IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Wood Lane, COVENTRY, CV7 8GG

This is part of the offshoot walk from the North Arden Way

Arley Wood...looks inviting eh?

Though Arley Wood was turned into a conifer plantation in the 1960s, its edges remain those of an ancient wood: sinuous, curving or zigzag, as described by Oliver Rackham, with broadleaved trees and a woodbank and ditch. The slight rise of the land outside the wood to the ditch along the edge can be seen very clearly here. The field beyond the wood is very muddy and has been reseeded by the farmer; a large puddle has formed after heavy rain. The land falls away to the Bourne Brook, with more fields and woodland beyond, as the land rises again towards Ansley. See also Image] and Image

Arley Wood, an ancient broadleaved wood, was turned into a conifer plantation in the 1960s by the Forestry Commission, with great loss of wildlife habitat for little commercial gain. The Commission now recognises this and is gradually planting broadleaved trees. A young oak is growing among the ranks of conifers, with a birch off to the right. "For its first twenty-five years, the Forestry Commission had little direct impact on woodland; but after 1945 foresters acquired woods and treated them as if they were moorland, trying to poison or otherwise destroy the existing vegetation and to replace it by plantations, usually of conifers. This was justified by a crude kind of cost-benefit analysis... a third of our ancient woods have been the victims of this habit of thought. Successful replanting destroys not only the trees of a wood but the herbaceous plants as well, which succumb to evergreen shade or are buried by heavy leaf-litter." (Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside, Phoenix Press, 2000, pp95-96). See also Image