This blog has written about the local issue of plans by Forest Holidays and Forest Enterprise England to develop Fineshade Wood with luxury cabins. Here are a few of those blogs: Dear Mr Pursglove, 6 May 2016; Fineshade Wood should be an SSSI, 15 April 2016; Fineshade Wood should be an SSSI, 28 March 2016; Woodland Trust withdraws from Forest Holidays deal, 4 June 2015: Forest holidays in case you missed it, 6 April 2015: Not so Fine Shade (8), 19 February 2015; Not so Fine Shade (5), 17 February 2015; Not so Fine Shade, 12 February 2015.
So I am very pleased to have heard that this threat to this site has now passed.
It should be an SSSI all the same – protection for the next time.
Yes, it should be an SSSI. There is a bit of a black hole in conservation advocacy where woodland is concerned – I wonder how many people realise that many AW woodland SSSIs were drawn around the bits that forestry had coniferised – including, most notably, some of Oliver Rackham’s famous Suffoilk/Essex woodlands which were the basis of his revolutionary research.
Looking at the Fineshade website, there’s also discussion about felling around the car park – which inevitably discusses which trees the Forestry Commission will plant. BUT the restoration of Fineshade and the other East Midlands Ancient Woods has been largely through natural regeneration, sadly with Ash dominating. However, we do urgently need to get away from the idea trees have to be planted – protected from deer, the growth on these heavy, intractable clays, when left to nature is quite spectacular. Interestingly, the Knepp estate rewilding project is on similar soils and both farmers and foresters can attest to the sanity of stopping trying to force what we want on them , and give them a chance to go their own way.