The Wood Read online

  About the Book

  This is the story of a wood: its natural daily life, its historical record. Cockshutt is a particular place – three and a half acres of mixed woodland in remote Herefordshire – but it stands as an exemplar for all the small woods of England.

  For four years John Lewis-Stempel managed Cockshutt, and did so in the old ways. He coppiced the trees, and let cattle and pigs roam there. This is his diary of the final year, by which time he had come to know Cockshutt from the bottom of its beech roots to the tip of its oaks, and to know all the animals that lived there – the fox, the pheasants, the wood mice, the tawny owl – and where the best bluebells grew. For many fauna and flora, woods like Cockshutt are the last refuge. It proved a sanctuary for John, too.

  To read The Wood is to live among its trees as the seasons change, following the author’s path until, suddenly, you come upon a grassy glade lit with white anemones, or your foot catches on a bramble, or a sparrowhawk startles overhead. Lyrical, informative, steeped in poetry and folklore, The Wood inhabits the mind and touches the soul.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Preface

  December: A Walk in the Wood

  January: Heartwood

  February: Roots

  March: Buds

  April: Flowers

  May: Leaves

  June: Midsummer’s Night

  July: In the Greenwood Tree

  August: In the Green Shade

  September: The Birds Have Flown

  October: The Fruits of Autumn

  November: Out of the Woods

  Sources

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by John Lewis-Stempel

  Copyright

  The Wood

  The Life and Times of Cockshutt Wood

  John Lewis-Stempel

  ‘You know I am no traveller. I am always wanting to settle down like a tree, for ever.’

  Edward Thomas

  Preface

  This is the story of a wood; its natural daily life, its historical times.

  A particular wood, but a wood which can stand as exemplar for all the small woods of England. Ever.

  Cockshutt Wood, in south-west Herefordshire, is three and a half acres of mixed (deciduous and coniferous) woodland with a secluded pool where the winter moon lives.

  I managed the wood for four years, so I knew it, from the bottom of its beech roots to the tip of its oaks. I knew the animals that lived there – the fox, the pheasants, the wood mice, the tawny owl – and where the best bluebells grew. (A very British quiddity, blue-bells in a wood.)

  I know why woods like Cockshutt are special: they are, for many fauna and flora, the last refuge. They are fortresses of nature against the tide of people and agri-business.

  Cockshutt was a sanctuary for me too; a place of ceaseless seasonal wonder where I withdrew into tranquillity. No one comes looking for you in a wood. You are safe from prying eyes, just another dark vertical shape among others: a human tree trunk.

  In the heart of Cockshutt there was often just the sound of nature; the leather creak of an old oak in spring wind, the drumming of the woodpecker, the lapping tongue of the badger at the pool edge at dawn.

  Actually, I lie. Sometimes there was the bark of a domestic pig, and the bronchitic rasp of a saw. I managed Cockshutt in the best way of all, the old way; by letting primitive livestock roam there, and by ‘coppicing’ it.

  Every book needs a justification, and a book about a wood perhaps most of all. How many trees will be felled for its pages? The excuse – no, the reason – I proffer is this: a wood should not be a museum. The notion of woodland as static, stately, fixed by ranks of mature trees is modern, and false. In Cockshutt a half-forgotten memory became real. Cows and pigs were raised there, as they had been in medieval days, and the wood provided us with everything from kindling to mushrooms for breakfast. Cockshutt was a working wood.

  A wood is different to a forest. A wood is wild, but not so wild it is frightening. You cannot get physically lost in a wood, only spiritually and imaginatively absorbed.

  I knew the trees of Cockshutt. Every one of them. A wood is personal; a forest is always remote. There is too much of it. So, I discovered the secret at the heart of Cockshutt, the little stand of wild service trees that are the vestige of the wildwood that was there at the very beginning.

  This is the diary of my last year at Cockshutt. I did not go on holiday that year, I did not miss a day of being with my wood.

