Not much happens in the sleepy town of Colaton Raleigh, where almost half the residents are retired. So local hikers were horrified when they awoke one morning to an act of “environmental vandalism” that left behind the mangled stumps of 100 ancient beech trees.
Residents in the east Devon community mourns the loss of the beloved trees, which were located in a special conservation area and site of special scientific interest, home to many local plants and animals, after they were felled by a government agency without consulting the community or council.
An application was made by a local landowner to the Forestry Commission, a branch of the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It would not comment on individual cases, but said all decisions were consistent with its standards.
Alan Pearce, a tree ranger for the area, said: “It should certainly be a fairly wide consultation because it’s part of our heritage, overgrown hedgerows going back hundreds of years. Once they’re gone, you’re talking about 200 year to regrow. The logs almost all look perfectly healthy and solid. I don’t see them being able to tell they were sick or dying. We are meant to plant trees, not cut them down.”
He said people were “absolutely shocked”, with one walker in tears at the decision, which he suggested may have been taken to improve grazing in the adjacent field.
Fiona Carroll, another resident, said: “A lot of people walk in this area as it is part of a large moorland and they are at a loss as to why this was allowed to happen. It was, in my opinion, valuable landscape- and game trees which were situated along an extensive old Devon bank. The roots have grown into large supporting structures which give many a distinctive appearance. My current impression is that this destruction is nothing less than an act of environmental vandalism.”
Ewan Macdonald, who researches how people engage with the environment at the University of Oxford, said he was not surprised that the felling had provoked such an emotional response because of the way people connect with trees.
“It highlights how intrinsically things like trees, the environment and conservation are connected to our culture,” he said. “The value of trees becomes important with age, so I can see why it is upsetting to remove them. It’s a natural thing that people form an attachment to things with which they can personalize or build a relationship.”
He added: “I do think it is always important to involve the local community in any decision made about conservation. That’s not to say that the Forestry Commission didn’t have good reasons for removing the trees, but communicating those reasons to people and making sure the community feels involved and brought in, that’s an important thing. It shows that it is difficult for anyone to own nature wholeheartedly.”
The beech tree is not the first to draw ire. Most recently is the felling of 40 palm trees in Torquay in Devon which featured in the 1970s sitcom Fawlty Towers prompted accusations that the council was wreaking “total destruction” on the seafront.
This followed a similar controversy when 110 trees were removed under cover of darkness in March 2023 in Plymouth as part of the redesign of the city’s Armada Way, which eventually led to the resignation of the council’s Conservative leader.
And in 2016, five people were arrested in a bitter dispute with the council over tree felling in an affluent Sheffield suburb. Nick Clegg, the constituency’s MP at the time, described the incident as “something you’d expect to see in Putin’s Russia, rather than a Sheffield suburb”.
