The ghosts in the forest

I've mentioned before the extraordinary changes in the New England landscape, from colonization and deforestation to abandonment and the return of the forest. I came across an interesting idea yesterday - that if North America had been colonised from the Pacific coast rather than the North Atlantic, New England would still be a wilderness, never transformed by farming, such is the poverty and difficulty of the soils. Even within the remaining New England population who didn't set off for the midwest, the vast majority 'went downhill' - abandoned the hilltop villages like Petersham and moved down into the valleys where waterpower and later rail access allowed the development of industry (the farming settlements were on the hills and ridgetops because the soils were less rocky).

Everywhere in the woods there remains the relicts of that brief flowering of farming. I took a walk at the weekend in a local reserve called Slab City - as well as farming it was quarried for paving slabs. Largely abandoned in the 1880s.

The 'Night Pasture' - a stonewalled pen to keep livestock safe overnight

I found this old oak rail-fence post. Can it really  have survived more than a century? What purpose it could have served after farming stopped?  

Another old road through the forest, here a raised causeway over a bog

A few of the remaining grasslands have been kept open until more recently near to  the remaining houses. This shows the start of classic 'old-field' succession, dominated by the light-loving white pine spreading out along the old stone wall

A cellar hole - all that remains of a timber farmhouse

It's not only the trees that have returned. Beavers were trapped out well before European colonists started to  clear this area - and in recent decades have been reintroduced to a landscape undammed for more than 200 years.

Beaver dam, Swift River at Slab City. The still water behind the dam remains frozen, and the beaver family have created the swamp behind the ice as their pasture. 

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