Woods and Belgium

~ judyheiser

We are part of a group who are interested in encouraging wildlife on their land and, this week, a group of us visited a wood that is owned by some fellow members. We were accompanied by three representatives from the Forestry Commission who spoke to us about tree health and woodland management, as well as what grants and support are available to plant and maintain a wood.

The Forestry Commission regalia is green and black but the pom pom hat is optional!

Our paths hadn’t crossed with the Forestry Commission before and we found them very helpful and interesting. We now hope to arrange a visit to our own wood by the East Kent Forestry Commission officer to discuss how we might better manage it.

The wood that we visited this week was very lovely, even at this time of year. I was very envious of the mature trees that they have there:

This is a ‘pippy’ oak. Oaks have many dormant buds lying just below the bark but which can be mobilised should the crown of the tree ever get damaged, and it is these dormant buds that can sometimes cause this interesting effect. The wood of these pippy oaks is much prized by woodturners
What an enormous gall on this tree.
Everyone wanted to have a closer look at this fabulous beech tree
The ash trees in one area have been affected by dieback and have blown over this winter. The advice from the Forestry Commission is to leave any suffering ash in place as long as possible, if it is safe to do so, which gives resistance the best possible chance to develop. But even now that the trees have been blown over, they still have immense wildlife value as deadwood and perhaps could still be left in place
There are an amazing eight species of orchid in the wood and this is the rosette of a lady orchid just coming up. The orchid leaves are nibbled by rabbits and so the woodland owners protect them with cages

Although I envied the mature trees and orchids in the wood, I would not want the fallow deer population that they have. We don’t have any deer in our wood and I hadn’t realised that they eat the fresh hazel shoots that regrow after coppicing, meaning that regeneration is badly affected. This has to be bad news for dormice.

About fifteen years ago we drove one of our sons to Ghent in Belgium for a rowing competition. Although we didn’t get much of a chance to explore back then, we did notice that it was a beautiful medieval city and thought we would like to return one day for a proper look around. It has taken us a while but this week we got ourselves onto a ferry to Dunkirk and drove to Ghent to stay for a few days:

The centre off the old city is pedestrianised but that doesn’t mean you can take your eye off the ball because bicycles, faster electric bikes, scooters, long flexi-buses and trams come at you from many unexpected directions
The Graslei was Ghent’s medieval port
Our comfortable hotel, on the left here, is on the Graslei but is newer than many of the other buildings. It was built in 1898 as the city’s post office
The hotel breakfast buffet was very impressive, and even included prosecco, but unfortunately I always ended up eating too much
Although I am not a big jam eater, I loved this combined strawberry and raspberry jam that was part of the breakfast buffet. I bought some pots of it in a supermarket as presents before we left Ghent (Aardbeien Frambozen in Flemish). I then decided I didn’t have enough and bought some more in a French hypermarket (fraise & framboise in French) on the way back to Dunkirk. Bonne Maman jams are sold in the UK, but not this particular flavour
The city has a 12th century castle that we visited. Although we are always on the lookout for wildlife, we saw very little in Ghent. However, we did see a coot and a great crested grebe already on eggs in these reeds in front of the castle
The coots.
The great crested grebe on her eggs

There was plenty to see and do in Ghent to keep us happily occupied for the couple of days we were there. Particularly memorable was this large room in the STAM museum filled with a birds eye view of the city:

We spent ages walking over the map and minutely inspecting it. The way the railway line expands out at one point was pretty incredible, I thought:

Once we were back in Kent I went through the trail cameras to see what had been going on whilst we were away:

The buzzard had been around a lot in the meadows. I was interested to see that it is clenching its foot just like the sparrowhawks do
It had been spending time hunting from the hay pile…
…and sometimes it had company
We always see groups of starlings passing through in March, sometimes in very large numbers. They are on their way back to Continental Europe to breed after spending the winter in this country
An unusual view of a sparrowhawk
A tawny owl at the wood
An unusual daytime shot of a woodcock in the wood

I want to finish today with La Plaine au Bois memorial that we visited on the way back from our Belgium trip this week. In May 1940 the British Army had been forced to retreat and were being evacuated out of France at Dunkirk. Some British units were tasked with delaying the German forces as long as they could to give more time for the 330,000 British troops to get onto ships and safely home. These units had been told to fight to the last bullet.

The barn in which eighty-nine British prisoners of war were murdered

A group of about a hundred men mainly from the Warwickshire Regiment had been holding back the Germans at Wormhoudt, a village a few miles from Dunkirk. Eventually they ran out of ammunition, surrendered, and became the captives of an elite German SS Division, II Battalion of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, who had been Adolf Hitler’s bodyguards earlier in the war. The Germans herded them into a small barn and then threw grenades in. The barn was also machine-gunned and anyone still alive after that was commanded to come out to be shot. Eighty-nine of the British prisoners of war were killed but six somehow managed to survive and were taken to hospital by the regular German soldiers.

Today, the original barn has been demolished but a replica has been built in its place
It is impossible not to be moved to tears when visiting the barn and reading its stories
This willow is one of the ones that was growing next to the original barn during the war
Augustus Jennings heroically threw himself onto the first grenade that was launched into the barn in an attempt to save the others. Stanley Moore threw himself onto the second
Piers Edgcumbe also died in the barn. He was the only heir of the Cotehele Estate in Cornwall that had been in the Edgcumbe family since 1353 and his death resulted in the house being gifted to the National Trust instead

Although it was known which German Battalion carried out this massacre, the men involved were never identified and no one stood trial after the war for this appalling crime.

I left La Plaine au Bois feeling shaken and very emotional and my thoughts have been returning to it ever since. Apart from their own terror and agony, these men were sons and brothers, husbands and fathers and every single one would have been loved and mourned back home. It is certainly a very fitting memorial to just one of the many atrocities that happened in the war and it feels very important that these things should never be forgotten.

4 thoughts on “Woods and Belgium”

  1. It must be quite interesting and inspiring to visit other people’s woodland.
    Your Belgian trip looks good. I recall seeing coots and Great Crested Grebes in the waterways of Amsterdam too. X

    Reply

    1. Because there were so many canals in Ghent, I had thought there might be a lot of waterfowl to be seen but hardly saw any. Everything was strangely uninhabited. Perhaps there aren’t many fish in them.

      Reply

Leave a Reply to judyheiserCancel reply