Wood pasture and Woodland Meadows with Dan Carne

Dan Carne had a capacity crowd (almost) at the Hay on Wye Village Hall to talk about woodmeadows and wood pasture, drawing upon his travels across Eastern and Northern Europe. We heard how different systems have evolved, the benefits they offer for biodiversity, the threats they often now face and insights that we can apply to the management of meadows and pasture in the UK.

Dan has thought a great deal about this topic – he previously headed up the Woodmeadows Trust and then applied for a Churchill Scholarship to travel across Europe looking at these often ancient systems and talking to the individuals and communities that manage them.

Dan’s travels included Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Germany and Sweden and he illustrated the diversity of woodmeadows in each country with a selection of beautiful slides. Woodmeadows and pastures were once widespread in the UK but they have been largely lost along with traditional management approaches and expertise. We are now seeing a revival of interest in wilder forms of farming that involves more trees and some recognition for such systems within farming incentives.

Woodmeadows can be places of extraordinary biodiversity and abundance as well as offering real advantages to farmers, it would be wonderful to see more such landscapes in the UK and this would certainly help push our farmed landscape in a wilder direction.

This was the first time that WVW had arranged a talk and it was exciting to see that there were so many people interested in attending – we will certainly arrange others. We felt there was a great deal more that we could learn from Dan and there were many questions from the large audience.

The presentation was filmed and a copy of the talk can be made available on request.

Bex introduced the group to the valuable farm advisory service that HWT offers – the first session being free of charge.  HWT are well qualified to advise on grant applications such as Countryside Stewardship or the new SFI schemes.  If this might be helpful, please contact Bex on r.meredith@herefordshirewt.co.uk