The Wood Read online

  Two long-tailed tits, with a late brood to feed, work over a silver birch branch, then start on the branch again. Eat. Repeat. A long-tailed tit takes an insect every 2.5 seconds. Or thereabouts.

  August is a quiet month on a livestock farm too. We ‘hayed’ in July, and the maize is not cut until October. The lambs are weaned, the cows not due to calve until September.

  So Willow and I are on DIY duties, off to haul two Norwegian spruce trunks out of the wood. The spruce is for poles to make a field shelter. In the Year of the Lord 2017 there are still times when horsepower is all; only an equine can fit along the woodland path.

  On an alder a fallow deer stag has left shreds of velvet. In August, when the new antlers are fully grown, stags are eager to rid themselves of the madly itching fabric. On hot days like these, when the urge to itch becomes unbearable, they rub their antlers against rough-barked trees until hard bone shows clean beneath.

  Under a hazel, there is the shell detritus of an immature squirrel who has rushed through the hazels trying the nuts and finding them all still sour and whitish-green, immature themselves.

  The crab apples are swollen with a sort of promise. They make the jelly for autumn game and Sunday morning toast. One of the beech trees is starting to show golden. Every year, it is the same: this one tree is the first to sign the dying of summer.

  Somewhere at the north end of the wood, where it points to Hay Bluff, a wood pigeon clappers, finds a hole in the larch and escapes the oppressive heat. From the same place another pigeon calls: ‘Coo-coo-coo/coo-coo-coo-coo/coo-coo-coo-coo/coo—’ The ending is abrupt, as though the bird decided its soft summer melody hopeless, and gave up.

  I tie the two trunks to Willow’s harness; the blue nylon rope around the dead trees is electric vivid in the pall of the Norwegian spruce.

  We start back. The trees close in. Birch. Alder. Sycamore. Hazel. Sallow. Beech.

  We take the path alongside the pool, to try and find some air and light. The tarry water is unmoving. In the reeds the moorhen calls her alarm. (After all this time, my beloved bird?) Her protest lessens but is never wholly abandoned, and she continues to bark intermittently at me from behind her fortress of green swords.

  Suddenly, from out of the sun a swift dips down, takes a sip of water, and screams a last farewell. The ‘devil’s screecher’ is migrating south. The stay-at-home moorhen is unimpressed, and continues her scolding.

  I can tell you why the shade of the August wood dismays. It is a foretaste of winter’s shadow.

  23 AUGUST: 25ºC. The moving leaves betray the invisible wind.

  A five-minute trot through Cockshutt, trying to find a missing sheep, a species ordained a flock animal, and yet so bloody-mindedly prey to individualism at all the wrong times.

  Scan the scene: ragwort; nightshade flowers; white marble clouds; a green dragonfly; honeysuckle flowers giving way to bright red berries.

  But no stray sheep.

  29 AUGUST: Hot, again. Wood gloom, as though the light is turned off. Lots of large white butterflies; their flight half determined, half dilettante.

  Mosquitoes whine (a pleonasm, I grant you: their name comes from the Greek muia, an attempted rendering in a word of that irritating noise they make when flying). Apples silently fill and grow.

  I see, for the first time, the autumnal, white-mist webs of spiders drenching the bramble.

  30 AUGUST: Squirrel = tree rat, though you have to smile at the high-wire antics.

  Swallow chatter; buzzard pee-ow, pee-ow.

  Three hundred or more house martins mass on the barns. The flight of the birds … The departure south by the swallow tribe is the unmistakable, unbridgeable divide between summer and autumn.

  But still you cling to your dreams of an Indian summer.

  From down in the valley, across the harvested fields with their ziggurats of waiting straw bales, comes the chatter and clink of a drinks party. Distant voices, over-excited ambience.

  Tonight, one of those farming happenstances that make you do a fist pump, raise a salute to the providential god. The lost sheep is waiting by the paddock gate on the lane.

