Around 8,400 hectares of Exmoor, or about 12% of the National Park, are wooded. About a quarter of the wooded area is “ancient semi natural woodland” generally the most important areas for wildlife.
These sites are known to have been under continuous tree cover for at least 200 years (when the earliest reliable maps were produced). But many are likely to be much older and may date back for hundreds evens thousands of years.
A great variety of plants are found in woods as old as this. Some, like the woods belonging to the National Trust at Horner and at Watersmeet, are specially protected as SSSIs. These woods feel old with gnarled trees festooned with ferns, mosses and lichens. Lichens grow where the air is really clear and there are more than 240 different species in woods around Dunkery. The main trees are sessile oak, ash and hazel. The oak used to be coppiced (cut down to allow plenty of new growth) to produce bark for tanning leather and timber for charcoal burning and boat building. The hazel was coppiced to produce spars for thatching and struts for making hurdles.
One of the main threats to Exmoor’s woodlands
is the spread of Rhododendron ponticum,
an alien invasion plant which quickly takes
over woodland habitats.
Fallow deer and roe deer live in the woods together with grey squirrels, hedgehogs and dormice. Red deer may shelter there. Woodpeckers, tree-creepers and nuthatches all nest in holes in trees; wood warblers and pied flycatchers feed on insects in the oak canopy. Butterflies are numerous and often colonies of wood ants can be found living in scattered mounds of twigs and leaf litter.
Trees don't normally thrive on coasts - too much salt and wind in the air - but Exmoor, of course, is different! The Exmoor coast is the most thickly wooded in Britain, especially the stretch between Porlock and Foreland Point with its wonderful ancient oak woodlands.
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