A reflection prompted by the threat facing our neighbours Nant y Calch
“We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through.
Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home.”
Aboriginal proverb, beloved by Queen Elizabeth II
We are visitors. Not owners.
Not masters of the land, nor judges of which creature deserves to breathe, which forest deserves to stand, which child deserves to live.
We arrived into a world already ancient, already intricate, its invisible threads woven long before our first breath, its web of life so vast and so precise that to pull even one thread is to feel the whole cloth shudder.
We are not the architects of this tapestry, we are guests within it and yet, here we are, burning, bulldozing and ecologically eradicating as though the lease were ours to break.
Somewhere, a dormouse curls in a hollow tree, unaware that people in boardrooms have drawn lines across its world and called it a development opportunity. Somewhere, an ancient woodland breathes its last beside a planning notice no one local was truly asked about. Somewhere, a farm untouched by pesticide or fertiliser, a quiet, extraordinary haven built by decades of restraint and respect, is purchased not to be loved, but to be held. Land banked. Waiting. While hired contractors move through it methodically, season by season, stripping out the very things that made it worth saving, so that when the men in suits return with their plans, there will be nothing special enough left to defend.
That is not land management. That is premeditated erasure.
This is the mathematics of greed: nature has no quarterly report, so nature has no value to the suits. The dormouse casts no vote, the oak tree holds no shares and so they are overruled, by wealth, by influence, by the quiet handshakes of the powerful who have never needed to depend on the living world because they have always been able to buy their way above it.
These are not inevitable losses, they are choices. Choices made by a very small number of very comfortable people, largely insulated from every consequence of their decisions.
And when the consequences come, the floods, the droughts, the famines, the migrations, those same people point their fingers at the very people who consumed the least and protected the most. The ones who, for generations, knew what we have forgotten: that you do not own the land. You belong to it.
I know this not from books, but from mud. From planning documents read alone at a kitchen table late at night, because no professional would help, not for lack of knowledge, but for fear. Fear of being blacklisted by the very industry that serves the developers. So the fight fell to individuals, learning law from scratch, while political opponents sharpened their knives, while those with influence whispered in the right ears, while one by one the others drifted away until there was only the cause, and the cold, and the absolute refusal to abandon what could not speak for itself.
The Tractor.
A tractor moving through hazel, ancient hazel, known dormouse habitat, ripping it from the earth. And in that moment, something older than reason took over.
I stood in front of it.
Feet planted on the ground, not through courage, there was no audience. Just instinct. The same instinct that knows, without being told, that some things must be stood for because they can’t stand up for themselves. The driver screamed that he would run me down.
I told him he would only do it once.
He stopped.
I knew even then that I couldn’t stand there forever. I knew the quiet fight would have to continue differently, in committee rooms, in letters, in the long unglamorous work of making the powerful admit what they already know. And I knew my faith in my fellow human beings had been altered in ways that would take years to understand.
But my feet had been on the earth and I had felt, in that moment, what connects us to everything that lives, the certainty that we are not separate from this world, we are not above it, we are absolutely not entitled to destroy it. We are of it. Every one of us, whether we remember it or not.
A Woodland I love
There is a woodland I love, this woodland, Coed y Werin, a former quarry, once a wound in the earth. For generations it gave everything: iron ore torn from its belly, coal from its darkness, clay fired into the bricks that built the miners’ houses that built the community entire. It gave, and gave, and gave. And when there was nothing left to take, the plans arrived, landfill, development, the final insult of a place deemed useful only in its destruction.
It was saved anyway. With love, with stubbornness, with the absolute refusal to accept that a place could be used up and thrown away. Saved with unpaid hands and unglamorous hours, and watched slowly, miraculously as it became itself again. A treasure. A jewel. The green lungs of its community. A Site of Special Scientific Interest, where dormice sleep in hollows of hazel branches and where children discover that the world is wider and wilder and more generous than any screen has ever shown them.
None of us who care for it are paid, we never were, we do it for love, and for the quiet knowledge that our children’s children may one day walk beneath these trees and feel, without knowing why, that they are held by something older and wiser than themselves.
And now, our neighbours, Nant y Calch
At Nant y Calch, the same machinery stirs again. Different place, same story. Men in suits will gather in rooms far from its paths and its streams and its creatures.
They will weigh their projected profits against the families who will be quietly impoverished; in health; in peace; in the irreplaceable dailiness of living next to something alive. They already know its value. They will admit it, perhaps, only after it is gone. Nant y Calch connects to our Woodland and is part of a wider ecological network. Its loss won’t stop at its boundaries. Wildlife corridors don’t work when fragmented.
Must every generation fight this battle? Must the land always bleed before the powerful concede what they knew from the beginning?
We all know what it means to tend something fragile into strength. We know the patience of growth. The grief of loss. The fierce, unperformable love that says this will not be destroyed on my watch, and means it, alone, in the cold, in front of a tractor, with no one watching and everything at stake.
We have stood on the rubble of moonscapes and seen the woodland beneath. We have fought the battles no one believed we could win. We have handed living, breathing, irreplaceable places to the next generation, not because anyone paid us, but because some things are worth more than money and we have always known how to love what cannot speak for itself.
That knowledge belongs at the heart of every decision made on this earth. In parliaments. In planning offices. In boardrooms. In the rooms where the fate of woodlands and watersheds and children is settled over coffee by people who will never once walk where they decide.
We are visitors, yes.
Each of us a thread in something far greater than ourselves. The dormouse, the river, the child, the oak, the quarry transformed by love into forest, the hazel that was stood for, on a cold morning, by a woman alone with her feet on the ground and everything to lose. All of us threaded together. None of us expendable. None of us more deserving of life than another.
Our purpose is to observe. To learn. To grow. To love.
And when we return home, as all visitors must, may we leave this tapestry richer for our having passed through it.
Ask yourself one question: when you return home, as all visitors must, what will still be standing because you were here? Find that thing.
Protect it. Pass it on
The Earth does not belong to us.
We belong to the Earth.
And to each other.
Jayne Garland is Chair of Caerphilly Woodlands Trust. As former Chair of Gwern y Domen Conservation Group she led the campaign that contributed to the withdrawal of Caerphilly’s Local Development Plan in 2021 and played a key role in the reform of TAN 1, the Welsh planning policy that had enabled speculative development on unallocated land. She is an unpaid volunteer. She always has been.
