A Place for the Heathlands

Klosterheden Plantation, located in western Jutland across Lemvig, Struer, and Holstebro municipalities, is Denmark's third largest forested area. The plantation covers 6,400 hectares. Resting on sandy soils and regularly hit by fog and salty winds from the North Sea, Klosterheden Plantation was for centuries a vast heath. In Løvschal's definition, that means "an artificially sustained vegetational succession stage dependent on frequent disturbance for its retention."^{1 ( 1 )}
Løvschal 2021:1. Having been "disturbed" by varying fire, tenure, and land-use regimes since the Bronze Age, Klosterheden was, indeed, an ancient heath until the late nineteenth century, when its transformation into plantation began.

Historically, the area was divided into Kronheden (the king's or "crown's" heath) and Klosterheden, which literally means "the monastery's heath," as it belonged to local Benedictine nuns from the thirteenth century to 1536. After the Reformation in 1536, the Danish king gained formal ownership over both Kronheden and Klosterheden. However, during the following centuries, the rights to use and manage the heaths were for long periods of time delegated to local noblemen, and through them to private citizens. In 1870, when afforestation efforts began on the initiative of three wealthy local landowners, the heath was subdivided into approximately three thousand privately owned plots used for hunting, gathering, grazing, heather collection, and peat extraction.^{2 ( 2 )}
Isager et al., 2022: 59. By 1880, 110 hectares had been successfully planted, mostly with Swiss mountain pines, and a deal was made with the Danish government to purchase Klosterheden. Over the following decade, negotiations took place with reluctant heath-plot owners who worried about losing access to the fuel, food, and fodder that the heath had hitherto provided. By 1896, Klosterheden Plantation had reached its current size, more or less, but only 1,576 hectares were planted.^{3 ( 3 )}
Isager et al., 2022: 59. In 1909, fifty per cent of Klosterheden was still heath.^{4 ( 4 )}
Klosterheden Plantation Management Plan 1909–1924. The plantation has since 1880 been categorized as Danish state forest, and is currently under the management of the Danish Nature Agency.

Nowadays, Klosterheden Plantation is usually referred to colloquially simply as "Klosterheden," the larger of the two medieval heaths. This naming practice, which emphasizes the heath rather than the plantation part of the name, is somewhat paradoxical, since Klosterheden is unmistakably a plantation. While the planting process proceeded slowly and suffered numerous setbacks during the first century as state forest, today's plantation is clearly demarcated from the surrounding agricultural landscape by tall trees growing along its edges. As plantation, Klosterheden is a landscape of extraction dominated by rows of coniferous trees of different heights and ages which determine their position in the plantation's commercial production cycle. In addition to that, Klosterheden is interspersed with chunks of deciduous forest that cover around six hundred hectares.^{5 ( 5 )}
Driftsplan 2002–2017, 37 and 45. Furthermore, the plantation contains some thee hundred hectares categorized as heath. This heath area is made up of five scattered places, known as Fladhøj Heath, Enebær Heath, Risbæk Heath, Sækken, and Kjærgaards Mølle Heath.^{6 ( 6 )}
Driftsplan 2002–2017, 37 and 45.

The natural and cultural histories of the five uneven heaths differ. Still, all five heaths present a contradictory image to the plantation of which they are an integrated part, in the sense that they are designated as natural heritage sites according to EU and Danish environmental regulations. In this respect, the small heaths are similar to other distinct areas within Klosterheden classified as cultural heritage sites – such as Egehaven ("The oak garden") and Møllesøen ("the mill lake"), as well as several barrows dating back to the Bronze Age. The natural and cultural heritage areas within Klosterheden Plantation are subject to government categorization, surveillance, and management regimes aimed at controlling any unruly life forms like invasive hordes of purple moor grass, the occasional wolf, or other out-of-place plants or animals, that might turn up and riot against the discipline of the plantation and its heritage sites.

Klosterheden is a complex mosaic of separate places and histories that come together in a single landscape. The ensuing analysis seeks to document the century-old transition of Klosterheden from ancient heath to mature plantation, as well as the histories of the small heaths that have emerged as special heritage places located within the contemporary plantation. Two theoretical tools are employed to account for the historicity of this landscape. The first of these is the French philosopher and sociologist Michel Foucault's concept of "heterochronia".^{7 ( 7 )}
Foucault 1986. If the heaths and other heritage places and the accumulated times connected to them are analysed as heterochronic "slices of time," then the mosaic of small heath parcels appear to represent different pasts, presents, and futures; but they also stand in the his­tory of the plantation as a collection of incompatible nature–culture objects and discontinuous times. The second theoretical tool is the critical heritage thinking formulated by Rodney Harrison, professor of heritage studies at University College London, and Colin Sterling, scholar of heritage, museums, art and ecology at the University of Amsterdam.^{8 ( 8 )}
Sterling and Harrison 2020. Their emphasis on heritage as multispecies interaction and representation over time enables an understanding of Klosterheden's heritage in which the future, the present, and the past all emerge as quite unstable.

