Postcard from . . . Kielder Forest

When we go for a walk in the forest, we don’t think of it as a tree factory,” the artist Anya Gallaccio, who works a lot with trees, told me this year. “We think we’re in wilderness, but we’re not.”

It was a thought that haunted me as I trekked through the dense woodland of Kielder Forest in Northumberland to a rocky outcrop known as Cat Cairn. It is the site of a Skyspace, one of more than 80 created worldwide by the American artist James Turrell. This one is partially subterranean, a circular room, clad in local stone and entered through a tunnel, from which one is invited to contemplate the ever-changing sky through a central oculus.

It stands surrounded by a sylvan landscape — mostly Sitka spruce but also Scots pine and Douglas fir — through whose canopy dappled sunlight falls on a hummocky forest floor, traversed by sparkling streams. It is a glorious scene: English landscape at its loveliest. Yet it is as much a construct as the Skyspace.

Kielder is the largest forest in England, stretching across 600 sq km just north of Hadrian’s Wall. It was established in 1926 as a national timber reserve, not least to supply pit props to the mining industry. Over the century the forest grew (it is now the largest area of man-made woodland in northern Europe), and in 1975 construction began on Kielder Water, a reservoir more than 9km long, sufficiently ragged in form to seem as though it was created by glaciers and erosion rather than bulldozers. Its raison d’être was also industrial: to supply the steel and chemical industries in Teesside, but with their decline, so it became redundant.

Since then its purpose has been to bring tourists to the area. Some come for water sports, and hiking and mountain biking around the water’s edge, others for the growing body of contemporary art installations — 23 at the last count. I loved Nick Coombe and Shona Kitchen’s discombobulating maze, Minotaur, built of local black whinstone and lumps of recycled glass that glitter in sunlight. And Tania Kovats’ giant 3D renderings of the Ordnance Survey viewpoint symbol, strategically positioned to focus on different aspects of the water. Ryder Architecture’s Janus Chairs (pictured) are giant seats that swivel to allow you to take in the view; Chris Drury’s Wave Chamber is a drystone “beehive” containing a camera obscura that projects the lake’s surface on to its floor and echoes to the sound of the waves.

A dozen of the installations are linked by a trail around the reservoir’s periphery. In all it is 42km long, so the obvious way to explore it is by bike (electric ones are available for those in need of a helping hand). To appreciate the trees and the wildlife, though, it’s better to walk. Amid the verdure as we strode to the Skyspace, we saw several of the roe deer that thrive here, but not the ospreys or red squirrels that have been successfully introduced. (Though there were skinned grey ones on the butcher’s stall in nearby Hexham’s market, alongside a note bearing the warning: “May contain nuts”.)

The next proposal in the project to “rewild” Kielder, and which was put to the people of Kielder village last month, is to bring in 10 or so Eurasian lynx, a powerful wild cat, weighing as much as 30kg. They died out in Britain about 1,300 years ago, probably hunted to extinction for their pelts.

Not surprisingly the farming community is set against it and at first, my instinct was to side with them — livestock farming is a hard enough hereabouts without a new predator to contend with. But the more I learnt, the more I saw merit in the idea thanks to an ecological process known as a trophic cascade. It’s explained in a widely viewed short film on YouTube, How Wolves Change Rivers, based on a Ted talk by environmentalist George Monbiot, about the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1995. The arrival of wolves altered deer behaviour, causing them to avoid parts of the park where they could be easily hunted. This enabled the vegetation to regenerate, encouraging the return of other species. In just six years, some trees quintupled in height, drawing migratory birds, as well as bald eagles and hawks, which fed on resurgent populations of rodents and rabbits. The trees’ revived root systems in turn stabilised river banks, which became more fixed in their course, encouraging the return of fish, beavers and otters.

The Lynx UK Trust, the charity behind the initiative, hopes that something similar, albeit on a smaller scale, may be effected here. For a place that started life as a plantation, parts of Kielder Forest already have the air of a wilderness. Thanks to a few lynx and the eternal mutability of nature, it may, by its centenary, seem wilder still.

Details

For curator-led walks around Kielder Water see kielderartandarchitecture.com. For general information go to visitkielder.com. Details of the lynx programme are at lynxuk.org. Book rental bikes at The Bike Place (thebikeplace.co.uk)

Illustration by Matthew Cook