Non-native species, such as Sitka spruce and lodgepole pine, used to be preferred for their qualities as a timber crop. Trees were planted in “flats” (areas of several acres) at a time, “and they planted them in straight lines, so they were easier to harvest.” All of this resulted in a forest that was “genetically very undiverse and a really bad habitat for wildlife,” Astley explains, with trees of a uniform height blocking light from the forest floor, preventing other species from thriving.
If this plantation-style forest was bad for biodiversity, Astley and his co-founders quickly realised it was also bad for their business. “It’s two things that don’t get along, commercial forestry and a mountain bike park,” he says. The mountain bike trails – narrow strips of land rarely more than a metre wide – don’t cover much actual surface area. “In percentage terms, we’re probably using 1.5 per cent of the site,” Astley explains. But the longer trails meander for 5 kilometres round trip through the forest, so they require a lot of space.
“If you cut down one group of trees, you might have to close 10 trails for six months, and the impact on our business would be huge,” says Astley. In the 11 years the bike park was in operation, he says, NRW had managed to avoid cutting down any groups of trees in the “core zone” of Gethin Forest, the 120-hectare area where its current trails are located. “But we got to a point where NRW said, ‘We can’t allow you to build any more trails up the hill because that makes it harder and harder for us to harvest timber. ’” It was clear that something had to change. And rewilding – actively helping the forest around the trails return to its pre-plantation state – seemed an ideal solution.
Astley, a zoology graduate, has always had an “ecological mindset,” he says. “Morally, I think business has a role to play in the fight we’re fighting against climate change and biodiversity loss and so on.” At the same time, he and his partners realised that a mixed forest made up of native species would be more resilient to a whole range of threats that could jeopardise the park’s future.
“Before we started our work here to build the trails, in 2013, there was a large outbreak of a disease called Phytophthora ramorum“It infected larch across the UK,” he explains. “There was a lot of larch here, maybe 30 per cent, and thankfully NRW’s predecessor cleared it all out just before we opened, because they knew we couldn’t occupy a site with all these dangerous dead trees,” he says. But similar businesses haven’t always been so lucky. “Revolution Bike Park in mid Wales has just closed for over a year because their hill became filled with dead trees.” Phytophthora ramorum“Astley says. “They had to cut down the whole hill.”
As well as being more vulnerable to disease outbreaks, single-species forests, with trees arranged in straight lines, are also less resilient to wildfires, Astley explains. “Last July there was a big fire at the back of our hill and the wind was pushing it towards us,” he says. “For about a week our path up was covered in smoke and firefighters were dropping water from helicopters to try to put it out. It was really scary.” The more they thought about it, Astley says, the more he and his partners realised that reintroducing wild species made sense, both from a business and environmental perspective. Compared with the current monoculture, a natural forest would be “much more resilient in every way,” he says. “We realised there was an opportunity to try and win on two fronts.”