The historian and museum curator Inger Bjørn Knudsen has analysed visitor uses of Klosterheden and concludes that they consider it as "another place" compared with the "usual places" such as homes or workplaces where people normally spend their time.^{9 ( 9 )}
Inger Bjørn Knudsen et al., (2022). An estimated 180,000 people visit Klosterheden Plantation every year. See https://naturstyrelsen.dk/naturoplevelser/naturguider/klosterheden/historie/ (accessed 16 March 3 2022). This sense of another place is captured in Michel Foucault's term "heterotopia."^{10 ( 10 )}
Foucault 1986; Knudsen et al., 2022. The concept of "heterochronia" is a kind of Siamese twin concept to heterotopia – different, but insepar­able. In Foucault's usage, heterotopias are exemplified by cemeteries, libraries, museums, festivals, fairgrounds. Some heterotopias, such as museums are places in which "time never stops building up."^{11 ( 11 )}
Foucault 1986:26.

The concept of heterochronia allows us to capture Klosterheden as a place that not only encompasses several other places ("heterotopias") but also the "heterochronias" or "time-slices" which are associated with these places^{13 ( 13 )}
See Knudsen et al., 2022 for an analysis of Klosterheden as heterotopia that has inspired this paper's topic. – Fladhøj Heath, Enebær Heath, Risbæk Heath, Sækken, and Kjærgaards Mølle Heath, as well as the other heritage sites known as Egehaven ("The oak garden") and Møllesøen ("the mill lake"). The heterochronias in Klosterheden are juxtapositions of "incompatible objects and discontinuous times." They also form the plantation as a collection of "slices of time," a collection that bears a resemblance to what Michel Foucault defines as "the modern museum." That is, a place that accumulates all kinds of things and establishes a sort of general archive by enclosing in "one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes".^{14 ( 14 )}
Foucault 1986, 26.

Philosopher Beth Lord rightly argues that Foucault's definition of the museum as heterotopia and heterochronia is useful "because it overcomes the problems of defining the museum exclusively in terms of objects, collecting practices, or methods of display that are historically contingent."^{15 ( 15 )}
Lord 2006:3. Still, the comparison between Klosterheden and the modern museum should not be stretched too far. Not simply because Klosterheden and, indeed, most museums do not contain all but, rather, some times, epochs, forms, and tastes. But, as Beth Lord contends, the museum is not a heterotopia, because it contains different objects (like a storehouse) and juxtaposes different times. Rather, the museum presents a more profound kind of difference between objects and concepts. "What every museum displays, in one form or another, is the difference inherent in interpretation."^{16 ( 16 )}
Lord 2006:3. And in this sense Klosterheden Plantation clearly resembles a museum. The his­tory of the plantation is more than simply a landscape with a his­tory. The existence of natural and cultural heritage sites within the plantation, as well as the government-controlled conservation, curating, and communication efforts attached to these sites, underlines the resemblance between Klosterheden and a museum – one epitomizing the idea of nature, the other that of culture. These activities are designed and carried out in large part to enforce people's belief in the Danish state as capable of protecting Klosterheden with its collection of nonhuman species, protected heath parcels, and heritage sites in a manner that enables a sustainable future of the area.

The culture heritage scholars Colin Sterling and Rodney Harrison argue that heritage studies should encourage new ways of imagining the past in the present. It can do this by looking to situated and relational forms of knowledge-making that transcend human/nonhuman and nature/culture boundaries.^{17 ( 17 )}
Sterling and Harrison 2020:38. Rather than "reducing heritage to processes of saving the past in the present for the future, as an often-cited cliché goes, heritage should be regarded as a fluid and emergent phenomenon gesturing towards an unstable future."^{18 ( 18 )}
Sterling and Harrison 2020:38. See also Harrison 2015:27, Baird 2022; Gentry and Smith 2019. Noting that the value systems of heritage tend to ignore the complex multispecies origins of heritage, Rodney Harrison, Caitlin DeSilvey, Cornelius Holtorf and Sharon Macdonald speak from an interdisciplinary position and stress the need to look at heritage as a series of multispecies "activities that are intimately concerned with as­sembling, building, and designing future worlds."^{19 ( 19 )}
Harrison et al., 2020:4. Taking note of these arguments, this paper ends with a discussion of the contradictory ideas of heritage associated with Klosterheden's contemporary management of a place where multiple species have lived and formed relationships for centuries.

