Savernake Forest - Inside The Forest

Inside The Forest

The areas of broad-leaved woodland which dominate the Savernake Plateau are accompanied by a farmland mosaic. The plateau is within the North Wessex Downs Area of Outstanding Beauty. The mosaic is emphasised by the assarted character of the area east of the Savernake (Coppices of Little Frith, Cobham Frith, Chisbury Wood, Haw Wood, etc.), where farmland occurs as clearings in a wider forest, creating a distinctive and memorable, 'secret' landscape.

Capability Brown worked out a strategy for linking coppices with oak plantings, lining forest trails with beech trees, and providing vistas with "proper objects" on which the eye might rest. The forest would be made part of the parkland. The scattered coppices, meadows, scrub, and heath should be united, into "one great whole."

As times changed, and social expectations altered, a later warden George Frederick was eager to show off his forest. There was much rearranging of copses and vistas and setting aside of grass rides so that visitors could see the woods as a whole and be impressed. He ordered that the entire estate be fenced and palings be placed around individual trees. That way, the deer might roam freely with a minimum of damage.

The fifth marquess recognized that the woodlands needed to be made commercially viable. Included among the 778,000 trees he planted were a high proportion of softwoods, placed outside the forest's core (e.g.: Birch Copse in the SE). This warden was too deeply imbued with tradition to contemplate industrialized forestry but he was the first of his family to introduce a measure of systematic management of larch and spruce plantations.

Chandos Bruce, the sixth marquess, did everything possible to carry on with this combination of systematic management and concern for amenity and symbolic representation. Eventually, however, he found the burden too heavy due to increasing costs, Lloyd George's taxes on inherited wealth, and the impossibility of hiring enough labor during and after the First World War. In 1930 he approached the government Forestry Commission but drew back when he recognized that surrendering control would probably bring on an invasion by ranks of straight-backed conifers. Eight years later the commission became more open to the suggestion that recreational uses might be as legitimate as commercial ones and agreed to the special conditions the sixth marquess had stubbornly laid down. As a result, after 800 years of wardenship, the family surrendered control and the public, because of Lord Ailesbury's dedication, gained a handsome amenity.

Savernake is a coppice-with-standards forest and an Ancient Woodland. A coppice is a wood where broad-leaved trees, typically hazel, grow out of the stumps or "stools" left from previous cuttings. Standards are trees allowed to grow to maturity. If these trees are allowed to grow in close proximity they grow straight and tall. If they have more room to grow then side branches become substantial.

In the past standardization was not at all essential. Craft work and early mechanical industry, such as shipbuilding, wagon making, and furniture making all required "bends" and "knees," as well as other eccentrically shaped pieces which the side branches would provide. Trees such as beech and oak can be pollarded, a process whereby a standard is cut two-thirds up its trunk. Multiple boughs grow from the cut point and the life of the tree is extended and curved pieces of bough or trunk are often produced. Such trees become magnificent specimens and they live through generations of forest workers. Their base trunk attains great girth. Often the side boughs become too heavy and are broken in stormy weather. In other cases the bough weight (an outward force) begins to tear the lower trunk apart creating a cavity which can over decades become cavernous in size. The oldest of these pollarded trees is the "Big Belly Oak" beside the A346 road. Big Belly is one of Fifty Great British Trees named and honoured as part of the Queen's Golden Jubilee celebrations. It has a girth of 11 metres and is 1000–1100 years old. In 2001 it was in danger of splitting in two, a fate that had already overtaken the similarly aged Duke's Vaunt. To prevent this, the tree was fitted with a metal corset. The 2011 Radiohead album The King of Limbs is named after the ancient King of Limbs tree hidden in the forest near Tottenham Court House, where the band recorded part of their previous album, In Rainbows.

It is thought that nowhere else in Europe is there such a concentration of "veteran" trees. Savernake has hundreds of such trees, beeches and oaks, some appearing singly, others in avenues, some amongst younger broad-leaved trees and others within coniferous plantations. Some of the historically important trees are named and their names appear upon local maps, and even upon the modern Ordnance Survey Explorer 157. Since about 2006 the Forestry Commission has been clearing space around well-known venerable trees, and naming them with green plaques. Elsewhere clearings have been created, revealing old ponds, long hidden by coniferous plantings but now opened up to the light. Standing water is essential for bio-diversity. Savernake has areas of damp soil, but no streams. Another best practice is to leave dead wood lying, for the benefit of invertebrates. In Savernake fallen trees are left to decay and dead standing trees (monoliths) are generally left standing.

In 2003 White Park cattle were introduced into Savernake Forest, to forage freely in the Red Vein Bottom area, a semi-open area of relict wood pasture which had not been grazed in more than 60 years. Such controlled grazing should recreate the naturally open glades ideal for the ancient oak and beech and their specialist lichen and fungal communities, as well as rare woodland and grassland flora; the exact wildlife features for which Savernake Forest is designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs) are regularly inspected and their health is monitored. Savernake has SSSI status primarily for rare lichens found on the bark of the older trees. There is also good representation of fungi types and mosses. However, the health of Savernake is not particularly good, partly because of the destruction wrought during World War II, and probably from wind-bourne pollutants. The entire site is at condition 88% "unfavourable recovering". This is not a comment of the beauty of the forest, but a health statement on the lichens and mosses and invertebrates.