Congratulations Luke! What does it mean to you to win the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing?
It’s beyond the wildest dreams that I had for this book, if I’m honest. Just to be shortlisted with such an amazing group of writers was more than I ever anticipated might happen when I sat down to start writing Ancient. So it’s just extraordinary.
For anyone who hasn’t picked up your book yet, how would you describe Ancient?
So Ancient tells the story of the time I spent as a ranger caring for some of Britain’s most special woods, and uses that experience to tell the wider story of Britain’s ancient woodland – woods that have always been wooded. They’ve never really been non-wooded landscapes.
We have been interdependent with those woods throughout the course of human history, and we’ve only lost that connection since the Industrial Revolution. I make the case that by refining our connection with our oldest woods, and with woods more broadly, we can find the key to a better, more sustainable, happier and fairer future.
Your book explores Britain’s ancient woodlands and the ways people have shaped and cared for them over time. What do you think is most misunderstood about these precious habitats?
Most people in Britain today are experiencing shifting baseline syndrome – this phenomenon where the world we grow up in, we think that’s how it’s always been. So we think that the low levels of species that we experience are normal, when they’re not. We’re experiencing the result of decades and centuries of decline in species.
We’re experiencing something similar with our woods. We all grew up thinking of the woods as dark, quiet places – places where we can go to get away from people. They’re still, shady and cool, and woods like that are lovely, but it’s a really recent phenomenon that they’re all like that.
Until the Industrial Revolution, people were managing the woods to get the things they needed, and they created huge variety and dynamism in the woods. There were shady areas, but there were also light areas where wildflowers grew and butterflies flew. There were shrubby areas where woodland birds nested. So, unintentionally, in managing the woods to get the things they needed, people were creating great places for wildlife.
That’s what we’ve lost in the last couple of hundred years as we’ve started to use other materials – concrete, steel, brick and plastics – which have all replaced woody products. We didn’t need to manage the woods in the same way, but they’ve also stopped being that vital resource for wildlife.
After more than 20 years of working with ancient woodland, was there anything new that you discovered while writing the book that surprised or excited you?
It was a real privilege to research Ancient, and I learned lots of new things. But the most exciting thing I learned about was innovations in wood products that might help bring some of our woods back into management and make them better for wildlife again, while also helping us find alternatives to the carbon-intensive materials that we’ve come to use over the last couple of hundred years.
I learned about laminated timber, for example, where instead of having to grow long, straight trees to go into structural timber, we can use shorter, wonkier wood and glue it together to make really strong structural beams. That opens up the possibilities for using different types of trees – perhaps the smaller or more irregular trees from our ancient woods – in buildings.
There are lots of other exciting technological innovations like that which could help us use more wood in future and get more of our woods back into management.
You have such a personal relationship with woodland, as well as a professional one. Is there a particular tree or place that has stayed especially meaningful to you?
I find it really hard to separate my work from my personal life. They’ve become completely intermingled, and the reason I do the work I do is that I found woodlands to be places of solace and adventure – places I really wanted to be as a kid – and I’ve never lost that feeling.
There are some trees that continue to have real meaning for me. The one that immediately springs to mind is the small-leaved lime in Coniston that I refer to throughout the book. I first knew it through work, but even since I moved away from the Lake District and I don’t work there anymore, I’m drawn back to it.
Every time I’m nearby, I’ll go and say hello. What’s so amazing about that tree is that, in just a relatively brief span of time – I probably first met it about 15 years ago – it demonstrates the amazing regenerative process that means that small-leaved lime is a living link to the wildwood.
Every wild specimen of small-leaved lime has been regenerating for the last few thousand years in this country, for lots of reasons that I explain in the book, but we see it actually happening in real time on this stream in a wood near Coniston Water. I go back there and find it a very special place.
What do you hope readers will notice or do differently the next time they walk through an ancient woodland?
There are lots of things that we need to do differently in our management of woods and the way we’re managing land more broadly. But I think the biggest thing I’d like people to take away from my book is actually the human connection to woodland.
I’d like people to be able to walk through an ancient wood and recognise that it isn’t stuck in aspic. It’s not preserved in the way it is now – dense, dark and shady. It might be beautiful as it is, and they are really beautiful places, but it has been in a process of continual change through centuries and millennia.
Part of that change has been because of its integral, crucial importance to human history, and the fact that it has been a place of human industry for thousands of years, until just a couple of hundred years ago.
I’d like people to feel the resonance, the echoes, of those woodlands and our ancestors who managed them so carefully, as they experience them as quiet, shady places today.
Luke Barley’s Ancient: Reviving the Woods That Made Britain was awarded the 2026 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing at the winners’ ceremony at Elmley Nature Reserve.