The Wood Read online

  We managed our woods back then. The products of coppiced woodland warmed village and city hearths alike. (To coppice, from the French couper, means to cut down to the ground, so the trees regrow. The coppice cycle varies with the species; hazel is cut on a seven- to twelve-year cycle, ash every twelve to fifteen years, and oak every thirty years or so. Pollards are up-in-the-air coppice, where the trees are cut above the browsing reach of livestock.) The woods provided the timber for the British battle fleets of Cromwell and George III that won an empire. Our native woodlands fell into disuse as man’s endeavours turned in other directions with the Industrial Revolution, fuelled by coal and producing iron.

  Two world wars, the felling of timber to pay death duties and the scourge of Dutch elm disease carried off much of what once remained.

  Only thirty-nine trees are believed to be native. Of these Cockshutt has:

  oak

  beech

  sallow

  hazel

  wild cherry

  silver birch

  ash

  larch

  alder

  elder

  elm

  service

  holly

  Cockshutt’s ‘alien’, imported trees are spruce, Canadian redwood, sweet chestnut, sycamore.

  And the difference between trees and shrubs? Shrubs have many ‘sticks’, trees a single trunk. Generally.

  6 DECEMBER: A milky-watery sultriness over everything. Windless. Almost a prelude to spring.

  I let the piglets out of the paddock at the bottom of Cockshutt into the dingle; they race around, the nine of them, as one thing.

  They were born only a month ago; elf-eared, ribby, plunger-mouthed fresh-born piglets are unattractive. They have become cuter with age.

  In the unseasonal mildness an eruption of conical Cononcybe tenera mushrooms near the pond; a rotting sci-fi city.

  Later, close to nightfall: a jackdaw murmuration above the wood. The murmuration clenches to a ball, then opens in the shape of a lady’s fan, becomes a Chinese dragon a hundred feet long, a rug shaken by unseen hands.

  Woods have ears. The recent mild, moist days have caused the biggest crop of Jew’s ear mushrooms on the lolling elder tree in the dingle I have ever seen. The Jew’s ear fungus derives its name from its extraordinary resemblance to the human hearing apparatus, together with the ancient belief that Judas Iscariot, having betrayed Christ for thirty pieces of silver, hanged himself from an elder tree. (The Latin name is Auricularia auricula-judae, meaning ‘ear of Judas’, corrupted over time to Jew’s ear.) Local names include wood ear and jelly ear, the latter recognizing the gelatinous, rubbery texture of the fungi when tumescent.

  One of the beauties of the ugly Jew’s ear is that it is impossible to mistake for any poisonous fungus. I take one of the Jew’s ears home; it measures five inches wide. Good enough to tweet.

  3.30pm. Redwings land in the hazels behind the pond: a waterfall of chattering.

  4.30pm. Red sky lit by the fires of Hephaestus. Gold-crests tease out seeds in the alder’s small black cones.

  Another jackdaw murmuration: two hundred birds this time, with small bands joining the mass, as tributaries join a river in confluence. The jackdaws jack loudest when changing direction.

  From the far side of the wood: Hoo-hoo … H-o-o-o-o-o-o-o. Night music: the hoot of a tawny.

  Is there an index of owl happiness? I think so. For the three years we have been managing the wood Old Brown’s wives have produced steadily bigger clutches. Two eggs. Three eggs. And this year, four eggs.

  The reason for the increasing size of the clutches is that we have improved the tawnies’ food supply by reducing the invasive bramble, nature’s barbed wire, which covered almost the entire woodland floor. Before Old Brown was simply unable to penetrate the bramble when out a-hunting.

  I say ‘we’ have reduced the invasive, hegemonic bramble, but the real graft has been done by the beasts, by the hooves and the teeth of the cows, pigs and sheep. More than a third of the woodland floor now is leaf litter, fallen boughs and grassy glades. No longer does Old Brown live on the margins, or need to fly from wood to wood. His meals of shrew and mice scurry in their hundreds around his home.

  8 DECEMBER: I shoot a pheasant (for Christmas lunch), under a black cloud the size of Europe.

  The pheasant, a cock, in his usual place, the coppiced alder at the corner of the pool. He lands with a thump. I regret killing him instantly. I liked his presence in the fields and wood.

