Having spent a very enjoyable Saturday at two nearby hillforts (Wapley Hill and Credenhill Camp) both of which had been afforested and now have been cleared, or at least partially so in the case of Credenhill, I have to say that the clearance should ultimately be of long term benefit to the site.

The woodland on those two may be more recent than that on Midsummer Hill, but the woodland on there cannot be older than the Roman invasion either.

Wapley in particular is an absolute joy of a site, and by keeping the woodland on the surrounding slopes there is a wildlife haven as well. There were numerous bird boxes on the trees and I came across a deer on the edge of the ramparts. This seems to me to be best of both worlds, keeping the archaeology intact and the wildlife environment protected.

I like woodland a lot, but I like prehistoric sites too and on balance I would say that the damage caused to earthworks by tree roots is far more destructive than that caused by potential visitors. I know Midsummer Hill is fairly well-visited but even so.

In respect of the "photo opportunity" angle, this touches on some of the points raised in the Climbing on Standing Stones thread. I'm not sure that there's any harm in someone taking a picture of their kids there, perhaps those kids will grow up to be the enthusiasts of the future and will take their kids in turn. It's through people's interest that these sites will thrive and survive, not by fencing them off and preventing any access, while the trees take over and erode the banks. I do find it a little ironic that this concern about people taking photos keeps coming up in recent threads, given that a very large proportion of the contributions to this website are photographs.

I'm the author of the Sulis Manoeuvre blog linked above.

It's true to say that a difficult dilemma is raised by the issue of trees on ancient monuments, and that there probably isn't any ideal solution. Midsummer Hill is managed as a wildlife reserve as well as an ancient monument and sometimes there will be conflicts of interest between those different objectives.

I'm stuck in this conflict of interests myself - on the one hand I'm an ancient sites enthusiast and fully support the need to protect the hillfort. I accept that its needs should take priority over those of the wildlife, since the wildlife is replaceable and the fort isn't. On the other hand I am a tree-hugging off-with-the-faeries woolly pagan type and those woods are one of my personal "special" places. So I admit that the reason I find the tree clearance upsetting is because of my attachment to those woods and I can't be entirely objective.

But - my concerns are that the work is being carried out with spectacular lack of sensitivity. The pictures taken by Credashill show some of the damage done by use of heavy equipment on the site, with areas of the fort churned up and rutted with tyre-tracks. Secondly, the area of clearance seems to have gone way outside the bounds of what had been planned, and many of the trees that have been felled were nowhere near the ramparts. While I'm reluctantly prepared to accept that the long-term future of the hillfort may be best served by not having trees on it, I'm alarmed that "conservation" involves chuntering over the site in a big tractor and lighting fires.

All around the Cotswolds where I live there are long barrows with dense clumps of trees on them. And while you wince at the thought of the archaeological damage the trees are doing to the barrow, you're aware that if they weren't there some Victorian farmer would probably have ploughed it flat!

It is indeed a difficult and fraught subject.