New Labour - New Rambling Routes  --  The Times, May 24th, 1997

The walk into the view pictured on this page develops like a Beethoven Symphony. Slow, reflective first movement at a car park in a dark wood; a hectic scherzo across a busy road; a gentle andante through a meadow and a short transition over a stile. Then, as you emerge out of some trees, a crescendo of brass for a jubilant finale.

Within a few strides the view opens up from 50 yards to about 50 miles. The Chilterns scarp plunges away to the chequerboard Oxfordshire plain. In the middle distance, the Thames. In the misty beyond, the Cotswolds, arcing round to the Uffington White Horse on the Marlborough  Downs.

But if you wanted to pause to celebrate one of the   finest perspectives in Southern England, perhaps raise a commemorative cup or sit and read some arcadian poetry, you would have to do so without touching anything you see around you. Legally the only place you may stop is right here on the track. To stray an inch off the defined route is, technically, trespass.

On our immediate left and right are the Shirburn and Pyrton Hills.  These sweeps of open downland are some of the most fiercely disputed forbidden tracts of lands in Britain. The ninth Lord Macclesfield, whose Beechwood estate this is, has resisted all appeals to open them to the public.

He may not be able to resist for much longer. We don't know how many ministers in the new government have enjoyed this view, but Kate Ashbrook, chairman of the 120,000 strong Ramblers Association, is confident that their accumulated commitments to legislate will soon give the  public the freedom to roam these hills, above Watlington in Oxfordshire.

Join the Great Elm Hunt  --  The Times, June 21st, 1997

Readers of The Times are today invited to take part in a nationwide search for a tree many of us assumed was no longer there - the elm. It seems that even the tree-aware among us have for years walked past mature surviving elms and - like the South Sea islanders who did not "see" Capt  Cook's ship because it was totally beyond their experience - simply marked them down as some other species.

However, naturalists and local authority tree officers now know that a tiny number of elms unaccountably survived the devastation of Dutch Elm disease. One was recently identified in Hampshire next to a public footpath. They suspect that some of the trees may be disease-resistant.  Suddenly the conservationist's ambition to restock the countryside with this once abundant tree, from cuttings taken off these "super" elms, is not so outrageous. In a pilot survey carried out this spring the Conservation Foundation located dozens of mature, healthy   elms. Retired biologist Ursula Broughton and her colleague Brian Wright found the elm in our photograph near Pebmarsh  in NE Essex, about two and a half miles north of the  Colchester to Cambridge Road.

Miss Broughton believes this tree and its neighbour, both elm clones peculiar to Essex and about 70 years old, may have immunity to Dutch Elm Disease. "I think they survived through a combination of things, including genetic resistance and isolation. And after that first enormous wave of deaths, trees that didn't succumb immediately had a better chance of survival."

David Shreeve, director of the Conservation Foundation, whose elm programme is part funded by Ford, believes there may be many more previously unnoticed elms in the countryside. He asked readers to send details of possible sitings, with grid reference, any other relevant local  facts and some leaves for identification by the foundation's consultant, Dr Jayne Armstrong of Glasgow   University.

Last week (June 12th) a tree surgeon working for the   foundation took the first cuttings, about six inch long, from elms in East Anglia. They were sent by courier to a  tree nursery in Bedfordshire, where they will be nurtured in a standard mix of bark and perlite. After a year's growth the Conservation Foundation will  offer the cuttings to schools, industry and local  authorities, close to where they were taken so they can be grown in an environment where they clearly belong. It will  also offer cuttings to individuals, perhaps people who had elms on their property, who would be willing to monitor the growing trees over the 15 to 20 years it will take  before they can be presumed safe from infection by the still active disease.