The Wood

by John Lewis-Stempel

  Running pigs are not gainly. They galumph. Neither are they quiet. There is grunting, and as they near me there is the flesh-slap of Dumbo ears. (If these pigs’ ears were any bigger, pigs might fly.)

  The pigs oink up at me as they come through the gate, a sort of salute, before advancing on the sow breeder nuts in the trough. Pigs eat like pigs, with their mouths open; their slobber is sea-foam phosphorescent in the dusk.

  Large Blacks, Berkshires, Welsh, they all get a bit of a rub behind the ear. People say they don’t like pigs, but are not sure why. I can tell them. The naked skin of a pig is that of a human. I lift up Lavender’s floppy-loppy ears to say hello. She has human eyes.

  Lavender, as she well knows, is my porcine darling, my Miss Piggy, but I do not think it blind favouritism to say she wears a lovely perfume. She smells of freshly ironed linen.

  The pigs seem particularly bonny tonight. Does landscape change an animal’s mood, their behaviour? Pigs are the descendants from the wild swine that inhabited the larger forests of Britain. I do not believe it fanciful that our pigs have the happiness of feeling at home, of existing in their rightful habitat.

  29 DECEMBER: Morning: up a ladder, putting up nest boxes on larch and oak, for tits and, more in hope than expectation, flycatchers.

  Freezing fog rolls in from the west, adding to the addictive privacy of the wood. I am marooned in my own world, me, alone with the animals, the birds, the trees.

  Two cock pheasants in the glade start fighting, head-bobbing, samurai-bowing, plunging at each other, then take a long walk out through the fence into the field, always a train track apart until they drown in the fog. The new pheasant, a big cock with a white collar, has escorted my pheasant away.

  The Jew’s ears are now shrivelled into scraps of leather parchment.

  A rush of jackdaws overhead: hail against the window, the breaking of a wave on the shore.

  The pigs eating in cold weather: steam-engine breath, piston-regular, white.

  30 DECEMBER: Oddly aware, walking through the wood this afternoon, that it is dormant rather than dead. How the seeds, the trees and hibernating animals (the hedgehog, toad, frog, snake, the thousand butterflies, the billion insects) are locked in a safe sleep against the cold and wet. Under the ground and in hidden corners they wait, for the signal to arise again. In this wood of dark oak, ash, beech, sallow, pine, runs the eternal circle of Zarathustra:

  O man, take care!

  What does the deep midnight declare?

  ‘I was asleep –

  From a deep dream I woke and swear:

  The world is deep,

  Deeper than day had been aware.

  Deep is its woe –

  Joy – deeper yet than agony:

  Woe implores: Go!

  But all joy wants eternity –

  Wants deep, wants deep eternity.’

  And I do notice that the velvet black buds on the ash are fully formed.

  31 DECEMBER: Evening: light and dark dispute longer.

  The wood is always beguiling. Always. Even on this minimalist evening, when the air is wetly soft, and milk-toned. Certainly, there are no birds singing prettily, or sweet little flowers … but there is the permanent moonlight of silver birch bark, the luminescent halo around the squirrel’s brush, the startling cold pewter of beech bole.

  There are nine mature beeches in Cockshutt, and I guess there were once more. The old British name for Hereford was Caerffawydd, the City of Beech.

  JANUARY

  Heartwood

  Cockshutt, a wood saved by poverty – a modest English wood – transplanting ash – ‘of alders’ – ageing – the elder, and its evil reputation – a storm – robin song – ‘a real wood. With blood’ – the foxes’ earth – dog’s mercury, indicator of ancient woodland

  1 JANUARY: In winter no one wants the desolate woods, so I wander the public footpath through the wood above Orcop church alone. On the lane below, small groups in bright clothes walk in the jaunty way of weekending people having self-conscious fun. Laughter comes up to me.

  The local woods are moulded around streams, or perched on hilltops, the places inaccessible to the plough and the hay mower. Old Hall Wood is too steep; Cockshutt, across the valley, is too wet; a wood saved from the blade due to poverty of drainage.

  The land spills about; hilly though not actively hostile.

  West Herefordshire is a separate country. Hard against the mountains of Wales, fronted by the rich River Wye, a place apart, a compromise between man and nature.

