The Great Escape: part two.

How to avoid the Three Fates, or at least lessen their rage...

Last time I ended with a question, if you were going to plant 19,000 acres of trees, such as in Coed Y Brenin, intended as a productive forest, what is the single, biggest omission you could make? I also said I would provide two answers to this question. Here's the first.

above: Coed Y Brenin from Moel Offrwm.

The single, most obvious omission in Coed Y Brenin is a decent, large sawmill. There have been mills, now and then, in its one hundred year history but these have been small scale and temporary affairs and by far the bulk of the timber has gone out of the forest and off to other places for processing. Its the old story of exploiting an area for its raw materials, adding value in some distant location then re-importing the finished products, like fencing stakes and rails, and selling them to the folk whose relatives lost their land to create the forest in the first place. (Back in the 1920s, when the first trees were planted, Cymru was still regarded as a province, feeding back into the heart of the Empire, London and the South East. Even in the late 1970s when I worked at Theatr Y Werin, (The People's Theatre) in Aberystwyth, it was referred to as a Provincial Theatre).

above: the Wood-Mizer at Signs Workshop, Maesgwm. An extremely useful machine, allowing the unit to mill its own raw material, timber, and produce high quality, value added signs. Just imagine what we could do with a proper sawmill…

From a permaculture design perspective its a no-brainer to close that loop and do all the value adding locally. I can't say I'm a fan of pressurised preservative treatment of timber for stakes and the like but if its going to be done anyway, it might as well be done here. The Welsh Government should seriously consider investing in a sawmill and subsidising it if necessary. A sawmill has the potential to generate a range of spin-off businesses that would create the local jobs that were promised right back at the start of the Forestry Commission, that were never really delivered. Ideally this would be a community run, not for profit venture.

above: examples of the quality signs produced at Signs Workshop.

Such a mill would deal with the large, well beyond commercial maturity conifers that are so tall now that they are highly prone to wind blow in the storms to come. The timber would be ideal for the construction of low impact dwellings that would go towards solving the appalling housing crisis that our young people face locally and further afield.

There is plenty of suitable timber- Douglas fir was the first species planted here and will be a century old in a few years time, with the trees now around 100 feet in height (30 metres) and of substantial girth, ideal for planking. It is unusual for a softwood in that it produces heartwood which has good structural strength that increases with seasoning (do all your cutting, shaping and planing while it is still green or you risk blunting your tools!). Cedar is a remarkably stable wood and is naturally resistant to rot, making it ideal for cladding timber framed buildings. Norway spruce can also be used be used structurally on small buildings and there's plenty of that. There is an interesting range of other species too, whose properties are currently not considered when felling takes place, most of the trees seeming to just go to Kronospan for wood chip.

These dwellings could be built using the One Planet Development (OPD) planning policy and leads me towards the second answer to my question. The question might be better phrased as How do we best manage a forest system? The answer is the same as How do we best care for the land? The answers to both, as I see it, is to let caring people live in it or on it. I see no reason why these new, low impact homes shouldn't go up in clusters or cantrefi newydd (new communities) with Cymraeg as the first language, in suitable, south facing sites within the forest boundaries, on clear-felled land.

Membership of such a community would require education in something like permaculture design, with a further emphasis on community building, conflict resolution and the like, to give the young folk as good a start as possible. They would also be room for a few elders (like me!) who would be on hand to give wise advice (ho ho!) when required...

above: Lammas Eco-Village Community Hub

Such cantrefi newydd could be self-built by the occupants to be, working in cooperative groups, providing educational opportunities alongside learning new skills. If we require adherence to a set of ethics based around the Big Three of Environment, Community and the Individual, we have a basic blueprint to follow and each cantref could add their own additional ethical directives, if they wanted, such as vegetarian or vegan, whatever. In this way we could introduce something like genetic diversity and by monitoring closely, assess how each cantref performed against criteria from the Big Three.

Interestingly, back in the 1980s, Nesta Wyn, Pantglas, my excellent teacher of Iaith y Nefoedd, (the language of the heavens), Cymraeg, showed me a design she had produced,. This innovative, far sighted design proposed the establishment of ten family smallholdings (tyddynnod) within the forest. While all would be engaged in food production and forest management, each would have a different area of specialist study. These study areas included fungi and deer¹, to name just two.

Nesta also saw very clearly how permaculture design, or Amaeth Parhaol as we called it, fitted in with her ideas. I remember we went to see various people of authority, including Dafydd Ellis Tomas, to discuss our proposals but got absolutely nowhere, the problem for visionaries everywhere.

As with Nesta's design, so too with the cantrefi, each could specialise in a particular area or operation and these various operations would be both mutually supportive and create a larger productive cycle between them. I would introduce here the Tree-cycle Design, produced by the original Mawddach permaculture Group back in the 1980s². This illustration below gives an indication of some but not all, of the possible spin-off businesses arising from a sawmill.

above: The Tree-Cycle Desing, produced by the original Mawddach Permaculture Group in the 1990s. Graphic by Sam R.

As mentioned above, all such cantrefi should be monitored and evaluated using something like the Big Three as a primary measure. We have to ensure that what we are doing really works- there will be no room for fudging in the future.

Incidentally, when I was invited by the Welsh Government to be an expert witness during the formation of the OPD, alongside Tony Wrench (that Roundhouse) and Paul Wimbush (Lammas Eco-Village)- you couldn't make this up, Expert Witnesses! “First they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win”, Gandhi- I argued strongly that rather than an Environmental Plan, OPDs should be required to provide a permaculture design; that is, rather than a limited, fixed, rigid set of actions petrified in a plan, instead, a flexible strategy that could adapt to changing circumstances and new opportunities. I also presented how the Big Three can be used as an effective and practical measure of whether a system is genuinely sustainable but I wasn't able to carry the arguments against officialdom- an Environmental Management Plan takes a lot longer to prepare but is easier for a bureaucrat to assess as it has tick boxes….

