Las and Wen. These formed natural dams and interrupted the flow of gravel. Given time they fill up with debris and its easy to imagine and over time, a river left to evolve naturally will gradually raise its bed. Its easy to imagine adapting this as a technique in designing for restricting the down stream flow of materials in such river systems. However, in the interests of tidiness, all such blockages were removed by Forestry Commission Cymru, allowing the gravel trains to continue without hindrance.

above: a natural dam on one of the tributaries of the Mawddach, the Afon Las (the Blue River, also known as the Afon Babi, the River of the Baby, which is another story and a good one…). Here, the water behind the dam is raised by about 4 feet, 1.2 metre. Many of these, repeated along the course of the rivers, could buffer the effects of high rainfall, holding more water in the river system and releasing it more gradually. However, a traditional urge for tidiness means they get removed, allowing the gravel to continue its journey downstream.

These gravel train rivers carry vast amounts of material downstream causing considerable problems. Heavy machinery is required to clear debris regularly from the arches of Bont Fawr (Big Bridge) in Dolgellau and the mouth of the estuary at Abermaw, (Barmouth) is continually silting up. Graham managed to find an old painting of Dolgellau showing Bont Fawr and its informative to compare the height of the arches to a contemporary photograph.

above: old painting of Bont Fawr (Big Bridge) in Dolgellau. Note the height of the pillars supporting the arches.

above: Bont Fawr as it is today. Enough said!

As global warming ramps up, water management is going to become absolutely critical and its vital that we understand as much as we can about the natural movement of water through systems. There's a huge amount to learn here including naturally occurring features that can be readily adopted into designed systems, if we are prepared to learn from nature and work with her.

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Thanks for reading. There’s more to come on Forest Hydrology at some point. A warm welcome to all new subscribers! Please feel free to comment, make suggestions or even requests for areas to cover. Delays in the newsletter have been due to a combination of internet outages (coincidentally (?), one at the peak of the recent huge solar flare) plus good weather, allowing me to catch up on winter fuel and fill up the garden, as well as all the usual and unusual challenges of living a more or less compromised life in a struggling society. So no change there then. Till next time, hwyl! Chris.

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Way back in the 1980's, I was puzzled when hearing folk, both visitors and locals, complaining about it raining all day or all week or even “all the time”. Being an active outside sort of person this didn't seem to match my experience. To me, rain, when it came, was rarely continuous and often even a day of apparently incessant rain provided longer or shorter gaps for bursts of outside activity. This led me to coin the phrase “it is extremely unusual in Cymru for it to rain all day”. I also started noting the weather in my diary, using the sort of graphics you might find in any weather forecast, in order to have some evidence to counteract the complaints

above: diary weather icons. Simple but contain a fair bit of information.

I found I could squeeze a fair bit of information into the weather icons, such as how much cloud, when in the day the sun shone, if at all and when it rained during the day, plus an indication of intensity, where any breaks came, wind, storms etc.

The main problem with this sort of data source is that diaries being analogue, the only way you can search it is by thumbing through every page, or, as the years went by, going through the growing collection of diaries. The thing was and still is, I just find it so easy to do at the time and being pictorially minded, I like drawing.

So after five or so years of this I used some of the long winter evenings to trawl through, looking for patterns that might be useful in my work, particularly in gardening and sure enough, I found patterns. it seemed pretty clear that for most of the year we were subjected to repeated western fronts arriving every two, three or four days, sometimes five, leading to two or three days with rain and giving us two or three days of clearer weather in between, occasionally four and maybe twice a year, five; in other words, pretty wet weather…

The only exceptions to this pattern were sustained highs in the winter months which could see cold north or east winds for several weeks, up to about four, with temperatures around or below zero centigrade during the day and the ground frozen hard. Snow tended to arrive in two bursts, one before and one after the winter solstice and it could be heavy and lie for several weeks.

One glimmer of hope was a two week clear spell in the early spring which moved about a bit but over the five years of records I had accumulated, was relatively consistent. As a gardener I was able to take advantage of this several years running and get seedlings started before the slugs appeared.

However...no sooner had I identified this pattern and begun taking advantage of it, everything seemed to change. I was to learn later, from a radio 4 programme that looked at long term studies, that this was in fact normal.

Among other examples, the Radio 4 programme introduced an ecologist who began a four year study of arctic terns. After the four years was up he felt satisfied that he had identified the trend, understood what was going on and was prepared to write up his paper but he thought he'd go back for another year just to check

above: extreme weather. Debris left after the flash flood of 2001. The Mawddach was 24 feet above its normal height here. More on this in part two.

To his surprise he found that the trend he'd identified had disappeared and the situation had changed completely. He ended up returning every year to continue the study and observing trends disappearing almost as soon as he'd identified them. He was talking on the programme after, If I remember correctly, his 21^st year of going to the arctic to observe the terns.

His main lesson was that had he presented his paper after just four years, it would have been wholly inadequate at capturing the complexity of the terns behaviour. The programme went on to give many examples of similar experiences. So too with the first five years of my weather recording. This is the inevitable consequence of dealing with complex systems- as soon as you think you've spotted a trend, the trend disappears and a new one appears, only to be replaced by another and so on.

It is also in our nature to look for and recognise patterns so we should be careful to not fall in love with them as they may not persist through time; instead we need to continue our objective observations, always open to changing circumstances- “Change is the only constant” as the Taoists say.

So here on the Mawddach river catchment in Cymru, from 1990 onwards,that regular pattern of western fronts every few days began to change and the two week window of clear skies seemed to extend each year. Droughts, particularly in the south east of Britain became more frequent but also extended into Cymru. When Bill Mollison visited and taught at Ragman's Lane Farm in 1991, he was amazed that we weren't already on fire and I remember folk who attended courses I ran at home during the early summers remarking on how they had travelled up from the south through parched landscapes with only the trees showing green.

On the Mawddach the peak came when the two week window stretched to two months, an event almost unheard off, with just a dribble of rain in the middle. Further south, grass did not grow, turned yellow, then white and died. With no grazing for livestock and no silage crops to cut, emergency measures were introduced to provide forage for farmers. Reverting to an old practice, those fortunate enough to still have hedges, cut tree fodder for animals. Winters became warmer and practically devoid of snow. It all looked like this was global warming really kicking in.

And then, once again, having identified a trend of increasingly dry spring and early summer, it all changed and we had successive winters beginning 2010-2011 of heavy snow fall and intense cold. We were cut off for two four week periods, one before and one after the winter solstice, for two years running with temperatures below zero during the day and down to -13 at night, followed by wet weather pretty much throughout the rest of the year, again.

above: Fool on frozen pond (me…). The only time, so far, that this pond has frozen right over. Extremes will still occur.

What was going on? All this time, scientists, including climatologists and oceanographers had been studying weather patterns and learning more about the complexity of the Earth system and the inadequacies of computer modelling which were unable to incorporate even just the El Niño/La Niña cycle. So they had learned that not only does each ocean basin have its own periodic warming/cooling cycle but that as the oceans are really just one huge system, these individual cycles influence each other- teleconnected is the term. The complexity of these interacting cycles was beyond the ability of computers to model, and still is.

On top of this are atmospheric currents and cycles, intimately related to ocean currents, as of course its all one vast, amazing system. The sudden reappearance of those two harsh winters in the UK seemed to coincide with three of these large scale cycles entering their cooling phase at the same time, namely the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), the Arctic oscillation plus a solar warming/cooling cycle related to sunspots.