  Robin song pinballs around the trees.

  From up here I regard my wood, Cockshutt, in perspective. Bigger than a copse. But smaller than a domineering forest. A moderate English wood, I decide. The best sort of wood.

  2 JANUARY: Frost stars in blue sky; I carry bales of straw to the pigs to warm them. Venus and Mars very clear. Redwings, with their strawberry flank-smear, chattering in the hazels behind the pool.

  By the time I finish bedding down the pigs, the moon is in the trees; tonight the branches defend the wood, try to preserve its secrets.

  I commit an unintentional pun to Lavender, the lop-eared Welsh pig – ‘You can’t see a sausage, can you?’ She snorts in exasperation.

  Old Brown starts hooting; it is about 4pm. He likes to sit in the elegant chestnut tree just inside the wood. (The Romans introduced sweet chestnut. What did the Romans ever do for us? They introduced sweet chestnut.) The tawny owl is, indeed, tawny – a definite brown, but patterned and mottled to resemble the trunks and boughs of its woodland domain. Thus the old country people called the tawny the ‘wood owl’ or ‘beech owl’. Tonight, Old Brown passes himself off as a broken stubby bough.

  Old Brown freefalls, only opening his wings at the last nanosecond to stall the impact. I do not see his catch; it is too dim, and he is quick to gobble.

  At the top of the wood, now: if I stand on the wood pile I can see the red lights of the TV mast at Checkley; my spiritual centre of gravity, the pivot around which I spent my early life. The place I never leave, no matter where I am.

  At night the wood’s trees seem to reach forward; shadows break and re-form, dart, become still. Cottage lights on Garway hang in the air.

  Gazing at the stars through the wire-work of branches: I decide I must learn the stars, their language; their Morse, their code. All I can manage at present is to join the dots.

  3 JANUARY: Mid-afternoon. The silence of a wood, like that of a church, is contagious.

  The sheep are lying, heads between front legs, in the way of dogs. Usually, they baa. Not today. I take their cue, and do not open my mouth to call to them. A robin solos, but his voice only stresses the sacred quiet.

  I’ve confined ten Hebridean sheep behind wire fencing tied to trees with the inevitable baler twine. Hebrideans, small, black and primitive, will eat, thrive even, on the iron rations of bramble leaves, much as wintering deer do. They are bramble-destroyers with horns on. Where bramble grows hardly anything else grows.

  I am making a last glade, of about a quarter of an acre near the top of Cockshutt, thin into the oaks like a sword. There was no variety in the wood when we arrived; it was an unlimited sea of briars crashing around trees, except for blank lands under the beech and conifers.

  5 JANUARY: Wood work. Transplanting ash ‘whips’ and saplings from the bank of the dingle to the grassy banks below the old ride. Sometimes even the fittest trees need human help to survive; the saplings were too dense for their own good.

  Ash has lost its importance to mankind. In the early nineteenth century one British farmer declared, ‘We could not well have a wagon, a cart, a coach, a wheelbarrow, a plough, a harrow, a spade, an axe or a hammer if we had no ash. It gives us poles for hops; hurdle gates wherewith to pen in our sheep; and hoops for our washing tubs.’

  John Evelyn adduced more uses of ash in his Sylva:

  It serves … the scholar, who made use of the inner bark to write on, before the invention of paper, &c. The carpenter, wh
eel-wright, cart-wright, for ploughs, axle-trees, wheel-rings, harrows, bulls, oares, the best blocks for pullies and sheffs, as seamen name them; for drying herrings, no wood like it, and the bark for the tanning of nets; and, like the elm, for the same property (of not being so apt to split and scale) excellent for tenons and mortaises. Also for the cooper, turner, and thatcher: nothing like it for our garden palisade-hedges, hop-yards, poles, and spars, handles, stocks for tools, spade-trees, &c. In sum, the husbandman cannot be without the ash for his carts, ladders, and other tackling, from the pike to the plow, spear, and bow; for of ash were they formerly made, and therefore reckon’d amongst those woods, which after long tension, has a natural spring, and recovers its position; so as in peace and war it is a wood in highest request.

