The transition of Wytham Woods from a working estate to unique research site (1943–1965)

Diaries written by Charles Elton and other unpublished material from 1942–1965 illustrate the state of Wytham Woods and debates about its management in the first two decades after the estate came into the ownership of Oxford University. They reveal a legacy of wartime activity, the problems of rabbit control and the tensions between the different departments in the University. The Forestry Department sought to manage most of the Woods as a resource for teaching the then prevailing ideas of modern productive forestry: most of the Woods should therefore be converted to plantation. Elton and others regarded the rates of felling and replanting, the loss of old trees, as a serious threat to the value of the Woods from an ecological research perspective. In 1961, the University sided with the ecologists and active forestry management largely ceased. The legacy of this period survives though in the composition and structure of the Woods today. The issues and debates at Wytham foreshadow many of those that took place in the 1970s and 1980s between foresters and conservationists more generally across Britain.