the question of maritime woodland

I have just been to a very entertaining lecture at the Colchester Natural History Society, about maritime woodland.  I wandered on to their website the other week when I was buying the book on Essex mammals, and saw that they had a talk coming up called 'Maritime Woodland', which posed the question why, when approximately twelve per cent of the UK was classed as woodland, less than one per cent of the coastline was wooded.  That was a very good question, which I'd never asked myself, and I had no idea what the answer was.  The speaker was a professional forester who'd just retired after thirty six years with the Forestry Commission, specialising in ancient woodland management, so it sounded like my chance to find out.

It turned out that the speaker didn't have an answer either, but thought the question was worth asking.  Maritime woodland, defined as woodland within a hundred metres vertically or laterally of the high tide mark, was strangely neglected in the literature, with neither of those two great experts Oliver Rackham or George Peterken having anything much to say on the subject.  His aim at this stage was map it, and put the topic of maritime woodland up for discussion in the world of nature conservation.  Not because it was especially threatened, since it isn't, most being thoroughly inaccessible and on land you couldn't use for much else, but because it was interesting and so mysteriously overlooked and ignored.

There followed a slide trip clockwise around the coast of the UK, other than that we skipped over the east coast of Scotland and north east England where he admitted he hadn't had time to look very much yet.  Suffolk and Essex have some beautiful examples including some large trees, while the Kent and Sussex coasts are almost entirely devoid of trees although woodland grows perfectly well inland.  A stand of hollies persists on Dungeness beyond the strict one hundred metre mark, but he thought Dungeness was a sufficiently maritime environment to count.  There are pockets around Southampton and the Beaulieu River, wonderful examples in the South Hams, rugged woods on the north coast of Devon and up the Bristol Channel as far upstream as the Clifton suspension bridge, a few battered trees on Lundy, and a whole variety of coastal woodland types in Wales, including woods which were previously maritime and are now inland due to coast deposition.  An island created by a century's worth of dumped ballast as the ships loaded up with slate now has natural secondary woodland on it.  The sea lochs of Scotland have some beautiful waterside woods, though none of the individual trees grow very large.

Sycamore is the coastal survivor par excellence, enduring strong winds and salt, but oak and birch are pretty good.  Then there are the stands of interlopers, tamarisk in Suffolk, naturalised pittosporum in the Scillies.  We saw how the salt water will kill the roots on the seaward side of a tree growing at the strand line, while the inland roots remain healthy, and how trees gradually toppled by undermining can survive and grow on, resting on a branch like a contemplative diner propped on one elbow.  We saw how large standard oaks and sycamore growing close to an eroding cliff die before the collapsing edge reaches them, probably because they cannot cope with the drop in the water table, while on London clay there is the additional complication that increased aeration as the clay moves can trigger an oxidation process whose by-product is sulphuric acid.  On the other hand, roots very gradually exposed to the air through erosion can grow thick bark, and be converted to an extension of the trunk.

There were some good local facts, such as that a bay on the Suffolk side of the river Stour holds the remains of a fish trap, so well preserved by the mud that the original axe marks can still be seen, that has been dated to 850 AD, making the largest surviving wooden Saxon artefact in the world.  It is not entirely original, though, since it was repaired in the early eleventh century.  The view from the Orwell road bridge was highly recommended, other than the fact that if you walk around the bridge stopping to look at the view, you will suddenly find that the police have stopped the traffic and come to see if you are OK after half a dozen passing drivers rang reporting you as a prospective suicide.

The natural history society seemed charmingly other-worldly.  There was no charge to attend the lecture, nobody at the door to check whether we were members, and the tea and biscuits were offered on a pay what you feel like basis, as compared to the beekeepers who got fed up with people deciding they felt like paying thruppence and firmly set down a charge of fifty pence for refreshments.  I have no idea how they can afford to live, though of course I don't know what they pay for the hall.  I am not overly keen on walking about central Colchester late at night, but the naturalists meet immediately opposite a quiet car park, so although I went tonight with a friend I wouldn't be overly fussed about going by myself.  In any case, the turnout was good enough that there was quite a stream of people going back afterwards from the lecture to the car park.  I've experimentally joined for a year, and will see how it goes.

Addendum  Nothing to do with trees, but there was a pod of 28 pilot whales today in the Blackwater, making their way up some small and treacherous creeks in pursuit of fish.  They made it safely back into deeper water off Jaywick, where they met a second pod of 12 whales.  The staff of the Essex Wildlife Trust are poised to set out in a small flotilla of boats to try and head them off if they attempt to enter the river again, to try and avert a mass beaching.