I'd already produced this method of evaluation for the Roman- sorry, Snowdonia National Park, who asked me too, as they didn't know how to assess sustainable developments, (again, you couldn't make this up- left hand asking for help, right hand presenting us with eviction orders). Not that they actually used it...oh well. I will present an updated method of this evaluation in a future piece, if I get round to it. (they are stacking up, these future pieces!)³

above: Well pleased members of the original Mawddach Permcaulture Group, delighted to receive their shredder from Malcom Thorpe (nice man with tie) of the old Cyngor Dosbarth Meirionydd (Meirionydd District Council) before it and its resources were engulfed by Cyngor Gwynedd (Gwynedd Council). This was to form an operational branch of the Tree-Cycle but eventually failed due to our inability to find a suitably secluded site- it was extremely noisey…

Interestingly, when Coed Y Brenin was planted, the Commission actually built a number of dwellings in the forest, for forest workers, which shows some foresight, so the precedent is there. However, these all got sold off along the way, as with the scraps of open land that had been preserved for the working horses of the past, mostly during the Thatcher era. Her regime did make an attempt to privatise the Forestry Commission and all the forests but public resistance was too strong; selling off the scraps was almost like spite, though it did mean that some locals were able to benefit.

A few words about a cantref (plural cantrefi, the single “f” in Cymraeg always like an English “v”) may be useful. The original meaning is something like one hundred (cant) spear holders (tref), that is, one hundred freemen of the blood or family, so basically a hundred holdings. The Celts didn't like to live on top of each other in villages, preferring to be scattered over an area with their own hunting, gathering and food growing areas. The meaning of tref has changed considerably since and is now found in cartref (home), pentref (village) and simply tref or town, to name but a few. A cantref is then a hundred or so hearths and if we think some homes would house couples and kids, then we have roughly the Dunbar number of folk, the minimum size for a viable community, and rather than spear holder, we could think of youthful eco-warriors who aspire to be gardeners!

above: traditional eco-village, 1000BC. Clusters of round house foundations at Tre’r Ceiri, Town of Giants on the Llŷn Peninsula.

With the purple cloak of “when I am Emperor” about me, I would also reappraise what we mean by a forest. From my own experience of observing Argel go through its many transformations over the last 35 years, from rough grazing to forest canopy, I would suggest that the greatest diversity of species and habitat, the most productive and most interesting period is somewhere in the middle.

Consider this- we begin from a pasture of say forty species and we move to a forest of say forty species, most of them different from the pasture species, for we have lost all the sun loving plants to shade. Yet somewhere in the middle, where we still have the pasture species in glades and clearings and we have the tree species in copses and thickets, we may have eighty species. So if we intervene to prevent the forest cover from becoming total, by taking out trees for our own purposes, by allowing animals to maintain clearings, then we have a richly complex landscape, a patchwork of different habitats and hence different opportunities for us to harvest.

The model for this landscape, I would suggest, is ffridd, as it is found in western Meirionydd. Fridd or Cae Coed, (field of trees) or Coed Cae, (trees' field) appear in place names pretty much throughout Cymru but it is here in western Meirionydd that it has a particularly unique character and place in the landscape⁴.

above: fridd remnant south of Dolgellau. Stack in some green-roofed, low impact dwellings and some more fruit and you’re away!

I have argued that this is a traditional form of agro-forestry, unique to Cymru and if we slot dwellings into it, we have something which starts to look like a genuinely sustainable, regenerative landscape, in a state of permanent transition, well out of equilibrium, its precarious, dynamic balance forever maintained by thoughtful human interaction. Its here that we may hope to create those win, win, win situations for the Big Three, the Environment, the Community and the Individual.

I will end this piece here, rather than overload your mailboxes- it leaves a bit of room for more pictures. There's still a bit more to come, in particular, the immediate actions required to reduce the serious fire risk, so that's for next time. Coincidentally, I can hear chainsaws and a chipper at work nearby so maybe they read one of my earlier pieces...bet they aren't inoculating the chip with fungi though- I may have to do that myself when they've gone...

Till next time, many thanks for reading and please feel free to leave comments! Hwyl!

1. At the time, Coed Y Brenin and the surrounds were overrun with a very large population of feral, fallow dee. It wasn't unusual to see several dozen of them lying up in a hay meadow, having eaten their fill, much to the annoyance of farmers and we had a dozen or so regularly wandering past our veranda on their daily browse. This was an organic herd that no one fed or managed, living in the forest. Management of this herd could potentially have created employment and a range of spin-off businesses but Nesta rightly proposed that studying their nature and habits should come first. Sadly, the Forestry Commission caved in to pressure from other landowners and brought in shooters to cull the animals. They are reputed to have shot over 2000 in the first year, including all the best, oldest stags.

2. The illustration gives a rough idea of the scope but you can find full details of the Tree-Cycle Desing on my web site, here. Note that on my web site, the image is an image map and clicking on the various operations will take you to further details. There is also a pure text description which you can find from the Resources page.

3. You can find the original 1994 piece on the assessment of sustainable developments, produced for the SNP, here.

A more recent version is included in my article on Integrated Permaculture Design, here. If you don't want to trawl through the whole thing, the section roughly half way down the page, entitled Integral Mapping, leads into the method of evaluation. Its all draft of course. Feel free to copy or adapt as you wish.

4. For more details of the western Meirionydd ffridd see my web site here.