Sunday at Bill's Mother's: 1st February 2026
Ash questions and woodland wisdom. Rings of power. Foggy bog jog.
Morning. And hello to the dozens of new subscribers who’ve arrived after yesterday’s inspiring post from our friends at the Sheffield Tribune, following our own stories about the colossal value of wild space volunteering to the Outdoor City.
I’m hoping to have more about how to support (or join) the hundreds of organisations looking after our parks, woodlands, moors and riversides this year, so please spread the word.
(If you’d like to know more straight away, all 279 posts of our teeming archive are available to our full supporters, who’ve joined this unique social enterprise publication for the monthly cost of a Millhouses flat white.)
Today we have a feature on our spreading woodlands, with news of a million new trees in the Peak District, and how some Ash trees may be resisting the dieback disease that was forecast a few years ago to devastate the White Peak as we know it.
We have up close and personal news from Sheffield’s east side birds, and a survivors account of the Tigger Tor fell race, with amazing photos from Rosie Burgess, Des Ryan and Jessica Gardner.
Ash Fightback
Common Ash woodlands in summer are shimmery and idyllic, with waving grass and wildflowers and buzzing insects, and a pale green feeling of all’s right with the world.
Six years ago, I stood with a National Trust ranger team looking out at thousands of Ash trees that were still blanketing the slopes of Dovedale. The foresters calmly told me about ‘a period of ecological collapse.’
After finding that Ash Dieback disease had reached every one of the charity’s White Peak woodlands, the National Trust had calculated that 85% of the Ash trees in Dovedale, Miller’s Dale, Taddington, the Manifold Valley (and along scores of roadsides) could die over the next few years: around 250,000 trees in total.
Then while we were sheltering from Covid, those trees took another hit. The dry spring weather and late frosts of 2020 weakened them and accelerated the damage from the Ash Dieback fungus, which had originated in east Asia, where native ash species co-evolved with the fungus and can survive its attacks.
Imported on infected trees into Europe in the 1990s, the spread of Ash Dieback was exacerbated by moving trees around the world for commercial reasons, often to grow on in a country of cheaper labour.
After arriving in the UK just over twenty years ago, Ash Dieback has spread across the country via wind blown spores or infected plants, and led to the felling of thousands of Ash trees across Sheffield and the Peak District.
Ashes have dominated the White Peak because they thrive on limestone. But like all human landscapes, threatened Ash woodlands in the Peak District are not as natural as we might think.
Ranger Luke Barley told me in 2018 that Ash is a ‘pioneer’ species, whose seedlings “grow like cress in cleared and open ground.” The predominance of Ash in the White Peak is actually the result of centuries of woodland clearances to make room for farming, quarrying and mining.
In a few months, take a look in any woodland with Ash trees, and the dozens of spindly saplings springing up alongside the paths are young Ash fighting to make their way into the light. So after farmers and mine owners in the Peak District’s limestone dales cleared their land of slower growing trees, the pioneer Ash took over the patches not used for their businesses like lighting, and became the White Peak woodlands we’ve known for generations. Without human interference, there’d be lots of other trees there too.
Luke is now the National Trust’s Senior Trees and Woodland Adviser, based in Sheffield where you might see him in his weatherbeaten winterwear, taking his kids to play in Sheffield’s treescapes.
Woodland specialists have been watching the spread of Ash Dieback, and Luke now sounds just a little more hopeful. The catastrophic decline of 2020/21 has not continued at the same rate, he says. There are bigger, older trees in the landscape that seem to be resisting the disease, but others are still dying. Ash is one of our most genetically variable tree species, he explains, and one of our most prolific for seed and sapling generation.
“We are definitely still seeing huge groves of saplings in our Ash woods, many of which die, but some of which survive. So I think anecdotally we can say the process of developing resistance in the population is happening.”
Meanwhile, agencies like the National Trust and Natural England have planted more than 84,000 native trees in the White Peak, including Wych Elm, limes, willows, Alder, Yew and Aspen that should naturally be there among the Ash dominated woodlands created by business folk hundreds of years ago.
When the Ash woodlands collapse, these trees might give the wildlife of the limestone dales a fighting chance - that was the thinking at the launch of the Life in the Ravines tree-planting project (funded by the EU), soon after Ash Dieback was first recorded in the pre-Brexit White Peak.