Archaeological findings from Klosterheden suggest that forest was cleared and the meagre soils cultivated in the Bronze Age. Air-borne laser scans show prehistoric road tracks and sunken roads, possibly a short cut from "Oldtidsvejen," the 110 kilometres long east-west alignment of burial mounds in western Jutland. In historical time, an early source from 1656 describes a "rather large heath" which lacks forest, but is "never poor in fuel as peat is abundant."^{20 ( 20 )}
Berntsen 1656:135. Sources from the eighteenth century portray Klosterheden as virtually deforested, like the rest of Jutland, and recommend afforestation to reduce sand storms and ensure access to fuelwood.^{21 ( 21 )}
Ellen Damgaard et al., 1985:91; Erik Viborg 1788:28; C. Dreyer 1795:59. The Danish writer C. Dreyer, however, in 1795 depicts Klosterheden with "berries, bog-myrtle, creeping willow and heather... and pasturing sheep." This sense of a useful landscape rich in essential resources for fuel, fodder, hunting, and pasturing is also found in travelogues from the early nineteenth century.^{22 ( 22 )}
I. C. Hald 1833: 222; Matthias Wedel c. 1800.

The early historical sources reveal that members of the nineteenth-century Danish national elite saw calls for the afforestation of Jutland's heaths, including Klosterheden, as a patriotic and rational economic endeavour. The local population, on the other hand, rather considered it as an unwanted colonization of a heath landscape and a traditional and useful form of land tenure. But when the private afforestation of Klosterheden began in 1870, it was not motivated by patriotic concerns, but by the prospects of future economic gain for the three wealthy landowners behind the project.^{23 ( 23 )}
Damgaard 2019:324. Hedeselskabet ("The Heath Society"), founded in 1866, gave advice and technical (but no financial) support. Initially, numerous local owners of heath plots refused to sell their land to the three men, even when they were promised rights to heather collection up to ten years after land sales. After Klosterheden was bought by the Danish government in 1880, the process of assembling small land plots into one large plantation area continued for more than two decades.

From the outset, the afforestation of Klosterheden followed the German scientific forestry principles of "nachhaltigkeit" (sustainability) in the tradition of the forestry pioneer Hans Carl von Carlowitz (1645-1714), to which Danish forest management had adhered since the eighteenth century. These principles involved the systematic use of geometry, mathematics, and biology in the division of land into numerous identical parcels, the planting and extraction of which was calculated and balanced according to a time plan spanning several hundreds of years.^{24 ( 24 )}
See Bendix 2014; Hölzl 2010; Gruber 2007. Klosterheden was divided into approximately five hundred lots of 500 m², separated by fire belts. Mountain pines were planted as windbreaks for white spruce. A small nursery with oak and Norway spruce, later known as Egehaven ("the oak garden") was established.^{25 ( 25 )}
Oak, at the time, was valued highly as timber, not least for marine vessels. Large ploughs pulled by four horses ploughed deep to prepare the heath for planting - with the unintended effect that sandy winds "whipped" the young trees and damaged the first plantings.^{26 ( 26 )}
Damgaard et al., 1985:126; Bjerg 1951. Human labour and care was indispensable for the trees to grow and yet, over decades to come, regular frosty winters, salty air, dry periods, and a variety of plant diseases meant that the labour intensity and investment never guaranteed successful plantation growth.

By 1896, the planted area, dominated by mountain pines, stood at 1,576 hectares or 26 % of Klosterheden Plantation.^{27 ( 27 )}
Management Plan, Klosterheden 2002-2017. In 1909, half of Klosterheden was planted and the other half still heath.^{28 ( 28 )}
Management Plan, Klosterheden 1909-1924: 415. In 1924, 60 % of the area was planted with a 2:1 ratio of mountain pines and spruces.^{29 ( 29 )}
Cultivation Plan, Klosterheden 1909-1924:415-20. In 1941, the area with mountain pines had shrunk a little and was balanced 1:1 with spruces. Jumping ahead to 1971, 89 % of Klosterheden was planted, and mountain pines made up just 20 % of the total area.

Notably, by 1971, the total area included 420 hectares of protected lakes, bogs, and heaths as well as 120 hectares dedicated as land for public leisure.^{30 ( 30 )}
Management Plan, Klosterheden 1956-1971: 165. From this time onwards, new forms of cultural and social values were ascribed to Klosterheden Plantation rather than just economic value and profit. During the 1970s, environmental politics became international concerns, as manifested in the Ramsar convention of 1971 and the United Nations' Conference on Environment and Development in Stockholm 1972, for example. More than a decade later, in 1987, a UN Commission under the leadership of Gro Harlem Brundtland published a widely known report, "Our Common Future," which famously defined sustainable development as development that "meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."^{31 ( 31 )}
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/5987our-common-future.pdf The ensuing UN Rio Summit on Environment and Development in 1992 involved new international agreements of significance for forest management in Denmark, and hence in Klosterheden. A new Danish Forest Law in 1989 called for reduction of monoculture plantings and introduced, instead, "good and multifaceted management" of state forests with increasing use of deciduous species and protected areas.^{32 ( 32 )}
Management Plan, Klosterheden 2002-2017.