So the Earth's climate is hugely complex and we should expect wide variations and oscillations at a local level but what is clear from averaging temperature recordings from across the globe as a whole there is a steady increase in temperature, leading to regular breaking of national and global records.

I've continued drawing weather icons in my diaries for nearly forty years now and I am glad to be able to say that over the years I have introduced more objective measures of the weather (daily rainfall in millimetres, relative humidity and maximum and minimum temperatures) as well as regularly transferring those measurements into a digital format, namely a spreadsheet, this now being a task for those long winter evenings. The advantage of a spreadsheet is it allows for easier searching and presentation of the information in a variety of ways to allow simple comparisons from year to year or month to month and to produce five and ten year annual and monthly averages.

I encouraged all my students, visitors and apprentices to record at least their local rainfall. Its simple to do with a cheap rain gauge and encourages more awareness of weather generally and specific knowledge about your local climate.

above: annual rainfall varies considerably across the UK.

One thing that will be obvious to most folk living in the Britain is that the weather is generally highly variable. This became very obvious to me after the first five years or so of taking daily rainfall measurements and working out annual totals. Now with several decades of measurements, I can see that our annual rainfall fluctuates between roughly 1.7 metre and 2.7 metres which is a considerable difference.

Here's the annual and monthly totals for 2023 compared to our ten year average.

above: annual rainfall for 2023 compared to ten year average.

The central column of figures gives the differences between rainfall in 2023 against the 10 year average for each month and for the year. Red figures indicate rainfall below average while black figures give the amount of rain above the average. So in 2023 rainfall was down in the first part of the year (especially so in February!) but higher during the autumn and winter months so the annual rainfall is close to the ten year average. This is in line with what scientists predict for global warming.

I was concerned that a ten year average might mask more recent changes so produced a five year average as well but found no appreciable difference, so I'm sticking with ten for now.

One of the things that bugs me with monthly totals, apart from the fact that months are ultimately arbitrary measures and of different lengths, is that it does not give any indication of how many days did not have rain. So I produced a different graph showing daily rainfall which provided me with good arguments to counter the “its rained all week” brigade.

above: graph showing daily rainfall and convincing proof that it does not rain “all the time”.

From this it should be clear that those regular western fronts of the 1980s bringing rain every 2, 3 or 4 days has vanished, replaced by longer bursts of persistent rain and longer intervals of dry weather between.

I've been trying to combine daily rainfall, minimum humidity and maximum temperatures into one graph, with limited success, however, here's my best attempt so far. Gaps in the blue line (minimum humidity) and red line (maximum temperatures) are where I forgot to note the readings...duh!.

above: an attempt at combining daily rainfall, minimum humidity and maximum temperature readings.

By overlaying the maximum temperature and the minimum humidity on rainfall we can see where the peak fire risk occurred, as humidity descends towards 30% and temperature climbs towards 30°. In 2023 this happened only once, towards the end of June, after several weeks without rain. Fortunately no fire kicked off in this instance.

above: rainfall figure for 2022; a scarier set of numbers.

If we look back at 2022 we see a starker picture with almost every month below the ten year average. Unsurprisingly this year saw a rack of records broken, being the hottest summer in Europe (coinciding with severe wild fires) and the second hottest in the UK (equalling 1995) and the hottest August in Europe. In the UK the 13^th of November was the hottest on record with Porthmadog (twenty miles north of us|) registering a temperature of 21.2º, in November...a sign of things to come.

Fortunately 2023 was a relative let off in comparison, giving more time to prepare for wildfire. What this year, 2024 will bring seems very unpredictable. After a pretty wet start to the year with a lot of rain in February it has now begun to dry up though temperatures remain quite low with a strong risk of frosts at night. We shall see and I will continue to draw pictures in my diary and try to remember to note down all the various readings. I’ll also try to improve my graphs…

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Thanks for reading. Next time I'll zoom in on Coed Y Brenin and what happens to all that rainfall after it hits the trees. A warm welcome to new subscribers. The newsletter has been and may well be prone to minor delays as this coincides with my busiest time in the garden and I am still catching up on firewood after the wet weather delayed my normal logging activities. More episodes of Konsk are in the pipeline and I will be putting out a note with links to all the previous episodes for any folk who may be interested in catching up.

Meanwhile, comments and suggestions always welcome, particularly any hints or pointers for combining multiple chart types in Open Office- many thanks! Till then, Hwyl! Chris.

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One of the things that appealed to me about permaculture design when I first encountered it, back in 1989, was the integrated or holistic approach. That's the idea that rather than approaching challenges one by one in a piecemeal way, we can, by careful analysis and protracted thought, design simple, elegant solutions that address multiple challenges at the same time.

Growing your own food is probably one of the best examples of this. Small scale gardening for food increases personal and local resilience, is proven to be good for our physical and mental well-being1, increases the diversity of our gut microbiome, can be done as a group activity which increases community interaction, can reduce the need to travel and if it follows organic or permaculture ethics and principles, is far less damaging to the environment than mechanised, chemical agriculture, among many other things.

Another example I often raise is that whenever we need to make paths, tracks or roads, we inevitably impact on water management. By careful siting of such access routes we can increase the water storage capacity by choosing routes that follow contours and incorporating swales (perfectly level to allow water to soak down into the soil) or close-to-contour routes and water ways (ffosydd dyfri) that allow for infiltration but also steer excess water into longer term storages like wetlands, bogs or ponds. We can also take advantage of the waterways and their edges to grow specific species for cropping in various ways.

above: almost perfect- several hundred metres of contour track in Coed Y Brenin with a ditch operating like a swale on the up side, trapping run off from above and slowly infiltrating it into the soil and under the track. A rare example of accidental good practice!

All too often, despite the growing demand for water, here in the UK, local authorities and other bodies' primary concern still seems to be to get rid of water as quickly as possible. This seems to occur even if there is a department within such an organisation that is actively trying to conserve water and develop longer term strategies for sustainable management of water resources.

This lack of joined up thinking within and between various bodies seems to be built into the systems where separate departments may be in competition for resources. Some past examples from Forestry Commission Cymru and the current Natural Resources Wales (NRW) make the point.

Here in Cymru, power and communication companies have various devolved powers that in some circumstances allow them to run lines strung on poles across landscapes without applying for planning permission. Coed Y Brenin has a number of such lines of poles, coming up the steep sided valley from Ganllwyd and over Mynydd Penrhos, delivering power or telecoms to various properties, whether isolated or grouped together. Indeed, our own landline is served by an additional 13 poles running from a neighbour about a mile away and about 800 metres of buried, armoured cable.

The power companies have the right to enter the land, whoever it belongs to and cut vegetation, particularly trees, usually birch, under their lines, so nothing grows up high enough to interfere with their cables. The cut material is always just left, usually roughly piled to the sides of the swath they cut. Here, it dries out and adds to the fuel burden of the forest floor. The conifers growing on either side of the swathe have access to more light and retain their lower branches, often down to the ground, offering useful ladders for fire to climb up into the canopy. So the cut swathe, running up steep slopes, layered with dead material that dries out, provide ideal routes for fire to race up and as I've mentioned in previous articles, fire on a hillside can move very quickly as it preheats material above it on the slope.