  DECEMBER

  A Walk in the Wood

  A walk to the far end of Cockshutt – my woodless life – woodcock – vixen barking – Jew’s ears – amid the winter ruins of the oaks – ‘agroforestry’ – ‘Old Brown’, the tawny – what’s in a wood’s name? – holly – tending cattle in the wood – Cold Song – yule log – ‘To the British the oak was as the buffalo to the Sioux’

  1 DECEMBER: Into the wood.

  Over the stile, on to the path, which runs along the entire western side of Cockshutt. Past the sweet chestnut; an amused fingertip greeting to the giant beech, with its cold slate for bark. To my left the woodland glade we made by hacking away brambles and sycamore, to my right the narrow dingle where in March the kingcups bloom yellow, and where in November the world’s mists are manufactured. One giant sycamore remains, pegging down this flappy edge of the wood.

  It is about 3pm; and the rooks are flying home to St Weonards, not the usual ragged flight but a silent, determined oaring. As straight as crows.

  Past a slumbering ash with a rabbit burrow at the base, hard pellets at the entrance. Down in the dingle, which is parallel to the path, the mauve haze of alder catkins.

  On the far side of the dingle, a scattering of mature ash trees, including one wrapped in ivy; it is an avian tower block, home to treecreeper, tawny owl and, in the penthouse, wood pigeon. Beyond the ash, the remnant of the old grass ‘ride’, or trackway, and beyond that, stone barns which once ate into the wood, but are now dead themselves. Beyond the ruins, more ash.

  Faster now, to beat the early-falling darkness. How barren, how gloomy the squirrel’s drey looks in the wild cherry.

  The tracery of the bare trees against the blank winter sky: a sort of scripture. Or an enclosing net.

  The wood slowly climbs a bank. Down in the dingle, wrecks of fallen trunk and branches. And alder with their exposed, rat-tail roots.

  At the heart of the wood now, which is longer than it is fat, reaching the pool with its ring of reeds. They are grey, spavined; the whole day is grey. A V travels the dull water; the bow wave of the moorhen, who swivels to flash her warning white taillight.

  I love the moorhen. Every pond should have a moorhen. It should be the law. In the centre of the pool, which extends to about a quarter of an acre, is a Swallows and Amazons island, with five alder trees. In this late, low light it is a barge under way.

  Silver birch line the western bank of the pool; the far side is hazel, alder and sallow.

  On, on. I have a personal law of gravity: the faster you walk, the lighter the load. (If Isaac Newton had spent less time loafing under apple trees he might have discovered it too.) Squatted on my shoulder is a bale of hay.

  Through the stand of spruce; grim regimented Norwegian sentinels on parade, stuck in their private, perpetual acidic twilight. (The Norwegian spruce, strangers to our shores, were planted on some half-baked subsidy plan in the 1970s, and choked out all the flowers beneath them.)

  The dying winter sun, white and nuclear, strobes through the passing larch.

  No birds sing, except for a fitful robin in a young beech tree hung with crumpled, copper leaves. In all the wo
od, this one beech is the sole tree to retain its dress.

  December, when the trees stand in their naked truth, is the time to see and assess a wood.

  The robin drops his phrase, then restarts, as if my passing by reminded him of his purpose.

  Further into the wood: following the faint ink-line of the clay path as it threads by my favourite trees, the Wishbone Oak and the giant Californian redwood (‘Hello, Big Boy’). What dream, what hope caused a farmer a century ago on this absolute edge of England, where it runs unseen into Wales, to plant a sequoia?

  Nearly dark now: the quarter-moon is failing to break through the cloud that came on the western sky. I have almost reached the grove of kingly oaks, which tower above all other trees in the wood except the sequoia.

  The character of trees depends on the season; in spring, they watch you. In early winter, in solitude and great empty skies, they have no more botany than stone.

  Tonight, the seven oaks are the temple pillars of a lost civilization.

  At the fork in the path I do not haver, I keep left, to year AD 01, or thereabouts, and pass the clump of three wild service trees. The trio of Sorbus torminalis are a remnant of the original wildwood. Cockshutt existed when William conquered, it existed when the Romans trod their road to Hereford.

  The right fork leads across the neck of the wood, through brambles, to the hollies, the sallow; and the tangles of honeysuckle bines, which, one feels, if tugged would pull down the entire wood. There too is the foxes’ den.

