Treswell Wood

I’ve been working with my brother, Rob, to produce a book about Treswell wood just a few miles from where we grew up in Retford, North Nottinghamshire. Rob works for the Notts Wildlife Trust, who own the wood, and he manages it on their behalf. At first sight it doesn’t seem all that special. Although it’s an ancient wood there aren’t many old trees since it was felled in the war and then sold on to a forestry company who wanted to plant it with conifers. It was rescued from that fate by the Wildlife Trust nearly 40 years ago and they tried to get some coppice going again but it didn’t have much long term impact. In those days nature conservation was about preservation and change was suspect. Ideas in the field have moved on and it’s started to be recognised that nature is remarkably dynamic and resilient, if it’s allowed to be.

In the mid 1990s the pace of change at Treswell stepped up when a Rob and a group of like-minded people started to try and make a living from coppicing. Coppicing is all about change, taking out canopy trees for timber and to let in light, cutting hazel shrubs regularly to get a range of useful habitats and lots of lovely sticks. It can look like tidying up, housekeeping transferred to the woods, but the tidiness doesn’t last and wildness quickly returns. Generally a tidy countryside is bad for wildlife but coppicing is unusual in that it creates a range of habitats that can be used by all sorts of plants and creatures. A well coppiced wood should be a healthy wood.

Treswell has been quite intensively managed for getting on for twenty years now by a small army of professional woodsmen and volunteers who are helping turn it back to healthy coppice that provides a range of valuable products and habitats. It’s the people that make Treswell unique. Although the wood is owned by a conservation organisation whose priority is its wildlife, it is treasured by many people who value it in many different ways. The book will focus on those people and hopefully will provide inspiration and ideas for anyone who is interested in ecologically and economically healthy woodland.

And as Christmas present for Rob I had my first go at woodcut printing. This is the result, inspired by Treswell. I’ll write more on woodcuts another time.