From the Forest (13 page)

By the end of the eighteenth century the Crown, having no more interest in either hunting or raising venison in Essex, became not merely willing but eager to sell its rights to the forest back to the actual owners from whom it had freely taken them seven hundred years before; many of these owners still retained their medieval rights as Lords of the Manor. Here as elsewhere, they made energetic moves to buy back the forest rights and then enclose the land – thus preventing the commoners from exercising their customary free grazing and wood gathering. These tensions were replicated throughout the country – and not just in forests. The long tradition of common rights and open grazing was in effect very nearly abolished between 1790 and 1880 because of the rising value of agricultural land and because of the high capital investment for the major land improvements of the Agricultural Revolution.

Enclosure was a greater assault on the rights of the agricultural communities than royal afforestation had ever been and needs to be seen in a larger context than simply in terms of how it affected the status of forests. Enclosure was a key factor in a wider, profoundly radical cultural shift (in the sense that Thatcherism was radical), conceptually and structurally. It was a vital part of industrialisation and the move towards active modern capitalism: ideas of private ownership, profit and ‘usefulness’ (that what makes something ‘valuable’ is its ability to generate monetary value – so that sub-fertile moorland, wild forest and mountain regions come to be seen as being ‘without value’) overtook older ideas of community and responsibility and duty. From the Highland Clearances in the North to the substantial urbanisation of the British labouring classes, the social consequences of the changes were enormous, and of course complicated and not all negative. The depth of the change can, as always, be seen in the way it is moralised. Landowners’ profits, at the expense of traditional agricultural life, quickly acquired a high ethical imperative: common rights were morally bad for the poor, as this free-range grazing and ‘easy’ acquisition of fuel encouraged idleness and allowed individuals to avoid decent wage labour and settled work. During the long-running nineteenth-century battle for the right to enclose Epping, the forest was described as the ‘nursery and resort of the most idle and profligate of men’.
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But enclosure was a hard-won victory. It was bitterly contested, both by legal recourse and by straightforward physical opposition throughout the country. Not all Highlanders went as passively as the narrative of doom requires; the troops were called out to suppress anti-enclosure uprisings in many parts of the country, from Kent to Galloway. The commoners of Epping proved particularly recalcitrant, and gained the support of some local landowners, who brought their plight to the attention of both Parliament and the Corporation of the City of London. Here, Epping’s proximity to the capital became significant because it transpired that the Mayor and Corporation were in fact commoners – that is, they held common rights – as tenants in some of the parishes of Epping Forest. Unusually, therefore, the commoners of Epping had among their own number an enormously rich, influential and powerful member.

In 1851, Hainault Forest, immediately adjacent to Epping, was legally disafforested. Within weeks, the vast majority of its trees had been grubbed up and the land converted to enclosed and ploughed fields. Encouraged, the landowners of Epping who desired enclosure began to fence ‘their’ parts of the forest, without waiting on the legal niceties. Between 1850 and 1870 more than half of Epping Forest (over 3,000 acres) was fenced – although not grubbed out. However, the forest communities were also inspired, in the opposite direction, and started to use the law more directly to protect their ancient rights. In 1866, Thomas Willingdale filed a suit in Chancery claiming that his lopping rights to trees in Loughton Manor had been infringed by the ring fence the owner had illegally erected. Like many other Victorian Chancery cases, this one dragged on and on, and Willingdale died while it was still being argued. However the Corporation of the City of London, increasingly aware both of the dangers to the forest and of the deeply unsettled mood of the community, took up the issue by bringing proceedings against all enclosures. Unlike individual commoners, it could afford to do this, and so this became a rare occasion when the whole concept of enclosure was challenged (rather than specific incidences of it). In the end it came down to one particular legal question – intercommonage. This ancient practice in Epping made the landlords’ ability to buy back the rights impracticable. The judges ruled, rather pleasingly, that the rights of intercommonage were so ancient and complicated that it would be impossible for the landowners ever to demonstrate that every single entitled commoner had given consent and been compensated, and that since the right was individual rather than collective, each and every commoner had the right to veto a change. Therefore, any enclosure in Epping Forest was illegal.