A further point is that one of the species that gets cut under the lines is rhododendron which is pervasive pretty much throughout the southern end of Coed Y Brenin and the western flank of Mynydd Penrhos is, or was, particularly heavily infested. This plant can grow in about 90% shade, casts an even denser shade and nothing will grow underneath it, hence it can drastically reduce the diversity of an area, especially of native species, as it becomes established in ever growing patches. It responds well to cutting, rapidly sprouting new growth.

Under the power or phone lines, when the combination of trees and rhododendron is repeatedly cut (in effect coppiced) its the rhododendron that wins out, growing on to smother the other vegetation. So in some places the cut swathes are now filled with rhododendron, running up into the plantation and beginning to spread out into the surrounding stands.

above: swathe cut through the forest under power lines showing nicely coppicing rhododendron and neatly piled cut birch drying out ready for the fire.

But we're not finished here. Natural Resources Wales (NRW) employed contractors to undertake rhododendron clearance on the western flank of Mynydd Penrhos a few years ago. The contractors used the “stem injection” method which sounds quite sophisticated but basically just involves drilling holes as low as possible in the branches and squirting poison into them. The poison is systemic, spreads throughout the plant and kills it over the course of a season or so.

Admittedly the contractors did a good job although wandering off piste, as I do, I find the odd one or few they missed which, unless there is any follow-up, will go on to spread yet more seed and start the whole process off again, an old story in this locality. Also, they marked out each area as they worked their way through it, by tying coloured, plastic tape to branches, which did not get collected afterwards. These, many hundreds of them, will inevitably break down into micro particles and end up in the soil, water and ultimately the seas and oceans,

The point I'm making here though is that the power company team happened to carry out their regular cutting of anything under their lines before the rhododendron killing team got there. When the rhododendron team worked their way through that area, looking for the dark green, evergreen foliage, they failed to notice the plants that had been coppiced under the lines, so they didn't get poisoned. These have now returned to vigorous growth filling the whole swathe, again.

above: the same swathe on the other side of the track. Freshly sprouting rhododendron looking very happy, thank you very much for removing the competition! The bare shrubby branches in the foreground and right mid ground are dead rhododendron plants that hadn’t been coppiced so got poisoned, now drying out nicely and ready to burn. Oh yes, the smoke from burning rhodi is poisonous…

This is the classic piecemeal approach which leads to an endless cycle of actions that do not work, favour the species that is seen as the problem and increases the fire risk in the forest, rather than decreasing it.

A permaculture approach would be to treat the swathe under the power lines as a system and design it. This would go along the lines of identifying the maximum height allowed under the lines and selecting suitable species; this would then give you the timing of a regular coppice cycle of harvested material. There's no reason why this sort of work should not be undertaken by a local group rather than the power company. It then becomes in the locals' interests to look after the swathe, as in care for it, rather than be careless about it.

I can imagine a linear coppiced apple orchard, as envisaged by Phil Corbett and currently being trialled by Chris Evans2[

https://www.facebook.com/ApplewoodPermacultureCentres

] or soft fruit. This turns maintenance into harvesting, transforming work for no product into a locally productive venture.

I'll offer another simple example of the left hand not knowing what the right is doing.

In the late 1990s we got a contract with the then Forestry Commission Wales to clear conifers from the riparian zones of the streams on Mynydd Penrhos; that's the sides of the streams. In some cases the streams had conifers, varying in height from seedlings to young trees, shading them completely and the water had taken on scary colours like bright orange, blue or yellow. Letting the light in provided the opportunity for native species to get going and has greatly improved the quality of the water. As we were in effect improving our own watershed, we did a really good job.

However, when you are in effect hand weeding a forest of several tens of thousands of conifer seedlings, most of which were western hemlock, it is inevitable that you will miss one or two (at least!) and the same is true with rhododendron. So a sensible approach would be to repeat the clearance process in say three or four years, when the ones you missed the first time will have become more obvious. This second go would require far less work and ideally, a regular sweep of the same areas maybe every five years or so.

above: hillside meticulously weeded of conifers some 25 years ago flourishing with rowan, hazel, oak and willow but the dark shadows up at the right background are just a handful of western hemlock that got missed and, without follow-up, have grown on to dominate the upper slope. The smaller hemlock to the right of centre has appeared more recently and is still of a size suited to guerilla forestry…

Does this happen? No. Has the small stand of eighty year old western hemlock trees that are providing probably 80% of the seedlings been cut down? No. Result, many of the areas that we cleared so scrupulously are once more thick with the trees that have seeded since we did the work and even in places where we missed only a few hemlocks, these have grown into broad monsters with branches down to the ground and nothing growing under them.

On this same contract, under the direction of the Forestry Commission Conservation Ranger we also cleared a small marsh of conifers and again, as it was on our own watershed, did a really good job. However, in the same year, only some six months later, we found it had been planted up with closely spaced Norway spruce! Duh! I could go on but you get the point

above: a peat bog, believe it or not, again, meticulously weeded of conifers but then planted with conifers…many of which have died or fallen over, probably because they were planted on a bog. Duh!

Unfortunately, apart from inter-departmental rivalry or sheer ignorance, governments and other bodies are still all too often caught on the hop and respond to crises by throwing money at a challenge without really thinking long term (take the UK response to Covid for example), leading to a limited number of individuals and businesses profiting from extravagant wastage (PPE for example or the scamming of furlough money) and the ordinary person (the tax payer) having to foot the bill and suffer a reduction in services as budgets are cut to reduce government spending.

We could save considerable energy, time and money if different departments within organisations and different organisations could coordinate their efforts and develop a collaborative approach. This sort of joined up thinking, exemplified by permaculture design, is going to be even more vital as we move into a future of static or shrinking economies when resources are going to be more and more constrained.

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Thanks for reading and welcome to new subscribers. Some more Konsk is on the way plus the next bit on fire, hopefully before the fire season kicks off. However, if the weather continues the way the spring is going here, (that is, pretty wet), then I might get away with it for another year, meaning more time to prepare, hopefully.

Till next time, comments, suggestions, requests most welcome. Hwyl! Chris.

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above: the fire closes in on Fort McMurray

Living in a forest that is very well stocked (and stacked) with fuel through lack of management over the last forty years, and very aware of temperatures climbing inexorably upwards, I am, I think understandably, concerned about wild fire. I've written about this before here on Substack and wanting to increase my understanding of the new nature of fire in a world of global warming, I've just finished reading John Vaillant's excellent book, Fire Weather.1

On the surface, Fire Weather is a thorough account and analysis of the 2016 Fort McMurray fire in Alberta, Canada. Fort McMurray, or Petrol City as it is known by its own residents, grew very rapidly in the last few decades in response to the huge amounts of money being thrown at the enormous quantities of bituminous shale lying just below the surface of Alberta's boreal forest, a forest that includes pine, aspen and black spruce.

Some perspective first. Canada is enormous, larger than India, bigger even than Australia. Alberta is similarly vast, (though only the fourth largest Canadian state), at 661,848 square kilometres (255,541 square miles), making it over three times the size of the Island of Britain, an area of a mere 209,331 km² (80,823 sq mi), yet with a population less than a twelfth of the UK's at under five million.

Vaillant, speaking about the evolution of wild fire in the state, begins with the Chisholm Oak fire of 2001, at the time the largest fire recorded. This fire was so large it generated its own weather system, (lightning, rain, storm force winds) pushed a pyrocumulonimbus cloud up into the stratosphere and was picked up by the US security agency who thought Canada had tested an atomic bomb.

