Category: Biodiversity

Cilfái: The Importance of our History.

Who owns history?

Last Saturday, I talked about the history of Cilfái as part of our National Local History Month celebrations.

I had a packed room in the Central Library, not to see me… but to listen to the topic. Concern over losing our history and heritage is mounting as more threats from local Council plans get closer. I knew many of the audience, some of my old colleagues, heritage and environmental workers, and my past history teachers. There were a lot of local people as well who made an effort to come and sit in a warm teaching room on one of the hottest days of the year.

The combined years of experience in the room were amazing. People who had worked on the hill researched and cared for it, and a newer generation is taking on the challenge of future care. There was an unbroken chain of partnerships and friendships dating back to the pioneer historians Clarence Seyler and George Grant Francis.

The talk and the questions session afterwards led me to reflect on the history I was talking about. Much of the past fifty years of Cilfái history is not documented and runs a significant risk of being ‘reinterpreted’ by an unmindful local authority and a foreign tourism company. That risk of deliberate amnesia was one of the reasons I wrote the Cilfái volumes.

But who ‘owns’ the history? It is always an important question. In 1891, Oscar Wilde penned an often-quoted phrase, ‘The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it.’ Although Wilde was likely thinking more of fine art criticism, the statement holds up in modern times with the revision of colonialism and racism prominently featured in research and popular histories. I’m part of that process as I talk of the environmental pollution and ecocide that accompanied the explosion of industrialisation and exploitation in the Swansea Valley.

As good as the Wilde observation is, I felt I was always led by this statement from George Santayana in 1905…’ Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ I suppose the ‘remembering’ or ‘forgetting’ can be both wilful and accidental. In the past month, I have had conversations with senior Council officers over Cilfái, where officials were adamant that records and land titles were entirely in order concerning the hill (and officially stating that was the case) whilst not checking anything about the truth and validity of those statements. The main reason behind their indolence was an intention to wilfully ignore the hill’s history. After my pushback, the senior planning officer had to retract those silly statements. The worst part of the episode was the inherent untruths and misrepresentation of vague facts advanced by Council employees who may be qualified but are rarely experienced. The injured parties are us as the public.

In books and talks about the history of Cilfái, I have tried to open ownership of our history to the broader public to combat the apparent desire of some to shut down debate, consultation, and knowledge. It is also important to remember that some of the most vocal Facebook warriors in unquestioning support for foreign tourism company plans have never been on the hill.

Above: Coal mine workings on Cilfái after 40 years of uninterrupted recovery. The Council and the foreign tourism company want us to believe this is worthless and they can do better. Really?

Ecological Monitoring: My complete protocol

This is my protocol from my civil service days. I used this (in whole or part) to educate, plan, or review monitoring programmes. Monitoring is hard to plan and very hard to do. In the UK, funding is often rewarded for a ‘project’ but the concept of understanding whole life costs is rarely appreciated. The money wasted on community lottery funding schemes is heartbreaking as projects are devised, money spent, and then there is no conception of maintenance or longer-term costs. Locally, I know of over £3m in lottery funding that has been wasted in ill conceived schemes with no oversight and unqualified charities signing cheques with no regard for quality or care.

As a Gateway Reviewer I was often brought in too late in a failing scheme, and my role then was merely to record the errors and failures. If we had been brought in at strategic planning or business case, it was better.

This plan was my basic script for programme oversight and I found I could frequently reverse engineer it to interpret what had gone wrong or explain how a programme failed.

I experienced three types of monitoring:

  1. Curiosity or passive monitoring. As I often undertake on Cilfái, and became the output in Cilfái: Woodland Management and Climate Change.
  2. Mandated monitoring. Imposing a requirement on a programme as part of their funding and appraisal system.
  3. Question-driven monitoring. The dreaded ‘research question’ approach of many academic bodies, often a waste of talent and time and merely to get a tick in a box. This is the stuff that is funded, completed, and locked away for ever. The best use of resources is through good quality research questions. However, I used to read questions that were long and incomprehensible…so how do you answer them…or better yet learn from them?