  Open the gate, and in the sheep goes, baaaing, happy as Larry the Lamb. If I was on Twitter I’d hashtag the day #Result

  31 AUGUST: About 9pm, a young fox out by him/herself. The fox cubs have been sent out into the world to fend for themselves. The wild lone.

  SEPTEMBER

  The Birds Have Flown

  Autumn smells as thick as curtain – glistening moss – being in a leafy wood: experience in pointillism – put the pigs on the beech mast – roasted beech nuts – chiffchaff renews its song – holly blue butterflies – a weasel – nutting – the yew in the churchyard of St Bartholomew’s – acorns falling – a hallucination of blewit mushrooms – the health-giving properties of elderberries – greater spotted woodpeckers chacking for territory – hedgehogs building up fat reserves for winter

  4 SEPTEMBER: A wet wood, hanging with autumn-rot smells as thick as curtain, but Cockshutt is still green in parts, especially the glistening moss on the stones and the boughs beside the trickle-ditch.

  The ragwort is a shocking, inconceivable yellow under the spruce.

  A fleeting glimpse of a rabbit – a flash – as it warps to shelter speed.

  This is how it is in a wood with canopy: sights and sounds exist in bits. Experience in pointillism.

  5 SEPTEMBER: In over the stile, and for the first time the beech mast crackles satisfyingly underfoot, the shells open in a three-way split, the kernels mahogany and shiny.

  A gang of six chaffinches is sufficiently absorbed in the epicurean delight of eating beech kernels that I almost tread on them before they fly off. Chaffinches, when working ground, seem to nod their heads; rather they keep their head still, the eyes on the prize, and jerk their body along to keep up with it.

  With this much mast already fallen, and the finch time beginning, now is the moment to let the pigs gorge, and expel the cows (beech and acorn are poison to them), among them the girl calf born in spring and now already half the size of her ma. I spend the early afternoon putting up an electric fence, three strands of horizontal polywire on plastic poles around the dingle and the bottom of the wood, but protecting the glade. Snouting pigs are indiscriminate diggers.

  The electric fence is attached to a tractor battery. I let the pigs into their new run. The scream of the weaner who puts her wet nose on the fence is not contained by the trees.

  Beech trees do not crop every year, but every three or four years, when the harvest is likely to be heavy.

  Some 20 per cent of the beech nut is comprised of a thick sweetish yellow oil excellent for frying.

  To extract the oil, pulverize beech nuts in an electric grinder, or by the keep-fit equipment of a pestle and mortar, and squeeze the pulp through a sieve, muslin bag, or failing these a pair of washed tights. A kilo and a half of mast should give you about 250g of oil. The oil is best if you can be bothered to de-shell each nut, and even better if you scrape off the slightly astringent skin of the kernel. But this is a fiddly operation.

  Beech oil was commercially produced in Britain until the middle of the Victorian era, and is still preferred in some French cooking circles over the ubiquitous olive oil.

  Beech nuts are mildly toxic raw, so always cook them before eating. That said, they can be used neat to flavour gin.

  Roasted beech nuts

  Remove the kernels, place on a baking sheet and sprinkle with extra-virgin olive oil. Bake at 180ºC/Gas Mark 4 until golden. Drain on kitchen towel, toss in ground sea salt, and eat as a party nibble.

  8 SEPTEMBER: This, I suspect, is our last good day. The house martins are still here, and autumn has failed to sink its barbs into absolutely everything. Sunlight through hawthorn is surprisingly verdant, and has all the pretence of youth.

  A dead wood pigeon on the path through the woods, with no marks of disease or harm from a predator. So, I suppose some wood pigeon die a natural death
, live their allotted lifespan. And I still maintain that the wood pigeon is our most underrated bird: it is good in the air, sparrowhawk fast; its sweet lowing makes a summer’s day; it is good on the plate; and the rose-china blush of its breast is art.

  9 SEPTEMBER: The day warms from a bad start, so by afternoon there are white butterflies and crane flies on the ride.

  The chiffchaff renews its song, but it is less spirited than the full-throated performance of March. As Sir Edward, Viscount Grey, put it, the chiffchaff’s autumn song is ‘a subdued repetition … a sort of quiet farewell before the chiffchaff leaves us on its long journey southwards’. The chiffchaff is the last warbler singing; all the rest have departed into memory.