This fire gives a good idea of the size of Alberta as no one in Alberta (or indeed Canada) knew anything about it until the Americans got in touch. The Albertans sent some research scientists to look for it...The energy released by this fire was estimated to be about equivalent to a 17 megaton nuclear explosion, that is, much bigger than the atomic bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were roughly 12-15 and 17 kilotons respectively, (mega is a thousand times larger than kilo).

A fire front, that is the part of the fire which is moving the fastest, usually in response to topography or wind, emits energy as radiant heat measured in kilowatts. So a slow moving grass fire might emit one kilowatt per metre of front and can be tackled by people wielding beaters. Once you get above 2 kilowatts per metre of front, you really need water and as the radiant heat increases as a consequence of more fuel for the fire to burn, then you need mechanical assistance. The heat of the Chisholm fire front was estimated at over 200,000 kilowatts per metre of front...

In describing the disaster of the Fort McMurray fire of May 2016, which is truly terrifying, Vaillant includes detailed accounts of past fires in Alberta (such as the Chisholm fire of 2001, above) and elsewhere as background. He also provides an excellent potted histories of the Alberta Tar Sands and the development of the huge industry that has arisen to extract them. He looks in detail at “The Site”, as the vast extraction area is described (the only human created feature visible from space- have a look at the maps on a world famous search engine's web site. Contrary to popular believe the Great Wall of China cannot be seen from space as it is too thin).

above: just a very small fraction of “The Site”. Try looking on a world famous search engine’s map and zooming in…

I've previously read about “The Site” in another book, Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life; A Tar Sands Tale by Matt Hern and Am Jahal with Joe Sacco2 that paints a similar vivid picture in an open, non-judgemental way which allows the reader to appreciate why individuals might choose to work at “The Site”- basically money, lots of money. It also deals very well with the environmental and social consequences of the extraction and subsequent pollution, in particular the effect on the indigenous peoples whose land is being despoiled.

And lets not make any bones about this, “The Site” in Alberta is an appalling assault on the earth and its people at the very bottom of the Brown Tech future that David Holmgren envisages in his Future Scenarios- you can't really get much dirtier energy than this. The “finished” product is DilBit, basically “cleaned” bitumen mixed with diesel oil to get it thin enough to burn. Its a disgustingly dirty industry that contaminates land and water to such an extent that it is not known if a genuine clean up (which was touted as part of the whole extraction process) is even possible.

The scale of the extraction process is difficult to comprehend- how many times can you use the words vast, huge, enormous? The machines at the opencast working face are some of the biggest ever built, imagine a Ferris wheel 10 stories high but carrying scoops you could fit a house in, these nightmare beasts work 24/7, every day of the year and until the Fort McMurray fire, had never stopped since they were first put there. The dumper trucks that service these monsters weigh up to 400 tons unladen...

above: machines on “The Site”. Don’t be fooled by the scale. Note the bulldozer low on the left, a D8, is huge. The tyres on those dumper trucks are fifteen feet in diameter…

“The Site” contains many hundreds of different companies, all scrambling for a share of the loot, a substance that is so polluting and so difficult to extract, separate, clean and otherwise process that only a very high oil price plus huge subsidies and tax incentives from the Canadian State and Federal governments, makes it even remotely financially viable. The Site's fortunes has waxed and waned as the price of oil moved up and down and it may be that the Fort McMurray fire marked the beginning of the end for the Alberta tar sands.

Vaillant also includes an account of the science of global warming which most of us will already know but what is so surprising here is how early some of this thinking appeared- would you believe 1824? Also vital here is the presentation of the oil companies own studies of CO2 emissions in the 1970s which showed conclusively that continued use of fossil fuels would wreck the climate and make the Earth uninhabitable. That these companies chose to not only ignore their own studies but actually suppress and deny it in the next decades leads nicely into a chapter on litigation.

This is a positive and genuinely hopeful section which suggests how the oil industry might be tamed, might even be being tamed, namely by the fear of litigation for past misdemeanours. Oil companies are currently facing many thousands of lawsuits in different countries for knowingly causing harm to young people of today and the future. The cases are brought by both large collectives and individuals (a 17 year old Australian school pupil, for example, took their environment minister to court for failing to protect her and other young people's futures). Although some of these cases fail, the fear of litigation and possible vast fines was one pressure in Alberta that has caused a huge reduction of investment.

Back to the fire itself, which is central to the narrative. Wildfires are described in certain ways but as the size and intensity of a fire increase, the term “Out Of Control” is displaced by “Beyond Resources”. People will still attempt to fight a fire that is out of control but when it is beyond resources, the only thing to do is to get out of the way and pray for rain. The Fort McMurray fire kicked off on May 1^st 2016 and was finally declared extinguished on August 2^nd 2017, having finished its assault on Petrol City, wandered off into British Columbia for a while then head back into Alberta and set off towards the great lakes, consuming over 1.5 million acres of forest and with an estimated cost of 9.9 billion Canadian dollars (about 5.8 billion pounds).

above: gridlocked on the road south, looking through and into hell..

In the event, Fort McMurray's 90,000 inhabitants were all evacuated. With only two roads out to North and South, the route south became gridlocked immediately and people spent up to three terrified hours in their cars with fires raging on both sides. Once into the town the fire capriciously changed direction multiple times, first leaving some properties untouched then returning to consume them. In all “only” some 2.500 homes were destroyed as the fire changed its mind and headed north, away from the town. Remarkably there was no loss of live, almost unbelievable given the awesome energy the fire unleashed.

One consequence of fires, whether starting in the home or from outside, is that the heat causes any petroleum products to give off flammable gases. Petrol City lived up to its name- carpets, curtains, wall coverings, work surfaces, furniture, cushions, bedding, window frames, cladding on the exterior walls and tar impregnated cedar shingles are all based on petroleum products. The radiant heat from the approaching fire front was so great that by the time the flames reached a house it was already filled with and surrounded by highly volatile gases, meaning that the entire house would burst into flames3.

In the conditions at Fort McMurray in early May 2016, once the fire hit the town,the houses burned to ashes in just five minutes. So precise was this that the unbelievably brave fire fighters who were still trying to control it were able to time how long till the fire front reached them by counting the houses between them and it. The fire left nothing behind it- the cinder blocks the houses were built from, the roof timbers and anything other than substantial chunks of metal such as cast iron baths, were vaporised. When people finally returned, hoping to salvage at least something, they found only piles of ashes in the their basements.

The underlying message here is that in the era of rapid Global Warming, fires have become a different beast all together. Increasing aridity in many parts of the world means potential fuels are tinder dry earlier in the year than ever. Fires burn faster, consume more fuel and burn hotter. The concept of a fire season has vanished with devastating fires occurring at any time of the year. More recent events in California and of course Australia, have seen even larger and more destructive fires than that at Fort McMurray.

above: dropping water and fire retardant from planes or, as here, helicopter becomes more and more dangerous as the fire grows. If the water is dumped from too high up, it simply evaporates before it reaches the flames, hence very low flying is required, often through dense smoke, inevitably leading to fatal accidents.

At Fort McMurray, once the fire got into the town, the traditional approach of defending individual houses became meaningless. Firefighters adopted the broad-scale tactics of forest fires, borrowing some of the massive equipment from “The Site” to flatten and bulldoze entire rows and blocks of houses and create firebreaks but in the end it was only a change in wind direction that saved the bulk of the town.

Here in the UK we've seen wildfires where we never expected them and some have made their way into built up areas. Even here in once Wet Wales we've had forest fires only half a mile from our house. In this instance, only a contrary wind stopped the fire from spreading to more fuel rich (for which read unmanaged) forest).