  My journey’s end: the four red poll cows lie in a ragged circle in the last glade, where they watch for the sabre-toothed tigers of bovine nightmares.

  I throw the bale in their metal feeder. Beyond the hay rack is a final stand of spruce and larch.

  This is Cockshutt Wood: a small wood, chiefly of ash, oak and sallow, in an archipelago of similar small woods in rolling far-west Herefordshire. From above, it would have the shape of a willow leaf, the tip to the north. Around Cockshutt eddy pasture fields, and one small cornfield in my care. Along the western edge is one long field – not farmed by me – put down to a repetitive cycle of wheat and oil rape. Beyond this field, the peregrine-stooped Black Mountains can be gazed. To reach Cockshutt from the lane where I park the Land Rover I cross a paddock, given over to our pigs.

  I head back down the path. It is now dark, but it does not matter. I have walked this path so often in the last three years I can walk it in the blindness of night.

  I came late to woods. I am not really a woodsman, although my paternal great-grandfather was the ‘reeve’ (a fantastically ancient appellation), or manager of woodland, for Barts Hospital estate at Aconbury, just over the hill. But then the Great War came and the family were uprooted.

  I was born into farming, meaning a woodless childhood, except for the circular hilltop copse at Westhide. As with many scatterings of woodland on farmland, its sole purpose was cover for gamebirds. Kicking through the leaf litter I and my friends sought spent, shiny shotgun cartridges, as colourful as exotic birds (except for the orange Eley cartridges, which no one wanted). Collecting shotgun cartridges passed for a hobby in 1970s Herefordshire.

  All my other woodland experiences as a child are mere fragments, bark chippings, of memory:

  i) In the attic, my stepmother’s dissertation, for her teaching degree, on deciduous trees of Haugh Wood, with examples of buds held to the page by Fablon, a transparent sticky plastic, as certain a signifier of the 1970s as Black Forest gateau and space hoppers.

  ii) Picking bluebells in Haugh Wood/picking wild daffodils in Bent Orchard.

  iii) There were trees though; the Georgian oaks in the parkland at New Court, Lugwardine, where I learned to ride a horse; the pear tree on the front lawn with its attached treecreeper; our apple orchard; gathering conkers, with their skins as polished as teak, their sour yeasty smell; the tricks and the cheats of playing conkers, such as soaking in vinegar, baking in the oven.

  In a small but I think honourable snub to Health and Safety I sent my son to a school where playing conkers was compulsory.

  2 DECEMBER: In the shaded places, the frost remains all morning.

  What’s in a name? Sometimes, there is the archaeology of meaning. ‘Cock’ is from woodcock, the bird. Shutt is Medieval English for shut or trapped. Cockshutt Wood is where, centuries ago, woodcock were netted.

  Once woodcock were common (hence the ubiquity of Cockshutt as an English wood name). Some still nest locally, over on Ewyas Harold Common, but the four woodcock that clump together for warmth in the bramble of Cockshutt today are autumn migrants. When God made the dumpy woodcock He was in the same whimsical frame of mind as when He cobbled up the platypus. Although the size of a hand, the woodcock has a stiletto knife stuck on its face.

  The bird books label the woodcock’s brown-and-white, flecked-and-striped feathers as ‘crypsis’; ‘magick’ would be closer to the mark. Only the curlew, the wryneck and the snipe possess equally effective camouflage. In the thaw, the woodcock’s rufous plumage blends it into the leaf litter of the woodland floor.

  Woodcock are seamless with their surroundings. They are the leaf blown through the beech grove, the rotted elder stump beside the path, the speck of grey in the shadows of evening.

  I know the four woodcock are down in the bramble only because I saw them blasted in by the east wind. Exhausted, they plummeted to earth as dawn rose and I was collecting kindling, and the frost illuminated the stalks of the rosebay willow herb.

  A note on English firewood: sappy or dry, ash makes white-hot wood; silver birch is flaming mad, pyromaniacal; pines are frenetic; apple, cherry and willow sweetly fragrant; holly will burn green, and bright; oak is slow, solid burning, like coal, and similarly acrid.

