If you go down to the woods today... you might find a school, a photographer’s studio, or a carpenter’s workshop. Britain’s forests are getting a new lease of life

In the stillness of autumn, the only sound on the old Saxon road is the gentle tapping of beech nuts falling on a carpet of terracotta-coloured leaves. “You must meet Robert Cunningham – he’s tremendous,” says Kathy Harris, pausing to touch the huge trunk of a venerable beech tree. Harris knows all the ancient trees in this 25-acre wood as individuals. There is also a decaying ash called Cecelia and a beech with two trunks: one has thrown out a limb to fuse with the other, like twins holding hands. There are badgers, rare bats, otters and water rails. A bonfire crackles with burning holly and, as dusk falls, a tawny owl hoots.

Harris is one of a growing number of small woodland owners in Britain – a market for resellers, who buy big forests and subdivide them into “affordable” four- or five-acre plots. One, woodlands.co.uk, has sold more than 625 plots in the past four years. Prices range from £39,000 for six acres in Wales to £95,000 for a similar plot in Hampshire. The reasons for becoming a woodlander are varied and often idealistic, but the Mark Twain quote “Buy land – they’re not making it any more” usually lurks somewhere in the background. Large forests may be the preserve of tax-dodging multimillionaires (if a wood is managed commercially, harvesting timber, it is exempt from inheritance tax), but most woodlanders are a long way from being able to run a commercial operation.

Harris’s motivation is more altruistic than most. In 2003, her 12-year-old son, Louis, died of leukaemia. During his long illness, she struggled to find places to take Louis and his two older brothers; with his depleted immune system, he couldn’t enjoy crowded amusement parks or busy beaches. After he died, Harris wanted to provide a place of peace, privacy and fun for other terminally ill children. She had spent much of her adult life running a research station for ecologists in east Africa’s Rift Valley and wanted to help protect the environment back home, too. After a year of searching, her eldest son, Joe, spotted 25 acres of boggy wood for sale three miles from their home in Norfolk. “We drove down. It just grabbed me by the ankles and I bought it.”

Wrongs Covert is possessed of a mysterious name and a strange outline on the map, “the same shape as an upside-down AK-47 rifle”, Harris says. “I’ll never forget the shape of an AK-47 – I’ve had one held to my head while face down in the dark on a road in the Congo.”

For a small place, the wood is unusually diverse, containing reedbeds and “alder carr”, the British equivalent of swamp. This attracts rare species and important conservation labels: a site of special scientific interest, a county wildlife site, and part of a larger special area of conservation.

Harris was struck by its changing character. “It’s like four different people throughout the year: there’s the spring character, the summer persona, then autumn and winter, each with a different energy. It took two full cycles of seasonal change to identify what I could do to help it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kathy Harris bought 25 acres of woodland to give terminally ill children a place to enjoy some peace and fun. Photograph: Ben Quinton/The Guardian

Joe works full-time managing the wood, carving bird and bat boxes, making charcoal, supplying firewood and making wooden reindeer, which are selling well. The money allows them to make the wood freely available to families and charities that work with vulnerable children, and Harris is turning Wrongs Covert into a fully fledged charity itself. “People derive great therapy and wellbeing just from being here. It has taken people until now to realise that these spaces are essential to health and mindfulness. It really puts your human life into perspective.”

Part of protecting the wildlife of Wrongs Covert has been Joe’s restoration of coppicing, a seasonal harvest of wood that opens up sunny clearings, enabling wild flowers and butterflies to flourish. But according to George Peterken, Britain’s leading woodland ecologist, and owner of a small wood, “The notion of woodland management is simply gone. To see someone hacking down woods is perceived as damage today.”

During the 20th century, woods were either turned into tree factories or neglected, and both approaches harmed the wildlife population. Traditional coppicing typically died out when local labourers went off to the first world war and never returned. In the 1950s and 60s, many ancient woodlands were obliterated with chemicals related to the notorious Agent Orange used in Vietnam, before being planted with non-native conifers, whose deep shade strangles other forest life.

