A crowd in the woods

I had another day in a quiet place yesterday with lots of people. It wasn’t really a crowd, though it felt busy. I went to Treswell Wood nature reserve with Rob and his volunteers to work for the day, mostly burning brash from trees that have been felled this winter. There were seven of us plus three other veteran volunteers who like to go at their own pace. Then there was a little posse who came up from the Notts Wildlife Trust head offices in Nottingham to have a look around, a couple of professional woodmen who were working in the coppice and at least a couple of dog walkers, including one old man who had known the wood for at least seventy years. I’d travelled down from Scotland on the train a couple of days before and I saw no-one in the countryside, apart from the occasional dog walker. There’s not much to attract people into the arable lands of Eastern England but there’s plenty to bring them into a wood like Treswell. And some of them are making a living by being there. Yesterday was a good example to me of how a well-managed wood can be much more socially, economically and environmentally valuable (in its way) than an intensively farmed field.