As a reviewer for government, I saw monitoring programmes that were ineffective or failed completely. It doesn’t help that many in the biodiversity sector see monitoring as a ‘management activity’ which is unrelated to scientific research.

The failures I saw

  1. Short-term funding preventing planning. Question-driven monitoring pushed staff to plan backwards…data first, question later. Also, data management was often dreadful with no structure or futureproofing for reviewers. A monitoring timescale can be a decade…who stays around for ten years on a program in biodiversity? Nobody…which makes succession planning vital, but never done. Loss of key personnel and the corporate amnesia that follows was harmful for staff and quality, but often treasured by politicians and managers who want a predecessor to own mistakes.
  2. The Shopping List approach. An impossibly long list of monitoring topics instead of a sharp defined monitoring objective. It is backlog planning in programme speak.
  3. Failure to agree on what to monitor. Often politicians and managers want career-enhancing metrics…not realities.
  4. Flawed assumptions. A very human desire to compare one set of data to something elso or associate with something else that looks good, but has incompatible data. The temptation to ‘salt’ data on key metrics (e.g. bats, reptiles, invasive speciers) was overpowering. An overclaim is more likely to get published etc.

It is a big graphic, so you may need to enlarge it.

Cilfái: The Principles of Diversity and Resilience

Cilfái’s connectivity to other wildlife and natural habitats is not just a concern, it’s a massive issue. The dangerous main roads dominate the wider extent, west towards the river and north towards what was the Enterprise Zone. Within the woodlands, further development for bike paths, walking trails and cable car routes are all immediate risks for ruinous fragmentation. The width of paths and firebreaks and cableways and how we manage the woodland edge habitats are crucial. Cilfái’s wider nature network must be urgently mapped and managed using the ten well-known best practice principles (Crick and others 2020a: 91–101).

1. Understand the Place. Understanding the community and the natural networks that are in place.

2. Create a Vision. Create a future that is understandable and engages the biggest stakeholders, usually the local communities, animals and plants, and those responsible for caring for and maintaining the land.

 3. Involve People. Communication, engagement and consultation are tremendously important. Do we see that commitment from local politicians?

4. Create Core Sites. The central Cilfái woodland is our core site.

5. Build Resilience. This is protection against climate change-related events such as drought, torrential rain, wildfires, and temperature extremes. I describe some of these in the book.

6. Embrace Dynamism. Nature changes constantly. Change can happen in a matter of minutes: a tree blows down, a stream bursts its banks, or a rockfall changes the shape of the land. We can’t keep spending money on keeping things ‘as they are’. Is expensively recreating a nineteenth-century landscape that relies on money, gardening, water and stable weather and climate  (as they do at Penllergare Country Park) even possible in the modern world? We must accept and adapt to our situation, not the situation we would like to be in.

7. Encourage Diversity. There is genetic variability, species diversity, ecosystem diversity and phylogenetic diversity. Diversity is not distributed evenly on Cilfái. The ecosystem we see building on the hill results from 50 years of growth and change.It should be allowed to develop naturally. The notion that a local Council or a private tourism company can care for the land is an outrageous conceit.

8. Think ‘Networks!’ Plants, animals, and people move and live in connected networks.

9. Start Now, but Plan Long-term. Short-term is about 3 years, long-term is about 50 or more. Nobody knows what the world will be like in 50 years.

10. Monitor Progress. We can’t understand change if we don’t observe it constantly. A 3-day ecological survey by a non-local contract ecology firm on behalf of a foreign tourist company doesn’t cut it.

However, there will always be uncertainty about what Cilfái can contain because it is always prone to extreme disturbance.