  The side-splashes on his face are scarlet to remind me I have spilt his blood.

  The afternoon light does not fade, it sinks, stone-speed.

  Pheasants have probably been here since Roman times. Palladius, writing in about AD 350, advises on how to rear them. Definite proof of their existence is provided in a Waltham Abbey Ordinance of 1059. The pheasant has always been preserved, fiercely so, by the shooting fraternity. On 18 January 1816 one John Allen and a group of men from Gloucestershire mounted a poaching expedition on the estate of Colonel Berkeley at Berkeley Castle. Berkeley’s keeper, Thomas Clarke, and nine other keepers were waiting for them. Someone fired a gun (allegedly the poacher John Penny), killing a keeper. The poachers were tried on 3 April 1816 for murder. John Allen and John Penny were sentenced to death, the rest to transportation.

  About 25 million pheasants are reared and released annually in the UK. The pheasant in the alder was a wanderer from a shoot, although pheasants do breed in Cockshutt.

  9 DECEMBER: The sky is bruised mauve.

  It’s as I turn to go to the Land Rover, parked up on the lane, after dropping off the hay to the cows in the oaks, that it starts snowing. The snow is harsh, and shimmers noisily.

  And I think: being in a wood on a winter’s eve, when the snow is falling through leafless oaks, is existence stripped back to the elements.

  10 DECEMBER: Snow is not usual in December despite the wants of my children, but this is high country so we do sometimes get it.

  Snow makes everything old, including us, who stoop before it.

  Fallen snow paralyses sound. The silence of high summer is actually a background hum of monotonous similar sounds: bee-drone; woodpigeon-coo; grasshopper-zizz.

  Standing in the wood, among the black trees, the blue afternoon snow at my feet, looking out.

  Beside me a solitary treecreeper searches an alder’s bark, in the same way a janitor checks under the auditorium seats for rubbish after a concert.

  The snow goes quickly, except under the hedges, where it lies in scars for days.

  Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

  Whose woods these are I think I know.

  His house is in the village though;

  He will not see me stopping here

  To watch his woods fill up with snow.

  My little horse must think it queer

  To stop without a farmhouse near

  Between the woods and frozen lake

  The darkest evening of the year.

  He gives his harness bells a shake

  To ask if there is some mistake.

  The only other sound’s the sweep

  Of easy wind and downy flake.

  The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

  But I have promises to keep,

  And miles to go before I sleep,

  And miles to go before I sleep.

  Robert Frost

  12 DECEMBER: A sorcerer’s dawn, red and violent; an ember of kestrel sits on the telephone wire.

  The domestic pig is not an early riser. I’m taking breakfast in bed to the sows and nine piglets in the paddock; against type the piglets have got up early, and escaped out of the night pen into the wood.

  I run through the trees, impenetrable at a distance, but close up they step aside for me. Finally I find the scampy piglets and shoo them back for their breakfast. Later in the morning, back at home, a customer phones and asks: ‘Are your pigs free range?’ Me: ‘Madam, they are practically wild.’

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sp; The afternoon is all mizzle and mist; my breath adds to the white veil. An unseen squirrel scolds. The pond trembles with tiny raindrops; the woodland floor has no colour, except bark brown. All the nettles and the skyscraping rosebay willow herb have now collapsed under the weight of the season, the unsloughable burden of time.

  7.25pm. Arrive at the lane. I can hear a dog fox barking up in Cockshutt; it is posh-fox barking. Rah. Rah. Rah.

  14 DECEMBER: The rabbits have scratched at a pollarded alder, causing pink sores on its thrashing, raised roots.

  In the sunshine the Norwegian spruces are colourful with their bright green needles and long orange armadillo cones, I give them that.

  Today, I finished a job I started three years ago – a cadastral survey of all trees in the wood. There are 647 trees above the rank of sapling.

  A note on terminology: in modern English forest and woodland are used interchangeably, except that forest suggests a larger area of trees, for example New Forest, Sherwood Forest. ’Twas not thus in the past.

