There is an oak in Sussex that was old when the Tudors were new. It has outlived monarchs, plagues, wars, agricultural revolutions and the entire concept of planning permission. It has stood through centuries in which the surrounding land was enclosed, ploughed, fenced, sold, resold and re-imagined. It has measured time not in deadlines but in seasons, not in targets but in generations.
And yet today, trees like this are asked to justify their existence against a spreadsheet.
Ancient woodland, by definition, is land that has been continuously wooded since at least 1600. That cut-off exists for a reason: before then, planting records were scarce, but ecology was slow. Over centuries, complex fungal networks formed beneath the soil. Insects evolved to depend on the cavities of old trees. Birds nested, bats roosted, rare lichens colonised bark that had taken hundreds of years to crack just so.
Once lost, that complexity cannot be recreated. Not in ten years. Not in a lifetime. Not even in several.
Sussex still holds fragments of this deep time. Veteran oaks scattered across estates, fields and parkland. Ancient woodland clinging to the Low Weald and the Downs. Some of it formally mapped. Some of it still not – which should give us pause. Because if we don’t know precisely what we have, we are already deciding faster than we understand.
Officially, ancient woodland covers less than three per cent of England. That small figure carries an uncomfortable implication: most of what once existed has already gone, removed incrementally, legally, sensibly, one “necessary” decision at a time. Housing here, a road improvement there, a quarry extension, a strategic development justified by “local need”.
Ancient woodland and veteran trees
Planning policy does recognise the importance of ancient woodland and veteran trees. They are meant to be a material consideration. Harm should be avoided. If unavoidable, it should be minimised. Compensation is a last resort.
In practice, however, compensation often arrives quickly, cleanly and photogenically. A line of saplings. A press release. A promise that biodiversity will be “net positive” in time.
Time, though, is the very thing ancient trees deal in – while modern decision-making does not.
A sapling does not replace an oak that has spent centuries hollowing itself into a cathedral for insects and fungi. A newly planted wood does not recreate soil that has never known the blade of a plough. These things are not equivalent, no matter how tidy the charts.
And yet our planning system is under relentless pressure to act at speed. Councils are pushed by housing targets. Politicians operate within short electoral cycles. Developers work to quarterly financial reporting. Decisions must be made now, because demand exists now, because delay is framed as failure.
Titnore Wood, near Worthing
In Sussex this tension is familiar. Titnore Wood, near Worthing, became a cause célèbre nearly two decades ago – ancient woodland set against the need for urban expansion. Protest camps came and went, plans were revised, compromises made. The wood survived, but the episode exposed something deeper: we have no settled answer to how much of our past we are willing to trade for our future, or how quickly.
Projects like the Lost Woods initiative now work to identify ancient and veteran trees precisely because so many remain undocumented. That, in itself, is telling. We are making irreversible decisions while still discovering what exists. It is rather like auctioning the contents of a house while opening drawers for the first time.
There is also a cultural cost that rarely features in planning reports. Ancient trees are not merely biological assets. They are landmarks of memory. They pre-date parishes, counties, sometimes even written place-names. They watched villages form around them, then expand away from them. When they go, something unquantifiable goes too: a quiet sense of continuity, of belonging to a story longer than ourselves.
This is not an argument against building homes, or against planning, or against change. Sussex, like everywhere else, needs places for people to live. It is an argument against pretending that all losses are equal, reversible, or neatly offset elsewhere.
When decisions are made faster than consequences can surface, responsibility dissolves. The councillor who approves a development will be long retired by the time the ecological absence becomes undeniable. The planning officer will have moved on. The developer will have delivered, sold, and closed the file.
The oak, meanwhile, would have needed another two centuries simply to become what it already was.
There is something faintly absurd about applying HS2-style logic – speed, efficiency, future capacity – at a much smaller scale, without acknowledging that nature does not operate on infrastructure timetables. You can accelerate concrete. You cannot accelerate ancient woodland.
A fair exchange
Perhaps the quiet scandal is not that ancient trees are lost, but that their loss feels administrative. A box ticked. A condition discharged. A mitigation strategy approved. The tone is calm, reasonable, professional – which makes the outcome feel inevitable rather than chosen.
Oaks measure time in generations. Humans now measure it in quarters. The mismatch is not malicious, just structural. But structures shape outcomes.
If we continue to decide at modern speed about things that exist on ancient timescales, the result will not be dramatic collapse. It will be something subtler: a landscape that looks fine, functions adequately, but remembers less and less.
And one day, perhaps, someone will stand beside a newly planted tree, consult a plaque, and read that it was planted “to compensate” for something that once stood there for a thousand years – and wonder when exactly we decided that was a fair exchange.
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