against the forests in which its capital city was first established, and out of which its founders, the wolf-suckled twins, emerged. It was the Roman Empire which would proceed to destroy the dense forests of the ancient world.
The association of the wild and the wood also runs deep in etymology. The two words are thought to have grown out of the root word wald and the Old Teutonic root walthus , meaning ‘forest’. Walthus entered Old English in its variant forms of ‘weald’, ‘wald’ and ‘wold’, which were used to designate both ‘a wild place’ and ‘a wooded place’, in which wild creatures - wolves, foxes, bears - survived. The wild and the wood also graft together in the Latin word silva , which means ‘forest’, and from which emerged the idea of ‘savage’, with all its connotations of ferality.
The wood and the wild are connected, too, because as the forest has declined, so too has the world’s wildness. Eight thousand years ago, early in the Holocene, Britain was a dominion of trees. Forest spread across it from coast to coast. The cover was not continuous: records of pollen, weather, and contemporary studies of the behaviour of colonising trees in the presence of wild herbivores, now suggest that the forest was broken and in places savannah-like, with glades and open areas of grassland present long before the first human beings arrived. But its extent was vast.
There have been many periods in the history of these islands when this wood - the deepwood, as I came to think of it during my time in the Coille Dubh , or the wildwood as the botanist Oliver Rackham calls it - was all. The most recent of these periods, and the wood-reign out of which humans would emerge, came in the final centuries of the last Ice Age, when the glaciers, which for thousands of years had covered all but the southern parts of the land, began their retreat.
To conceive of the history of these millennia, you have to reset the chronometers of your imagination, and to think in ice-time and in tree-time. You have to imagine the air temperature rising over years. The fall of heavy warm rain on the grey backs of the glaciers. The blue glacial prows that marked the outworks of the ice, some of them hundreds of feet high, beginning their northwards retreat. The noise of those centuries, near the frontline of the glaciers, would have been prodigious: the screams of rending ice, the roars of calving ice.
The glaciers receded. Fifty miles a century, roughly speaking - half a mile a year. They left behind them a transformed terrain: diminished hills and deepened valleys. Furling out from their snouts were blue meltwater rivers, which harrowed channels through the raw earth, and filled lakes the size of counties.
At the height of the last glacial period, the ice had been so dense and extensive that its weight depressed the land beneath it into the earth’s mantle. Think of that: it caused an entire country to sink down into the earth. Conversely, so it was that when the ice melted and its weight was lifted from the land, the bones of the earth rose - in some places by hundreds of feet. Geologists call this effect ‘isostatic rebound’. The rebound was most pronounced in the north of Britain, where the ice had been most massive; on the south coast, by way of counteraction, the coastline dipped.
As the ice melted, and the land tilted, the oceans grew. For glaciation had stored a significant proportion of the world’s water. The run-off from the melting ice across the northern hemisphere joined the oceans, raising sea-levels by nearly 400 feet in places, and transforming the map of the world. Among those transformations was the cutting, sluicing and filling of the channel between what is now England and what is now France. The ancient land-bridge of chalk, weald sands and clay was gouged over out by rivers. As the sea-levels continued to rise, the water flooded up the river valleys, ate at the hills, and eventually overran the
The association of the wild and the wood also runs deep in etymology. The two words are thought to have grown out of the root word wald and the Old Teutonic root walthus , meaning ‘forest’. Walthus entered Old English in its variant forms of ‘weald’, ‘wald’ and ‘wold’, which were used to designate both ‘a wild place’ and ‘a wooded place’, in which wild creatures - wolves, foxes, bears - survived. The wild and the wood also graft together in the Latin word silva , which means ‘forest’, and from which emerged the idea of ‘savage’, with all its connotations of ferality.
The wood and the wild are connected, too, because as the forest has declined, so too has the world’s wildness. Eight thousand years ago, early in the Holocene, Britain was a dominion of trees. Forest spread across it from coast to coast. The cover was not continuous: records of pollen, weather, and contemporary studies of the behaviour of colonising trees in the presence of wild herbivores, now suggest that the forest was broken and in places savannah-like, with glades and open areas of grassland present long before the first human beings arrived. But its extent was vast.
There have been many periods in the history of these islands when this wood - the deepwood, as I came to think of it during my time in the Coille Dubh , or the wildwood as the botanist Oliver Rackham calls it - was all. The most recent of these periods, and the wood-reign out of which humans would emerge, came in the final centuries of the last Ice Age, when the glaciers, which for thousands of years had covered all but the southern parts of the land, began their retreat.
To conceive of the history of these millennia, you have to reset the chronometers of your imagination, and to think in ice-time and in tree-time. You have to imagine the air temperature rising over years. The fall of heavy warm rain on the grey backs of the glaciers. The blue glacial prows that marked the outworks of the ice, some of them hundreds of feet high, beginning their northwards retreat. The noise of those centuries, near the frontline of the glaciers, would have been prodigious: the screams of rending ice, the roars of calving ice.
The glaciers receded. Fifty miles a century, roughly speaking - half a mile a year. They left behind them a transformed terrain: diminished hills and deepened valleys. Furling out from their snouts were blue meltwater rivers, which harrowed channels through the raw earth, and filled lakes the size of counties.
At the height of the last glacial period, the ice had been so dense and extensive that its weight depressed the land beneath it into the earth’s mantle. Think of that: it caused an entire country to sink down into the earth. Conversely, so it was that when the ice melted and its weight was lifted from the land, the bones of the earth rose - in some places by hundreds of feet. Geologists call this effect ‘isostatic rebound’. The rebound was most pronounced in the north of Britain, where the ice had been most massive; on the south coast, by way of counteraction, the coastline dipped.
As the ice melted, and the land tilted, the oceans grew. For glaciation had stored a significant proportion of the world’s water. The run-off from the melting ice across the northern hemisphere joined the oceans, raising sea-levels by nearly 400 feet in places, and transforming the map of the world. Among those transformations was the cutting, sluicing and filling of the channel between what is now England and what is now France. The ancient land-bridge of chalk, weald sands and clay was gouged over out by rivers. As the sea-levels continued to rise, the water flooded up the river valleys, ate at the hills, and eventually overran the
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