Lecture 4: Changing UK Landscape Flashcards
UK Glacial maxima
The thames was a small tributary
20,000 YBP
What is the UK’s isolation timeline?
14,500 BP sea levels stood at –100m • 13,000 BP sea levels stood at –60m
• 11,000 BP (start of Holocene, ice volumes reduced by more than 50%) sea levels stood at –40m
• 9000-8000 BP Dogger bank and then the Straits of Dover breached by rising sea levels
• 6000 BP current coastline of Britain established
• So it took several thousand years for Britain to become an island, and different sections were separated at different times
Recolonisation of the U.K
UK’s environment is Tundra
Birch, aspen and willows (arctic/tundra species)
Pine and hazel (cool/temperate species)
Alder and oak (temperate, slow colonisers)
Lime, elm, holly, ash, beech, hornbeam and maple (warmer, slow colonisers)

More on recolonisation of the U.K
The recolonisation process effectively mirrored the general seral sequence for dominant vegetation within the UK, though it took a very long time.
• Eventually a series of climax woodland types were established across the UK (by 4000 BC):
1) Pine (eastern Scottish Highlands and some English mountains)
2) Birch (western Scottish Highlands) 3) Oak-hazel (southern Scotland,
Highland England, Wales)
4) Hazel-Elm (most of Ireland and SW Wales)
5) Lime (lowland England)
What is wildwood?
woodland before any human interaction
UK trees don’t burn like US trees apart from pine
Wildwood- neolithic
Neolithic humans (societies developing and utilising new agricultural technologies) colonised the UK around 4000 BC and rapidly changed the wildwood
the common perception that the UK was a wooded wilderness prior to the Roman conquest is inaccurate
The effects of the neolithic on wildwood
Early effects include e.g. a loss of elms (probably because the colonising humans were a vector for elm disease),
But the main impacts were the destruction of woodland to make space for farmland – this is not felling of wood for timber, which does not destroy a woodland, but the conversion of land for another use
By the early iron age
By the early iron age (500 BC) more than half the wildwood of Britain had been removed or converted
• But not all of this conversion was removal for agriculture – this was also the period of woodsmanship in Britain, which is the management of woodland to produce wood-related products (not plantations, which came much later)
Woodland management styles
woods used to obtain wood resources, trees replace themselves by natural succession when cut (often involves coppicing to produce rods used for building) and branches for burning
most woodlands were seen as a source of fuel rather than timber
WMS- Wood pasture
the use of woodland as habitat for grazing animals, so that animals can be kept and fattened while also obtaining wood resources. Can be difficult to balance.
pollarding opposed to coppicing
WMS- Plantations
very recent developments (1800s onwards)
due to the amount of effort required to clear land, replant with the desired trees, and then maintain their growth.
Once these trees are cut they are used up and need to be replanted (and succession controlled), e.g. many pine plantations
What does Forest mean?
Means a place associated with deer (not trees)
And was often wood pasture, though there was no association with vegetation implied by the name.
This came later as the meaning of the word became corrupted
Roman landscape
During and after the Roman occupation, the English landscape was an ‘inherited’ mix of two types of region:
1) patchwork of woodland and farmland, and 2) areas with no woodland at all
• The Romans were highly industrious and needed large amounts of wood products e.g. timber buildings
and so managed woodlands ever more intensively
