Guy Shrubsole - The Lost Rainforests of Britain

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2022

Copyright Guy Shrubsole 2022

Guy Shrubsole asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover illustration by Alan Lee

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008527952

Ebook Edition September 2022 ISBN: 9780008527976

Version: 2022-09-15

For Mum and Dad;

for my late grandmother, Lilian Jean Maddever;

and for Louisa, with all my love.

And here, as sages say, in days long flown

Here, on this stormy, barren, blasted ridge,

Luxuriant forests rose; and far away

Swept the bold hills beneath the gazers eye,

In beautiful succession, dark with leaf

An ocean of freshing verdure tossd

By gales Atlantic.

N. T. Carrington, Dartmoor, 1826

I didnt really believe that Britain was a rainforest nation until I moved to Devon. Visiting woods around the edge of Dartmoor, in lost valleys and steep-sided gorges, I found places exuberant with life. I spotted branches dripping with mosses, festooned with lichens, liverworts and polypody ferns; plants growing on other plants. I was enraptured. Surely, I thought, such lush places belonged in the tropics, not in Britain.

But its true. Few people realise that Britain harbours fragments of a globally rare habitat: temperate rainforest. Rainforests arent just confined to hot, tropical countries; they also exist in temperate climates. A temperate rainforest is a wood where its wet and mild enough for plants to grow on other plants. Temperate rainforest is actually rarer than the tropical variety: it covers just 1 per cent of the worlds surface.

The temperate rainforest biome, or set of ecosystems, is strung across the globe, in areas where oceanic currents bring warm winds and torrential downpours. Rainforests exist along the Pacific northwest coast of the USA and Canada; on the southern edge of Chile; in Japan and Korea; across Tasmania and New Zealand; and along the western seaboard of Europe particularly the Atlantic fringes of the British Isles. In fact, Britain has some of the best climatic conditions for temperate rainforest in Europe.

Awestruck by what I found in Devon, I spent months delving into whats known about these extraordinary places. During my research, I came across an astonishing map made by the ecologist Christopher Ellis showing the bioclimatic zone suitable for temperate rainforest in Britain that is, the areas where its warm and damp enough for such a habitat to thrive. This zone covers about 11 million acres of Britain a staggering 20 per cent of the country. Over the millennia, weve destroyed our rainforests, so that now only tiny fragments and relics remain. Were so unfamiliar with these enchanting places, weve forgotten they exist.

As I read more, I started noticing how frequently other habitats get called Britains version of the rainforests. To the Prince of Wales, peat bogs are Britains tropical rainforests. Whilst peat bogs store billions of tons of carbon and England boasts nearly all of the worlds remaining chalk streams, the implication that theyre our version of the rainforests is odd.

Britains rainforests are our rainforests.

Yet, as I got used to the idea, it became obvious to me that rainforests belong here. As a country, were stereotypically obsessed by our rainy weather. How very British, then, to have rainforests. And, as I was to later discover, half-forgotten memories of our rainforests are woven into our myths and legends, and feature fleetingly in poetry and prose from some of our greatest writers.

But why, I began to wonder, have we managed to so comprehensively excise Britains rainforests from our cultural memory? Why are even environmentalists unaware of their existence? Why was it a surprise to me to find rainforests here, when this should have been something I was taught in school?

Elliss map of the British rainforest zone describes a damp arc stretching across the west of the country. Its at its most expansive on the wet west coast of Scotland; flows down through the Lake District and parts of the Pennines; washes across Wales uplands, from Snowdonia to the Brecon Beacons; and soaks parts of the Westcountry, particularly Exmoor, Bodmin Moor and Dartmoor.

I was lucky enough to have moved, by chance, to a part of the Westcountry that abounded in these rainforest fragments and I quickly fell in love with them. My partner Louisa and I began making frequent visits to them, whenever travel conditions would allow: they became our escape between the coronavirus lockdowns of 2020 and 2021.

Its hard to appreciate the awe and beauty of a temperate rainforest without visiting one yourself. Their rarity and remoteness mean most people in Britain have probably never seen one. So let me take you on a journey into one of Britains lost, forgotten rainforests.

My first, abiding memory of visiting one of Britains rainforests is how lush and green it all was. All woods are green in summer, of course: but our rainforests are green all year round, due to the plethora of mosses and lichens clinging to their branches. Even when the leaves have fallen from the trees, they glow with a verdant luminosity. I remember the earthy smell of fungus and leafmould, the distant roar of a river in spate, the drip-drip of falling rain.

A visit to a rainforest feels to me like going into a cathedral. Sunlight streams through the stained-glass windows of translucent leaves, picking out the arches of tree trunks with their haloes of moss. Theyre places that at once teem with life, and yet have a sepulchral stillness to them. Small wonder that the Celtic druids once revered them as sacred groves.

The trees that make up Britains rainforests are both familiar and strangely alien. The mainstay of our wet Atlantic woods are oak trees. Yet theyre quite unlike the tall, straight oaks of lowland England, so prized by the British Navy in centuries past for supplying it with sturdy timbers for shipbuilding. By contrast, our rainforest oaks tend to be stunted and small, windblown and gnarled hunched low to the ground to withstand the Atlantic gales, their roots clutching at the thin upland soils.