Argel: The First Rewilding Project in Britain!

Probably... (if you know of an earlier one, please tell me about it!)

Although I didn't call it rewilding, then, I called it a Natural Regeneration project and this piece is about language as well as wilderness.

During the early 1980s, working with my good friend Eurig ap Gwilym, the Welsh Bavarian Natural Forester, we considered what would happen if domestic livestock were to be removed from a landscape and the land was allowed to do its own thing. There were some

models of forest development, largely drawn from observations of abandoned farmland in Europe but we could not find any practical examples in Britain.

This was in the pre-internet days, a time of libraries, journals and specialist broadsheets with very limited circulations that you might only hear of by chance. Indeed, Eurig showed me one such broadsheet, Permaculture One, dated 1983, (you can download a copy here.) and told me about a man he had worked for, Robert Hart, who was creating something called a Forest Garden. It all sounded very interesting.

Eurig had also heard rumours of a small plot, somewhere on the Pennines, which had been fenced off but we failed to find any more about it. (I did succeed in tracking down this site much later, after the internet appeared- known as the Moor House Tree Plots and part of a wider National Nature Reserve on the Pennines. It wasn't about natural regeneration though but rather small scale experiments planting different tree species and measuring their growth rates over time).

Strange as it may now seem, at the time, most people hadn't even thought about what might happen to land if it was just left alone and if they had an opinion, it was that the result would probably be unproductive scrub- this turns out to be a contradiction in terms!

So it had long been a dream of Eurig's, to have a patch of land of his own to watch, to see what happened when you left it alone. Sadly, he died before he achieved his dream though he was able to see at least the start of it through sharing the early years of my natural regeneration project.

In February of 1986, Lyn and I gained a foothold on seven acres of fields in Coed Y Brenin, Lyn, with her interest in animals, especially horses and myself with a desire to plant and work with trees and timber- my first trade was that of a theatre carpenter which inspired me about wood and what could be done with such an amazing material, a material that literally grows on trees- like magic!

Initially, Lyn took on management of the better pasture and I concentrated on a rather beaten up, eroded acre or so of poor grazing which we referred to as “the rough patch”, easily isolated from livestock by a short run of fence. It was here that I intended to start planting trees but following some instinct, I decided to wait a year to see what would happen, though I couldn't resist planting a few things anyway!

In that first spring of observation, in the profusion and diversity of tree seedlings that appeared, as if by magic, it became very obvious that I needn't bother planting anything, for nature planted far more trees in far denser mixes than anything I could have achieved. In places I counted over a hundred seedlings per square metre! The fuller story of this remarkable adventure can be found on my web site, here.

What I wish to look at here though, is the language around the naming of this process. I'll have to go back a bit.

In 1976 I arrived in Cymru, not realising at the time that I would probably stay here until I died. I was a student at Coleg Prifysgol Cymru, Aberystwyth (the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth).

I heard first about Wales from my childhood friend, Leighton, on our Yorkshire housing estate; he and his family holidayed there annually. Leighton told me that the Welsh spoke a different language and that his brother's name, Bryn, meant a hill. Later, aged ten, we had a Welsh family holiday, exploring the Llyn peninsula, Aberdaron and Abersoch and loving it, at a time when tourism had hardly begun to leave a mark. Later still I read Lady Charlotte Guests translation of the Mabinogion and found it unique in its strangeness compared with other ancient texts.

I arrived in Aberystwyth as a mature student. the name of my hall of residence, Cwrt Mawr, written on a piece of paper, at that time unpronounceable; I showed it to people, dumbly, as I tried to find it! Duh!

To my great disappointment, bilingual education had not yet been invented! English and Welsh students were taught separately, even on the same course and didn't mix much. Aberystwyth then was a town of about 4,000 locals, overlain in term times by a similar number of students and a summer season of another 4,000 or so tourists and so, due to that largely English influx, I heard very little spoken welsh when wandering about. Consequently, although I was interested in the language and had bought a little book of place names and their translations (a very good place to start), I felt no real need to learn it.

When we moved north to Dolgellau in 1982, Lyn returning to an old job with horses and me taking on the care for our two year old son, Sam, I remember going into the small, market town for the first time, on the day of the livestock sale. Eldon Square was clustered with farming families, down from the hills, energetically engaged in multiple conversations. As I walked through the square, clinging on to Sam's hand for some comfort, all I heard was Welsh, Cymraeg, and I knew immediately that if I was to spend any time here, I would have to learn the language.

I was most fortunate to find a teacher, a farmer and poet, having won a chair at the National Eisteddfod, who lived five or so miles further up the valley from us, Nesta, Pant Glas. She it was who lead a small group of us on a magical discovery of Iaith y Nefoedd, the Language of the Heavens, through her own deep interest in and love of the traditional culture, the turning of the seasons around the farming year, nature and wildlife.

Learning a language is a continuous and never ending process of exploration and discovery and I will speak more on this at another time. Suffice to say here that during that process I came across a word that leapt out at me and seemed appropriate as a name for that scrap of rough grazing that was transforming itself into something like a forest; Argel.