But the Corporation of London had its own agenda, which did not have much to do with traditional forest community life. Above all it wanted to secure the forest for ‘the health and recreation’ of its own constituency – the citizens of London. So it proceeded to buy up, from the disgruntled landowners, the ‘waste’ ground of all nineteen manors in the forest. By 1878 it had acquired 3,500 acres and induced Parliament to pass the Epping Forest Act, which made the Corporation itself the Conservator of the Forest, with the primary obligation ‘at all times to keep Epping Forest unenclosed and unbuilt on as an open space for the recreation and enjoyment of the public’.

This was a brand-new development – a forest, or indeed any other large space, whose primary function was to provide recreational space for people
who did not live in it
. Today this seems entirely natural – Epping was a direct forerunner of the national parks and of the amenity role which the Forestry Commission has now adopted as a major management aim. But in 1882, when Queen Victoria opened Epping Forest to its new existence, there were no precedents. For example, no one had much idea about how to balance the needs of the public with the preservation of the ancient woodland itself; as the Epping Forest guidebook puts it, ‘early management was rather experimental’. One mistake that we now know they made was to buy up the lopping rights (this is not the same as enclosure) as it was felt that pollarding and coppicing were ‘bad for’ trees; since then, it has become clear that these activities actually extend the life of individual trees and enrich the biodiversity of an area of woodland. Pollarding in Epping has now been re-introduced, although much of the old skill and tree lore has been lost and must be re-learned or re-created. At another level, though, it was extraordinarily successful – Epping Forest became a ‘Cockney Paradise’.
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Urban dwellers made it abundantly clear how much they liked getting out of town – on one bank holiday in 1920, 102,000 visitors poured through Chingford Station heading for the forest. The open spaces of Chingford Plain and High Beech offered the visitors donkey rides, coconut shies and similar entertainment; twice a year, there were big travelling fairs. Huge tea rooms, named ‘Forest Retreats’, catering for up to 2,000 people at a time, were opened and drinking water fountains made available. Beyond these facilities, the forest was open and, released from both the gross overcrowding of the expanding city and the repressive ownership of most open land, with its onerous trespass laws and lack of access, it was extensively used by Londoners for walking, for early bicycle clubs and for a more general sense of freedom and play. This role has continued: Epping Forest is now designed and managed primarily for leisure – waymarked and amenity pathed and car parked and caféd and toileted. Interpretation boards tell you what you are looking at and footbridges stop you getting your feet wet. There are picnic tables and viewing points. There are sixty football pitches and three cricket grounds. The Corporation also owns a public golf course, licenses angling, hires out boats, makes provision for horse and bicycle riding, and offers natural history and local archaeological courses.

Meanwhile, in terms of maintaining the natural forest – another duty the Epping Forest Act laid down – the new managers did not do at all badly. Epping Forest was the first public ‘nature reserve’ in the country. It has maintained an impressive diversity of habitats, and therefore of plants and animals. This diversity is partly based on the remarkable variety of soil types within the forest, but is partly due to some very forward-looking policies: at a time when birds of prey and terrestrial predators were being energetically exterminated elsewhere, usually in support of exclusive game and hunting activities, the Corporation extended protection beyond the requirements of the act and brought owls, hawks and stoats under its protective mantle. Today, areas covering two-thirds of the forest have been designated as Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs), and English Nature has assessed the forest’s bio-diversity as ‘outstanding’ for its variety of invertebrates, dragonflies, amphibia, breeding birds, mosses, liverworts and fungi. There are over 50 species of tree (although this includes introductions and garden escapees); 200 species of bird – including 60 breeding varieties; 650 flowering species; all three types of British newt; over 4,000 different insects, including 1,337 beetles, and 525 different moths and butterflies. Given that nowhere in the forest is out of walking range of a London tube station, this is remarkable. Moreover, because Epping was taken over by the Corporation, it was no longer part of the Crown Estate when the Forestry Commission was set up after the First World War, so it never came under the pressure to be ‘productive’ as the other Royal Forests did, and consequently there has been no mass conifer plantation or clear-felling.

