Devon’s heart of wood

Canadian Forestry Commission logging after World War 1 – photos (including below) Evolving Forests
In Devon, the last hundred years has been marked by serial waves of forest experimentation, which have influenced current approaches to woodland management and growth, not only in the county, but across the country. Jez Ralph tells this century plus story
Absence makes the heart go stronger. By the 1920s the lack of trees in Devon, like the rest of the UK, became a catalyst for a century of intense development in both treescapes and timber use. This immediate lack of trees can be put down to the intense amount of timber needed to feed domestic use, mining and the war effort of the first world war but has its roots in centuries of landscape domestication and increasing need for timber.
The taming of the
countryside for agriculture, including the expanse of Dartmoor along with
urbanisation and increasing population meant that woodland cover became
increasingly marginalised. The ability to import timber from the vastness of
the British Empire had decoupled demand from the ability to supply from
home-grown resources. By 1917, though, German submarines had made importing
timber all but impossible and, to offset this loss, the Canadian Forestry Corps
were brought in to harvest what remained of the fragile woodland that was left.
These expert lumberjacks and sawmillers brought the latest in sawmilling
technology to encampments throughout the UK. At Stover in South Devon, in an 18
month period between 1916-17 an astonishing 8 million board meters of timber
were felled and sawn from what was already a diminished standing stock of trees[1].

[1] Lucas Radford – The Canadian Forestry Corps in Devon. Plymouth University, 2023

Leonard Elmhurst in discussion with Rabindranath Tagore – photo Dartington Trust
The intensity of these operations became the focus of a small group of landowners and foresters not least Lord Acland in Tiverton and Lord Clinton near Exeter. By 1919 the Acland committee, reporting to the Prime Minister had created the Forestry Act and the Forestry Commission to oversee the radical re-establishment of forests throughout the UK to ensure a strategic reserve of timber. The first trees planted by the new Commission went in the ground at Eggersford in mid Devon.
In 1925, when Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst bought the run-down estate of Dartington in South Devon, the focused planting of swathes of uplands had begun. Having spent time in India under the auspices of social reformer Rabindranath Tagore and bringing the inherited wealth of the Whitney family they set about reinventing Dartington as a place of innovation and experimentation. Social, educational, agricultural and forestry conventions were all challenged. The family had the ability to draw in influential reformers and give them a test-ground for their experimentation. Modernist architect William Lescaze landed white blocks in the Devon countryside to challenge the convection of rural sentimentalist aesthetic. In the forest Wilfred Hiley, professor of Forest Economics at Oxford’s Imperial Forestry Institute was persuaded to leave his ivory tower to develop the Estate’s woodland.
Hiley arrived in Devon in 1931 bringing with him the economics of the post-war economic consensus, the precursor to modern Keynsian economics. Buoyed by the Forestry Act and travels in the U.S., Hiley advocated expanding the area of forestry on the Estate to create an efficiency of scale. Coupled with this expansion should be the creation of sawmills and a range of garden & interior furniture that would create a circular economy that kept money within local communities. Luckily for Hiley the Elmhirst’s, having taken out the last of any quality timber on the Estate to renovate the Great Hall roof and associated buildings, bought into these new land-use economics. Land was purchased stretching up the Bovey Valley towards Castle Drogo in central Devon and three sawmills built to process the timber coming off the estate. This planting focused on the growing of conifer species brought in the western seaboard of the United States. Douglas fir proved to grow exceptionally well in the relatively wet and verdant Devon climate as did Redwoods. Hiley had seen both in their native ranges and had seen how useful they could be as timber resources. To showcase the value of this new land-use economic a range of furniture was designed in 1935 by architect Robert Hening, the Dartside range, made most famous by the Lamda Chairs which can still be found on the estate and in upmarket mid-century modern auction houses.
This model of forestry continued through the 1960s and 70s. Hiley died in the early 1960’s but his legacy lived on through a forest management team and the establishment of the forestry training school on the Estate that carried on into the early 1990s. Maybe as a result of this influence, over in West Devon on the Tavistock Estate, Lord Bradford had experimented with Douglas fir and other ‘exotic species’ at a similar time. By the 1960s it had become clear to Lord Bradford and his forest manager Phil Hutt that the ecological balance of the forest may be compromised by the intensity of the single-age monocultural systems and they set about a transformation that turned out to be fifty years ahead of its time. By creating geometric spirals of single tree felling and replanting in blocks of nine trees over a 45 year period the Bradford-Hutt plan became one of the first attempts at what we now term Continuous Cover Forestry (CCF).
This changing attitude has allowed the Woodland Trust to come into the world of timber in Devon. Traditionally focused on ecology, conservation, health and wellbeing, the Woodland Trust own a broad range of woodlands all of which need management, many of which need some material extraction to bring them into better management. They have resources of beech which they have few markets for and whose heavy shading may not be considered ecologically optimal. Beech which is threatened by increasing periods of drought. Western Hemlock which naturally regenerates so freely it out competes not just other trees species but also herb layers so vital to soil health. Alder which many are planting as Ash replacement as ash has succumbed to disease that proliferates in our milder winters.