The word derives from two parts, the prefix ar, similar in meaning to the English arch, suggests an elevation of importance, as in arch-bishop. The second word is cêl, both adjective and noun, meaning hidden. The accent, a circumflex, is referred to in Cymraeg as the To Bach or little roof; the accent turns the vowel from a short to a looong form.

So prefixing cêl with ar, elevates the hiding, and gives us the word sanctuary- Argel.

But cêl now has a different letter to start it, you complain, it has changed from a C to a G! Be patient my friends, for I am about to divulge to you the strange and beautiful concept of mutations, treigladdau.

It is a truism to say that all languages are spoken languages but Cymraeg is more so than others! The mutation of initial letters, depending on the words that come before, among other things, makes the words easier to say- compare pronouncing ar-gêl with ar-cêl; this is called a soft mutation; the hardness is taken out of the sound.

Consider this applied to whole sentences and you can begin to imagine the beautiful fluidity of Cymraeg as a spoken language and how it might be so perfect for poetry and song. When I had learned sufficient so as to be able to speak in Cymraeg without having to translate from English and found I could observe the movements of my own mouth and tongue, it was as though the separate words became one continuous sound, constantly moulded by the subtle shaping of sound.

This is one of the things that makes it hard for the learner, listening to spoken Welsh for the first time, for it can be difficult to separate out the individual words from the flow. Mutations also make it extremely easy to talk rapidly, very rapidly, which poses another difficulty!

Cêl appears in other words, so dirgel (tir, meaning land, the t mutated to a d plus cêl) means a mystery- literally a land hiding or a hiding in land, an earth mystery. Do you start to see it, my friends, the magic inherent in the language?

However, no matter how I tried, the scrap of land which I might call Argel when I write about it, remains stuck in Lyn's and my speech as simply, the rough patch, despite some of its trees now topping eighty feet! Oh well.

When David Holmgren, co-founder of permaculture design, taught at our place in 1994, we had a long conversation as to the naming of this process of transformation the rough patch was undergoing, that I called natural regeneration. David liked the natural bit, as nature was what was going on or doing it but he felt that re-generation suggested some sort of return to a pre-existing state and that this was both not necessarily what we wanted and also probably impossible. After some more discussion, we decided that Natural Re-Vegetation was a more relevant description.

The same can be said for the term Rewilding. Rewilding is founded largely on the work of F W M Vera, Grazing Ecology and Forest History 2000, a book that caused a stir and considerably resentment amidst proponents of the Wild Wood model of forest development. I had made similar observations to Vera from my experience of the rough patch, in particular the importance of spiky, spiny plants in the presence of large herbivores, as nurse to trees. The book is full of fascinating information and detailed observations, the natural appearance of oak groves being especially interesting here in Druid country; its expensive so get your library to order it.

As with regeneration, rewilding implies that we can somehow roll back time to an earlier, wild state of native species, plants and animals.

But given that global warming is radically changing our climate plus the appearance of ever more tenacious, exotic species, (invasive species, so-called), it seems very unlikely to me that the supposedly original wild states rewilding seeks to recreate will develop in anything like the imagined form.

This relates closely to an argument I have had with various ecologists over the years who insist on trying to preserve “native” British environments, usually by a process of murdering unwanted species, so called exotic or invasive ones, both plant and animal.

There are other challenges too. Re-vegetating landscapes are highly fire prone and global warming brings increasingly severe droughts; we've already begun to see wildfires of great severity in Britain and they will only get worse. This risk needs careful consideration in the development and steering of any plant based system. Even here in Once Wet Wales, |I have been modifying my design over the last ten years or so, well aware that fire is on its way. I will look at designing with fire in mind in a later piece.

There's also a whole range of plant diseases, such as the phytophthora varieties (here, now, in Coed Y Brenin- more on that when I deal with The Real Coed Y Brenin) which are capable of killing a wide range of trees and shrubs, both native and exotic. And finally, rewilding tends to exclude humans and some of the projects, such as the proposed Summit to Sea large scale here in Cymru, smack of a top down, eco-imperialism, acting with no concern for the local communities and traditional land practices they seek to displace. This latter project, conceived in the main by a wealthy elite, was suspended due to local opposition but there are ongoing attempts to revitalise it through other organisations including the RSPB and WWF.

Why should we think only in terms of so-called native species? Pretty much all of the plant and animal species we find in Britain have only arrived here in the last 10,000 year or so anyway and many of them that we think of as British, much more recently than that (for a detailed look at this, try Fred Pearce's The New Wild: Icon books 2015; an objective perspective on so-called invasive species and very well referenced).

Given all these threats, rather than rewilding or regeneration, shouldn't we be working with everything nature can offer and supporting the development of recombinant ecologies (as David Holmgren would argue) and novel environments, that might be even more productive, resilient and diverse?

Many thanks for reading and thanks to those of you have subscribed, old and new friends! Please feel free to leave comments, to help steer this thing, point out errors, ask questions, request more detail, suggest an area to cover or whatever- we can be interactive here! Thanks again and until the next time, hwyl!