  The saying ‘by hook or by crook’ comes from the Middle Ages when villagers were allowed to take only dead wood, not cut down trees or bushes. Fallen timber and dead wood could be cleared and pulled out with a shepherd’s crook or a weeding hook.

  Although people were punished for taking or damaging live trees in medieval England, the law was not as brutal as the Old German laws mentioned by the Roman author Tacitus. He noted that the penalty for someone who dared peel the bark of a living tree (and thus kill the tree) was to have his navel cut out and nailed to the tree and then be driven around the tree until all his guts were wound about its trunk.

  John Gilbert, the Bishop of Hereford, settled for excommunicating persons who cut down trees from the nearby Wood of Ross in 1383.

  Collecting or cutting firewood produces warmth; burning firewood produces heat. A virtuous circle.

  Wood was the first serious fuel. So each day as I bend to pick up ash and willow twigs and branchlets for kindling I am merely a picture echo of Stone Age man. We humans have been utilizing the wildwood for warmth for five hundred thousand years.

  3 DECEMBER: I set up a white plastic garden chair by the pool, at the line where the deciduous trees give way to the pines; the middle of Cockshutt, where I can see the wood before and aft. The view from this seat will be time-lapse photography in my memory.

  The stand of spruce: viewed from a certain angle, the spruce are so close together they form an impassable wooden wall. The smell of firs varies; sometimes it fills the air, sometimes, like today (refrigerated and dry), it is non-existent.

  To my front, the poolside birch, the snow queen trees; no one, ever, thought of silver birch as male. Despite its gracefulness, birch is tough; it was the first tree to colonize Britain after the last Ice Age.

  Silver birch, Betula pendula, is distinct from its cousin the downy birch, which does not have bark bosses at its base.

  How our woods were made: when the ice retreated ten thousand years ago Britain was treeless tundra joined to the Continent. As the climate improved, the time was ripe for arboreal invasion. After the birch came juniper, willow and Scots pine, to form the advance guard of trees.

  In the corner of my eye, movement. The vixen. In the half-light her fur lustres. She b
urns alive.

  She screams her mating call, which is the wail of the bereaved.

  If I had been cold before, I am colder now. She howls again, and cocks her ears for a response. Nothing comes back over the bitter-hard fields or through the trees. She trots on, is almost in front of me when she finally catches my scent. A flash of her face, then she bolts and is gone, an extinguished flame.

  In a wood, the trees are the star turns; but I do applaud the support acts.

  5 DECEMBER: Fog huddles down in the dingle; along the bottom is a trickle-stream from the pool. A heron comes up through the dingle fog, exactly in the style of an Ancient Greek trireme riding surf, to berth at the side of the pool.

  The bracket fungus on the willow is a dry shelf; when tapped it sounds like polystyrene. In a life form unassuming, inert, is held, perhaps, our human future; bracket fungi could be the next source of antibiotics.

  The woodcock have flown.

  Sometimes I worry that Cockshutt is so small that it is, properly, a copse. But it feels old, and from the lane there is the impression of solidity, of belonging.

  In the beginning was the wildwood. Then came the Stone Age people, who made the first holes in the limitless canopy. The wildwood provided nomadic hunters with game, berries, edible roots, leaves, seeds, cut wood, and covered almost the entire land of Britain, including the hilltops. Pollen counts from prehistoric peat show a sudden decline in elm from about 3000 BC, and a corresponding increase in nettles. The dismantling of the wildwood by Neolithic farmers had begun; the Stone Agers killed most of their selected trees by ring-barking, chipping a horizontal skin-wound with a stone axe, in imitation of the deer. Then came the Celts with their iron tools. The Romans turned much of lowland Britain into an imperial bread basket; yet in the ninth century large tracts of natural forest remained. The Kent and Sussex Weald stretched for 120 miles. It was the agriculturalist Anglo-Saxons who transformed the landscape; they fixed boundaries of field, woods and parishes still extant today. By the time of the Norman Conquest, the open pattern of our modern countryside was established. Only some 15 per cent of the land recorded by the Domesday survey was woodland and wood pasture. It is thought that the Forest of Dean was the last natural wild-wood in England, and that was felled in the thirteenth century.