Now, in addition to those limes and Wych Elms making a home in the Derbyshire dales, the developing resistance of Ash is welcome news, Luke says, but the disease is still killing lots of Ash trees.
“In 2020 it seemed trees were dying much quicker than anticipated. Now we’re thinking these changes are going to be quite slow, but they definitely are real, and happening on a very human time scale.” Trees and woodlands usually change their ways over centuries rather than years.
Luke says the combined impact of recent heat and drought has probably been worse for our trees than years like 1976: “Which everyone always talks about as being the worst year ever.”
The severe drought of 1976 made the cambium (living tissue beneath the bark of some trees), dysfunctional because it dried out, he says. “You didn’t notice that immediately, but over the years, that dead cambium was colonised by fungi that led to big cavities in some old trees. So we don’t know what the longer term impacts of a drought year like this one will be, never mind the cumulative impact of two or three of the driest years on record. So it’s worrying, if I’m honest.”
You have to remember the complexity of woodlands, tree folk tell me.
Sheffield Council is now rewriting its woodland strategy (published in 2018) due to the effects of disease and climate since those distant times eight years ago. We need to recognise that a woodland is everything from the soil under the trees to the air above the top of the canopy, I was told by one municipal woodlander.
Dying Ash trees that might cause danger to people are still being felled, and the effects of extreme weather will be monitored to learn which trees might be most resilient in future years.
Our urban forest is an important asset, but the effects of all those urbanite visitors have to be addressed too. And given we have around 80 ancient woodlands, natural regeneration using seeds already here is probably more valuable than media friendly tree planting targets, as we’ve covered before.
Nevertheless, Luke tells me the National Trust is increasing its woodlands in the Peak District by planting a million new native trees over the next ten years.
I’ll have more on all this in future posts, of course, but it’s worth knowing that the value of trees and woodlands is now quantified against carbon storage, flood resilience and human health, so we’re going to see a lot more trees and woodlands in the Peak District and Yorkshire in the next few years.
Are we still expecting a period of ecological collapse in the White Peak woodlands?
Maybe tree planting and thousands of evolving Ash saplings have slowed it down. Maybe we’ve contained it. Or maybe we’re changing those shimmering relics of long ago farming and quarrying clearances into something older and darker and more resilient. Time will tell.
More from Luke Barley soon - his book Ancient, about his own experience of the past and future of our country’s woodlands, is published in March.
Rings of Power
A Wood Pigeon weighs half a kilogram. Enough to bake into a traditional pie with bramble gravy. As Europe’s smallest bird, however, a Goldcrest weighs around six grammes. The best way to appreciate the contrast is to see someone hold them in their hand.
The Shire Brook Valley Species Survival Fund project hosted a Community Bird Day yesterday, with bird ringing demos by Sorby Breck Ringing Group, a bird walk with the RSPB’s Pete Brown and talks by Sheffield Swift Network and the British Trust for Ornithology.
“The Goldcrest drew everybody in because not many people had seen one before, and they were captivated by how small the bird was,” said Mehgan Tipping, our Beginner Birder columnist.
Over 100 people took part, learning about the varied birds making a living on the former industrial site. Seeing a bird up close makes all the difference, especially for children, said Helen Twigg from the Shire Brook Valley Conservation Group.
“As common as they are, you see a Blue Tint or Great Tit all the time. But to actually hold one in your hand, even for just a couple of seconds and then release it, it’s just lovely.”
Fellow volunteer Christine Handley from the Shire Brook Heritage Group hoped visitors learned the scientific value of bird ringing.
“Ringing can show us about a bird’s incredible journeys. That tiny Goldcrest might have flown here across the North Sea from Scandinavia,” she said.
If you had fun at the RSPB annual Garden Birdwatch event last month, the BTO have run a year round Garden Birdwatch citizen science project for over 30 years. Join in at: https://www.bto.org/get-involved/volunteer/projects/gbw
Watch for more wildlife events at Shire Brook, as the Species Survival project is now continuing up to the summer.
Fog Jog
Burbage Brook: it sounds so picturesque and tranquil. Not so much in a wet January.
After locating two yellow jacketed marshalls and slithering down a laughable moorland path, we asked the one at the bottom where people had been crossing. “Pretty much anywhere really,” he shrugged.
