The Cleanest Line - Manon Carpenter

I've always wondered what the British landscape would look like if left to grow naturally.

Originally (prior to human intervention anyway) mainly woodland I believe.

I’ve always wondered what the British landscape would look like if left to grow naturally.

https://www.rewild.scot/

I'm reading an interesting book on the topic at the moment:

https://www.waterstones.com/book/an-irish-atlantic-rainforest/eoghan-daltun/9781399705271

Ireland even worse than UK I believe in terms of ancient woodland remaining

Glen Feshie throws other areas of the Highlands into sharp relief, but it's reassuring how quickly areas can revert. Cycling the back roads to Perth the other week, the verge had encroached nearly to the cats eyes at one point.

The Way Through The Woods

Thanks for that

Originally (prior to human intervention anyway) mainly woodland I believe.

I spend a lot of time wondering about this it's really interesting. Originally I agreed with you, and thought if left to it self woodland would dominate the landscape. But that probably isn't the case. I've read that it doesn't take into account the role of large animals in making clearings and paths etc - for example big parts of Africa are kept open by grazing herbivores such as elephants and wildebeest. So the reason that hills tend to return to just forest in the UK is that stone age humans killed off all the large animals, radically altering the ecosystem.
Animals and insects surviving now that are adapted to live in clearings and grassland are evidence that those environments have existed for millenia.

I think George monbiots book feral talks about it, and isabella trees book.

Good read, thanks for posting.

Would agree the Isabella Tree book is a great read for an understanding of what wilding actually means.
From memory, it's in there that there's a good chapter on canopy theory and how it wouldn't have been all close cover forest as once assumed.
What we commonly hold up as 'wild', Dartmoor, The Lakes, Moors etc is about as naturally wild as a carpark (give or take a few thousand years!)

Interesting, there is a large area near me that I recently found was farmland that the owner had left to rewild in the 90's. It's now scrubland and shows exactly what happens if you leave a field alone for 20+ years.