heating up in a house, and I thought back to my Cambridgeshire beechwood.
Around dusk, there was a drop in the wind, and coppery clouds pulled slowly overhead, their high cold bosses still struck with the light of the low sun. Then it started to snow - light flakes ticking down through the air, settling on every upturned surface. A flake fell on the dark cloth of my jacket, and melted into it, like a ghost passing through a wall.
Snow! I had loved old woods in snow for as long as I could remember. Winter woods were realms of austere beauty and tremendous adventure to me: the snow-bound chase out of which the wolves run in John Masefield’s The Box of Delights , the frozen forests of the Snow Queen’s Narnia, and the wildwood in the Wirral through which Sir Gawain travels on Christmas Eve, during his quest to find the Green Knight, after sleeping out on bare rock and under waterfalls. ‘A thick forest, wild and drear . . . of great hoar oaks, a hundred together, of hazel and hawthorn with their trailing boughs intertwined, and rough ragged moss spreading everywhere.’ Roger and I had once tried to work out the route Gawain would have taken through the Wirral to reach the Green Knight’s Chapel. As far as we were able to tell, he would now be able to make the whole journey by A-road in a single day, sleeping in a bed-and-breakfast if he wanted to make a weekend of it.
In a clearing, I found a big storm-felled birch, prostrate but alive. It had been blown over two or three years earlier, I guessed, from the extent of the growth since then: an ordered row of healthy branches which shot upwards from the main trunk. Flat brown semicircular fungi clustered on the trunk’s southerly flank, like embedded coins. I walked round to the root bole. As the tree had fallen, it had torn up in its roots a circular cliff of mud. The upper rim of roots had dried as hard as rock, and had turfed itself over, providing a roof of a foot or more. The snow was coming faster now. I cleared an area at the foot of the bole, cast around for fallen pine branches, and layered them so that they formed a springy mattress. Then I leaned larger boughs against the sides of the bole to provide a rough triangular porch.
I was glad of the shelter, even within the wider shelter of the forest. From inside the den, warm in my sleeping-bag, I watched the snow fall beyond the roof, more heavily and more softly, and it seemed strange that so much motion could provoke so little sound. In those minutes before sleep, I felt accommodated by the forest, and watched it move into night: the dark settling like a fur on every object, the dropping snow, the quick adroit movements of birds between trees. I thought of what Nan Shepherd, the Scottish novelist and poet, had once written of the Cairngorms: ‘No one knows the mountain completely who has not slept on it. As one slips over into sleep, the mind grows limpid; the body melts; perception alone remains. These moments of quiescent perceptiveness before sleep are among the most rewarding of the day. I am emptied of preoccupation, there is nothing between me and the earth and sky.’
To understand the wild you must first understand the wood. For civilisation, as the historian Robert Pogue Harrison writes, ‘literally cleared its space in the midst of forests’. For millennia, ‘a sylvan fringe of darkness defined the limits of its cultivation, the margins of its cities, the boundaries of its domain, but also the extravagance of its imagination’. Although the disappearance of the true wildwood occurred in the Neolithic period, before humanity began to record its own history, creation myths in almost all cultures look fabulously back to a forested earth. In the ancient Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, the quest-story which begins world literature, Gilgamesh sets out on his journey from Uruk to the Cedar Mountain, where he has been charged to slay Huwawa, the guardian of the forest. The Roman Empire also defined itself
Around dusk, there was a drop in the wind, and coppery clouds pulled slowly overhead, their high cold bosses still struck with the light of the low sun. Then it started to snow - light flakes ticking down through the air, settling on every upturned surface. A flake fell on the dark cloth of my jacket, and melted into it, like a ghost passing through a wall.
Snow! I had loved old woods in snow for as long as I could remember. Winter woods were realms of austere beauty and tremendous adventure to me: the snow-bound chase out of which the wolves run in John Masefield’s The Box of Delights , the frozen forests of the Snow Queen’s Narnia, and the wildwood in the Wirral through which Sir Gawain travels on Christmas Eve, during his quest to find the Green Knight, after sleeping out on bare rock and under waterfalls. ‘A thick forest, wild and drear . . . of great hoar oaks, a hundred together, of hazel and hawthorn with their trailing boughs intertwined, and rough ragged moss spreading everywhere.’ Roger and I had once tried to work out the route Gawain would have taken through the Wirral to reach the Green Knight’s Chapel. As far as we were able to tell, he would now be able to make the whole journey by A-road in a single day, sleeping in a bed-and-breakfast if he wanted to make a weekend of it.
In a clearing, I found a big storm-felled birch, prostrate but alive. It had been blown over two or three years earlier, I guessed, from the extent of the growth since then: an ordered row of healthy branches which shot upwards from the main trunk. Flat brown semicircular fungi clustered on the trunk’s southerly flank, like embedded coins. I walked round to the root bole. As the tree had fallen, it had torn up in its roots a circular cliff of mud. The upper rim of roots had dried as hard as rock, and had turfed itself over, providing a roof of a foot or more. The snow was coming faster now. I cleared an area at the foot of the bole, cast around for fallen pine branches, and layered them so that they formed a springy mattress. Then I leaned larger boughs against the sides of the bole to provide a rough triangular porch.
I was glad of the shelter, even within the wider shelter of the forest. From inside the den, warm in my sleeping-bag, I watched the snow fall beyond the roof, more heavily and more softly, and it seemed strange that so much motion could provoke so little sound. In those minutes before sleep, I felt accommodated by the forest, and watched it move into night: the dark settling like a fur on every object, the dropping snow, the quick adroit movements of birds between trees. I thought of what Nan Shepherd, the Scottish novelist and poet, had once written of the Cairngorms: ‘No one knows the mountain completely who has not slept on it. As one slips over into sleep, the mind grows limpid; the body melts; perception alone remains. These moments of quiescent perceptiveness before sleep are among the most rewarding of the day. I am emptied of preoccupation, there is nothing between me and the earth and sky.’
To understand the wild you must first understand the wood. For civilisation, as the historian Robert Pogue Harrison writes, ‘literally cleared its space in the midst of forests’. For millennia, ‘a sylvan fringe of darkness defined the limits of its cultivation, the margins of its cities, the boundaries of its domain, but also the extravagance of its imagination’. Although the disappearance of the true wildwood occurred in the Neolithic period, before humanity began to record its own history, creation myths in almost all cultures look fabulously back to a forested earth. In the ancient Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, the quest-story which begins world literature, Gilgamesh sets out on his journey from Uruk to the Cedar Mountain, where he has been charged to slay Huwawa, the guardian of the forest. The Roman Empire also defined itself
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