AS a visitor to the Forest, I am bemused by some of the things that I have seen. First, wild boar. Do you really want to live in a pig wallow?

The trouble is that a pair of breeding boar can produce a dozen piglets a year, so the population rises, in the right conditions, very rapidly and soon gets out of control. As has happened in the Forest.

The little refreshment stall at the ever-popular Mallards Pike is now surrounded by what looks like a ploughed field.

Everywhere you go there is fresh evidence of boar damage notably, at the moment, evidence of the pigs’ appetite for bluebells which will quite quickly become extinct.

There will be no natural regeneration because all the acorns, chestnuts and beech mast are gone.

The Forest is already suffering. A few pigs are fun. A lot are not. It is hard to understand any opposition to a very major cull. 

No-one wants to over-commercialise the Forest, although it seems to me that the Forest community and, I suggest, your new verderer, needs to show a much more open and imaginative approach to the 21st century.

It needs better facilities for visitors. It hasn’t moved on. Where is the tree-top walk? Where are good, attractive hotels and restaurants? Where is there any evidence of the Forestry Commission providing stimulating and original activities? It’s just the same old stuff, isn’t it?

I’m also saddened by the low level of understanding in all the people I met on my travels as to how a forest actually works. Again, how would you know?

There’s no information on the long-term policy for management available to the public. Matters such as tree health, a very major issue with the loss of larch and ash and, more alarmingly still, acute oak decline, already well established in the Dean, were never mentioned at the recent verderer’s election. Or anywhere else for that matter.

When the oaks are withering and dying, perhaps, just perhaps, Foresters will sit up and realise that they need to know much, much more about their surroundings if they are not to be lost for very different reasons than potential sales-off. 

I understand that there was, at the height of the controversy about the sale of state forests, a proposal to form a locally-managed trust to acquire the Forest.

With safeguards, this would have been a mighty step forwards.

At present, it seems all we can expect is stagnation and inevitable decline.

Sad, but true.

– Tanarus, Cirencester.