This fire was started accidentally (sparks from an angle grinder being used to cut a metal gatepost) on a clear felled site. I remember talking to old foresters about the fire risk on clear fell sites back in the 1980s; these sites are liberally strewn with “waste” timber, up to 10% of the harvested crop but the foresters reassured me that they didn’t burn, any fires that started there tended to burn themselves out. Not so now. Increasingly hot and arid conditions in the spring and summer mean that fuels can be tinder dry. Once you reach that critical threshold of 30-30-30 (30 degrees centigrade or more, 30% humidity or less and a windspeed of 30mph or more) the slightest spark can ignite an inferno, very rapidly.

So I have been preparing for the last decade or so4, taking much more care about what I leave lying about, chipping brash from tree work rather than leaving piles as “habitat”, increasing our water storage and hose points, having beaters to hand and am considering investing in something that the Canadians have long used, namely a water pump with a set of attached sprinklers- in the event of a major fire these can be located as necessary to dampen down vegetation or, in our case, wet that cedar cladding.

However, its important to recognise that some fires will be so big, hot and fast that they cannot be controlled. My friend and colleague Misrule who lives in France, has a bag packed ready for when the next wildfire gets close. It won't be long before many of us will have to be similarly prepared.

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Thanks for reading. Any suggestions for fire control gratefully received!

I must admit to a strong association to Alberta, Canada, having had the great and unusual good fortune to spend over a month there, in Jasper, a tiny town just inside the Rocky Mountains but already higher (just over 3,000 feet) than anything we’d been up in Cumberland, way back in 1969 when I was a mere 11 years old, a fantastic formative experience that has influenced my thinking on landscapes and forest ever since. Now, Jasper is just outside the Albertan tar sands operation.

above: me at 11 years old on Mount Athabasca, Canada, about 6,000 feet up- very unlike Cumberland. Grabbed from a cine film- Our entire visual record of this mammoth, once in a lifetime trip was four cine films, each four minutes long. I know, dark ages…

When I was in Canada, we travelled on the Pan Canadian Railroad from Winnipeg (pretty much bang in the middle of Canada) to Jasper, a train journey of two days and one night, most of the second day through Albertan virgin forest. The state authorities had cut surveying lines through the forest, splitting it up into 1000 acre blocks which could be bought at the subsidised price of 20,000 Canadian dollars (at the time, about £5,000). Some younger friends of my father’s were buying a block. They described how you could get a mobile sawmill company to come in, clear and mill 100 acres to create your fields and all the timber for your house, barns, fencing etc. leaving you 900 acres of pristine forest. My brother and I were unable to persuade our father….now, given the awful combination of devastating wild fire and the industrial tar sands venture, that was probably just as well.

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Wetlands and peat bogs.

Following my recent piece on The Once Very Wetlands of Coed Y Brenin, where I suggested the old peat bogs might be restored by clearing the trees and scrub, blocking up the drainage ditches and employing fascine causeways to raise the water table- well whaddya know? On one of my recent wanders I noticed what had been a peat bog towards the top of our watershed had been marked off with orange tape. A few days later and all the regenerating trees and scrub had been cut and green tape used to mark something else, though I don't know what yet.

above: what was once a peat bog newly cleared of trees and scrub. What the green and whote tape is marking is currently a mystery. Not unusual for Coed Y Brenin.

All this is intriguing coming so soon after my Substack piece. Coincidence, synchronicity or is someone in Cyfoeth Naturiol Cymru (Natural Resources Wales or NRW) actually paying attention?

At the moment the area is looking like heathland with blobs of heather dotted over it. If they really intend to recreate wetland here, they'll have to read my piece again and block up the drainage ditch under the footpath, so the water can start to back up and raise the water table, slowly re-wetting the now dry peat and hopefully allowing sphagnum moss to flourish again. We shall see.

Bryn Merllyn Quarry.

On the other hand, my piece on NRW Aggregate Quarry versus Sacred Druid Pool has (sadly) had no effect whatsoever. On the contrary, a month or so ago, there was a sharp crack in the air and a low rumble through the ground as NRW blew up a bit more of Bryn Merllyn. I've been expecting a stone crusher to appear to grind up the rock into aggregate but as yet nothing else has happened.

above: quarry before and after with enlarement of blasted area showing shattering of rock.

Fortunately they are blasting downward rather than working back toward the merllyn, so there's still time for them to run out of money (blasting is very expensive) and the whole operation get shelved before they destroy the sacred site. And there's always the chance that the Druidic curse will get them in some novel way...

Larch and the Great Plague

Lack of progress at the quarry is probably because most of NRW's attention is still focused on felling all the larch in Cymru before it succumbs to the dread phytophthora ramorum, to which larch is particularly susceptible, with the risk of the disease spreading from the larch to other species. Large empty spaces are appearing in Coed Y Brenin where larch has already been clear-felled but much remains still to be done.

above: spaces appearing in Coed Y Brenin as blocks of larch are clearfelled.

Considerable stacks of felled larch are also growing in various places and despite regular sightings of well laden timber lorries going out, the stacks hardly seem to be shrinking. Some of this wood is pretty amazing, from a sawyers point of view. I was admiring a great pile of larch logs, roughly 40-50cms in diameter, 80 years old, the growth rings almost perfectly concentric indicating the trees have not grown under stress, 4.9 metres long, straight grained and almost completely know free- wow! This has got to be some of the best grown timber in the country, sadly never to be repeated.

above: 80 year old larch logs the likes of which we shall probably never see again.

I was guesstimating how many low impact homes we could build with this stuff and rather that counting individual dwellings, very quickly started to add stacks up into entire villages. Unfortunately its been sold to France, not that I have anything against France, just that Cymru has its own housing crisis and here's enough timber here to make hundreds of families happy!

More of the modern world appears on our doorstep.

I was aware when we first arrived here in 1986 that although the place was remarkably quiet and peaceful then, (five gates on the council road so no traffic, pre-mountain bike trails so no mountain bike hordes, footpaths overgrown so no walkers in the woods, pre-internet so no fungus forays or selfie hunters) it was only a matter of time. So it has proved to be.

Latest manifestation is a 40 metre (120 feet) tall Emergency Services Network mast that will also host an enhanced 4G mobile phone transmitter, all within 400 metres of our door. We were the only people to object to it, being the only people who will be affected by it...and the only people who will benefit from the enhanced 4G, as long as we keep our tin foil hats on, if the internet is to be believed (its not).

above: Moel Friog gains a new structure, visible from all the classic viewpoints, Precipice Walk, Moel Offrwm, Cader Idris…

That's not quite true as the emergency services, especially the Air Ambulance, can have a lot of trouble finding and contacting injured folk on the ground. My mate Dave had a nosy in one of their helicopters when it landed in his field and he said there were eight or nine mobile phones sitting between the pilots, each one with a different provider and they still couldn't get complete coverage.

So when the mast is finally commissioned, they'll be able to find that walker who has slipped and might have sprained their ankle and whisk them off to Bangor, just in case, for an ego-massage, I mean treatment, (in my day we just had to limp home).1

Watching progress and the lack of it, on the mast has been interesting. A company called Heyrod has the main contract and then sub-contracts out different stages of the job. Each of the subcontractors in turn comes in and works flat out to do their bit (some have been working from 7am to 10pm every day; obviously paid a lump sum so the quicker they can do it the better). Then there's a long pause of days or weeks when nothing happens before the next sub-contractor comes in and rushes through their bit. All very odd really.

