Walking along the promenade one
day last week, I looked at the sea and thought how
good it would be to go down the steps and jump in for a swim. Unusually the
sea was calm, the water blue, and it looked so inviting. As regular readers of
this blog will know, that would never happen due to my fear of being in or on
water! However, two things I have never been afraid of are the dark and walking
alone in isolated places. I used to do a lot of walking in the Lake District
and often for much of the walk wouldn’t see another soul. When I lived in
Wales, I loved walking in the Forestry Commission plantations, which at times
could be dark and lonely places. However, I liked the quietness, and the
unexpected glimpse of a deer, or bird. Occasionally I would take on extra work,
hauling fertiliser up steep forest tracks or bringing down Christmas trees
ready for the Christmas sales. When I had the House in Scotland, I lived within
walking distance of the Dalbeattie Forest. This is over 2,600 acres in size,
and it’s amazingly easy to get lost in it; something I have done a couple of
times!
Where we live now, the forests
are less grand. There is the Forest of Bowland, which touches my new home town,
but isn’t actually a forest at all, although it is still worth a visit. On the
next beach to my home beach, at Cleveleys, is a petrified forest. This phenomenon
is only visible at low tides, and even then not always, depending on the
movement of the sand. No one really knows what caused the loss of this forest, it
might have been an early example of the erosion of coastal land due to rising
sea levels. The stumps of the forest trees are still there, but everything else
has gone.
There is, however, a budding
forest right on my doorstep (just 4,503 steps away). Possibly, at this stage,
it would be better described as woodland or a forest-in-making. This is the
Fylde Memorial Arboretum and Community Woodland. At just under five acres, it’s
considerably smaller than the Dalbeattie forest! It is a site of remembrance
at Bispham (which is my new home town and is just up the coast from Blackpool), and the only one of its kind outside the National Memorial Arboretum, in
Alrewas, Staffordshire. The aim of the woodland is to provide a place of peace and beauty in
which people can remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of
the rest of us. In the Community
Woodland area of the arboretum, it is also possible for anyone in the local
community to commemorate a loved one by arranging to have a plaque set against
a tree.
Overall, it is home to some 2,500
trees of differing species and made up of a series of interconnecting paths
that lead you to a number of different places for reflection. There is the
Services Glade, which permanently flies the Union Flag alongside its simple
black granite inscribed slab. This leads to the Millennium Grove, which is
devoted to the memory of those local service people who were killed while on
active service during this millennium. There is a smaller area, planted with a
half circle of Rowan trees which is dedicate to the memory of Major Jim Houldsworth
Bower, an absolute champion of the ex-service community. Nationally, this is a big
community (in 2016 it was a community of 2.5 million veterans).
Interestingly I, like many others
I guess, assumed that ex-service personal would experience many mental health
problems – but this is not the case. Studies show that the rates of mental
health problems in ex-service personnel is actually 1 in 5 compared to 1 in 4
in the general population. The rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PSTD) are
also much lower than I expected – between 4% to 6% of all personnel depending on
whether they were combat troops or not.
Now you might have got thus far reading
this blog and might be thinking what has any of this got to do with the price
of eggs? Well I was intrigued last week to hear of the recent heated debate that
had occurred on the Good Morning Britain TV programme over ‘forest bathing’.
Forest bathing has its origins in the traditional health and wellbeing culture
of Japan. There it is called ‘shinrin-yoku’ which means immersing yourself in
nature in order to improve your wellbeing. It is the practice of mindfully
taking in the sights, sounds and smells of nature without distraction. In June,
the Woodlands Trust (part sponsors of my new ‘forest’) suggested that ‘forest bathing’, as a treatment should be prescribed on the NHS. Apparently, there is
a growing industry around folk (not sure what else to call them) who charge up
to £25 for a two-hour ‘forest bathing’ session. However, I’m reliably informed
that the NHS has no plans to introduce ‘forest bathing’ as part of its ‘social
prescribing’ schemes.
I’m not sure that anyone should
be charging for such an activity. I have a number of ‘places’ that I regularly
use for my mindfulness sessions. One is an ancient bench atop of the cliffs on
my beach walk, and another is a hidden glade in a beautiful little local park
called the ‘Rock Gardens’, where the sound of running water drowns out the rest
of the world. Mindfulness is an easy practice to acquire (see here) and if
finding a spot in a forest near you provides the opportunity then why not give it
a go?
If this is the case, you might
want to hurry up. Last week the BBC reported that a chunk of the Amazon rainforest
the size of a football pitch is being lost every single minute. That’s right,
every single minute! One might almost change John Heywood’s famous phrase
(1546) to: its increasingly difficult to see the trees for the wood…
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