Independent: We have finally finished tidying up all the trees and branches thrown down by the furious winter winds in Court Wood. It's an 11-acre, mixed broad-leaf woodland near my home in the Black Mountains, south Wales. As part of a not-for-profit, community woodland group, I started managing the wood a few months ago.
Before our small team of volunteers arrived with billhooks and chainsaws, Court Wood hadn't been touched for 60 years. Like thousands of similarly anonymous British woodlands, it had silently...