How a Welsh village saved its forest … and its future
In an edited extract from her latest book, Hazel Sheffield sets out a new blueprint for community stewardship
It was a Saturday in February 2020 when the flood came. It had been a wet winter, so wet it seemed that before the month was out, the brown trout of the River Taff might be washed clean out into Cardiff Bay before the fishing season had even begun. But this is Wales. People are used to a spot of rain. No one realised how bad it would get.
For two days, it hammered on the windows of the houses at the top of the South Wales Valleys, where people tucked in their children before a sleepless night. It poured into the rivers at the bottom. By the time the rain departed again, many people would be standing in water up to their knees.
A history of coal mining had left the sides of the valley covered with a monocrop of larch, planted for pit props. The forests became overgrown and impenetrable. Under the coal board, villagers were warned off entering them. Before the Pentre floods, Natural Resources Wales, which took over from the Forestry Commission in Wales in 2013, stepped in with felling licences, drawing the ire of dogwalkers and hikers when they sent in their machines. As the authorities felled and winched the trees, dead material and branches snapped and dropped on to the forest floor.
The high street in Pentre had never flooded. But that night in February, the rain was unable to find its natural course. With a crack barely audible against the downpour, the banks broke and the water gushed towards the houses below.
An inquiry was promised. No wrongdoing was found. But the people of the valleys knew the land with its knotted forests, old mines and ancient springs. They feared the felling done by public bodies in their name. The summers were getting warmer, the winters wetter. Diseases thrived on the damp, stressed trees. A different way was needed to manage the valleys. Not by profiteering businessmen, nor paternalistic government, but by the locals themselves.
Eighteen months later, in the cool, dappled sunlight of a clearing in the Cwm Saerbren forest above Treherbert, a larch stands tall but dead. Its black branches turn like spindles in the breeze, covered in black and yellow burrs. Behind the dead tree the valley drops sharply, covered in forest. A handful of people jostle for space on the uneven ground around Richard Phipps, an official from Natural Resources Wales, the body that manages these valleys. But they don’t look at Phipps, in his hiking boots and a regulation beige shirt. Everyone is looking up at the dead tree.
“It’s a fire hazard,” Phipps says. He sounds so certain that it’s hard not to believe him. He explains that the longer a dead tree is left in the ground, the harder it is to get it out as the forest grows around it, and the harder it is to use the timber, which degrades over time.
He has been put in charge of drawing up the official forest resource plan, a document created every 10 years. These plans detail how the authority will manage the Welsh government’s woodland estate, including how and when tree felling will take place. In order to meet certain standards, Natural Resources Wales has to consult the public, so it normally makes the documents available online. Few look for them, and those who do find colour-coded maps that are meaningless without explanation. So this kind of engagement – coming to the forest for a tour of the trees – is somewhat new.
For as long as they can remember, the villagers have heard these kinds of warnings about the forest. Industrialists barred people from entering, protecting their crop of pit props. That narrative was inherited by the public body, Natural Resources Wales. As part of its mandate to maximise profit from the timber, it restricted access, rather than welcoming people to the forests as a public good.
For many years, this status quo has been unchallenged. But something is changing, thanks to an initiative started by land reform activist Chris Blake called the Skyline project. Skyline is working with a local organisation called Welcome to Our Woods to propose a co-management plan for the forest. As part of the programme, a handful of locals visited a croft in Scotland. On their return, they asked Natural Resources Wales if they could have a hand in designing their management plan. Then they set up a series of 10 meetings over the course of a year, and invited Phipps and his colleagues to join.
The trip up the side of the valley is the second meeting of the 10. One of the women steps forward and says they want a plan where they manage the woodland alongside Natural Resources Wales, 50-50. “Not 80-20,” she says. “We need to have a say in what happens.” “Hear, hear,” says Ian Thomas, who coordinates Welcome to Our Woods, the local organisation that has for many years been teaching young people to care for the forest by starting campfires safely, to address a history of teenagers going into the woods after dark to set things alight.
Over the next year, the group meets Natural Resources Wales to consider every aspect of their relationship to the valleys. They dream up plans from beekeeping to producing renewable electricity using water and wind. But the two sides differ on one major issue: whether or not to cut down all of the trees at once: a method called clear felling. Over the 18 months of talks, this point comes up over and over again. At the first meeting, when Phipps said clear felling was the only way to manage the forest, Thomas spoke up. “That’s your version of the truth, not ours,” he said. Thomas has worked with the woodland in Treherbert for long enough to have seen whole forests disappear, leaving empty hillsides where once people walked and hiked. Once felled, it takes 30 years for the trees to grow back.
