In search of Britain’s forgotten rainforests

On the outskirts of the former slate-mining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog, the forested hills of Snowdonia National Park give way to a post-industrial landscape. Slopes are gashed with quarries, broken slate discarded like fish scales, rows of pebble-dashed terraces.

Most of the traffic turns off at the adventure sports centers now occupying the abandoned slate mines and caverns. The rest disappears a few miles on—once Snowdonia’s sheep farms, stone cottages and high peaks reassert themselves on the landscape—heading towards the Italianate village of Portmeirion and the beaches of the Llyn Peninsula.

No-one else stops at the lay-by opposite the Maentwrog hydro-electric power plant or perhaps even notices the blink-and-you-miss-it sign for Coed Felenrhyd and Llennyrch. Yet this little-visited reserve protects one of the most unusual ecosystems in the UK—a fragment of temperate rainforest.

Few people know that Britain’s west coast was once covered by rainforests. Dating back 10,000 years to the end of the last ice age, they originally spanned as much as a fifth of the country, as well as France, Spain and Portugal’s Atlantic coastlines.

Today, only isolated pockets remain, mainly in Scotland, Cumbria, Wales and Devon. Representing less than one percent of the British land mass, these ‘Atlantic’ or ‘Celtic’ rainforests are rarer and under greater threat than their tropical counterparts. They’re also biodiversity hotspots, home to hundreds of moss, fern, fungi, epiphyte, liverwort and lichen species, many of which are endemic. 

Spread across 310 hectares of the steep Afon Prysor gorge, Coed Felenrhyd and Llennyrch’s relative inaccessibility has helped to preserve it, while the wet, humid microclimate—it rains around 200 days a year—has sparked an abundance of life, which I’m about to meet.

I follow a path of splintered slate, which tinkles underfoot like a xylophone, along a river bank lined with gently swaying ferns. A carpet of velvety moss, sodden and springy as a sponge covers tangles of fallen branches and the gnarled trunks of towering oak, birch, ash and hazel trees.

I begin counting the shades of green—lime, pea, olive, emerald—but quickly lose track. The only variations are clusters of bluebells and occasional flashes of burnt orange or crimson red fungi. Dragonflies zip about and the canopy echoes with birdsong. Cuckoos, jays, redstarts and pied flycatchers are all found here, alongside otters, badgers, lizards and adders.  

“The government talks about how [countries like] Brazil and Indonesia need to look after their rainforests,” he says, “but we don’t apply the same logic back home. Britain needs to come to terms with its own history of deforestation of woodlands in general and temperate rainforests specifically.”

- Guy Shrubsole, author

It’s easy to see why the woodland featured prominently in the Mabinogion, a 12th-century collection of Welsh myths, legends and folklore based on older oral traditions, as the site of a fight to the death between a sorcerer named Gwydion and King Pryderi over a herd of magical pigs. Despite this evocative connection, the reserve was deserted during my visit.

This isn’t unusual, says Kylie Jones Mattock, the Wales estate manager of the Woodland Trust, a conservation charity that owns the site and other rainforests in the UK. “If I meet two people here, that’s a busy day,” she tells me. “People don’t appreciate that we have temperate rainforests in the UK. You don’t have to fly to Brazil to experience that environment. Parts of this gorge are as wild as you get in modern Wales.”

The Woodland Trust acquired Coed Felenrhyd—the western half of the woodland, previously used for grazing, farming, slate mining and timber—in 1991. Over time, they cleared the invasive rhododendron and thinned the conifers, planted after the Second World War, that were stifling the ancient trees.

“It soon became apparent a lot of the temperate rainforest’s special features had survived,’ says Mattock. She highlights the rare waxcap fungi and hay-scented ferns, numerous mosses and liverworts, and 300 lichen species. Some of these are found nowhere else in Wales, including the wonderfully named blackberries-in-custard (Pyrenula hibernica). “These lichens grow slowly and don’t spread very quickly,” she says, “which suggests the woodland has been here fairly continuously for a long period, probably since the end of the last ice age.”

The reserve was extended in 2015 when the Woodland Trust purchased neighboring Llennyrch Farm, remnants of which are still visible. After exploring the river bank, I head uphill, passing drystone walls draped in greenery. A faint baa-ing drifts over, a reminder that the farm’s sheep help to maintain the rainforest by grazing on the brambles and bilberries that would otherwise proliferate. 

At the summit, I’m enveloped in a sea of rustling, head-high ferns. While you can’t escape the outside world completely—power lines march down the hillside, the whistles of the Ffestiniog railway sound in the distance, and Trawsfynydd nuclear power station lies just out of view to the south—Coed Felenrhyd and Llennyrch feels like a secluded, timeless place.

Despite the lack of visitors, awareness of the UK’s rainforests is growing. After becoming captivated by ancient woodlands near his Devon home in 2020, author and campaigner Guy Shrubsole launched the Lost Rainforests of Britain blog, crowdsourced a UK-wide map, and started writing a book, The Lost Rainforests of Britain, which is out in October. 

Protecting, restoring and expanding our forgotten rainforests is vital, particularly given that we’re one of Europe’s least wooded countries—just 13 per cent of Britain is covered by trees.

“I also set up a campaign because these amazing places are not nearly well enough protected, nor are they given the space to regenerate and spread,” he tells me. Working with the Seahorse Environmental agency, his petition urging the government to develop a rainforest strategy has gained more than 10,000 signatures—that figure means ministers are obliged to respond.

“The government talks about how [countries like] Brazil and Indonesia need to look after their rainforests,” he says, “but we don’t apply the same logic back home. Britain needs to come to terms with its own history of deforestation of woodlands in general and temperate rainforests specifically.”

The issue feels particularly salient on this mid-summer afternoon in Coed Felenrhyd and Llennyrch, amid unprecedented heatwaves, wild fires and water shortages across the UK. Later, I head to the nearby seaside resort of Fairbourne. As the sun fades, I wandered along the sea wall, watching dogs chase sticks on the beach and a pair of golfers struggle round the village course, and understand why Fairborne is set to become the first community in the country to be abandoned due to the climate crisis.

Although the sea wall looks formidable, it will do little to protect Fairboune’s low-lying homes—built on a salt marsh by a Victorian flour magnate in the late 19th century—as sea levels rise due to the climate emergency. Local authorities say it “will not be sustainable to defend“ the village from flooding in the future. In a process that’s been awkwardly titled ‘managed realignment’, residents will be forced to leave by 2054, or potentially earlier, depending on the climate emergency’s pace and severity. Many are unhappy about how they’ve been treated. Some say Fairbourne has been singled out when there has been worse flooding in other neighboring areas in the past while others say there are no plans in place for compensation and resettlement.

While it may be too late for Fairbourne, protecting, restoring and expanding our forgotten rainforests is vital, particularly given that we’re one of Europe’s least wooded countries—just 13 per cent of the UK is covered by trees.

As Mattock emphasizes, creating new woodlands and linking together existing ones will help us to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, capture and store rainfall, protect soils, and provide shade and shelter. “They’re one of the tools in the toolbox for helping us to adjust to a changing climate and avoid the most extreme versions of those changes.”

On my journey home, I read more about the exploits of Gwydion after he killed King Pryderi. A medieval Welsh poem, Cad Goddeu (The Battle of the Trees), describes a later battle in which the sorcerer used his ‘staff of enchantment’ to animate the great oaks, hazels, birches and willows, transforming them into an army to overcome the forces of Arawn, King of the Otherworld. Today, it seems the roles have been reversed: We’re the soldiers and the rainforests need us to fight for them.

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