Sandy McCook, the local community council chairman, says: \u201cIt has been absolutely traumatic. We sit on the edge of Britain\u2019s largest natural forest. A lot of these trees were centuries old and they\u2019re gone.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was born and brought up here. I know the forest like the back of my hand, and when you\u2019re seeing it be destroyed in that way, it just breaks your heart,\u201d says McCook.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe country is totally and utterly ill-prepared.\u201d<\/p>\n
The risk of forest fires, according to woodland managers, is not taken seriously enough.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re just not prepared for it,\u201d Nick Adams, the co-founder of Kilmaha Forestry, argues.<\/p>\n
Around 10pc of England is covered in forestry, with 19pc in Scotland and 15pc in Wales.<\/p>\n
Adams claims that forestry is no longer actively managed as it was when he was young.<\/p>\n
\u201cThinning\u201d is a process where some trees are removed, which reduces overcrowding and allows the remaining trees more access to light and nutrients.<\/p>\n
If this doesn\u2019t happen, some trees fall, which creates fuel load \u2013 more combustible material that increases the risk of fire.<\/p>\n
Adams says: \u201cIf trees are shaded out, they die off and they tend to be quite small, so that\u2019s your kindling. That\u2019s what gets the fire going. Once it gets up into the canopy, you\u2019ll never stop it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thinning was standard practice when there were more workers on farms and estates who would take the wood to process it into pulp. It is now considered hardly worth the bother.<\/p>\n
\u2018You need to do the boring stuff\u2019<\/p>\n
Adams also claims that fire breaks were previously cut into woodland to a greater extent than they are now.<\/p>\n
In part, he thinks that it is now in vogue to just leave woodland alone and essentially allow it to \u201crewild\u201d. There are plenty of cheerleaders for this approach, such as Chris Packham and Ben Goldsmith.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey don\u2019t ask people like me who work the ground and know what we\u2019re doing,\u201d Adams warns. \u201cI\u2019ve been in the woods since I was a child helping my dad.\u201d<\/p>\n
A lot of fire-prevention in woodland is \u201cboring\u201d, Adams admits, but essential nonetheless.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s more interest\u201d, he says, \u201cin headline acts like beavers and megafauna, but to prevent fire you need to do the boring stuff: the weeding, going in and removing dead trees and the thinning.\u201d<\/p>\n
Adams is also concerned about stipulations on what happens to brash and deadwood after forestry work is carried out. When he was young, foresters tended to burn the brash, but it must now be left. This creates an ideal habitat for hedgehogs and wild pheasants, but it also forms ribbons of tinder-like fuel.<\/p>\n
In Langdale forest, North Yorkshire, a fire burned for 40 days last year. It\u2019s thought to have started because of somebody cooking over a naked flame that got out of control. The Government paid \u00a33.2m for repairs to footpaths and conservation efforts.<\/p>\n
Adams says that in the forestry community it\u2019s estimated that \u00a31m worth of commercial timber was destroyed.<\/p>\n
That \u00a33.2m figure is just \u00a3100,000 less than cuts that the North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue has been hit with more than the past three years.<\/p>\n
This is a similar tale across the country. The National Fire Chiefs Council warned that the service\u2019s funding had dropped by \u00a31bn in the past decade, while call-outs had increased by a fifth.<\/p>\n
The National Farmers Union (NFU) told The Telegraph that it had called on the Government for the first time this week to devise a national strategy for dealing with the increase in wildfires.<\/p>\n
Paul Tompkins, the deputy president of the NFU, said: \u201cWildfires breaking out across parts of the UK like the one in Suffolk are devastating for those rural communities affected.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sandy McCook, the local community council chairman, says: \u201cIt has been absolutely traumatic. We sit on the edge…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":579754,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[3810,72,2885,246,15463,61,60,244476,82,1284,20340,244477,162334,8769],"class_list":["post-579753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-agriculture","tag-business","tag-climate-change","tag-environment","tag-heatwave","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-premium-inclusion","tag-science","tag-standard","tag-top-story","tag-trees-and-forests","tag-uk-property","tag-wildfires"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579753\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/579754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}