Crick, H.Q.P., I.E. Crosher, C.P. Mainstone, S.D. Taylor, A Wharton, and others. 2020. Nature Networks: A Summary for Practitioners (York: Natural England)

Above: The western part of the woodland with areas of particular attraction to birds and wildlife highlighted in shades of Brown. These areas are open or semi open and also show strong characteristics of ‘woodland edge’ or ‘Stand A’ structures (see Annex 7). These areas have their origin in polluted soils from slag tips or fire damage from wildfire attacks. The old coal adits and leats provide damper cover than the surrounding woodland and frequently act as biodiversity hotspots because they retain moisture in drought conditions. These Brown areas are the current centres of natural regeneration. The woodland cover in these areas will not be necessarily native species, it is far more likely to be the ‘Cilfái mix’ of coniferous, native and invasive non-native. These areas are rapidly becoming reptile hotspots and also very strong presences of foraging bats.
 

Woodland Resilience

I talk about ‘Resilience’ in Chapter Three of the second Cilfái volume.

The term ‘resilience’has become a key concept in our landscape management. Resilience in woodland is becoming a broader and more important topic as climate change starts to bite.

In its current form, Cilfái is resilient. Yes, people burn it every year, but that results in more biodiversity hotspots as the burnt patches grow back with local species of trees and vegetation that are much more resilient to fire and drought.

Anything done to the woodland should be to enhance resilience…not knock it back with imported plants, plastic tree tubes and high maintenance planting schemes.

Diversity in the Cilfái woodlands can range froim genes and species to habitats and landscapes. The complexity of the Cilfái woodlands ecosystem will always be limited compared to a woodland that is older or has not been polluted. Still, the pollution history of the hill makes the ecosystem special and probably even unique.

Above: The seaward slopes of Cilfái are increasingly susceptible to windstorms which easily topple the trees that often have poor anchorage because of the soil conditions. The resulting deadwood (both prone and standing) provides useful food and shelter for many animals and insects. The natural regeneration quickly takes over a windblown space and colonises fast with the ‘Cilfái mix’ of local species. Incredibly, this site on the proposed tourism development is a bat hotspot. (Author’s collection).

Cilfái, The Death of Nature, and Carolyn Merchant

When I wrote the first Cilfái book, on the history of the hill, my views were strongly coloured by the work of American ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant. Merchant has many talents, but one of her earliest books was titled ‘The Death of Nature’ (The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution )A strong title, and I can recall being quite challenged by it when I first read it in the early 1980s. Merchant is a formidable historian of science and her book explored the importance of gender in early writing on nature. Her grasp on European industrial history was superb and her interpretation of how the understanding of nature changed in the Industrial Revolution from an organic or female conception through to the mechanistic model of coalfields and resources.

Alongside this, the destruction of people’s rights and freedoms throughout the medieval period by greedy landlords had a profound impact on the perception of land and property. The medieval economy of Cilfái was based on organic and renewable energy sources (wood, water, and wind), the emerging capitalist economy of the Mansel family was based on coal and metals which transformed the nature of the hill. The changes on Cilfái over the past few centuries are confirmation of Merchant’s theories.

In one of her most famous statements…

The female earth was central to organic cosmology that was undermined by the Scientific Revolution and the rise of a market-oriented culture … for sixteenth-century Europeans the root metaphor binding together the self, society and the cosmos was that of an organism … organismic theory emphasized interdependence among the parts of the human body, subordination of individual to communal purposes in family, community, and state, and vital life permeate the cosmos to the lowliest stone

Cilfái: The legacy in the soil

The industrial pollution phase of Cilfái’s history has left a permanent mark in the nature of the landscape. Industrial smelting waste forms a large part of the soil for over twenty percent of the woodlands around The Glade, Roundhouse, and up to Martin’s Pond. Slag takes its place amongst the native sandstone and the glacial debris from the last ice age. The structure and chemical profile of the soil is permanently altered and many trees eventually succumb to the toxicity. This is a good reason why natural regeneration should be favoured over massive new plantation of native species. Natural regeneration allows plants that are resilient to the poisons to develop. I explain more in the second Cilfái book.

P.50 Cilfái: Woodland Management and Climate Change

Copper slag in the soil at Martin’s Pond 2022.

Cilfái: The importance of dead wood.

As Climate Change accelerates, the conifers are increasingly susceptible to higher windspeeds and many trees will snap forming ‘snags’ such as this one near the Steam Engine Spring.