Currently the council road that passes our place is closed as a power cable is laid in a trench down the middle of the road, coming down from poles at the top of the hill. This has been made all the more interesting as the sub-contractor who dug the trench cut through all the culverts that directed water into the stream that runs parallel to the road. Now with nowhere to go, the rain water, which can be considerable, is finding all sorts of interesting new places to emerge.

Meanwhile, the mast is up and it is a novel new structure to have in the local environment, dwarfing the trees. The ravens took great offence when the construction work kicked off on their favoured hill and we hardly saw them for months and feared they'd moved for the first time in at least 35 years and probably longer. Now, thankfully, they are back and hopefully will get used to the monstrous metal tree, build nests on the thing or at least poo on the transmitters or something equally awkward.

A compound has been created on the large concrete slab around the mast base enclosed by a two metre high mesh fence topped with barbed wire. Various metal cabinets and a sort of shed have appeared along with signage issuing strict commands not to enter or climb up the mast, though no one thought to lock the compound gate...We’re wondering if the mast will have lights on it to warn off the following;

Low Flying Aircraft...

When students and visitors remark how quiet our place is I have to point out that this is not always the case and the forest is at times subject to considerable noise. We're aware that we live in a working (sort of...) forest and expect to have timber being felled by noisy machines on the other side of our fences or hedges every few years or so, the odd explosion at the quarry, stone crushing and the like- not a problem, its a working forest. However, One of the worst assaults of an aural nature and impossible to get used to are low flying aircraft.

above: not my picture I’m pleased to say. Weapon of mass destruction flying the Mach Loop in the Talyllyn Pass stage. A scary thought is that from here it might be possible to take one of these things down with a well timed and thrown brick….

There's an RAF air base up north on Ynys Môn (Anglesey) and an airport just over the hills at Llanbedr and with us being on route for the Machynlleth Loop2, we're very well served by aircraft. Like flies, they tend to come out when the weather is fine and if its been a wet, overcast month then the end of the month can get very busy as pilots try to get their hours in, (as I write, the roar of jet engines comes and goes..).

We get buzzy, very low flying, propeller trainers, usually in pairs, though sometimes one of the pair is a drone. These can buzz about pretty much all day, sometimes out of sight and presumably performing some form of repetitive, aerial manoeuvring, sometimes swooping past then circling to have another go. Then there's a range of the RAF's hugely expensive war machines including the £92 million F35 Lightning. The fighters are impossible to get used to as you don't hear them coming, just the appalling thunder as they roar overhead and you're looking up at the rivets on the fuselage.

Complaining doesn't help either. Our old friend Steve painted “Piss Off Biggles” on his shed roof in large white letters and ended up attracting whole squadrons of British and European aircraft, including on one memorable morning four Apache attack helicopters, all keen to see the infamous roof. The roof with its sign was later included on the RAF Valley flight simulator and was noticed by the then Prince Charles (now King Charles the III in case you've forgotten) on a visit which sparked a further rash of news reports and more waves of avian visitors.

above: excellent pic (not one of mine!) over Steve’s house where the faded paint on his barn roof is still just readable.

Llanbedr has recently upgraded from airport to Spaceport, raising the possibility of even more exciting visitors. I'm tempted to write “Piss off ET” on a shed roof just to see who comes to have a look. I shouldn't complain really, after all is said and done they are training to save us (the RAF, not the aliens). Not sure from whom or what but thumbs up anyway!

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Many thanks for reading. Let me know if you have similar concerns where you are or, if you’re local to Coed Y Brenin, have spotted anything interesting, intriguing or just downright odd going on in the forest. Next time, a suite of episodes from the patafiction, The Great Takeover Of The Place, which should take us to End Of Part One! Till then, thanks again and hwyl!

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above: initially unfamilair poo1.

On the NRW (Natural Resources Wales) tracks its not that unusual to find the occasional deposit of dog muck and similarly on the footpaths but these poos were different, having the odd twists and constrictions of a mustelid2. The “proper” term for their dung is a scat, though in the end its just a bit of poo...Intrigued, I began to take photographs (I know, a bit weird but we haven't got a television).

I was working at the Signs' Workshop at the time and one morning got a phone call from Lyn, my wife, to tell me she'd seen a vehicle going up the NRW track that borders our fields. Her rural curiosity was piqued as rather than the familiar NRW logo this one was labelled The Vincent Wildlife Trust (VWT). I had a good look on the net while at work (don’t tell the boss…) and found they were involved in reintroducing Pine Martens in Mid Wales.

Now I was intrigued and finding a contact email on their web site, sent them a message explaining that we lived in Coed Y Brenin, had seen their vehicle and wondered if we could help at all. I had a very friendly email back and after a brief exchange, arranged a meeting at our place.

The meeting was excellent; two very friendly, enthusiastic and knowledgable young folk turned up, Josie, a worker for the VWT and a volunteer. Over a number of cuppas they shared pine marten movies, stories, pictures of the Martens' poo, I mean scats and a load of useful knowledge.

above: Morag, pine marten 13, still wearing her tracking collar and her kit, looking all innocence, butter wouldn’t melt etc. Still from the VWT trap camera in Coed Y Brenin.

Pine martens (martes martes) are beautiful animals, curious and playful. One great movie Josie showed us was recorded at a trap camera set up very near us that showed pine marten no. 13, who had been christened Morag, with her kit who had been born in Coed Y Brenin. Most of the pictures of Pine Martens I've used here are screen grabs from that movie.

The tale began in Scotland where in some places there is an apparent surplus of pine martens (I'm not sure how you would define a surplus of pine martens). I'd already had an inkling about this as my step-mother's sister who lives on the west coast had sent me a great picture of a marten perched on their mailbox- I was extremely jealous!

above: pine marten checking the mail, or about to deposit a scat on the top…Picture by Susie.

The VWT had been tasked with trapping some of them and bringing them down to Cymru to release in Ceredigion, in the forestry near Devil's Bridge. Each marten had a number and usually got a suitably Cymric name on the way down. They were also fitted with radio tracking collars to allow their movements to be monitored. It was the tracking collars that led VWT to follow the epic wanderings of several of the martens, including Morag, as they made their way up north. A male, Bryn, went even further north, up to Llyn Brenig which lies between Conway and Denbigh, a distance of about 70 miles.

Morag seemed happy to settle down in Coed Y Brenin, a mere fifty mile trek, at least long enough to have her kit. Martens demonstrate delayed implantation so its not clear whether she was pregnant when she came down from Scotland, or got pregnant somewhere in Cymru. No matter, she produced a lovely, boisterous kit who, in the movie, seems far more intent on play than food, a pattern familiar in most youngsters...

Josie also showed us pictures of pine marten scats (always good to find another voyeur, makes you think its quite normal...) and gave me some useful clues as to distinguishing those of the pine marten from other mustelids, as follows:

Pine martens tend to follow paths and tracks and will usually deposit their scats on them. The other mustelids are more off-piste wanderers and scat pretty much anywhere on their travels (save for badgers who have their own latrines- very civilised). The pine marten will also often choose a prominent location on the path or track, like a stump or even a rock, as the photo demonstrates. In fact I do wonder whether there is a humorous element involved here or perhaps a challenge- I wonder if I can get it right up there?

above: this rock, having fallen off a quarry lorry, was the only one on the track for hundreds of metres in either direction and proved irresistible. The shape of the scast will vary depending upon the current diet.

