New threats to the New Forest’s ancient woodlands
New threats to the Forest’s ancient woods
At the last Verderers’ Court, members received a presentment from the chair of the New Forest Commoners Defence Association, Andrew Parry-Norton, challenging some of the assertions made in the previous month’s meeting by Burley resident, Anna Lawrence. This lady had complained of the poor condition of some ponies in the Burley area and of the number of animals depastured on the Forest in winter being beyond the area’s ability to provide sufficient food. The result, she said, was the damage and destruction of many beech trees, including very ancient pollards, from which the bark had been torn by impliedly desperate ponies.
The way in which these two presentments were handled was a departure from past procedures. Normally a presentment is considered the same day that it is made and the result is announced at the next court. In the regulations, there is one important exception to this rule, in that where the court’s consent for something is sought under an act of parliament, such as the building of a campsite or the putting up of a telephone line, a decision will not be made until after the next following meeting, in order that supporters and opponents of the scheme may be heard before a decision is made. Most major applications (usually by public bodies), such as the camp-building, must, by law, be made by a presentment, but others such as the telephone line do not demand such formality. The regulations, however, provide that to ensure proper public consultation, a presentment for consent may be required in such cases also. Ms Lawrence was not making an application for consent for anything. She was making a complaint and asking what the verderers were going to do about it, so that a decision would normally have been made later that day. The court decided to treat it as “an application for consent under an act of parliament” and the decision was deferred for a month.
My own view of Ms Lawrence’s claim about the bodily condition of ponies is that it was rather over-stated. As Mr Parry-Norton said, a few ponies do become poor in winter and are then promptly dealt with by the agisters, often by requiring their removal from the Forest. The welfare standards today are a world away from those prevailing 20 years ago. In those days I would seldom spend a winter day in the Forest which was not followed by a telephone call to the verderers’ office reporting a below standard pony. Today the need for such calls is a rarity. Attitudes to welfare among both the commoners and management have changed markedly and the Forest is a better place because of that.
On the question of beech tree barking, Ms Lawrence’s complaint is on much firmer ground. What has been happening east of Burley is immensely damaging and absolutely unacceptable, although I do not think it is correct to attribute it to hunger among the ponies. It is a result of an equine vice learned by one pony from another, which the CDA chairman likened to crib-biting in stabled horses. Perhaps an even more direct parallel is with the activity of bored horses in fields, where even thick thorn hedges can be torn apart very quickly once damage starts. Then creosote or electric fencing are the only cures. Neither can be used in the Forest.
The complainant drew particular attention to the widespread damage to the trees of Undersley Wood on the east side of Burley which is particularly shocking, but recently the trouble has spread much further. I have seen badly damaged beech in Bolderwood Grounds, Oakley Inclosure and now even beginning in Berry Wood. What the verderers are going to do about it will be announced by the Official Verderer in mid-May, but that is two months after the original complaint. On the last occasion of such barking, dreadful damage was done in Mark Ash and adjoining woods (2016) and commoners were paid to remove offending animals.
The final element of Ms Lawrence’s complaint was that woodland structure is being seriously damaged by barking of the trees and by the insupportable browsing pressure. Here also I think that she is correct, although there are other factors at play beyond the activities of rogue ponies. The ancient woodland of the Forest is being wrecked slowly but inexorably by the high stocking levels of recent years, together with the immense and almost wholly uncontrolled expansion of deer numbers. To these factors must be added the effects of a fungal disease – neonectria ditissima – which contributes to the widespread destruction of the holly woods and understorey. Natural regeneration of the ancient woods has virtually ceased in the decades since the Second World War as stock densities have increased, and following the fencing and gridding of the perambulation which greatly intensified pressure as animals were confined to the Forest. In the 600 acres of ancient woodland east of Lyndhurst there is scarcely a handful of oak and beech saplings under 30 years old except on a unique upturned root plate where there is a flourishing group of small beech which the ponies cannot reach because it is protected by the depth of the hole from which the tree fell. In Berry Wood (130 acres), north-west of Burley Lodge, where I have spent many days this spring, I counted only half a dozen stunted saplings near Old House in a wood in an advanced state of decay, littered with the dead stems of barked holly and the fallen trunks of beech nearing the end of their lives and felled by recent storms. It is a picture repeated throughout the unenclosed woods.
Responsibility for this state of affairs rests with all branches of management, but particularly with Forestry England (FE) which ignores its statutory duty to protect the old woods. Beyond a few miniscule, but very welcome, holly regeneration plots, it has done virtually nothing to secure natural regeneration since the 1960s. Some ecologists, it seems, obtain perverse satisfaction in observing the decline and disappearance of the Forest’s woodland. They look on it as an interesting natural phenomenon which is not to be interfered with. What does it matter if the woods vanish? Trees might reappear in a century or so if stocking levels should eventually fall. In any case, it would be difficult, controversial and expensive to tackle the problem of domestic stock, let alone the reduction of the massive deer population – so nothing is done and things get worse every year.
Encroachments
There is in the New Forest, and perhaps elsewhere, an inclination among landowners adjoining the commons to appropriate little bits of common which they might find useful. Perhaps they want to protect a few bushes which will give extra privacy to their houses or they may want to fill in and enclose a ditch in order to plant a new hedge. They may want to move outwards an inconvenient gate or cattle grid. To the landowner it may appear sensible management of unused land, but to the commoner it is stealing. In most of the Forest the common is owned by the state and it is the state’s managers, FE, who must prevent this stealing. Its offices employ trained land agents and an experienced force of keepers, so that this work of protection is usually very successful.
Unfortunately, there are innumerable small parcels of land which do not fall within FE’s control and these are easier targets for the encroachers. In particular they do not understand, or claim not to understand, the status of ditches outside their properties. Such ditches usually belong to the householder, but most will have been open to the Forest for centuries and have been subject to the same grazing regime as the contiguous Crown common land. Fencing them is a trespass against the commoners. While a few yards of such ditch may be of little consequence, if every landowner in the Forest were enclose his ditches, the loss of grazing would be very large.
In the past I have written about much larger encroachments such as that at Shobley where the owner of the common enclosed part of it to make a paddock for his private use, but such cases are fortunately quite rare, if very expensive to contest. Still, it is the small strips which are probably the greater problem. The capital value of the land enclosed may be quite small, but legal action to protect it may cost thousands of pounds. Leaving such encroachments unchallenged could establish a dangerous precedent. That is the dilemma faced by the Forest’s encroachments committee made up of all the main common land owners, representatives of the different management authorities and of course the commoners themselves. Apart from legal action, the committee has a few useful weapons which have been developed over recent years. An open grassy ditch will probably need planning permission for a change of use if incorporated into a garden. Changed access over Crown land may also need such permission and also consent from FE and Natural England.
So what is permitted in the way of new fencing of a boundary against the common? Of course there may be special circumstances which alter the general rule, but on a standard bank ditch and hedge boundary, a fence on the outer slope of the bank above the level of the ditch is unlikely to raise objections. On the diagram here, a fence line at ‘A’ or any further to the right is acceptable, but either ‘B’ or ‘C’ is likely to be met with a challenge. With today’s high fencing costs, that is likely to be an expensive mistake for the owner.
