Northampton Natural History Society & Field Club
Natural History of Salcey Forest by James Fisher
The Journal (Vol. xxxi : 65-74, June 1947)

Natural History of Salcey Forest

The boundary of the civil parish in which I live, the ancient village of Ashton, in the county of Northampton, would seem strange to any but a student of history. The line on the ordnance map runs across the L.M.S. main line and then up hill; and then it runs through the neighbouring village of Hartwell – straight down the village street – and, sweeping round, encloses Hartwell Rectory and an enclave of Salcey Forest. For the villagers of Ashton once had rights of commonage in the forest. And nobody has seen reason, or has bothered to alter the map since those rights were given up. From the railway embankment, where it cuts Ashton in two, Salcey Forest is a woolly, ruffed line of oak on a near horizon, a plateau of trees which in the evening has a kind of green darkness.

“Sawlcey” Forest is the local pronunciation and, I think, the ancient pronunciation. Not unreasonably, there is no reference in Domesday Book (1086), because the Forest was not cultivated land: the first mention is in 1206 (see Rottuli Litterarum Clausarum) whence “bosco de Sasceya. “Bosco de Salceto” (1212) gives us, clearly enough, the derivation; from the late Latin Salicetum, meaning “willow wood,” or “place abounding in willows.” Its spelling as “Saucey” in 1213 and subsequent variations of spelling indicate, beyond reasonable doubt, a continuity of pronunciation through 700 years …. Salix, the willow, the sallow. Salicetum, now a botanical term for a community of willows. To-day, of course, the forest is too well drained to be a community of willows or sallows; it long ago reached another climax, the oak. But in some of the copses there are still ponds and little boggy places where the sallow shines in spring.

On a flattish plateau astride the water-parting between Nene and Ouse, Salcey Forest may well have been a boggy Salicetum, a willow community, when the Charter of the Forest was granted in 1217, to preserve deer, roe and boar. After that it was probably managed, and cut and drained, so that the oak, the usual climax of English woodland, became dominant.

There was a managing bureaucracy by 1238, under the Justice of the Forest South of the Trent – indeed, a hierarchy of civil servants. First came the steward of the forests between the bridges of Stamford and Oxford, and under him deputy wardens, or lieutenants, or sub-stewards; then the verderers elected from the local landed gentry, and below them again the foresters and their pages, the woodwards, the agisters, the palesters, the rangers – all for the king and his hunting. By 1307, however, private rights had been asserted. Edward I, resisting to the last, conceded the disafforestation of all tracts in the county outside the forest of Salcey, Whittlebury and Rockingham. These remained under full forest law: the rest of the woodland was split into parks and chases and warrens and commons. The parks were granted to subjects, usually noble subjects; they were enclosures fenced with palings, and were under no forest law. The private chases were parcels of the forests granted to subjects, under partial forest law. In the public warrens, any free men could hunt the fox, hare, cat and rabbits. To us, these creations of six hundred years ago are familiar as places, as areas, still defined and known. Some are fossilized, it is true, as mere names on the map; but still really exist, like Yardley Chase and Easton Neston Park.

In those old days Salcey Forest was, in shape much as it is now, only more untidy. Certainly the oak was dominant, and was a crop, by 1531. In that year the officers of Salcey Forest were commanded to deliver to John Hartwell “such as many oaks, convenable for posts and Rayles with the Lops, Tops and Bark of the same as shall be sufficient for enlarging the park at Hartwell and making a new lodge there.” And in about that time, in 1542 to be exact, Henry VIII made Salcey and Whittlewood, the royal forests, and the king’s land around them, part of the Honour of Grafton.