Thomas knew that some of the forests around Treherbert were so old and overgrown that clear felling had become the only option. But the community wanted to change the policy for the future so that the forests would be continually thinned, taking out the biggest or the weakest every year, to maintain their productivity for hundreds of years. By thinning, not clearing, the ecosystem survives, allowing nature to thrive – and people can still enjoy the trees. It is called continuous cover, a method of forestry more popular in Alpine regions than the UK.
It takes many decades to establish continuous cover, planting trees with a mix of ages, so bigger trees can be removed without destroying the whole habitat. With smaller amounts of timber from regular thinning, a local forestry company could be established to process the wood and use it to build everything from houses to tables, creating jobs in the village.
At the end of March 2022, Phipps stood up in front of the people of Treherbert again to share the forest resource plan. The community assembled nervously to hear how much from the co-production process had been included. In his speech, Phipps promised felling would be done differently. Instead of cutting down forests covering whole sides of the valleys, Natural Resources Wales would work in blocks over the course of a decade, so the community always had some forest to use.
Phipps said the plan was to work more closely with communities in the future. “I want to reduce conflict,” he said. “To make sure the community doesn’t feel ignored and Natural Resources Wales doesn’t feel attacked, by working together.” It sounded so good. Thinning not clear felling. Working in partnership. But the community had heard it all before. The people in Treherbert needed more than a plan. They needed to see that partnership in action. The next few years would be crucial.
Two years later, Thomas and Blake take a trip up the side of the valley, past culverts carved neatly into the side of the road, and cubes of rocks in mesh put in place to stop landslides and flash floods. At the top of the valley, they get out of the car. They are standing on one of the 12 coal tips that surround Treherbert, a manmade mountain that never existed before the mines.
The settlements run down the centre of the valley, alongside the River Rhondda, conjoined like the beads on a necklace: Treherbert, Treorchy, Pentre. From here, it’s possible to see where the Pentre flood started, just below the square tower of a church. No one could have expected a place like that to flood. It was too high up the valley, too far from the river. But flash flooding and trapped brash nonetheless conspired against the people of Pentre that day.
Thomas can just about pick out the fire pit first established by Welcome to Our Woods. The forest around it is gone, clear felled as part of the compromise the community made with the authorities. One day, in early 2024, the machines arrived: gigantic trucks and chippers bearing the branding of a nearby biomass plant. Within a day, the timber had been driven off to be incinerated to make electricity.
Over the other side of the valley, they can see the timber roundhouse that has been constructed by Down to Earth, a social enterprise offering healthcare and education programmes through sustainable construction to excluded communities. Their work ranges from this beautiful, open meeting place, to whole developments of sustainable timber housing, residential accommodation and public buildings in Wales.
The roundhouse is symbolic. It’s the first structure to be built from Rhondda larch for many years, proof that Natural Resources Wales can do more with the wood in these forests than chip it and burn it as fuel. Thomas has grand plans for the little wood they have acquired from felling. Steps from the roundhouse, safely stowed in a metal shed, is a small green tractor. Thomas dreams of the day it will be hauling logs at a brand new Welcome to Our Woods timber processing plant. One day, not so long from now, the roundhouse will be the entrance to the Cwm Saerbren nature reserve: a permanent place for residents and tourists to celebrate the natural history of this part of the forest.
On the high street, the old library has become the headquarters for Welcome to Our Woods, where the organisers are working with Black Mountains college, a local interdisciplinary education institution started by the writer Ben Rawlence, to offer courses about wellbeing in nature, coppicing and green wood trades: skills to equip local people for the planetary emergency. They are planning to run their courses in an old grammar school just off the high street, opening up another of Treherbert’s vacant buildings. Right next to the old library, the village pub serves as a reminder of what can happen if these buildings are left empty. A year after its owners sold up, a police bust found cannabis plants in black tubs, state-of-the-art ventilation equipment, UV lights and piles of compost bags.
The true economic right to manage the land eludes the people of the valleys. This is still public land. Only a forest croft of the kind they visited in Scotland gives them the right to profit from the timber. But the project proves that there are other ways to give communities the control they need to deliver benefits for people and for nature in the long term.
Treherbert will go down in history as the first Welsh village to secure an agreement with the government to stand shoulder to shoulder on decisions about how to manage its land. It’s a blueprint for a different kind of stewardship. A first for Wales, and a signpost to other post-industrial communities across the world.
Frontierlands: Britain’s Survival in the Making by Hazel Sheffield is published by Torva, £20