Worth Forest worth saving

Worth Forest in Sussex is old. Veteran oaks and beeches line its rides like sentinels. The traces of Iron Age paths can still be seen, ghost lines left by many feet. Fungal and plant life that you rarely see beyond the bounds of the forest linger on here. The light is greenish and on an early autumn morning is cold. Standing within it, the outside world feels far off and not entirely real. It is a place unlike any I have been in.

The irony is that much of what I describe is hidden away from view by the imagined concept that we call trespass. To see and experience all of this, you have to break the law.

In most circumstances trespassing is a civil offence, rather than a criminal one. So, when I went into the heart of Worth Forest – much of which the public are denied access to – there was no great sense of danger. The fact that I was part of a several hundred strong group, walking together to raise awareness of and protest against Center Parc’s proposal to turn 553 acres of the Forest into a vast holiday village, probably helped too.

We had been brought there by the groups Landscapes of Freedom and Right to Roam. The former seeks to ensure public access to the South Downs, Sussex Weald and beyond, while Right to Roam, in its own words is “campaigning to extend the Countryside & Rights of Way (CRoW) Act in England so that millions more people can have easy access to open space, and the physical, mental and spiritual health benefits that it brings.” On Saturday 24th September – the day I went to Worth Forest – they had joined forces to organise a Mass Trespass. It was a deeply joyful event in a truly beautiful setting, but a sombre note hung throughout the day with the knowledge of what threatens this special place.

So, you might ask, how does a few hundred people walking into Worth Forest, off the public footpaths – stopping at points for talks, poetry and music – stop the destruction, commercialisation and sanitisation of this ancient space?

The simple answer is that it does not. Not by itself. Yet this simple act of not only walking but of being in a place, of feeling it around you, hearing its sounds and seeing the life held within it, has a great power.

It makes you realise that Worth Forest is more than simply two words on a page. It is a place where you can walk amongst veteran trees; each of which, in the curve of their trunks and the twist of their boughs, tells the story of their growing. They leave their impressions etched across the surface of my mind in a way that the commercial plantations of firs and pines in Worth Forest never could.

The Forest is a place where you can sit beside the burble of a brook, hear the circling calls of buzzards somewhere above you and be mistaken for thinking there are no such things as villages, towns or cities. There is, after all, little to suggest you are in the 21st century. You have no time markers with which to ground yourself, and so you can move out of time and into timelessness.

This is what the simple act of walking can do. It can make you feel these things. In a place like Worth Forest, it can make you feel them intensely.

But we are not allowed to feel such things, because for the most part we are restricted from being in places where we can feel them. The Right to Roam movement seeks to address this problem – one of the two that the Mass Trespass sought to confront.

The second problem is that such places are slipping from our grasp. The veteran oak and beech pollards in Worth Forest are the victims of neglect and mismanagement. Beneath their gnarled branches, the rides – paths through the forest – are made of unlawful hard core and chalk rubble which allows the heavy commercial harvesting machinery to access the plantations of fir and pines that jostle with the ancient trees. Worth Forest is already under threat. Because we are not allowed in it, this is all hidden from our view.

But the construction of a Center Parcs would mean what remains is irrecoverably threatened. The birdlife, including Lesser Spotted woodpeckers, goshawks, redstarts and nightjars, would face habitat disruption and destruction. The rare plant and fungi life, which rely on the delicate balance of nature that makes up the forest’s soil, would disappear. It would be a unequivocal disaster.

Worth Forest is a flashpoint for several issues. It is representative of the denial of land access that is taking place in England: 92% of which the public are denied access to. It is representative of the threat that short-term vision and greed pose. It is representative of the abundance that we once had, which is slipping away and may well be lost completely.

Even taking this into account, a Center Parcs, you might argue, is surely better for the forest than an alternative such as a housing development. Perhaps, although you would be choosing your poison in regards to habitat destruction and the loss of the forest’s power and importance. What would be better – what is necessary – is for it not to be touched at all. For it simply to be a place where people can walk through, sit in, as we did on Saturday; not leaving litter, not foraging for fungi or taking anything from the woods but simply experiencing what I have described. That would be best of all. That is what has to happen. That is why we must walk. In such simple actions lie great power.

You can read more about Landscapes for Freedom and their campaigns here.

You can read about the Right to Roam campaign here.

In other news, the UK government is threatening to disregard all science, common sense and sanity in doing away with the Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS) as well as a host of other measures that constitute an all-out attack on the natural world. Follow this link to contact your MP and protest against these proposals.