  Like the French forêt, the English word forest has at its root the Medieval Latin foresta, in turn probably derived from late-Latin foras meaning ‘outside’ ordinary jurisdiction, being subject to separate ‘forest law’. Forest law was primarily designed to protect and provide game for the king’s table. A forest would include large areas of land that were treeless, such as farmland, and even whole towns.

  We have lost the clear definition of forest in English. An area of trees can be a forest or a wood, though forest has come to suggest super-size. Woodland is a term associated with naturalness, but natural woodland is a misconception. Along with coppicing and wood-cutting, from the Bronze Age onwards woods were farmed with livestock.

  This knowledge has all but lapsed from Western memory, although trees and flower names preserve it. Sallow is also ‘goat willow’, because goats will readily browse on its leaves.

  All common livestock, except sheep, are descended from woodland beasts. Much of the medieval economy depended on marauding pigs in woodland. Chickens prefer woodland; they are, after all, descended from Indian jungle fowl. Aerial predators need a clear ‘run’ – trees stop this. Free range chickens are reluctant to go outside into treeless spaces. For cattle, pigs and chickens, woodland provides tubers, nuts, invertebrates (for swine and fowl), along with ‘browse’ (herbage, foliage), and shelter, shade. In return, the livestock and fowl manure the land, knock bits of branch off, open up dense undergrowth to light. The rootling of pigs and chickens, the churning of cow hooves provide ideal conditions for the germination of seeds and nuts. The beasts imitate the actions of the aurochs and the wild boar which once roamed the wildwood. Save for deer, the influence of larger animals on woodland was largely lost between the later Middle Ages and the twenty-first century.

  I am not the only one who now runs livestock in woodland. The new-fangled farming in woodland even has a name, ‘agroforestry’, meaning the production of trees alongside the production of livestock or conventional food crops.

  15 DECEMBER: An ice moon in the morning, perfectly round, perfectly white.

  The heron stands in the dingle; after the rain and the melt the dingle bottom is an African delta seen from an aeroplane; shining silver, branched waters.

  Robin song trickles through the wood. A grey squirrel jumps up a birch – emphatically he does not climb, but lurches up and grabs: repeat – then goes over the canopy above my chair; one branch too slender, tries another – continues his parkour performance before climbing down and walking along, insouciantly.

  There is always the sense of the unexpected in a wood, a constant feeling that, around the next bend in the path, behind the bole of the next tree, there will be a surprise.

  16 DECEMBER: Dusk: the wood pigeons fly into the larch, in ones and twos, till about thirty settle.

  At the impenetrable pond; the reeds dissolve out of existence into night.

  A surprising amount of birdsong: blackbird, pheasant, wren.

  Woods: they inhabit the mind.

  Old Brown the tawny starts his hooting; he is announcing his rule of this wood. Tawnies are most vocal in autumn, when the male hoots in claim of breeding territory. The first call is heard in late September once the birds have completed their moult; the calls increase in frequency until December. Creatures of the night, owls communicate primarily by sound.

  The Saxons knew the bird as Ule, named after its lamenting cry. The tawny is Shakespeare’s ‘clamorous owl, that nightly hoots and wonders at our quaint spirits’.

  Old Brown will keep calling till about 7.45 tomorrow morning, a long shift. The owl that sings loudest, longest is likely to be of better stock than one who can only afford to sing for short periods.

  It is three years ago that Old Brown won the territorial rights to Cockshutt. He has since held it against all comers – owls, foxes, badgers. He once had a go at our Jack Russell; luckily I was on hand.

  I link my fingers together, then press the palms together and blow a facsimile hoot to Old Brown.

  It takes three attempts, but then he replies. Hoo-hoo-hoo-h-o-o-o. What a hoot.