  A brood of holly blue butterflies, so late I think them out of time, is on the wing, flying around the ivy, where they sup nectar from the green flower.

  11 SEPTEMBER: Sitting in my chair, I am suddenly aware of being watched. A weasel is sitting up beneath the Tall Oak, so close I can see every whisker. The black-button eyes are utterly without gentlenesse.

  Weasel. Say the word. There is no fluffy, Bill Oddie way to pronounce ‘weasel’. The animal is synonym for cunning, of deadliest sort.

  The weasel is from the old time, yet it is also the perfect modern predator; a miniaturized, malevolent twelve inches of muscle with needle teeth. She is plainly unable to categorize the shape in the chair, with its stink of sheep (I have my farming coat on). Eventually she determines on discretion, and slides away.

  12 SEPTEMBER: Hazelnuts sufficiently ripe to fall when the tree is shaken.

  14 SEPTEMBER: Holy Cross Day (aka Holy Rood Day), a subject about which John Clare wrote to William Hone:

  On Holy rood day it is faithfully & confidently believed both by old & young people that the Devil goes a nutting on that day & I have heard many people affirm that they once thought it a tale till they ventured to the woods on that day when they smelt such a strong smell of brimstone as nearly stifled them before they could escape out again – & the cow boy to his great disappointment found that the Devil will not even let his black berrys alone & he believes them after that day to be poisoned by his touch.

  William Cobbett, a decidedly earthier character than Clare, observed that ‘a great nut year is a great bastard year’ due to the ungodly fun folk had when out nutting.

  15 SEPTEMBER: In the Middle Ages, the hazel was allocated to St Philibert (Filbert) because his commemorative day was 22 August, when the nuts were considered ripe. Neither I nor the squirrels nor the wood mice have ever found them properly ripe until mid-September. Since the devil, who is best avoided, went nutting yesterday, I go gathering hazelnuts today.

  The modern English name for hazel derives from the Anglo-Saxon haesel, meaning hat, in reference to the frilly cap in which the nut sits.

  The nomenclature might be medieval but the culinary use of hazelnuts is prehistoric, and they formed an important item in the diet of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. Pick a hazelnut to eat and you are the first man, the first woman, the English Adam and Eve.

  Hazelnuts have, proportionately, more protein than a hen’s egg, as well as a significant amount of oil.

  In the kitchen: put shelled hazelnuts on a baking tray (150–200ºC for about ten minutes) and watch like a hawk because they will burn. When cool, I sprinkle some salt over them, and snack. Part of the consuming pleasure, I confess, is having beaten the squirrel to Cockshutt’s bounty.

  Hazelnut and mushroom pâté

  Serves 4

  1 small red onion, chopped

  2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil

  1 clove garlic, crushed

  150g porcini (cep) or chestnut mushrooms

  1 tsp cognac/brandy

  100g roasted hazelnuts

  250g smoked tofu

  1 tsp fresh rosemary, chopped

  1 tsp fresh thyme, chopped

  1 tsp shoyu

  1 tbsp water

  salt and freshly ground black pepper

  Fry the onion in the olive oil until caramelized. Add the garlic and mushrooms and fry over medium heat until the mushrooms soften. Remove well away from heat and add the cognac or brandy.

  Put the hazelnuts in a blender and blitz. Then add the tofu, herbs, shoyu and onion-mushroom mix from the pan and process until a firm paste emerges. You may need to add water. Season. Serve on toast.

  16 SEPTEMBER: Visit to St Bartholomew’s, Much Marcle. In the graveyard there is a yew, 1,500 years old, its girth in 2006 measured at thirty feet eleven inches. One can sit inside the yew, on a three-sided bench; it is a rustic room.

  Heartwood of yew has high crushing strength; yew sapwood has high tensile strength. The archers of medieval England made their killing longbows from the yew, from the part of the trunk where heartwood meets sapwood. With dark heartwood on the inside and the light sapwood on the outside, the yew bow gave tremendous spring, and made short work of French knights at Crécy and Agincourt, despite their expensive armour.

