As everyone will know from the road sign, for 50 years Kingsbridge has been twinned with both Isigny and Weilerbach. Indeed, it’s more of a tripletting as Weilerbach and Isigny are also twined. Weilerbach has an Isigny-Allee and a Kingsbridgering (Kingsbridge Crescent).
This year Kingsbridge twinners went to Weilerbach, on the German borders with Luxemburg and France. Unlike Isigny, Weilerbach has neither a harbour nor, as its name implies (weiler = hamlet; bach = stream) a river that you would notice. Instead it has forests, part of massive woodlands which extend for hundreds of miles. These are deciduous trees which completely cloak the mountains and the valleys: when we were there, the autumn colours were truly awesome. Large parts of these forests are municipally owned, cared for and open to the public. Weilerbach owns a swathe of forest but, as we were told between gritted teeth, much of that has been fenced away inside the last American Air Force base in Germany, the huge Ramstein.
One of the quirks of human nature is that the landscape we idolise is the landscape of our childhood. So, in Devon, as children of our time, we currently hanker after green fields on rolling hills and eulogise the marvellous countryside in which we live. But it was not always like this. Until only a few thousand years ago, England was as heavily wooded as a rainforest, inhabited by lion, bear, tiger and wolf. Salcombe Harbour was completely surrounded by woods until the need for wooden ships changed all that: as each ship needed about 1500 trees, it took only a century or so before the only remaining ancient woodland round the Harbour was on Halwell Point and Heath Point opposite.
As the trees came down, how the inhabitants at the time must have craved their childhood memories of the colours of the Devon hills covered by deciduous trees and how they must have despaired at the resulting mono-cultural fields, tree-free and grazed uniformly to grass by an invasive species of ruminants introduced from far-away Mesopotamia, sheep. (George Monbiot writes eloquently on this).
The residents of Weilerbach therefore now guard a rich heritage – important, too, because we should never forget that the oxygen which keeps us alive does not occur naturally on earth. It is solely the product of trees – trees which absorb carbon dioxide, mop up dust and atmospheric dirt on their leaves and then drop this safely to the ground, and gift us life-giving oxygen in return.
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