Bison, bison burning bright

I have just fulfilled a lifelong ambition to visit the great forest which stretches from eastern Poland deep into Belarus. The huge expanse of broadleaved and conifer trees, known as Bialowie´za, is now a national park and a Unesco World Heritage site.

Woods elsewhere in Europe, such as those of Killarney, Co Kerry, may be very old but their trees were harvested, alien ones introduced and the stands managed over the centuries. Bialowie´za, however, is ‘primeval’, ‘of the first or earliest age’, the last substantial remnant of a vast forest which covered much of Europe. The hornbeams oaks and pines there have never been harvested.

The czars were despots but, had it not been for them, this pristine forest would not have survived. It wasn’t out of a regard for posterity that they, and the Polish kings who preceded them, protected Bialowie´za; the continent’s largest surviving land animal, the European bison, lived here.