Old laws and documents show that, on the whole, from the Middle Ages to the Battle of Trafalgar, the history of the forest was the decline of the deer and hunting, and the unsteady but inevitable rise of the oak as its main product and industry. In 1571 John Wake made a survey of Salcey; he had to stop the keepers taking for themselves the annual crop of deer to which they had been entitled, because of the heavy losses due to outrageous poaching. In 1608 James I made a proclamation for the preservation of the forest trees; but this had little effect. There were, then, a hundred thousand timber oaks in the forest. In 1639 Charles I, tried to extend the boundaries of the hunting part of the forest; but this was soon put a stop to by Parliament. The Commonwealth tried to make a survey of the trees, but could control the poachers no more than the King’s men. At the Restoration (1660) there was a big, but ineffective, drive for shipbuilding timber. Nisbet shows, though that no timber was really taken for the navy before 1783; not many bits of Salcey oak were at the Battle of Trafalgar. The survey of timber in 1608 found 24,000 trees fit for the Navy, and about 1,700 decayed. By 1783 only 2,500 trees were fit and over twice that number decayed.

In 1712 there were 24 coppices. In 1783 there were 24 coppices. In 1825 there were 24 coppices. In 1901 there were 24 coppices. To-day there are 24 coppices. And the rides and lawns are nearly the same as ever.

There used to be two lawns; Great Lawn, and the Lodge yard Lawn; great clearings for deer – purely for the deer to graze and browse. But about a hundred years ago, and perhaps before that, Lodge Yard was enclosed and cultivated, and later it was planted up with oaks: now they form some of the finest timber in the forest.

The Great Lawn remains. The air pilots call Salcey the forest with the hole in it. The great lawn is the hole. From 2,000 feet the forest is a great rectangle about 2½ miles by 1½. And the lawn is a huge oval patch in the middle. From an aeroplane you can see things like giants, walking across the grass, towering over the tractors and wagons on the road to the farm in the Lawn. Then you see that the giants are the bodies of the great old hollow oaks, still slowly living on the lawn. There is a farm in the middle of the forest; also a great house, woodmen’s houses, and a rabbit-catcher’s house. People live in the forest who have business there. And first of all the woodmen for timber is the chief business of the forest; as it was when William Cowper, the poet lived near at hand.

“Forth goes the woodman, leaving unconcern’d

The cheerful haunts of man; to wield the axe

And drive the wedge, in yonder forest drear,

From morn to eve his solitary task.

Shaggy, and lean, and shrewd, with point’d ears

And tail cropped short, half lurcher and half cur-

His dog attends him. Close behind his heel

Now creeps he slow; and now, with many a frisk

Wide-scamp’ring, snatches up the drifted snow

With iv’ry teeth, or ploughs it with his snout;

Then shakes his powder’d coat, and barks for joy.”

“Yonder forest drear.” Why not Salcey Forest? It was Cowper’s nearest forest, when he wrote that poem in Olney in about 1780. Cowper often wandered in Yardley Chase, and to Ravenstone and Stoke Goldington, and no doubt to Salcey.

The woodman and the dog, the axe and the wedge, still belong to the sounds of the forest. Last autumn I watched Eric Whatton and his men from Hartwell Sawmills felling a common red elm, two hundred and twenty years old, or more; a giant growing free from the shade of others, and in the upward-seeking style of common elms. One man, in a boiler suit and a cloth cap, began sinking the tree, chopping out a great gash with his seven pound axe on the side where the tree was to fall. He was soon joined by his mate. All tree-fellers are ambidextrous – one chopped left handed the other right. After a time they changed to the two-man crosscut, and another man tamped wedges into the cut. There soon came a cracking, and then a rumble and a rush and a long smashing crash: while Eric Whatton cried “TIMBER” the tree fell.