When Peterken moved to the Wye valley, deep within Gloucestershire’s Forest of Dean, the first thing he did was survey the small-leaved lime trees on his steeply sloping five-acre wood. “It made me understand the place,” he says, as we walk through a world rendered yellow by the shade of the huge limes. One dying tree has reached across a gap between two stone walls with its roots and begun a new tree. “This lime is gently moving around the wood like one of Tolkien’s Ents,” Peterken says. He loves these trees, because “their arching branches make me think of Salisbury Cathedral’s nave – they have a mystique about them”.

Beneath the trees is a maze of mossy stone walls, and the remnants of stone barns and cottages. This wood was once common land, grabbed by impoverished local families in the early 19th century and abandoned a lifetime later, probably because the stony ground was so poor.

It's a tragedy that Britain has such a homogenised landscape, owned by so few people

Peterken chooses not to manage it: it is too steep, he explains. “And when you see this variety of trees, who on earth would want to manage it?” He doesn’t think others should follow his lead, and wants more woods to be managed. His scientific study of nearby Lady Park Wood, which has been left to nature for 75 years, shows that abandonment reduces plant and insect life (although bats and possibly fungi have benefited): the number of plant species has roughly halved since the late 1970s.

Peterken argues that the burgeoning number of small woodlanders will be both good and bad for wildlife. “Some people wreck the places, some people look after them,” he says.

Nature writer Mark Cocker is more positive about the benefits of multiple ownership. “It’s a tragedy that Britain has such a homogenised landscape, owned by so few people, and an extraordinarily regressive tax system for land, whereby multibillionaires are handed millions of pounds of money from taxpayers,” Cocker says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Author Mark Cocker bought five acres of riverside meadow. Photograph: Ben Quinton/The Guardian

While the Forestry Commission manages England’s “public forest” – 250,000 hectares of woodland, of which 90% is freely accessible to the public – people like Cocker are buying woods traditionally held by larger private landowners. Public rights of way must be maintained (although woodland resellers tend to sell forests that have never been publicly accessible).

Cocker spent £42,000 of the advance for his acclaimed 2013 book Birds & People, 10 years in the making, on five acres of riverside meadow near his home in Norfolk which is now reverting to woodland. The wood is his workplace, providing inspiration and a window on wildlife, from the vivid song of the Cetti’s warbler to the hornets that have colonised Cocker’s barn owl box. But what he has realised is that “nature is ungovernable. What Dylan Thomas wrote about, ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’… that’s the one thing I’ve learned: humility before nature.”

David Tipling, a wildlife photographer, once owned the wood that neighbours Cocker’s, before selling it to buy another small copse closer to his north Norfolk home. On one occasion, he fell neck-deep into a boggy hole in the old wood. Another time, he poured petrol on to cut branches to help seal them and nearly set himself alight. “It shook me up a little bit,” he says.

Tipling's hide enables him to photograph buzzards and firecrests; his children love to build dens

Tipling’s wood is also a kind of outdoor studio, with camera traps and a wood-framed hut, or hide, which enables him to take photographs of the buzzards, sparrowhawks and firecrests. His young children love building dens and climbing while Tipling potters about doing conservation management: planting a hedge of crab apple (good bird food) and honeysuckle for the white admiral butterfly (which flourished here last summer) and, during the autumn, 1,000 native bluebell bulbs. “In some ways I wish I’d started 20 years ago,” Tipling says, “because a lot of this work is so long-term. I get as much pleasure now going down to my wood and finding something new like a lizard, as I would going abroad and photographing something really exotic.”

Few people can afford to buy their own wood, but it is still possible to become a woodlander. Mark Eccleston was working as a railway signaller when he met a tree officer who told him about a disused council wood behind an industrial estate near Telford, Shropshire. Eccleston loves green woodworking, or pre-industrial woodcraft, and asked to have a look. The council offered him a 28-year lease on the seven-acre wood for a peppercorn rent. “And I said yes straight away.”

After Eccleston was made redundant two years ago, his wood became his full-time job. “There are a lot of people who play in the woods, which is no bad thing,” he says, “but there aren’t many people who make a living. I like to show people that you can, and have a nice time doing it.”

