Humanity is not a guest of nature. It is a meddling tenant. In the 1980s, university researchers came to some remarkable conclusions using peat cores taken from the high reaches of Bonfield Gill1Simmons, I. G., and J. B. Innes. “Late Quaternary Vegetational History of the North York Moors. X. Investigations on East Bilsdale Moor.” Journal of Biogeography, vol. 15, no. 2, Mar. 1988, pp. 299-324. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2845415.. Using radiocarbon dating, they found that those Mesolithic folk were not living in harmony with the woods. They were playing with fire.
These people were forest managers. They used fire to make small clearings to attract deer and grow more hazel nuts. It was arson with an appetite. They kept this up for millenia, burning the ground then letting it grow back.
When this fire pressure stopped at the beginning of the Neolithic, something odd happened: the forest actually returned. Birch and oak stumps a metre wide prove the moor became a thick wood once we stopped burning it. Nature is quite happy to fix itself once people go away.
However, we had made a proper hash of it. This re-afforestation did not occur everywhere. At higher, more fragile altitudes of about 400m, the soil degradation caused by those Mesolithic fires was irreversible. The constant burning over thousands of years had made the soil sour and leached the life out of the earth. The ground became a soggy, acidic mess.
And that is how the moors began. It is a human scar, not a natural beauty. We destroyed the forest and left a wet, purple wasteland. It is a total dog’s dinner.
We pretend the moors are wild. They are merely an ancient crime scene. If we stopped meddling today, would the trees reclaim their kingdom, or have we broken the world beyond repair?
- 1Simmons, I. G., and J. B. Innes. “Late Quaternary Vegetational History of the North York Moors. X. Investigations on East Bilsdale Moor.” Journal of Biogeography, vol. 15, no. 2, Mar. 1988, pp. 299-324. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2845415.
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