30 years fallen

It was 30 years ago today that the 'Great Storm' ravaged the South Coast, wreaking havoc and destruction. The forest suffered, especially the older trees. Swathes of adolescent timber plantation were felled, sad, though easily replaced. Not so easy to replace were veteran and ancient leviathan trees who'd watched over the forest for centuries. They'd seen the works of man in the forest come and go, coppice, pollard, graze, enclose, bound, drain, plant, extract, repeat. Standing firm and resolute these ancients had weathered countless previous storms with maybe only a battle scar, though this storm was to be their downfall, quite literally. Bratley Wood, exposed as it is on high open ground, took a pounding in the storm. I remember the prostrate hulks, shattered trunks and fallen boughs of many of it's inhabitants. Bratley felt like an appropriate place to walk today. Bratley Wood's a beautiful open woodland, never enclosed, it's old and knows it, it holds an air of timeless tranquillity, along with the memory of the forest in it's huge Beech and Oak. It also holds a history of storms in its rotting relics, a history which extends well before 1987 and right up to the present day, and some of those stumps of trunks and fallen remains are the result of 30 years ago. 30 years and still a presence in the woodland. Some of the trees were truncated in the style of a brutal pollarding, though even some of these still produce leaf each year, and some have become fertile homes to seeds from other species, and live on. How cool are trees.