A new dawn for Newborough Forest?

I've no doubt that the Countryside Council for Wales (CCW) will be heaving a sigh of relief today. Three years ago they contacted residents in the village of Newborough on Anglesey, North Wales, to tell them that a large slice of Newborough Forest was being felled, and would not be replanted. Something to do with the EU, and sand dunes drying out, and...

But most readers didn't get that far. They read tree-felling. They read threat to red squirrels and the largest raven colony in Europe. They read a place they enjoy for recreation, sharing it with over 100,000 visitors a year, being reduced to a windswept land of sand and scrub. The acrimony was all over the press within days, and the CCW realised it had underestimated the impact of its proposals.

Three years and a long consultation process later, at a meeting of the Newborough Liaison Partnership on November 27, a draft plan for the forest's short-to-mid-term future was effectively approved. I was among those at the meeting who saw a pretty slick video featuring a voiceover from the rather ubiquitous Iolo Williams. The more cynical might see this as a final public relations push to get the locals onside. Personally, I think it's a measure of the effort from many people behind the scenes who want to get this right. It all still needs rubber-stamping in January, when the same residents who read the CCW letter in horror will finally see the plan for themselves (and hear from Iolo in the video, no doubt) in local exhibitions. After that, and with a bit of fine tuning, the forest can be managed once more. Hence the relief around the CCW offices today.

The Newborough Forest story is a relatively recent one, but no less interesting for that. For a start, it's completely man-made. Its modest size of 600 hectares really should be made up of windswept sand and grasses and scrub, a feature that makes up a large part of the geology along this Anglesey coastline, from Abermenai Point (the southern gateway to the Menai Strait) to Aberffraw further west. But after the 1940s, when sand blowing into the village threatened a repeat of an event recorded from the 14th century, when dunes all but obliterated Newborough, the Forestry Commission planted Corsican and Scots pine trees to create a barrier.

Now, the EU wants the dunes back. They may not be the most visually appealing of landscapes, and they're even harder to walk on, but dunes are an important habitat and need protecting. Specifically, the hollows between dunes, where ponds sometimes form, are wildlife utopias that need our help to stop them drying out.

Trees need to come down to enable the water table to rise, creating ponds. The science on this is not proven, or it is proven but not predictable, or it is proven and it won't have any effect. It depends on who or what you want to believe. And mention of climate change and coastal flooding just has everyone shrugging their shoulders.

In any event, some trees will come down, to protect the dunes, but enough will stay up so Newborough village doesn't disappear under sand. Some new trees will be planted that aren't as thirsty as the Corsican pine. It's a balancing act for Forestry Commission Wales (FCW), who undertake the forest management and have led the consultation process. Given the positive outcome of the latest meeting, it appears it's a balancing act they've pulled off.

More than that: By underestimating the feeling initially, CCW and now FCW have done users of the forest a huge favour. They've brought us together. Through the consultation process they've revealed how the forest means different things for so many different people. They've revealed a collective passion and an energy that, in isolation, most of us probably knew never existed. Even the FCW, which carries out consultations on many of its projects, has admitted it has never created a management plan based on such detailed public debate before. Like us, I suspect they've learned a few things.

So the future of Newborough Forest starts here. It seemed like an opportune moment to start this blog. It may not be frequently updated, but I thought it would be useful to record the early progress of what are, in my opinion, modest changes to the make-up of the forest. I intend to sign up for a volunteer scheme, perhaps to become an early custodian of the forest. What I see, hear and do might make an interesting diary.

Why the interest for me? Well, we all have our special places. These are places, usually near where we live, that we like to tell people about. When family and friends visit, we take them there with a certain sense of pride. We say, without actually saying it, "This is part of me. There's nowhere else like this, in the same way that there is no-one else like me." Newborough Forest is part of my special place. It's a forest, two wide beaches, a rocky island with coves, a warren of dunes, and a backdrop of sea and mountains. Man-made Newborough Forest may be, but I for one believe it fits here. It completes a blend of natural elements that exercises all the senses and stirs every emotion. No other place thrills me in such a way.

In the meantime, as far as this blog goes, what will intrigue me more than the actual felling and replanting of trees is what locals and other interest groups (like the red squirrel project) will make of the forest following this lengthy consultation. Will they value it any more? Will they make more of it, perhaps through developments like mountain bike trails and a visitor centre? Can the passion and energy that's been shown so far, by so many interested parties, be carried forward now that we know how the forest will be maintained for the next 25 years?

I hope so, for otherwise it will feel like a wonderful opportunity wasted.