Snags allow insects, birds, and bats into holes and crevices in the dying wood providing much needed habitat. Where it is safe to do so, features like this must be maintained.

Dead wood is a vital part of biodiversity and a recovering ecosystem. Wherever possible, we don’t ‘tidy it up’ or sell it for firewood as the Penllergare Trust used to do.

Dead wood is part of life.

See pages 28-32 of Cilfái:Woodland Management and Climate Change on Kilvey hill, Swansea.

Bats over Cilfái

One of the reasons we know so little about the abundance or distribution of bats is the general technical difficulty of surveying and recording where they live and where they hunt. Nationally, the effort to monitor the bat population is significantly bolstered by the invaluable contribution of volunteers. Their dedication, although often underappreciated, plays a crucial role in our understanding of bat populations. However, this reliance on volunteer work, while commendable, is not without its challenges. The situation is further complicated by the need for specialized equipment and training. Although bat surveys have become a regular requirement for planning permission, the surveys remain expensive and knowledge is considered commercial and rarely shared, making understanding of bat distribution even more complex. Using specialist recording equipment means the data files for bat surveys can become very large very quickly, although the advantage is that the data is available for further analysis and verification.

I trained as a bat surveyor in the Thames Valley, where University researchers waxed lyrical about the high densities of bats along the river. One warm night we went out and didn’t detect a single one. That has never happened to me on Cilfái, where bat presence can be staggering on many nights.

Bat surveys have become high cost as surveyors seek to extract as much income from the work as possible. It is unfortunate, as much needed information then becomes restricted or unshared. That greedy attitude led me to share as much as I have on the bat presence on the hill in the second Cilfái book. Cilfái: Woodland Management and Climate Change on Kilvey Hill, Swansea.

On Cilfái, I use a combination of a handheld detector and automatic recorders, which give me a sample of several nights at various locations. This lets me hear the bat calls as they hunt and analyse the recordings at home. I use the classic handbook for techniques Jon Russ wrote (Russ 2012). I use Anabat Express (or equivalent) passive bat recorders and process the data with Anabat Insight Version 2.  Over time, this gives me an understanding of the ‘hotspots’ of activity across the hill. I only get snapshots of what is happening, and I cannot realistically project what I know into the overall picture of bats on the hill. That will take a few years. I can assume that our ‘Year Zero’ in 1970 had no bat presence and that everything I see and hear in 2023 is the product of fifty years of recovery. However, realistically, the woodland only began its recovery in the mid-1990s.

The hotspots on the hill are where the food is. Generally, these are the open spaces where previous burning or wind damage has opened up the forest canopy and allowed a wider range of native plants to prosper. Some of these open spots are also good for birdlife. On a warm autumn evening, the air in the hotspots is thick, and flying insects attract the bats. I have evidence of a large presence of Common Pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pipistrellus) and Noctule (Nyctalus noctula). It is possible that hidden in my recordings is some evidence of the Brown long-eared bat (Plecotus auritus), only further data collection will confirm.

Although I can track and monitor activity, it remains immensely difficult to understand hibernation and roosting sites. I am slowly building up a library of bat presence data across the hill.

Russ, John. 2012. British Bat Calls: A Guide to Species Identification (Exeter: Pelagic).

Below: Although it looks a bit technical, it is the nature of bat survey work that we prepare this kind of evidence. The land above Foxhole and the Glade is very busy with bats and clearance of trees will definitely cause problems for the population that has re-established up there. On the night this recording was made I had hundreds of similar records. You can see more evidence in the Cilfái book.

This is a recording of a Common pippistrelle hunting on the woodland edge above Foxhole in September 2023. Temperature above 20 Celsius (Analook F7) compressed with split-screen option Cycles, showing the characteristic call shape of a hunting pippistrelle.

