Forest of Dean

The Forest of Dean has always been a land apart.

 

The River Wye wends its way along the northern and western edges of the Forest, in a beautiful deep, meandering valley, and the mighty River Severn bounds it to the south and east. The busy A40 trunk road, once a Royal coaching road and the main east-west route into Wales from England, skirts the Forest's northern boundary. Densely wooded, the Forest was difficult to traverse in the days before modern roads. But even today it still seems remote. Likewise, the inhabitants of the Forest were sometimes seen a race apart, with a distinctive culture and accent.

 

A stone's throw away from juggernauts rushing along the A40, the Forest's tree clad hills surge to a cliff above Symonds Yat, a spectacular viewpoint where peregrines nest and hunt far above the water. Yat is an ancient term related to gate. In this context it means an opening in the hills, a portal through which the Wye flows.

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The magnificent ruin of Tintern Abbey can be found further down the Wye. The stretch of river between here and Chepstow was significant in the development of the Romantic Movement of the 19th Century. River cruises once plied this waterway and passengers were instructed on the finer points of Romanticism.

 

Throughout the forest there are miles of paths leading through intimate groves. Stands of huge oaks can be found in the deeper forest and magnificent, smooth barked beech flow down the steeper slopes to the Wye. Eventually, their lower branches graze the water alongside alder and other riverine species. A mosaic of habitats provide sustenance and shelter for forest inhabitants as diverse as wild boar and natterjack toads.

This ancient woodland has changed many times over the centuries. In the medieval period it was a royal hunting forest, before becoming one of the primary sources of timber for the navy's Tudor warships. The Forest is one of the few surviving ancient woodlands in England. It consists of more than 110 square kilometres (42 sq miles) of mixed woodland. A large area was reserved for royal hunting before 1066, and for centuries remained as the second largest crown forest in England, after the New Forest. Although the name is used loosely to refer to the part of Gloucestershire between the Severn and Wye, the Forest of Dean proper has covered a much smaller area since the Middle Ages.

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Although it's hard to tell, this is now a post-industrial landscape. The area was transformed by the growth of mining and the production of iron and steel in the early 19th century. By Victorian times, exploitation of the Forest of Dean Coalfield had developed extensively. With increased demand from local ironworks and coal mining, some of the earliest tramways in the UK traversed the landscape, built to transport coal to local ports on the Severn.​ In 1938 the Forest was designated England's first National Forest Park and is now a stronghold for nature, although still a working forest for the extraction of timber.

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We will be based in Coleford, in the heart of the forest. The large, well-appointed house has a strong connection with the areas industrial past as it was where the iron master David Mushet lived. He and his son Robert were the originators of the Bessemer smelting process.

Most locations will be less than an hour's drive and many within 15 minutes. Saskia will be providing her usual, delicious food so we can fit the meals around the photography rather than being beholden to a hotel's timetable.

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This is truly an excellent place for a woodland photography workshop. Trees are often considered one of the most challenging subjects that a landscape photographer has to face. This will be an ideal opportunity to concentrate on refining your compositional and technical approaches to this tricky subject. Autumn is always a difficult season to predict in the UK but hopefully we have timed the workshop to coincide with good autumn colour.