We parked in a car park full of motor bikes and a mobile café. We went into the forest.

It was June. The sun was shining. After we had walked a little way, Macfarlane took his shoes off. He did not urge me to do so too, but after a small self-conscious moment I did and he said that only barefoot can you truly feel a forest. It was strange; in my hippyish youth I was a notorious barefoot wanderer – even along Oxford pavements; but it was, I suddenly realised, a very long time since I had felt the extraordinary intimacy of the ground against naked toes, naked soles. It also made me look where I was walking with a new concentration – aware not just of brambles or old sharp refuse, but of the texture of beech mast, wet grass, moss, fallen leaf mould, bare wood. And suddenly it reminded me not of my student days, but of my childhood. My mother was a great believer in the positive health effects for the young of going barefoot in the countryside. I had forgotten. Manley Hopkins is right: ‘nor can foot feel now, being shod’.
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It was as though my body itself had its own sweet memories of freedom and innocence.

We wandered: it was a walk of extraordinary variety, of both habitat and mood.

In places the forest felt deep and ancient; the trees are mainly oak, beech, and particularly hornbeam, which flourishes only in the south-eastern corner of Britain (and, perhaps because it is rather slow growing, it has not been transported north as an ornamental or hedging the way beech trees have). Hornbeams make exceptionally fine pollards with their sinuous silver grey bark and the flutes and gnarls of long survival (there are hornbeam pollards in Epping known to be over 300 years old). We followed paths that seemed to have no purpose except to be followed. They led to glades and clearings, places of meeting, but there was no one to meet. We may have seen a dark feline creep off. Macfarlane wondered if it might be the infamous Beast of Ongar
,
but I preferred a witch’s familiar, vanishing to warn her of our possible approach. We came out of the thick trees and onto pasture where there were grazing cattle and open ponds, with dragonflies and late tadpoles; Macfarlane, who plunges into every bit of cold water he encounters in
The Wild Places
, did
not
swim here, although I suspect he was tempted, and if he had done, I would have been too.

Then elsewhere, without warning, the atmosphere seemed to change abruptly and the wood felt grubby with picnic refuse and evidence that we were walking where too many people had recently trodden, certainly with their shoes on. One strange thing about this walk was the constant awareness of how near ‘civilisation’ we were all the time. We were never really beyond the reach of engine noises from the roads which cut through the forest – not lanes or tracks, but major trunk roads. One moment we were in old woodland with all its silent muttering and the harsh musky smell of ransoms – wild garlic, which follows hard on the heels of the bluebells – and then suddenly we were crossing a busy road or hearing a blare of engine revs. It was oddly unsettling and unresolved.

This sense of the public aspect of the forest, as opposed to my more usual experience of silence and hiddenness, never quite disappeared. We walked through cathedrals of beech trees, their leaves still delicately green, but now much denser than in April and May. But the clearings they stood in felt open for gatherings, and the graffiti carved deep into the smooth trunks provided constant reminders of people coming into the woods for their own reasons, although apparently always reasons of love. Macfarlane expounded his ‘tentative theory’ that people do not, cannot even, carve anything vile or obscene into living bark; I had never thought about this before, but all the trees we encountered seemed to prove his point.

Somehow it felt as though we were always somehow on the periphery. Macfarlane later described this slightly distanced feeling: it was, he said, as though ‘we were really wandering in a memory or wish-fulfilment of the ancient forest, which we wanted to be far wider and deeper than the actual forest was’.
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Gradually it dawned on me that this is exactly what Epping Forest is: it is a dream or memory of ancient woodland. A feeling of barefoot childlike enchantment is an entirely appropriate response to Epping Forest. This is a forest which is the way it is and where it is in order to replicate the pleasures and playfulness of lost forests, lost childhood.