The sudden silence after the fall was broken by the drum of hooves. Two great cart-horses, grazing nearby, took fright at the crash and galloped past. They soon slowed down, and then came up to the fallen tree. One started, at once, to eat the leaves so abundantly and suddenly within its each. The other backed into the mass of bruised foliage and began to scratch its hind quaters. The men were already attacking the tree to get it ready for hauling. The trimmers, working, appeared to hack through a jungle; when the trunk was stripped, up came the caterpillar diesel with its snig chains and snaked the eight-ton bole along the ground at eight miles an hour. Pools of grey-green sap accumulated slowly in the pits of the scarred stump, and this blood of the tree had a sharp, rather unpleasant smell. Eric Whatton’s new, powerful articulated timber drug, which can carry 400 cubic feet, or up to 20 tons, was next driven parallel to the trunk, and the roll-up skids were let down. Facing the drug, on the other side from the elm, was a great Latil forestry tractor, with a steel cable on a winch. This cable was run over the bar of the drug, and the cant hook on its end caught the trunk and rolled it over a pair of loading chains. Now the chains were round the trunk and it rolled up the skids like a fat pencil, and was secured on the drug …. The drug started for the sawmills. How to load a ton a minute!

In the forest felling is now over. The war demanded its share of timber, but it was senseless to over-crop. Rectangular patches have been clear-felled in the copses; if anything, the result is more interesting to the botanist than is the climax forest.

At dusk, on the Great Lawn, the little muntjacs come out to graze. The muntjacs are all that Salcey has in the way of deer in the twentieth century: tiny little animals, not much larger than a terrier. The males have straightish, short antlers and little tusks descending from their upper jaw. It is perhaps twenty years since these little barking deer came to the forest. Nobody knows exactly where they came from, but there is a private zoo-park not twenty miles away where Muntiacus muntjac is at liberty. They are a bit of trouble, I am afraid, to the Forestry Commission. There are no other deer. It is ninety years since the Deer Removal Act. Of course, fallow deer, escaped from nearby parks and chases, have been killed by the foresters now and then. But none has lived in the forest since 1855. Before then there were fallow deer all right. In 1783 there were about a thousand in the forest, and 56 bucks and 24 does were killed each year. The forest copses were cut over every twenty-one years, then enclosed for seven years by a high fence which kept out both cattle and deer, and allowed the copse to regenerate; and then enclosed for nine years by a low fence which allowed the deer to jump in and browse, but kept the cattle out. Then the copse was open to cattle for the remaining five years.

There were certainly roe deer in Salcey in the Middle Ages. Perhaps there once were red deer. The accounts are so vague. There is no record of either since the seventeenth century. Salcey is not a deer-forest; it is an oak-forest. Its oldest and most important inhabitants are the great oaks: the giants, the sentinels. In the Lawn there is the Salcey oak, a thousand years old. It is 32 feet round. In a copse nearby, the Milking Oak, hidden in the wood, is 35 feet round. These giants are often, to-day, greater in circumference than height. There are at least thirty of them in the forest.

“Yonder upstarts.” It is few of them end as giants, or sentinels, or caves for owls to roost in. The upstarts usually end in the timber yard at Hartwell. Not long ago a vertical fixed coffee-pot steam engine hauled the oak trunks over the sawing pits in the forest. Now diesel oil and electricity take the boles in charge, a crane rattles, out comes the electric chain-crosscut saw, and in less than half a minute a 2½ foot trunk falls gently in two. At the band-mill (a big one; the wheel of the band-saw is 4½ feet across) the trunk is lifted on to a trolley; the band-saw bites it and cuts it plankwise at 65 feet a minute. It can cut a coffin lid over 4 feet deep and 6½ feet long every half minute. The bandsaw is and endless strip of fine steel, toothed on one edge. It is led over great pulleys, and the toothed edge sails through elms and oaks like a wire through cheese. Eric Whatton has a special machine to sharpen it, which buzzes a bright facet on each tooth, as a busy automatic pusher shoves it by. Not a bit of oak or elm or ash is wasted: outside the mill two deft girls work an ordinary two-foot circular saw; they run off odd bits of plank for packing cases; or they saw the bark and outer wood of faced-off trunks into lumps of firewood … Millie and Mary, the cheerful girls, heave a half-hundredweight bag of blocks away like a feather pillow.

All the forest comes to this in the end, or nearly all of it. Well too, as long as for every end there is a beginning. The ancient forest of Salcey has suited the land it grows on for a thousand years; and seems to have suited it well. Nobody wants to make another sort of husbandry there.