  This ‘useful and profitable tree’ also gave the ‘sweetest of our forest-fuelling, and the fittest for ladies chambers’, while the leaves were relief to cattle in winter.

  The Ancient Egyptians imported ash from Europe as far back as 2000 BC to make wheels.

  I’m spreading the ash throughout the wood in the hope that some will beat the odds against ash dieback, caused by the fungus Chalara fraxinea. That Britain’s 80 million ash trees will not suffer the fate of the elm, whose demise transformed the landscapes beloved of John Constable.

  The French soldier Marshal Hubert Lyautey (1854–1934) once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected, saying trees were slow growers and it would take a hundred years for the tree to mature. The old soldier replied: ‘In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon.’

  Of alders: there are four mature alders in the wood, and six in the pig paddock, all twenty feet in circumference. As the 1903 Ordnance Survey confirms, the paddock was originally part of the wood, but only the alders still stand. All of them are coppiced into hydra-headed giants, of eight, nine, ten uprights each.

  The alders honour-guard the peaty streamlet. Alders love the secret, mirey places. To slush through the black, oozing earth between the paddock alders is to enter a druid’s grove.

  Like the ash, the alder is yesterday’s tree. Evelyn positively rhapsodized them:

  And as then, so now, are over-grown alders frequently sought after, for such buildings as lie continually under water, where it will harden like a very stone … they us’d it under that famous Bridge at Venice, the Rialto, which passes over the Gran-Canal, bearing a vast weight. Jos. Bauhimus pretends, that in tract of time, it turns to stone; which perhaps it may seem to be (as well as other aquatick) where it meets with some lapidescant quality in the earth and water.

  The poles of alder are as useful as those of willows; but the coals far exceed them, especially for gun-powder: The wood is likewise useful for piles, pumps, hop-poles, water-pipes, troughs, sluces, small trays, and trenchers, wooden-heels; the bark is precious to dyers, and some tanners, and leather-dressers make use of it; and with it, and the fruits (instead of galls) they compose an ink. The fresh leaves alone applied to the naked soal of the foot, infinitely refresh the surbated traveller. The bark macerated in water, with a little rust of iron, makes a black dye, which may also be us’d for ink.

  The dye from the alder flowers stained Robin Hood’s clouts green.

  Cockshutt’s alders, which are about two hundred years old, were perhaps grown for the local building industry. More probably, they were a source of firewood for the lime kilns on the lane to Bagwyllidiart (an un-pronounceable Welsh name left behind from when this was disputed land: it is simply ‘Baggy’ if you are local. To the amusement of my friends, the first person they ever encountered who could say ‘Bag-ill-id-ee-art’ was my wife. Who is from London.)

  It was the Romans who developed the burning of limestone to make lime as the main ingredient in mortars, concretes, plasters, renders and washes. During the Middle Ages the demand for lime increased as the construction of castles, city walls and religious buildings went up. House walls were lime-washed to make them waterproof and as decoration to brighten and disinfect the interiors.

  Lime kilns were used increasingly for the production of lime for agricultural purposes. When added to acidic soils, like the Devonian red sandstone of Herefordshire, lime broke up the clay, ‘sweetened’ the grass, suppressed weeds, prevented foot rot in livestock.

  Ah, lime: the cure-all, in a long list of putative cure-alls sold to farmers. The advertising slogan for agricultural lime was ‘Give Life to the Land’. Farmers eventually learned the painful adage, ‘Lime enriches the father but impoverishes the son.’ Lime’s improvement of the soil was transitory, meaning ever more was needed to keep up productivity.

  Farmers with larger landholdings had their own lime kilns, and burned limestone for others. At a price.

  Cockshutt and the other local woods produced the fuel (possibly turned into charcoal first); the limestone, or chalk, came from Woolhope ten miles away.

  For every two tons of limestone burned, a ton of lime was produced. Lime kilns entered their demise at the end of the nineteenth century, when chemical fertilizers began their resistible rise.

  The kiln on the lane, which is built into the bank, is a flare kiln, with rough, squat stone chambers, formed into hollow eyes. Today, the chambers are full of 7UP cans.

  How do I know the age of the alders? One does not need to cut down a tree and count the annual growth rings to know its age. This can be done non-invasively.

