This column appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.

Back on a glorious May day, I visited a patch of woodland, on the outskirts of Paisley. Accompanied by a small group of women, I walked the edge of the fenced off area, in which they had once camped in a bid to protect the trees from felling, but from which they were now banned. As we wandered, amid an orchestra of birdsong, it seemed to me the emotional connection they had to the trees was palpable. They had named one of them, they told me, Hamnet. “After Shakespeare’s lost son. It’s the loss, the grief, the story it would leave behind.”

Nearly four months later, Kirsty Menzies describes to me having watched from a distance as they were felled last week. “I don't think I will ever be able to listen to the sound of a chainsaw again without feeling sick to the stomach.”

Following a 10-year battle by a consortium of developers to complete its plan for the Abercrombie Park housing development, its last patch of inconvenient woodland has been cleared. The magnificent Hamnet is now just a ragged stub in the ground.

The group’s chief argument has been that this is ancient woodland, which is normally protected from development. They have said that, while only one veteran tree was acknowledged by the Scottish Government Reporter, there were many on the site. “Thirteen,” Menzies said, “that the Woodland Trust has verified as being veteran trees, and I submitted another seven that I also think are veteran trees.”

Meanwhile the developers, Cala, Barratt and Bellway, maintained that the site was not ancient woodland – pointing to maps which they said showed this was the case.

Whether it was ancient woodland or not matters. The UK’s ancient woodland cover is just 2.5%. In 2014 it........

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