Since 2002, management of the plantation has focused on transition to so-called "nature-near forest management" (naturnær skovdrift), as well as development of recreational activities and reconnection of the few scattered heath areas within the plantation.^{33 ( 33 )}
Management Plan, Klosterheden 2002-2017. The European Union's Natura 2000 programme is an important element in the management. In the current plan period (2022-2027), almost seven hundred hectares in Klosterheden Plantation are listed as part of Natura 2000 area no. 224. This area particularly includes heath parcels and bird protection areas within the plantation.^{34 ( 34 )}
In the management plan, these areas are coded as Habitat H224 and Bird Protection Area F115. Each of these categories consist of sub-categories, e.g., for different types of heath. See https://mst.dk/media/upvfua3h/n224-natura-2000-plan-2022-27-flynder-aa-og-heder-i-klosterhede-plantage.pdf Notably, the remaining 5,700 hectares in the plantation are not subjected to the same level of environmental protection.

Currently, the plantation's workforce is small. Most operational tasks have been mechanized and outsourced to private companies. The management still holds responsibility for commercial operations, but more and more attention and activities are focused on the bio-services and social values of Klosterheden. These are linked to national and international agendas for sustainable development, biodiversity protection, carbon dioxide reduction, clean fresh water supply, public recreation, and natural and cultural heritage.

Paradoxically, Klosterheden Plantation never achieved economic sustainability. After 1945, when the trees had grown sufficiently in size and numbers to be valuable as timber, the plantation's deficits grew even more.^{35 ( 35 )}
Isager et al., 2022. In Klosterheden, as in most other plantations and forests in post-1945 Denmark, timber prices were halved and labour costs tripled.^{36 ( 36 )}
Larsen 1997, cited in Fritzbøger 2018:189. No one predicted this at the end of the nineteenth century when Klosterheden Plantation was planned. Just as no one imagined that oak would no longer be used for ship building. And no one could have foreseen that, after nearly a hundred years of nonprofitable operation, the fully-grown plantation would suddenly gain new significance due to environmental, moral, cultural, and social values now ascribed to the forest. The plantation's founders would have marvelled at the Forest Agency's contemporary income sources in Klosterheden - including courses in stress management and tobacco rehabilitation!

Since the late nineteenth century, when old tenure systems and livelihoods clashed with new ideas of resource extraction and international principles of scientific forestry, Klosterheden has transitioned into a beautiful, mature plantation. The plantation stands as "a frictional space," in the sense defined by the American anthropologist Anna Tsing. That is, a structure that facilitates and enables particular actions and developments while being, simultaneously, a structure of confinement that prevents other forms of action and development.^{37 ( 37 )}
Tsing 2005: 6. Key to this is the prioritization of human versus nonhuman needs in the plantation. Should human presence and activity be more limited in the plantation for the sake of nonhuman species' future survival and thriving? Indeed, whose futures are to be protected, and whose are to be ignored?

The Danish Forest Agency plays a lead role in answering such questions, but it is not the sole decisionmaker. Local museums carry responsibilities for sites that are categorized as cultural heritage. The three municipalities of Lemvig, Struer, and Holstebro are active decisionmakers as well. These levels of management and government are, of course, subject to national and international laws and agreements, which largely determine the management options available in Klosterheden. Moreover, several local and national non-governmental organizations engaged in nature conservation, sports, or other forms of recreation act as stakeholders and make claims to Klosterheden's spaces. For example, mountain bikers, amateur ornithologists, dog owners, horse riders, and boy and girl scouts. Furthermore, a range of nonhuman species actively forms the plantation as well, and not necessarily in line with the plans and intentions of the state foresters and other human managers. In this way, the contemporary Klosterheden Plantation may be described as a series of multispecies "activities that are intimately concerned with assembling, building, and designing future worlds" - that is, as heritage.^{38 ( 38 )}
Cf. Harrison et al., 2020:4. Inherently, Klosterheden is also a place that contains many distinct places and "slices of time."

Every year, an estimated 180,000 people visit Klosterheden Plantation.^{39 ( 39 )}
https://naturstyrelsen.dk/naturoplevelser/naturguider/klosterheden/historie/ (Besøgt 16/3 2022) Some go for a walk or go fishing, individually or in organized groups. Others ride horses, cycle, hold picnics, or watch birds, plants, deer, beavers, and perhaps even a wolf. Inger Bjørn Knudsen has analysed visitor uses and thoughts about Klosterheden, and concludes that visitors to Klosterheden consider it as "another place" (heterotopia) compared with the "usual places" such as homes or workplaces in which people normally spend their time.^{40 ( 40 )}
Knudsen et al., 2022. But Klosterheden is also a collection of heterochronias or "slices of time" represented by the curated, interpreted, communicated small heaths and other official heritage sites within the plantation. Even a brief description of these places shows Klosterheden's complicated heritage:

Fladhøj ("flat mound") is a man-made mound, presumably a sacred place used for ritual gatherings in the Bronze Age. Fladhøj was planted with mountain fir and spruces as part of Klosterheden Plantation's establishment more than a century ago. But in 1968, a fire erupted and swept through 250 hectares of forest around Fladhøj. The heat was so intense it created its own rain cloud above the plantation, which eventually put out the fire. By that time, heath had become a rare landscape type in Denmark. After the fire, half of the burnt area was therefore reclassified as heath, and named Fladhøj Heath in memory of its pre-afforestation natural and cultural heritage. Since then, the Forest Agency, often aided by voluntary labourers, has protected Fladhøj Heath according to Danish and EU law, for example by removing feral proliferations such as young trees of contorta, sitka, pine, and other conifers, as well as various scrubs, which are perpetual risks to the heath. In recent years, purple moor grass (Molina caerulea) has been particularly invasive.^{41 ( 41 )}
See https://naturstyrelsen.dk/find-et-naturomraade/naturguider/midt-og-vestjylland/klosterheden/oplevelser

Enebær ("Juniper") Heath is the only original heath parcel left in the plantation. Whereas Fladhøj Heath is predominantly covered by heather, the Enebær Heath with its rockier and nutrient-poor underground has a different appearance, with junipers, thyme and poplars growing among the heather. Red deer (cervus elaphus) regularly help to "disturb" the Enebær Heath and maintain it as heath.

Risbæk Heath, for centuries heath and then for several decades plantation, has not been planted for more than thirty years. The area is a grass- and herb-dominated heath. In 2022, the Nature Agency introduced seven Exmoor horses as all-year grazers in addition to the cattle that graze on the heath during the summer period. The presence and practices of these animals have allegedly caused new vegetation to emerge, including march gentian (Gentiana pneumonanthe), the hostplant of the Alcon blue (Phengaris alcon), and devil's-bit (Succisa pratensis), which provides food for the marsh fritillary (Euphydryas aurinia).

Fladhøj, Enebær, and Risbæk heaths are all classified as Natura 2000 areas, and thereby all require active Forest Agency management and protection. In contrast, two minor heath areas, Kjærgaardsmølle ("Kjærgaards Mill") Heathand Sækken ("the sack"), are "not in good condition".^{42 ( 42 )}
Tina C. M. Pedersen, biologist, Klosterheden Plantation. Personal communication, September 25, 2023. In Kjærgaardsmølle Heath, the common broom (Cytisus scoparius) has invaded the hilly terrain and hidden several prehistoric and culturally significant sunken roads. Grasses such as the purple moor grass (Molina caerulea) are invading Sækken and making it difficult to maintain the heath.

In an interview, Tina C. M. Pedersen, a biologist and Forest Agency employee at Klosterheden Plantation, explains that contemporary heath care is inspired by the practices of heath peasants in the old days. "You cut the heather, burn the heath, remove scrubs of mountain fir, sitka, contorta. Depending on how much you remove, new plants emerge or the heather flourishes again."^{43 ( 43 )}
Tina Pedersen, personal communication, 25 September 2023. And yet, the heaths as biotopes and objects of management differ in several respects from their past lives and looks. Due not least to emissions from modern agriculture, contemporary nitrogen and ammonium levels are much higher than they were in the past. This affects plant life considerably on the heaths. The fact that the five scattered heaths are small parts of a large plantation rather than five parcels on a very large heath, as was the case in the past, also makes a difference in terms of the conditions for plant growth and animal life. Klosterheden's population of deer began moving in when the plantation was young, whereas the current population of cattle and horses owes its existence to recent rewilding initiatives by the Forest Agency. This means that old traditions cannot simply be copied in contemporary heath management.^{44 ( 44 )}
E.g., a Belgian study shows that purple moor grass thrives on burnt land so this invasive species needs removal by other techniques (Jacquemon and Neubert 2005).

Maintaining the heaths for the future is clearly a complex operation. It requires a delicate balance between protecting natural habitats and species as they exist in the present, and at the same time allowing nature, ever dynamic and transformative, to run its course in these heaths.

In addition to the five heath patches within the plantation, there are several other heterochronias in Klosterheden, which are not heaths. These include:

Egehaven (the oak garden) was a tree nursery for oak and Norway spruce during the earliest planting period in the 1870s. Nowadays, it consists of 150-year-old moss-clad oak trees. Egehaven is often referred to as the oldest part of the plantation. It stands encircled by berms or compacted ridges of earth that separate the oaks from the coniferous and much younger surrounding trees.^{46 ( 46 )}
See https://naturstyrelsen.dk/find-et-naturomraade/naturguider/midt-og-vestjylland/klosterheden/oplevelser