  Collective nouns for trees:

  avenue – a line of trees, one or more rows deep, each side of a road

  brake – a clump of shrubs, brushwood, briars or fallen trees (cf. thicket)

  coombe – the head of a wood in a valley

  coppice – an area of woodland where the shrubs (e.g. hazel) are cut regularly for wood or ‘browse’, fodder for livestock

  copse – a small woodland, a half-acre or less

  covert – a dense group of trees or shrubs, often connected with game rearing and shooting

  dingle – a deep wooded valley

  grove – a small group of trees without undergrowth

  hagg – a small group of trees (cf. stand)

  hanger – a wood at the top of a rise, from the OE hangra, wooded slope

  plantation – an area of artificial woodland, composed usually of conifers

  spinney – a copse, often of thorny shrubs and trees, that shelters game or foxes

  stand – a small group of trees. Also used by foresters to describe a particular group of trees under similar management

  thicket – a dense growth of shrubs and briars

  wood – used interchangeably with woodland, for an area of tree-covered land bigger than a copse but smaller than a forest

  17 DECEMBER: On the far bank of the pond the heron stands in the mess of dead crossed-sword reeds, between two alder pillars, looking fiercely pharisaical in the way that herons do. The temple priest of the pond, deciding I am too close for safety, flaps off on slow, sad wings. He emits a single craaak, which cracks the valley’s frozen silence apart.

  I am sorry to have disturbed his fishing.

  There is always a certain amount of Mr Bean comedy in cutting holly with pruners. Sure enough, as I am climbing up the ladder a bough springs back, catching my forehead. I bleed berries.

  But I have to go up the ladder because of ‘spinescence’. Holly leaves at the bottom of the tree are armed with prickles to deter grazing animals. Leaves above grazing height are spikeless ovals, as smooth as on a camellia.

  Centuries ago someone planted a ‘hagg’, or stand, of holly in the wood, probably to provide winter fodder. When the hay ran out, or when it snowed, the upper branches of the Ilex aquifolium were lopped off to feed cloven-hooved stock. There are five coppiced holly trees remaining. A living remnant of the old farming ways, they are as tall and green as firs.

  Using holly as fodder is one of those agricultural practices that, along with scything and the making of corn dollies, has gone to the rural museum. But the custom of feeding holly was of great importance in the years before hay and turnip winter feed, especially in the west and in the hills. The deliberately planted holly grove was important enough to warrant a name, hollin, as in the Hollingwood Grange in the Golden Valley, just a few miles up from us. Like holly itself, ‘hollin’ place-names in Engla
nd are concentrated in the north and north Midlands, away from the lowlands and more fertile soils.

  There is a scene in ‘The Dream of Rhonabwy’, a Medieval Welsh tale from the twelfth century, where the quarters for the livestock have ‘branches of holly a-plenty on the floor after the cattle had eaten off their tips’. Holly was also used as fodder for the lord of the manor’s deer. Illegal cutting was punishable by the bleeding of your wallet. At Tideswell Court in the Royal Forest of the High Peak ten people were fined for lopping ‘green-wood’ in 1524, twenty-four were subsequently fined in 1559, and twenty-one in 1567. Holly was green money; rents for holly groves could be as much as £1 16s 0d a year in the eighteenth century. William Cobbett, during his younger years working at Farnham in the 1770s, apparently spent time grinding holly to make it more acceptable to domestic stock. Up on Exmoor Richard Jefferies, the Victorian nature writer, noted, ‘Wire fencing has been put round many of the hollies to protect them’ from deer.

  By then, the practice of using holly as fodder was dying out. Also the use of holly trees as a source of shelter for livestock became superfluous with the building of dry-stone walls on the enclosed commons.

  I use holly as a pick-me-up or vitamin supplement for cows and sheep. You have your echinacea and white chia – the moos and the ewes have holly.

  It was my grandfather who taught me to use the plants as medicine or tonic. Whenever any farm animal or horse was ‘not looking too clever’, which is what we say in Herefordshire for sick, Joe Amos would let said animals browse the hedges to cure themselves. Just over the mountain, Welsh farms used to have a cae ysbyty or ‘hospital field’, with healing wild flowers and plants.

  After four hours of cutting I have a heap of glossy holly leaves stacked on a tarpaulin which I drag up to the cows.

  I thread about half the holly into the wire stock fence alongside the north-east edge of the wood; a woven fence of Christmas decorations for livestock, and a welcome wall of green in a leaden landscape.