HS2 moving ancient woodland habitat for rail line is a ‘fundamentally flawed idea’

Owners of an ancient piece of land and ecologists have reacted with fury to the news that an ancient woodland in Warwickshire is to be chopped down to make way for HS2. National ecologists have stated that chopping down ancient woodland is a fundamentally flawed idea and is without any strong evidence.

The owners of the ancient woodland in Cubbington, Warwickshire are set to lose their 3.7acres of trees. The owners are warning the area means ‘everything,’ to the community, with the land often a site where families scatter people’s ashes. 

Bosses at HS2 have refuted the accusation that the woodland is being destroyed because they say that the soil is translocated to other spots one of which being a neighbouring field.  Sam Whittall who is an ecologist working on the HS2 project has said: ‘We are aiming to create the same habitat… the idea is to move that habitat from A to B’. 

However, the Wildlife Trust has raised concerns with this plan. The Wildlife Trust’s website says: ‘It is impossible to re-create ancient woodland, as it is the soil structure and ecosystems that have built up over hundreds of years that make them so unique. Therefore generally, The Wildlife Trusts view translocation as the absolute last option’. 

David Coomes who is a professor of forest ecology and conservation at the University of Cambridge has slammed the move and has said it ‘is like tearing up a Turner masterpiece and tossing little bits of it in to a new art installation and hoping people don’t notice the difference. There are complicated networks and they take a long time to come together – hundreds of years – particularly the three-dimensional structure of the forest, the trees which have hollows for bats, the homes for lots of different fungi and lots of different insects’.