Pine martens are more omnivorous than the other mustelids and have a fondness for fruit (and peanut butter sandwiches, which is one of the ways to encourage them to use feeding stations). So the contents of the scat can give a very clear indication that it is that of a marten. I have found scats containing the stones from wild cherry (gean), damson and slough (plant them to find out which- they usually germinate very quickly after going through a marten's digestive system!) and in blackberry time I've found scats containing a large proportion of bramble seed.

above: this week I have mainly been eating blackberries.

Their diet also very strongly influences the smell. Generally, the scats of mustelids smell disgusting, foul as in putrid, rotting, decayed, bleaghh! Get a tiny bit of say a pole cat scat on the end of a stick and take a very careful, very small sniff, (don't get any on your nose!). Horrible, isn’t it? It triggers a very human disgust reaction.

Do the same with a pine Marten scat and OK, you may well whisk the stick away the first time but then you'll have another sniff and even another. Yes, its strong but it lacks the foul, putrid stench of long dead things. People usually describe the smell as very musky and sweet but there's something of skunk in it, both the North American beasty's smell and that of the strong cannabis named after it. The jar of smelly paste that VWT gave us as bait to set up our feed station had the same whiff.

A dog can be an extremely useful assistant in scat identification. Loyal subscribers will have noticed the shaggy beast, Cadi, who accompanies me and is often seen posing in my pictures to give some sense of scale (she is well practised in modelling and will sit patiently for five or ten minutes while I search for the perfect angle and is happy to work for pieces of dry cat food). Her responses to various scats are very clear indications of whose done what.

above: an old scat showing a more carniverous diet, probably bones of bank voles, the martens favoured prey.

Scats produced by pole cat, stoat, weasel, badger etc. or the non mustelid hedgehog smell so bad that she will either want to eat them or roll in them3.

As an example of the difference in smell, Cadi will be merrily trotting down a path in front of me when suddenly she'll stop, put her nose up, scenting, then back track a dozen steps, veer off the path for the same distance and there, hidden in undergrowth, yummy, pole cat scat....A pine marten scat on the other hand, laid in a prominent position, right in the middle of a track or path and she'll walk straight past it. If I call her back and point it out she'll just give it a vague sniff then wander on.

We did set up a pine marten feeding station here but sadly, failed to attract Morag- probably the lure of peanut butter sandwiches at her official station proved too much. All we captured with the trap camera were several hundred short clips of one mouse, two mice or three mice gradually diminishing the bait to practically nothing during the night and then another hundred or so clips of a robin polishing the rest off in the morning. We did get a couple of shots of a jay raiding and one night there's the shadowy form of a deer in the middle distance. Closest we got to possibly Morag was a vague shadow on a wet night that turns to look directly at the trap camera so the eyes flash mysteriously in the infra red.

above: Morag’s attempts to quietly eat peanut butter sandwiches continually interupted by her kits desire to play, play, play!

Another indication of the presence of pine martens is the reduction in number and size of grey squirrels. The martens are excellent hunters, wreaking slaughter amongst the greys, catching all the fat ones first. The scrawny ones that we still occasionally see around here are more like rats now and display a noticable paranoia. This means good news for areas where red squirrels are under threat and hopefully opens up opportunities for their return in areas where they have disappeared, like Coed Y Brenin, (back in the 1980s we did very occasionally (twice) see reds near us but nothing since).

Me and Cadi still find pine marten scats but they are not as common. Whether these are those of Morag, her kit or another marten is unknown but its good to see them. The VWT obviously had a bit of money to set up the project and were able to pay for DNA testing of the scats and so identified individual martens even after the batteries had died on the radio tracking collars.

above: forget the peanut butter sandwich! Play, play, play!

Incidentally, Josie did manage to successfully trap and re-release Morag to remove the radio collar. Hopefully she is still around and who knows, perhaps had more kits by now. In my perhaps not so humble opinion, they are the most beautiful of the mustelids and there are some great pictures and short videos of them in action on the VWT web site, with links below.

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Thanks for reading. As always, comments are very welcome. Next up will be a few episodes of Konsk. Till then, take care and hwyl! Chris.

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The Vincent Wildlife Trust website provides information about their various re-introduction programmes.

There’s specific details of the marten projects in Cymru, with some good videos including a brief appearance of Morag and her kit on their feeding stump in Coed Y Brenin.

And there’s more very entertaining pine marten videos from VWT including a kit falling out of nesting box (don't worry, they bounce!) and mum retrieving it. Also a mother returning with a freshly killed grey squirrel for her voracious brood.

Mynydd Penrhos and the surrounding hills can be very wet, as the name suggests. The name translates as something like Mountain of the Top (pen) of the Marshland or Moorland (rhos). With an annual average rainfall of between 2 and 3 metres and thin soils over bedrock, it favoured the development of wet moor, damp meadows, marshes and peat bogs of varying size, with some open water in places (Bryn Merllyn) and extensive issues, where water percolating down through the soil meets an impermeable layer and reappears at the surface, usually on slopes.

Bryn Merllyn in a wet phase. You can find the Substack piece I wrote about it here.

There are surprisingly few streams draining what is a considerable upthrust of rock. A handful exit on the western side in extremely steep descents that vary from dribbles in dry conditions to torrents in wet. The Mynydd itself actually consists of two ridges, rising to form a watershed at the north end and opening to the south but only draining a relatively small valley between them, again giving rise to a mere dribble when dry and more of a babbling brook when it's wet.

The northern end of the Mynydd is drained by a single stream, beginning at Llyn Garnett Uchaf (more of which later) and running first east through a fairly extensive bog before curving round to the south, picking up another tributary, passing through our own holding and finally descending rapidly down the end of its little hanging valley, into the Afon Wen. Its this stream which drains areas that were formerly peat bogs.

Remnants of bogs can be found on almost any sunken area, as well as in the bottoms of the many small valleys and the dips in the shelves that jut out from the slope. Together with the many issues, these wet soils favour the the growth of rushes and mosses, including sphagnum. Wandering “off piste” I have found expanses of sphagnum moss on quite severe slopes, surviving apparently happily, under the trees that have not grown very well due being planted in a bog... Able to hold from 8 to 20 times its own weight in water (depending upon which source you consult) these sphagnum beds can slow the flow of water considerably, hang onto it and release it slowly.

above: mostly sphagnum moss under struggling conifers and sparse birch below an issue running down towards the foreground, so damp to wet for much of the year.

Peat formation is very clearly linked to sphagnum moss in mires, raised bogs and blanket bogs. Indeed, as I've mentioned before, the source of the Afon Mawddach is some 9,000 acres or so of bog in the uplands, a vast plateau land that's acts like an invisible lake, storing huge quantities of water.

With the increased likelihood of flooding due to high rainfall events its no wonder then that there is so much concern about preserving and re-establishing wet lands and peatbogs, particularly in the uplands. They have an enormous role to play in the storage and cleaning of water, acting as buffers to reduce the speed of run off and hence reducing the risk of flooding. One of the reasons why in permaculture design, we will always try to store water as high as we can in any landscape.

It can be difficult to establish the original sizes of the peat bogs of Mynydd Penrhos, due to the often extensive drainage ditches cut by the Forestry Commission prior to planting, the drying effect of sticking thousands of trees into them and the radical disturbances of machine clear-felling and extraction.