Risk injury by trying to leap across, or get frozen and wet for the next hour? We waded over the swirling peat cauldron of Burbage Brook, adrenaline warming my legs for a few seconds, then followed the next theoretical path, across the flattened reeds of a swamp.
This was my recreational post publication Sunday last week: I’d always wanted to navigate the notorious Tigger Tor fell race, and why should fog, cold and the ≤ 100 yards visibility challenge for a map reading idiot stop me? (“Some of the worst conditions we’ve had,” said organiser Tom Ricketts from Totley Athletic Club).
The run was launched 42 years ago by Totley AC member and Sheffield Tigers Rugby Club player Don Longley, originally starting at the Tigers club house, until traffic danger moved the start uphill to the Fox House.
“Just follow the people in front,” I was told by Tigger veterans in the days before. Unfortunately nearly all the people in front cantered away into the mist after we passed the first few checkpoints on Houndkirk Moor, so we trudged out onto a never-ending sheep track over Burbage with only a few grey silhouettes ahead.
“We’re trying to make it a classic fell race within our local area,” said Tom. “A proper navigational fell race, with the day determined by the conditions.” Safety of runners and marshalls are higher priorities than the competition, he said, adding that the fell racing tradition expects runners to be adults responsible for their own safety.
Nevertheless, he had 41 helpers last Sunday, with most of them static marshalls happy and willing to “give up their Sunday morning to stand in the freezing cold to help the event go ahead,” he said.
“It’s always positive when the runners acknowledge that to the people on top of Higger Tor or Burbage where you’re coming out of the mist, and there’s someone who’s been stood there for an hour and a half.” Some of us really meant it when we gasped our thanks, as it meant we weren’t lost forever.
The mist opened and closed and seeped into my bones. But I was assisted by my stalwart Scottish son-in law, chatting in his I laugh at the weather shorts, so I kept going. We lost our way a few times on the myriad pathways of Sheffield’s moorlands, (“Interesting route choices” observed a mate who finished hours earlier on social media), and were eventually rounded up by the sweepers, who seemed to be discussing their holidays as I struggled to keep moving through the mist and murk.
Virtually all the run is within the Sheffield boundary, said Tom, including all those crags and interminable foggy moorland. “I think it’s a great advert for sheffield as an outdoor city,” he said.
The Tigger Tor is one of those ridiculous type two fun kind of things that make Sheffield what it is. Dozens of people put themselves out into the freezing winter fog, in the middle of nowhere, to help a few hundred mad runners take on the challenge to overcome the landscape of their city in the worst conditions.
Some try and do it as fast as they can: “An hour and seven minutes,” said Tom of the winning racer last week. “Phenomenal!” And some just try and do it, to head out into the wilds in terrible weather, on purpose, and survive.
More What’s On Out There (from Sunday 1st February)
A tiny selection from our new (and regularly updated) What’s On Out There news and listings post for January. (Full post is for full members, preview for all).
Sun 1st - Garden Birdwatch and children’s crafts at Sheffield General Cemetery (£6.50)
Mon 2nd - SRWT Volunteering - Crabtree Ponds
Tues 3rd - Friends of Ecclesall Woods volunteer & footpath repair session
Weds 4th - Sheffield Ramblers Walk - Grenoside (10m)
Thurs 5th - SRWT Volunteering - Moss Valley Woodlands
Fri 6th - SRWT Winter Wild Wellbeing at Shirecliffe
Sat 7th - Whirlow Brook Park volunteer morning
If you’ve enjoyed this post, please forward it to everyone else who might like it. We have thousands of readers already, but the more we have, the more we can do.
And if you’ve been subscribing (or just reading) for a few weeks: our subs are at pocket money prices so pretty much anyone can support real local out there journalism. Helping us cover the costs of this publication will set you back less than the price of a pint of beer a month. You get access to every post we ever publish, and you’ll be blowing a locally grown raspberry at the anti-social media billionaires.
Thanks for reading.
Thanks David. A really interesting read as usual.
Another corking issue - thanks to all. Lovely to hear about the complexity of woodland wellbeing and what's happening with the ash trees. It's a slim hope isn't it, but makes me think that we can't give up on the efforts to help our landscapes recover as best we can. I could read about birds until the cows come home so really enjoying Meghan's stories. Also can't stop chortling at the report of the Tigger Tor race. Salutations and deep admiration to all who took part. Already looking forward to next Sunday's issue!