  Robert Graves claims in The White Goddess that the yew was the symbolic ‘death tree in all European countries’. As with St Bartholomew’s, many an English churchyard has a yew tree that pre-dates it, suggesting the Christians engaged in a little light religious appropriation, building their churches on druid sites.

  The yew contains highly toxic alkaloids in nearly all its parts, as befits the graveyard tree. (The one edible part is the berry, providing the seeds are not consumed.) Thomas Gray trades on the dark association in ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’:

  Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,

  Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap,

  Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,

  The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

  And today, having sat in a yew tree, I see that Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree’ are scripted in clear, distilled truth:

  Nay, Traveller! rest. This lonely Yew-tree stands

  Far from all human dwelling: what if here

  No sparkling rivulet spread the verdant herb?

  What if the bee love not these barren boughs?

  Yet, if the wind breathe soft, the curling waves,

  That break against the shore, shall lull thy mind

  By one soft impulse saved from vacancy.

  Who he was

  That piled these stones and with the mossy sod

  First covered, and here taught this aged Tree

  With its dark arms to form a circling bower,

  I well remember. – He was one who owned

  No common soul. In youth by science nursed,

  And led by nature into a wild scene

  Of lofty hopes, he to the world went forth

  A favoured Being, knowing no desire

  Which genius did not hallow; ’gainst the taint

  Of dissolute tongues, and jealousy, and hate,

  And scorn, – against all enemies prepared,

  All but neglect. The world, for so it thought,

  Owed him no service; wherefore he at once

  With indignation turned himself away,

  And with the food of pride sustained his soul

  In solitude. – Stranger! these gloomy boughs

  Had charms for him; and here he loved to sit,

  His only visitants a straggling sheep,

  The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper:

  And on these barren rocks, with fern and heath,

  And juniper and thistle, sprinkled o’er,

  Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour

  A morbid pleasure nourished, tracing here

  An emblem of his own unfruitful life:

  And, lifting up his head, he then would gaze

  On the more distant scene, – how lovely ’tis

  Thou seest, – and he would gaze till it became

  Far lovelier, and his heart could not sustain

  The beauty, still more beauteous! Nor, that time,

  When nature had subdue
d him to herself,

  Would he forget those Beings to whose minds,

  Warm from the labours of benevolence,

  The world, and human life, appeared a scene

  Of kindred loveliness: then he would sigh,

  Inly disturbed, to think that others felt

  What he must never feel: and so, lost Man!

  On visionary views would fancy feed,

  Till his eye streamed with tears. In this deep vale

  He died, – this seat his only monument …

  William Wordsworth

  Wordsworth might have added that the female yew, feathered and black as crow, with a red berry, is exotic in this English sky.

  19 SEPTEMBER: Sweet chestnut leaves hang, smoked-kipper brown and shaped; cep mushrooms rise from the earth under pines, plus their bulbous ‘babies’; squirrel chitter and chatter in the oak.

  All trees on the turn; the earth smells of musk. Fallow deer barking over in Hole Wood, and so the rutting season begins.

  20 SEPTEMBER: Hot. Tired acorns plop to the ground. Blackberries now the general foodstuff of many a bird and animal. A shrew pauses on its hind legs to sniff the summer air with its twitchy snout. Its incessant movements in search of food earned the creature its name, derived from the Old English screawa, to swirl. Shrews are annuals, they last no more than a year.

  This shrew, with his jaded fur, is entering the winter of his life. His children will continue his bloodline.

  21 SEPTEMBER: Into the wood via the stile, and when I get to the beech a hallucination, a troop of wood blewits has appeared. Blewit is a corruption of ‘blue hat’, and the mushroom is true to its labelling, bluey-lilac, though the large cap browns with age.

  Long ago, the mushroom was used to make blue dye in the clothing industry.

  This most desirable of edible mushrooms has a delectable orange smell. I slip a dozen in the pocket of my coat.