On Mynydd Penrhos there are several fairly obvious, larger natural depressions where peat has slowly formed since the last ice age. In the more recent past some of that peat (a very small proportion) was dug to heat the scattered dwellings of the subsistence farmers I have talked about before, the tyddynwyr, or smallholders. In some cases, such as on our own holding, depressions can be seen in the land suggesting where the main peat cutting beds were.

Other clues can be found in the neat, rectangular mounds of stones that mark a turbary or peat cutting area. I was familiar with what are called field clearance cairns which are simply piles of stones that have been cleared from the surface of the land when those early farmers began to make fields. Larger stones were used to make the walls that enclosed the field so usually the clearance cairns contain smaller stuff. The cairns tend to be round or roundish and today often have oak growing on them that date back to before the planting of Coed Y Brenin.

The neat, rectangular peat drying mounds are quite different though, measuring some 30 feet by 10, (say 10 by 3 metres) and sloping upwards towards the centre, like a low, peaked roof. When I first came across them, my imaginative, speculative self wondered whether their relatively precise forms were in fact some sort of ancient barrow, concealing graves of past heroes. However, in conversations with my good friend Andrew Wolf, an archaeologist, I was put on the right track.

above: a well preserved example of a substantial peat drying mound on the edge of a turbary with the long axis facing south.

Andrew explained that these rectangular piles were usually constructed of larger stones and were used in the first year of drying cut peat. They were built with the longer side facing the south, though depending upon the lay of the land, they may be angled a bit towards the east or the west to make best use of the morning or afternoon sun. the slices of peat were laid out on the sunward facing slope and left to dry for the first year. In the second year, the peat was moved to a barn for further drying before being burned in the third year. I've found several of these rectangular, peat drying mounds on the sides of depressions in the landscape which were most obviously peat bogs in the past.

Here on Mynydd Penrhos, prior to planting the conifers, deep drainage ditches were dug in the peat bogs, following the herring bone type pattern. When I first pushed my way through the trees in the 1980s, in one of the drained peat lands just above us, I walked a dry ditch that was some four feet wide (1.2 metres) and at the lower end so deep I couldn't see out of it. Other ditches from those early years are still visible, some seemingly incongruous, apparently going nowhere and draining nothing, on sloping sites and ridges which you would not associate with wetland.

above: wet hollow on Mynydd Penrhos and likely peat bog in the past. Note the poorly grown conifers and extensive moss in the foreground. A harvester has cut an access track running from left mid-ground to centre background and beyond.

Following the appointment of Dr. Martin Garnett to the Forestry Commission as the Conservation Ranger (the first in Coed Y Brenin and in the UK, I think, and almost certainly the most highly qualified!), I had the chance to give some feedback on the opportunities presented by the clear felling of much of the southern end of Mynydd Penrhos, Bryn Coch and Bryn Merllyn, in the 1980s.

I'd had a good look at the topography of this newly exposed landscape, strewn as it was with waste wood and uprooted stumps after the clear fell. I could see tremendous opportunities for building more water storage into the landscape through the recreation of peatlands and bogs and the inclusion of ponds of varying sizes.

One particular site of perhaps half a dozen acres, had obviously been a bog because despite drainage ditches, it still was.1 The centre of the bog had remained completely open, as everything planted there had died.2 Towards the edges you could see the stunted bodies of trees in their rigid, close-planted geometry that had struggled on, managing a scant few feet in height before giving up and been left at the time of the clear felling as not worth bothering with. All the drainage seems to have done was favour Molinia grass over sphagnum moss.3

The Forestry Commission Conservation Ranger, Dr. Martin Garnett, (or Doc Martin as he was often known), had to work within the limitations of the Forestry Commission and budgets but was still able to organise the creation of a new pond and the safeguarding and improvement of a more substantial body of wetland, towards the very top of the watershed, the best place to start storing water!

above: just a small part of Llyn Garnett Uchaf, a wonderful mosaic of open water, sphagnum, bog, rushes, sedge, mollinia preserved and extended by simply raising the outflow.

This latter project was a great minimum effort maximum effect operation. The original outflow of this bog had been considerably altered by a Forestry Commission track which had meant the normal issue had to be confined to a pipe which spilled down into a gutter under the track. By simply arranging for the raising of the outflow pipe, Doc Martin increased the area of the bog by several acres. Its now an amazing patchwork of open water, rushes, mosses and the like.

Llyn Garnett Isaf: an open water pool dug into the water table hence always full. Home to dragonflies, amongst many other life forms. Another tribute to Doc Martin. The original bog extended for a considerable distance below but is now being drained by birch and willow.

Having carried out my own wet land re-creation project at home, using fascine causeways4 I was keen to try something similar on a larger scale and our watershed seemed like an ideal location. I knew it very well, probably better that most, I'd identified the old peatlands and could see how causeways would work well.

One old peat bog in particular was ripe for reinstating. The trees currently growing on it could be cut and bundled for fascines so all the materials are already there. A public footpath runs across the bog remnant with a little bridge over the main drainage ditch- simple to block and the footpath becomes the first causeway, with say 6 inch (150mm) pipes replacing a fascine every 10 feet (3 metres) or so and the top levelled with soil or gravel from the very nearby quarry or wood chip (plenty of wood lying nearby for chip). The pipes would allow overflow in times of high rainfall, spread along the entire length of the causeway and out-flowing into vegetation rather than ditches and consequently slowed down and infiltrated back into the new bog.

above: footpath over drained bog. The birch tree on the right marks where the original drainage ditch passes under the path at a depth of about 1.5 metres.

No other dwellings would be effected and all the water drains out through our land and under our track, so it would be relatively easy to monitor flow rates and hence assess success or otherwise of our actions, something which I think is essential- if we don’t measure the consequences of our actions, how do we know if they are really effective. I'd also got Graham Hall, our local sane scientist interested5 and I’d looked at possible funding opportunities for a pilot scheme.

In 2022, Natural Resources Wales (NRW) held an open day event in Neuadd Y Pentref Ganllwyd (Ganllwyd Village Hall) and various representatives of the organisation were on hand to explain a revised strategy (yet another one, with yet more colourful maps) and answer questions. This seemed like the ideal opportunity to broach the idea for restoring some of the peatlands on Mynydd Penrhos.

I spoke first to the NRW Community Liason Officer (a very friendly and supportive individual) and she pointed me to someone (a bloke who shall remain nameless) who seemed like an ideal candidate as he had already been involved in some peatland restoration with NRW. I went over and explained what I saw as the opportunities that Coed Y Brenin offered. Wow, talk about not interested! He couldn't have been more uninterested if he'd tried! Oh, he was trying...

Its a crying shame really because the peat is still there but its drying out and so absorbs less and less water and breaks down, releasing all that stored carbon back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

Perhaps an opportunity will arise at some point and here's hoping. Maybe I should just get more uppity about it. Meanwhile, someone quite close to me practices a form of guerilla wetland restoration and encourages material (logs, boulders etc.). to take up residence in the ditches.

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Thanks for reading. You can voice your suggestions, corrections, additions, criticisms or any other -tions or-isms you like in the comment box below. Next its back to Konsk, a fictional account of hoe folk might experience and deal with the simultanoeus descent, transition and collapse of industrial techno-consumer society or Imperial Modernity, as Jem Bendall puts it in his new book, Breaking Together which he has made available for free here. Doubtless I will refer to it again. Take care all. Hwyl! Chris

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