  Begin by determining the tree species, then measure the circumference in feet using a tape measure at diameter breast height (‘DBH’ in the jargon) above stump level. Then divide the circumference by 3.14 (pi) to find the diameter. Multiply the tree’s diameter by its growth factor as determined by species (see the list below) to find the tree’s approximate age.

  Alder – 5.0 Growth Factor × diameter

  Birch – 5.0 Growth Factor × diameter

  Ash – 4.0 Growth Factor × diameter

  Cherry – 5.0 Growth Factor × diameter

  Oak S – 5.0 Growth Factor × diameter

  Elm – 4.0 Growth Factor × diameter

  Easier yet, the late dendrologist Alan Mitchell found that most trees conform to a simple rule: mean growth in girth in trees in a wood, where there is lean competition for light, space and food, is an inch a year. Trees in parks and gardens grow faster and fatter, and sprawl like sultans eating Turkish delight on divans. So a tree in open ground with an eight-foot girth is about a hundred years old – a tree of similar size in a wood might be two hundred years old. There are exceptions to Mitchell’s general rule of tree ageing; most young trees grow much faster – growth slows with age – so in very old trees the growth rate over the life of the tree will be less. In certain species, such as Cockshutt’s giant redwood, normal growth is two to three inches per year.

  Measuring trees is addictive. The first prolific tree measurer was John Claudius Loudon, whose impressive eight-volume Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum (1834–37) provides us with more than five hundred historical tree measurements. Between 1880 and 1895 Robert Hutchison measured nearly a thousand trees, mostly in Scotland, and more than 3,500 records appear throughout the volumes of Trees of Britain and Ireland by Elwes and Henry (1900–13). Modern-day tree measuring reached its zenith with Alan Mitchell, who measured more than a hundred thousand trees between 1953 and 1995 and co-founded The Tree Register of the British Isles.

  Cockshutt’s trees were harvested for industry before Georgian times. During the Roman occupation the Wormelow Hundred, of which Cockshutt was part, supplied vast quantities of timber for the purpose of smelting iron ore brought by the Romans from the Forest of Dean. There were forges at St Weonards, just over the hill. (If you live in hill country everything is over the hill.)

  7 JANUARY: Mild; winter gnats pester the face, while I eradicate sycamore saplings, thus bringing a welcome sense of space to the bank of the dingle.

  Then it starts to rain. My tools are an axe, an ordinary hook, a slasher, a bow saw and pruners. I select them in the manner of a sur
geon selecting an instrument in theatre; I too, like him/her, wear rubber gloves – but mine are yellow Marigolds for washing up. To stop the tools slipping.

  Every time I cut a tree, drops of rain fall from the branches. Like tears.

  Trees: you never really know what they are thinking. John Stewart Collis, 1940s naturalist, farmer, proto-conservationist, observed: ‘Truly trees are Beings. We feel that to be so. Hence their silence, their indifference to us is almost exasperating. We would speak to them, we would ask their message; for they seem to hold some weighty truth, some special secret – and though sometimes we receive their blessing, they do not answer.’

  I am surrounded by a gang of trees, suddenly malevolent in the rain and the noir sky. It is time to leave.

  Then spake I to the tree,

  Were ye your own desire

  What is it ye would be?

  Answered the tree to me,

  I am my own desire;

  I am what I would be.

  Isaac Rosenberg

  8 JANUARY: With the exception of the coppiced Wishbone Oak, the oaks in Cockshutt are uniformly straight and tall, and none has a body thicker than a man. Only the Wishbone is a giant.

  A slow sky, lichen grey, the same colour as the oaks this afternoon.

  It is getting on for evening when I leave. Deep up in the last oak a female tawny owl kerwicks – a casual scraping noise, akin to the opening of a metal garden gate. This is her contact call, and it is becoming the aural grammar of night in Cockshutt Wood, a constant comma. Old Brown has a new mate.

  The woodcock are back. The wood breathes birds in, and out.

  Woodcock snooze during the day, and come out to feed in the evening, probing the damp dingle floor with their long beaks. They can detect worms and other underground creatures by the sensitive nerves at the end of the beak. Sometimes they will creep out when it is still light. As they did today. I saw them.