Surviving Ancient Forests Are 2% Of England - 19 Tracts 2B Damaged, Destroyed By New Rail Line
The woods at South Cubbington, near Leamington Spa, have a wild pear tree, the largest in England, which was young during the French Revolution, and middle-aged before Leamington Spa even existed. After 250 years, it is about to be chopped down to save 23 minutes on the journey to Birmingham.
Walk five yards into Mantles Wood, near Great Missenden, and you are transported in time. The noise and sight of the world fades out and you are among woodland that has been in this place since the year 1600 or before. Roald Dahl, who lived nearby and knew something about magic, used to walk here. But the world is coming for Mantles Wood.
After four centuries, it now has four years until it becomes, first, a construction site and then a permanent concrete scar, the 100-metre wide northern exit of the HS2 Chiltern tunnel.
EDIT
As with so much about David Cameron’s high-speed supertrain, from its ever-growing budget, ever-shrivelling business case and ever-shifting justification, the exact amount of damage HS2 will do to England’s ancient woodlands appears rather a moveable feast. On page 17 of HS2’s “statement of route-wide effects”, one of the 50,000 pages of documents issued last week, we are told that 10.2 hectares of ancient woodland will be completely destroyed. By page 22, this has gone up to 10.8 hectares and by page 74 of the same document this same figure has trebled, to 32 hectares (79 acres, roughly the size of 45 football pitches.) What a relief that the people in charge of this exercise are not going to be responsible for spending large sums of public money.
EDIT
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/countryside/10502587/The-destruction-of-our-forests.html