It is an unexpectedly beautiful place, with tall oaks and ash soaring above a lower layer of hazel. Eccleston has divided the wood into seven areas called “coupes” and each winter he coppices the hazel in one coupe, thinning out the bigger trees above. Sunlight cascades on to the woodland floor, where in a few months wild daffodils, bluebells and foxgloves will grow. By the time he completes his seven-year cycle, his first coupe will be ready to harvest again.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Former railway signaller Mark Eccleston, who rents seven acres in Shropshire. Photograph: Andrew Jackson/The Guardian

Eccleston’s work is low-impact – he hauls out his felled trees by hand – and nothing is wasted. The smallest twigs of hazel are bundled into faggots, which are sold to stop riverbanks eroding. Hazel sticks become garden canes. Larger branches are placed in three small charcoal kilns; these take a day to burn 15 bags of charcoal (for £100, sold through a local farm shop). Eccleston carves benches from the biggest pieces of wood. He also runs woodworking courses, sells firewood and helps a friend with other tree surgery work. It is a modest living. “Being self-employed, the income is up and down, so you do get stressed,” he says. “But as soon as you get here, it’s just like, ahhh.” He gives a deep sigh of contentment. “You do feel happier.”

A significant group of new woodlanders are teachers, setting up “forest school” nurseries for pre-school and home-schooled children. Caroline Watts pays a licence fee to the National Trust to use one acre of Toys Hill wood in Kent as a forest school kindergarten. She and five colleagues take 25 children aged from three to six to play and learn in a basic outdoor environment: a log circle around a small fire, with an open-sided “parachute shelter” for rainy days. They are allowed to roam the rest of the 200-acre wood.

Watts’ kindergarten was the first of a growing number of forest school nurseries (25 have opened in the past two years) to be rated outstanding by Ofsted. Like most forest schools, hers offers a number of free hours, like any conventional nursery. When they start, she says, children are sometimes nervous, but they soon become entranced by watching an insect, “or the feeling of strength that comes from realising they can lift a branch themselves, and make changes to their environment – unlike in a classroom, where it wouldn’t be acceptable to move all the chairs and tables around. They learn great resilience, and the ability to be interested and self-directed.” They cannot roam freely on windy days (much of Toys Hill was destroyed by the great storm of 1987) and “it can get hard in the cold and rain,” she admits, but she cites a great list of joys, from watching a child stick his whole head into a puddle, to having a nap in a hammock after everyone has left.

“We are so far from any real-world problems, like admin, boredom or technology. The joys of each season, collecting beech nuts, chestnuts and conkers; cloud watching, ant gazing, feeling rainwater on your face.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Caroline Watts in her kindergarten at Toys Hill, Kent. Photograph: Ben Quinton/The Guardian

As more Britons move to cities, leading lives dominated by technology, small woodlands are just one way for our “landless society” to reconnect with nature, Mark Cocker argues. “Go to Greece, or Estonia or Serbia, and almost everybody has ancestral land, a place in the country. They have a connection to nature. Most people here don’t, and that’s why we’ve got plastic grass and Leylandii hedges.”

Woodlanders find their wild places help them develop more intimate relationships with other species. “I remember standing by a favourite fallen beech tree one spring day and noticing that a single bud had burst into leaf. There is something strangely exciting about that,” Watts says. “Every week the landscape changes, subtly, reminding you that it is a giant living organism, and that you can never quite know it – like a person.”

How to get into woods (without buying one)



• The Woodland Trust offers volunteering opportunities at woods across England and Wales. Go to woodlandtrust.org.uk for details.

• Conservation charities including the Wildlife Trusts, the RSPB and Butterfly Conservation protect woodlands across Britain, and need volunteers to help with maintenance.

• There are also community woods across the UK where you can plant trees and learn forestry skills and woodworking. Try Colne Valley Tree Society, West Yorkshire; Blarbuie Woodland, Argyll and Bute hospital, Scotland; The Cherry Wood Project, Bath; Friends of Chopwell Wood, Gateshead; Common Wood, Penn, Bucks; or The Sustainable Trust in Cornwall, which manages three woods: Crenver Grove, Fox Grove and Dandelion Wood.

• This article was amended to remove a personal detail; the spelling of ‘coupe’ was also corrected.