Plantation Blues

A grand area of woodland on Blacka with birch, beech, sycamore, rowan and larch. This is part of the area SWT usually refer to as the plantation.

The word plantation for UK walkers carries with it images of dense commercial conifer crops blighting the landscape with serried rows of daylight-starved Sitka Spruce and similar alien species. SRWT chooses to call, repeatedly, the fascinating woodland to the north east of Blacka a plantation. The label is used so many times that I wonder why there is the persistent repetition.. The word appears again and again as if they felt the need to make a point. A similar thing happens with the word 'reserve'. They don't call it Blacka but insist on referring at all times to 'the reserve' as if to expunge from consideration its primary role as 'public walks and pleasure ground' and install it into the minds of visitors that conservation, and their own brand of it, really comes first. I am as certain as could be that there is a requirement on all staff at SWT to stick religiously to this practice as a tried and tested  indoctrination technique. As for 'plantation' it emphasises a view of the land as managed and dependent on human intervention, an idea they like to promote for obvious reasons, whereas the overwhelming attraction of a walk through here comes from seeing the woodland pursuing its own momentum, with a diverse range of spaces and natural regeneration going on alongside trees falling and decaying.

The woodland in question certainly has some planted trees but many would not be aware of it. Some is just lovely woodland  made specially interesting by the altitude and the absence of intrusive management over many years. There's no resemblance to most people's conception of a 'plantation', and any plantings were certainly nothing like the exploiting projects of commercial conifers that appeared across the country post war, nor the obvious cash crop at Lady Canning's Plantation at Ringinglow.  The origins of the larch and pine may fail to satisfy the purists but the proof of the pudding is the enjoyment.

A major feature of our woodland here is the amount of standing and lying dead wood usually covered with moss, algae and lichen.

 

The scupltural forms are all over. SRWT  talks about creating more standing deadwood. Work creation again: the deadwood is already everywhere on Blacka. But here we go again with SWT vandalism. They are intent on removing trees they say they don't think should be here. It won't be case of repatriation. Their speciesism agenda is simpy about finding work to do. But trees will be destroyed and others stripped of all beauty and dignity. Piles of tree body-parts will be left all over the woodland floor declaring themselves to be the work of man and his sub-species the manager.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrD4mflJfLA

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Plantation-Blues-Cotton-Patch-Tobacco/dp/B0002ANRNA