Hazel and oak, Bubbenhall Wood

Image: © Robin Stott Taken: 14 Feb 2010

My own interpretation that this is a 20th-century planted wood turns out, happily, to be entirely wrong. Dr David Morfitt writes: "Bubbenhall Wood is an intact ancient deciduous coppice wood that has not been quarried or otherwise grubbed out, apart from some small areas on the edge (e.g. where the buildings are on the south-east corner), as old maps show. Its present state is probably natural regrowth after felling up to a century ago - most intact ancient woods have been felled many times in their lives and allowed to regrow naturally from stump and seed like this. The hazel coppice is probably suffering from shading by the canopy of standard timber trees. The birch will have got in from seed at the last felling and as it is very shade intolerant will have been killed off by the shade from the growth of the timber trees of oak etc.. Some of the hazel may also be young new growth from seed after the last felling, something that does not now happen so often with the advent of the grey squirrel since the 1920s. If the wood had been "planted up" in the 20th century it would almost certainly have been largely with conifers, not deciduous trees, as in Brandon Wood to the north east, where the ancient deciduous wood was almost entirely wrecked from the 1920s onwards by planting. Hazel is also a very unlikely candidate for planting in the past few centuries; much of British woodland naturally has plenty of hazel, a species with limited if widespread utility. A good overview of woodland history and ecology is Oliver Rackham's wonderfully readable "Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape" Second Impression Dent 1990. (I did a PhD on the historical ecology of the woods of Binley to the north some years ago, inspired initially by Oliver Rackham's work.)"

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