Dorothy and Leonard Elmhurst – photo Dartington Trust

Wilfred Hiley in the Teign Valley woods – photo Dartington Trust
Photo – Evolving Forests
This was the precursor to a suite of silvicultural techniques that are a core part of modern lowland silviculture that attempts to create ecological diversity through species and structural complexity in a woodland.
By the 1970s the results of the Forestry Act and the focused planting of large block of conifer across the landscape were being noticed and reflected on. Wealthy landowners were getting tax breaks through ‘schedule D’ planting of these agri-industrial plantations (which in turn gave rise to a group of forest management specialists led by Fountain Forestry, also formed in Devon), leading to their benefit to rural communities being questioned. Imports of timber hadn’t substantially reduced, and a post-modernist backlash had begun within land-use. In 1972 the Woodland Trust was created by Ken Watkins on the southern edge of Dartmoor to protect ancient woodlands from felling and replanting with Conifers.
Devon could now point to its own group of forest visionaries like Hiley, Hutt and Watkins balanced by the traditional estates such as Clinton and could take a long-term view and potential innovation risk. It had a resource that was a mix of new plantation, old plantation from the times of the Victorian seed collectors and increasingly threatened and dispersed small, unmanaged ancient woodland fragments. Into this Dartington, now the Dartington Action Research Trust, came full-circle and started investing into these threatened small ancient woodlands whilst at the same time reducing the scale of its forestry holdings in order to pay for innovation on the core estate.
This investment came in the form of the Silvanus Trust, the first of a national network of woodland initiatives whose objectives were to not only protect the fragmented resource of small ancient woodlands but to re-invigorate the economy around them. Though Dartington’s original aims were to create localised woodland economies, they had played into the centralisation of sawmilling that was a natural result of growing commodity crops and Silvanus aimed to counter this through its charitable objectives coupled with its trading arm that could put small-woodland management into practice.
Timber was also sent on to Bowden and Tucker joiners in Ashburton for joinery manufacture into casement windows and doors. Bowden and Tucker were selected for being interested in using more locally derived timber having undertaken some work with beech and local softwood and who produce regular volumes of windows, doors and staircases. It was important that the joinery came from a site used to using more regular imported softwood and heartwood to give a comparison.
These small woodlands were not only being threatened by replanting of conifers but also by being scrubbed up to make way for agriculture and urbanisation. They were considered the last remnants of the wilderness, the land without use that could be better utilised. Into this came the Community Forestry movement, largely focused on peri-urban protection and expansion of woodland but also, uniquely, in North Devon where the South West Forest looked to using woodland as an agricultural enhancement. Over the 1990s and early 2000s a large area of new small-scale farm-woodland planting was undertaken that had joint objectives of increasing woodland cover in a way that provided an economic value to the farmer and increasing the ecological value of the landscape. South West Forest became a forerunner to a government policy that still today focuses on small woodland and how they can become a meaningful part of the forest economy and macro forest ecology.
By the early 2000s Devon had created a legacy of woodland innovation that had spanned a century. By this time Dartington had started to become a center of regenerative land-use thinking through education at Schumacher College and attempts at Biodynamic farming on its land. Silvanus and South West Forest had shown a way of bringing small woodland into the fold of economically active woodland and it was a natural time for regenerative agriculture and trees to become further integrated.
Under the land management of John Channon and Harriet Bell, Dartington asserted themselves as innovators in the nascent movement of UK agroforestry. This technique of intimately mixing food and tree growing has very long traditions across the globe but had fallen away in our push for intensification. Its value was now being understood but a huge cultural leap was needed to reassert this as a normalised land-use option. Experiments with different agroforestry systems were introduced onto the estate alongside a set of novel contractual approaches to bring estate, tenant farmer and tenant tree grower together to more closely integrate land-use.
The results of a century of innovation have created a complexity of treescapes within the broader landscape at Dartington, throughout Devon and spreading through the UK. This complexity is aimed at creating resilience. Whilst the threats of the 1920s were around material security, the threat today is more complicated. Climate, changing rural social structures, disease, increasing demand for Biobased materials and increasing concern they are grown in more sustainable ways. Though forest cycles can be measured in centuries, a century has provided a huge shift in forestry in Devon from no trees, through agri-industrial pioneering to innovation in agro-ecological approaches to timber growing. The next hundred years may provide greater challenges and the question has to be asked whether our thirst for innovation in land-use to respond to contemporary demands needs to take a back seat to steady-state resilience, or whether extreme pressures on our landscape once gain demand extreme innovation?
Jez Ralph has been working at the intersection of forestry and timber construction for 20 years. He went on to found Evolving Forests in 2019, via the Silvanus Trust and the Architectural Association Ralph, to focus on resilient supply chains and a renaissance in wood culture in the UK.

Photo – Evolving Forests