Møllesøen (the mill lake), a lake connected to the local river, Flynder Å, is another special place. For centuries, a water mill dating back to at least 1420 operated here. It burned down in 1889, and the mill dam broke and disappeared. But after nearly one hundred years' absence, Møllesøen was restored in 1977 by the Danish Nature Agency, and has since been a most popular meeting and picnic place in the plantation.^{47 ( 47 )}
See https://naturstyrelsen.dk/find-et-naturomraade/naturguider/midt-og-vestjylland/klosterheden/oplevelser In 1999, the Nature Agency reintroduced beavers into Møllesøen and Flynder Å after an absence of 2,500 years - partly to help conserve an endangered European species and, more importantly, to ensure a more biodiverse landscape aided by the beavers' alleged landscape engineering talents.^{48 ( 48 )}
See https://naturstyrelsen.dk/find-et-naturomraade/naturguider/midt-og-vestjylland/klosterheden/oplevelser

Initially, the beavers' dam constructions caused flooding on local farming land outside of Klosterheden Plantation, and thereby led to conflicts between Klosterheden's foresters and local farmers. At the same time, beaver dams and visible bite marks on trees became popular visitor attractions. Since then, beavers have multiplied and wandered into numerous other small streams and big waterways in western Jutland. Their migration has raised concerns in the nearby River Storå, where beavers are considered a menace by local sports fishers because their dams prevent the endemic Storå salmon from travelling up and down the river. As the Storå salmon nearly went extinct in recent decades and was saved only by a considerable and still ongoing intervention by local sports fishers and municipal environmental initiatives, the negative effect of beavers on the salmon has become a new conflict of interest.^{49 ( 49 )}
Holstebro Municipality reckons that efforts to save the Storå Salmon has since 1980 cost 30 million Danish Kroner. See https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/gnavers-byggeboom-spaender-ben-beskyttet-fisk See also https://dagbladet-holstebro-struer.dk/holstebro/lyst-til-laks-eller-begejstring-for-baevere-der-er-krig-i-vandloebene-og-millioner-paa-spil and https://mst.dk/erhverv/rig-natur/artsforvaltning/beskyttede-arter/baever

The accumulation of time-places in Klosterheden encompasses several times, epochs, forms, and tastes. Here are Bronze Age mounds, a recently reborn lake named after a long-existing but now vanished mill; old oak trees from the 1870s next to numerous younger age-sets of conifers; a small patch of "original" heath and larger patches of newer heaths - all of them, obviously, not the same as they were in previous times. And there are ancient, yet brand-new, beavers - not to mention the odd uninvited wolf, that is nonetheless accepted because wolves are nowadays officially parts of the future, hopefully rewilded Danish nature. It is, indeed, a place made up of complicated histories.

While a large part of the plantation is still commercially operated according to the Forest Agency's planting and extracting plans, other areas are managed as natural and/or cultural heritage. The Forest Agency's webpage covering Klosterheden barely mentions the commercial aspect of the plantation, however: Instead it lists a selection of natural and cultural historical facets, including some of the above-mentioned heterochronias, and certain plant and animal species considered special attractions in Klosterheden.^{50 ( 50 )}
For a longer list of these sites, see https://naturstyrelsen.dk/find-et-naturomraade/naturguider/midt-og-vestjylland/klosterheden/oplevelser

In this way, Klosterheden is officially communicated to its visitors as "an immobile place" in Foucault's sense:^{51 ( 51 )}
Foucault 1986:26. that is, as a place that represents a special kind of historical continuity by still being where it always was - and by accumulating discontinuous spacetimes ranging from geological postglacial structures, through places and structures associated with human activity from the Bronze Age to the present. The ongoing conservation activities on scattered heaths and other heterochronias in the plantation are explained on the webpage as either protection of natural or cultural sites of special value and interest, or as heritage work in the sense of assembling, building, and designing a future-to-be sustainable and biodiverse Klosterheden.^{52 ( 52 )}
Cf. critical heritage theory associated with, e.g., Harrison and Sterling 2020. This heritage work is communicated as a multispecies endeavour in which human managers and visitors coexist, even collaborate, with nonhuman animals and plants. While some nonhuman species are seen as unwanted in the plantation, others are clearly regarded as "companions"^{53 ( 53 )}
Cf. Haraway 2003. - animals and plants considered helpful and necessary cohabitants to people in the plantation's present and future.

As we continue to discuss Klosterheden's history and heritage, we would like to introduce a figure who defines whether plants and animals are unwanted or companions, who plans and manages, regulates, and perhaps reverses course. A figure who plants, cuts, burns, builds, categorizes, curates, and communicates: namely, the clown.

The clown has a long and complex history, from early commedia dell 'arte, known for its improvisations and masks, to the modern circus, where multiple clown figures like the White Clown, Pierrot, Auguste usually interplay. Clowns combine the tragic and comical faces and behaviours of humankind. They may excel as musicians or acrobats, but, at the same time, appear extremely clumsy.^{54 ( 54 )}
The Danish word for clown, klovn, is synonymous with "clumsy." The modern clown is complex and contradictory. He, and these days also she, comes in several versions and may appear as reasonable, rational, and authoritative - or as a confused, well-intending troublemaker unable to foresee the mess he is just about to initiate. The clown may be a tearful figure, lovelorn and optimistic, heartsick and remorseful, who engages the world with grotesque, yet poetic agency. As human beings, it is easy to recognize the clown figure in ourselves as well as in others - in this case as a figure who has wandered or worked or written about Klosterheden Plantation for quite some time.^{55 ( 55 )}
It should be emphasized that the authors of this paper consider ourselves as belonging to this category of clowns, too.

