Discover North-East nature at home by revisiting your favourite Natural History Talks, delivered by local environmental experts.
You can watch previous talks on Roseate terns, bumblebees and misbehaving plants elsewhere on this blog.
This week, we’re thrilled to share a popular talk by archaeologist and landscape historian, Max Adams, whose research is helping to show how patterns of ancient woodland can help to illuminate the forgotten evolution of a landscape.
Max is an archaeologist and a historian of trees and landscape. He is the author of The King in the North, The Wisdom of Trees, Aelfred’s Britain and Unquiet Women. He lives and works in the Derwent valley of County Durham and is a Visiting Fellow at Newcastle University.
Cocwudu: ancient woodlands in Northumberland
There is ‘something funny’ going on between the Coquet and the Wansbeck, according to Professor Brian Roberts. In 2015 the Bernician Studies Group took up Brian Roberts’s challenge and began to investigate, through woodland visits and through map, place name and charter analysis. Teams of botanists, tree historians and scholars of Early Medieval land holdings – particularly those of the Lindisfarne community of St Cuthbert – are revealing how patterns of ancient woodland can help to illuminate the forgotten evolution of a landscape and a lost frontier, hiding in plain view.