Tree ferns as tall as houses and club mosses larger than Joshua Tree cacti dripped on and shaded a forest floor covered by decaying vegetation, contributing the latest increment to a swampy mass of organic matter over 25 metres thick.
A millipede, stretching to 2 metres long and half a metre across, rustled through the damp plant litter leaving a tyre-tread trail in muddy patches. Oxygen levels higher than the planet had known before, had allowed this arthropod and its extended family to evolve into giants. But despite this atmospheric richness, the tree ferns, and indeed all the oversized primitive plants in this part of an equatorial forest, which stretched well over 7,000 square kilometres, looked less than healthy.
Groundwater levels were rising and becoming brackish. The ice cap at the South Pole was melting and retreating, and after tens of thousands of years of terrestrial dominance, the sea was about to drown this piece of forest. The climate and the landscape were changing.
The above isn’t a description of the Amazon Basin, or the jungles of Borneo today, facing the consequences of our warming climate. No, this is us, south Northumberland and eastern Cumbria, but 320 million years ago. It’s a description of the environment that produced an extensive and persistent coal; the Little Limestone Coal. A story of plants that became peat, that became a black rock on which the livelihoods of many thousands of people have depended.
The coal lies just below the limestone from which it takes its name and which was a product of the coral sea that flooded the forest. It’s thinner perhaps than the younger and more numerous coals of the Newcastle and Durham coalfields to the south and east. But it had just as much influence on the local population.
In over 20 hamlets, villages and small towns in Northumberland and Cumbria, from Amble to Capheaton, Wall to Haydon Bridge, Bardon Mill to Haltwhistle, Hallbankgate to Hartside, and Alston to Lambley, mining this coal used to be a significant, if not the dominant, occupation. These places owe their persistence, if not their existence to this rock. It was first mined by the Romans and then much more extensively, especially in the 19th century, up to the middle of the 1950s. Look carefully and you will still see the hundreds of bell pits, dayholes, drifts, adits and shafts. It is still mined today at a solitary small colliery at Ayle.
Nowadays we have, at best, an uneasy relationship with coal and fossil fuels, but let’s not be tempted by the current vogue to re-write history on this one and make it a 100% villain. Coal put bread on the table for tens of thousands of families in the North, for some it brought prosperity and invention, for others it brought tragedy. Today, unarguably, it leaves us with a colossal global problem - climate change. Ironic that it was a change of climate that brought about the demise of the coal forest itself.
And the title - the true northern forest? I congratulate the Woodland Trust and other agencies who have set out their ambition to plant 50 million trees in and around the cities of Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Chester and Hull. It’s a great concept that will reduce the risk of flooding, create jobs, make people happier and healthier, and store an awful lot of carbon. But isn’t it nice to hold on to the cheeky thought that we here in the real North had a much bigger forest a little before them?