Klosterheden Plantation was always about future-making. The afforestation process of the late nineteenth century followed carefully thought-out long-term plans designed to satisfy local timber needs and bring economic profits to its state owner in the (then) future. While the toilsome implementation of these plans hardly ever led to fulfilment of their economic goals, the trees nonetheless grew up. And by the 1970s and 1980s, Klosterheden stood as a large and lovely plantation, not delivering in economic profits, but suddenly surfacing as possessing a range of characteristics of great social, cultural, and biological value. Paradoxically, Klosterheden might therefore be a fine example of sustainable development as defined in 1987 in Brundtland's "Our Common Future," in the sense that Klosterheden at its inception as plantation met the needs of the (then) present generation, while never compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Or is Klosterheden rather the clown version of sustainability, since the plantation never met the expected economic needs of the heath owners who started it but, instead, in true clown fashion and by historical coincidence, ended up meeting a completely different and unforeseen set of needs formulated by new generations of caretakers?^{56 ( 56 )}
See Isager et al., 2022.

Since the 1970s and 1980s, it is fair to say that the times have been a-changing. Møllesøen was reborn in 1977; two decades later, beavers were brought back - ancient and brand new at the same time - to help engineer Klosterheden's landscape for the future. Moreover, the scattered heaths gained new national and international significance as endangered biotopes, and thus became subjects to new management categories and forms of protection. Fladhøj Heath, named after its Bronze Age mound, emerged as a new heritage site due to an unintended yet not entirely inconvenient forest fire, which enabled the Forest Agency to reclassify the burned-down plantation parcel as heath. It has since required considerable efforts by human foresters and volunteers, aided by nonhuman animals, to maintain Fladhøj Heath as heath for the future. Looking at the history of Klosterheden from the perspective of rational planning that did not succeed, or was reversed due to unforeseen new rational plans and coincidences beyond human control, it is tempting to see it as an intergenerational clown show - one that ridicules modernity's dream of controlling nature and freezing the past. Another view could be that it is an intergenerational pantomime, where each generation of clowns plays its part behind masks of foolingly orderly appearances - and improvises provisional solutions to a story that never ends.

But the small, scattered heaths within the plantation cannot be recreated, of course. Not as they used to be in the past. The Forest Agency and the local museums that communicate the history of Klosterheden tend to straddle (at least) two quite different versions of this history. One version presents the scattered heaths as lovely (though endangered) biotopes and/or cultural history sites, aka government-protected remnants of the vast Klosterheden and its old tenure systems, systems that existed before "plantation" was added to its place and name. This version stresses certain species and sites as heritage, as "immobile places" to be preserved and fixed in time by state foresters and scientists in control of the situation. Another version stresses that these heaths are not the same as they were in the past, nor will they be in the future. Because, after all, Klosterheden does not exist outside of time, and is not inaccessible to time's ravages, such as excessive levels of nitrogen and ammonium. And, also, because the small heaths need to develop naturally and adopt new plant and animal species - not just to be carpets of heather, but become room for the greatest possible biodiversity of characteristic heath species, following Danish and EU regulations. This version thus stresses fluidity, multispecies intentions, and coincidences as heritage: a more open, improvisational approach by state foresters and scientists in regard to the human and nonhuman agencies who form our past, present, and future.

Hence, the scattered heaths, like the other heterochronias within Klosterheden, carry their own multispecies histories, in which continuity and change, intentions and coincidences, clowns and companions must somehow be accounted for. As separate time-places, they represent different pasts, presents, and futures. At the same time, they stand in the history of the plantation as a whole - the place of all times - as a collection of incompatible nature-culture objects and discontinuous times. Like Foucault's museum, which in Beth Lord's words "engages in a double paradox,"^{57 ( 57 )}
Lord 2006:3. Klosterheden contains "infinite time in a finite space, and it is both a space of time and a 'timeless' space." Maybe it takes a clown, him/herself inherently paradoxical, to see and communicate the history and nature(s) of Klosterheden in this way.

Luckily, the contradictoriness and untidiness of Klosterheden's times and landscapes seem to bother neither its workforce nor its many visitors.^{58 ( 58 )}
See Knudsen et al., 2022. Possibly, as anthropologist Barbara Bender points out, because people tend to see signs of different pasts simply as "history" or "layered palimpsests"; their "ignorance of official history" may well go hand-in-hand with great depth of local knowledge or personal memory, intimate landscape relations and a "multivocal sense of place."^{59 ( 59 )}
Bender 2002:S108-S109. A person may understand the landscape in a dozen different ways. Landscapes are "time materialized" and they "refuse to be disciplined. They make a mockery of the oppositions that we create between time (history) and space (geography), or between nature and culture."^{60 ( 60 )}
Bender 2002:S106. "We," in this case, could be clowns of the more categorizing, curating, and communicating kind. And it is funny to contemplate the possibility that Barbara Bender may be right, and that the clown-heath and heritage communicated by us is not really noticed by visitors to Klosterheden.

