Woodlands

Woodlands

As well as the extensive woodland at Dunollie, there are also smaller areas of native woodland within Oban and in the area around it. Some of them are on small areas of steep ground, for example above Atlantic car park. We know that there are some rare lichens within some of these woodlands, but that they are threatened by invasive non-native species such as Rhododendron ponticum. Some of these areas have been continually wooded for generations and are therefore more important for biodiversity.

Ancient Woodland Inventory

In 1980 the Nature Conservency Council realised the importance of ancient woodland, and using the early Ordnance Survey maps from the 1860’s onwards mapped these ancient woodlands across the UK. In Scotland they also had Roy’s military map from 1750 to refer to. The map below shows the areas in Oban designated as Ancient Woodland.

Unfortunately the Ancient Woodland Inventory only looked at woodlands over a certain size so tended to miss smaller woods and strips of woods along rivers. It’s worth looking back at the original OS maps to see what areas had been missed.

The Ancient Woodlands Inventory is available online: https://opendata.nature.scot/datasets/snh::ancient-woodland-inventory/explore?location=56.645470%2C-4.307542%2C7

The Roy maps can be seen on the National Library of Scotland website: https://maps.nls.uk/geo/roy/ and the early OS maps at https://maps.nls.uk/os/25inch/