Below: Me bat surveying on the threatened land above Foxhole September 2023

Ancient Woodland in Swansea

We don’t have any ancient woodland on Cilfái. The last of it was killed off in the 1750s by industrial pollution. The coal industry on the hill probably removed most of the bigger trees before that as coal mining consumed massive quantities of timber. Both Cilfái and Townhill were cleared of their natural woodland by the 1300s (Robins 1990: 4–8).

1970 marked the new beginning of woodland on the Cilfái woodland site. We know that the Scots and Monterey pines on the western side were planted alongside efforts by the Forestry Commission to reestablish forestry on the upper slopes of the west side (Robins 2023a: 62–77, 2023b: 55–58).

Although the landscape of ancient woodland has disappeared, Swansea does have some incredible surviving old trees in Singleton Park and Penllergaer (Penllergare) Country Park. The trees in Singleton survived being part of farmland in the 1600s and were incorporated into the estate of the Vivian family in the 1800s (Morris 1995: 5–26).

The Penllergaer Country Park has some incredible survivors who survived the devastation of the coal mining period between 1500 and 1790 and became incorporated into the private parklands of the Dillwyn Llewelyn family. I wrote about some of the trees in Swansea History Journal a while back (Robins 2021).

The trees of Cilfái are special because we know how old they are and what they have gone through to survive today. The trees of Nyddfwch are special because they are far older but have also survived the ravages of industrialisation and human interference.

Morris, Bernard. 1995. The Houses of Singleton: A Swansea Landscape and Its History (Swansea: West Glamorgan Archive Service)

Robins, Nigel A. 1990. The Enclosure of Townhill: An Illustrated Guide (Swansea: City of Swansea)

———. 2021. ‘The Landscape History of Nyddfwch (Penlle’rgaer)’, Minerva: The Swansea History Journal, 29: 121–34

———. 2023a. Cilfái: Historical Geography on Kilvey Hill, Swansea (Swansea: Nyddfwch)

———. 2023b. Cilfái: Woodland Management and Climate Change on Kilvey Hill, Swansea (Swansea: Nyddfwch)

Below: The Nyddfwch oak in the Llan Valley. Originally planted as a marker tree on a hedge guarding the Llan meadows.

Cilfái and Habitat Fragmentation

One of the big threats to a recovering woodland is habitat fragmentation. This is a huge problem for wildlife in Wales. I covered this in the second Cilfái book (Cilfái: Woodland Management and Climate Change on Kilvey Hill, Swansea). It is reasonable to assume that a big woodland is better for biodiversity and the environment than a small one. After two thousand years of habitat destruction in Wales we are left with one of the poorest environments in Europe. The woodlands we have are constantly being threatened with further subdivision as roads and houses are built in ever remote or pictureesque areas.

The woodland that has recovered since 1970 will now be fragmented further by the foreign tourism development which will cut through the centre of the biodiversity area. The impact on the recovering wildlife will be immense. The impact will be change and a reduction in opportunities for wildlife and plants on the vital central area of the hill. Fewer opportunities to live will result in fewer species and reduced biodiversity. That is habitat fragmentation.

In numbers, the 102 hectares of woodland and open access space we now have on Cilfái will be reduced to about 29 hectares of woodland. As a comparison, the country park of Penllergare (near Junction 47 on the M4), has about 67 hectares of mixed woodland and Singleton Park has about 11 hectares of (badly fragmented) woodland. So, yes, the loss of Cilfái woodlands is significant.

It may not necessarily be all doom and gloom. Swansea Council and the tourism developers will hopefully be obliged to produce a series of habitat recovery and restoration plans for various tracts of land that may be leased to the Company but will not be built upon. I assume pressure will be put on Welsh Government to provide a large sum of money for ‘native’ woodland restoration. As everybody who has a say is committed to cable cars and adventure tourism, I’m sure the money will come…it has to.

Below: The area of concern on Cilfái is coloured red here. A large chunk of this is the original Forestry Commission land (now NRW). A mixture of coniferous forest, fire damage and fantastic natural regeneration. Full of bats and birds. The contract ecologists bought in by the tourism firm will seek to devalue the quality of the environment and frame it as a place that is worthless and ripe for redevelopment.