The American professor of Latin American languages and literature, Mary Louise Pratt, has observed how contemporary writers and scholars are experimenting with nature writing in which "multispecies entanglements" are among the "new plot elements."^{61 ( 61 )}
Pratt 2017:G171. Faced by climate change and damage to ecosystems worldwide, Pratt finds that writers are asking questions about "how will people get from here to there? What material, ethical, political, esthetic, affective, choices are we, and will they be called upon to make? What will be possible?"^{62 ( 62 )}
Pratt 2017:G170. One prominent writer is the Australian anthropologist and environmental scholar Deborah Bird Rose, who calls for radically reworked forms of attention to multispecies kinship and connectivity.^{63 ( 63 )}
Rose 2017:G51-G63. While acknowledging the contributions of Rose in particular and the emerging nature writing more generally, Pratt concludes that "humans, modern, Occidental humans [remain], at the center of the narrative. Its story is still all about an 'us.'"

Pratt's words of caution are relevant to Klosterheden's landscape, dominated as it is by an industrial plantation interspersed with more-or-less feral forest patches and heritage places. In the scattered heaths and other heterochronias that are not part of the commercial plantation operation, multispecies entanglements have certainly become important plot elements. European nightjars, beavers, ospreys, deer, cattle, horses as well as both wanted and unwanted plant species are key protagonists in the story of the future-to-be habitats and biotopes in Klosterheden. Several species have joined the plot as companions to the human caretakers in Klosterheden. Their presence and practices are explained in terms of mutually dependent landscape care for the sake of the future survival of a diversity of "good" plants and animals, and for the eradication or prevention of other, unwanted species.

But just as agricultural and industrial practices that take place outside of Klosterheden do affect multispecies lives and habitats inside Klosterheden, it is a fact that, vice versa, activities of care and conservation inside Klosterheden also have consequences elsewhere. One example is that the beavers who came to Klosterheden in 1999 as companion landscape managers have since then naturally multiplied and expanded from Flynder Å to other rivers and waterways in western Jutland, including the Storå River. Here, their dams are causing problems for the river's endemic Storå salmon and its annual passage up and down the river. In some places, the beaver dams prohibit passage for mature salmon; in other places the fry of salmon, unable to forge the dams, are eaten by cormorants in the thousands. The cormorants are officially categorized as an endangered and therefore protected species. But cormorants have multiplied in recent decades. They have moved from their normal coastal habitats in the Limfjord, the strait between the North Sea and Kattegat, which is more-or-less biologically dead due to agricultural pollution and failure of management. Instead, aided by beaver dams, cormorants have found new habitats with delicious salmon buffets in inland river systems. Hence, the assemblage of apparently reasonable and rational decisions about landscape management in Klosterheden Plantation, national protection of cormorants, and intensive initiatives to ensure the survival of the Storå Salmon have led to unforeseen and messy situations caused by highly competent but somehow also clumsily uncoordinated clowns, each supporting their own agenda and favourite companion species.

In Klosterheden's landscape of extraction and heritage, it seems inevitable that clowns and companions end up in situations like this on a regular basis. The history of Klosterheden thereby suggests that we should look at heritage, as Sterling and Harrison argue, as "a fluid and emergent phenomenon gesturing towards an unstable future."^{64 ( 64 )}
Sterling and Harrison 2020:27. Interestingly, the knowledgeable and competent employees at Klosterheden, such as the biologist Tina, appear to share Sterling and Harrison's understanding of heritage as

But as this paper's analysis has shown, it is difficult in practice to get this right. Perhaps because, in Deborah Bird Rose's memorable phrase, "our past is now racing towards us from the future."^{66 ( 66 )}
Deborah Bird Rose 2013:7. And we - the clowns and our companion species and all the unwanted others in Klosterheden - face an uphill battle if the goal is to challenge the plantation's structure of confinement and, instead, introduce new and more radical forms of action and development such as ceasing (or reducing dramatically) all commercial logging and restricting human beings completely from entering large parts of the plantation.^{67 ( 67 )}
See Engelbreth 2021.https://www.altinget.dk/miljoe/artikel/uroert-skov-er-en-klar-gevinst-for-baade-klima-og-biodiversitet While such a decision would enforce some clowns' belief in the Danish state as capable of protecting Klosterheden's nature, it would undoubtedly cause other clowns to protest loudly. But there we are.

The authors are grateful to an anonymous peer-reviewer for highly valuable comments and suggestions.