Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

by Roger Deakin

  Primroses are up, so are celandines. The verges pinned with celandines.

  25th March

  Toads croaking tonight in the pond at one end of the moat. A clear sky, bright moon, just a puff or two of Santa’s beard cloud.

  This afternoon I went into Burgate Wood with Alison [Hastie] and we found oxlips in the rides. Low pollards of hornbeam, cut at three or four feet off the ground. One huge old hornbeam pollard you could stand inside with ten great poles.

  We found the mound site of the original hall, huge moats, the site now full of coppice hazel and ash. Stumps of very old oaks, all split into pages like books. Huge cratered coppice stools of hornbeam and ash. Nettles on the site of the old hall where the midden was.

  At sunset, Alison thinks she sees a bonfire across the far side of the wood, but it’s a burning wedge of the setting sun, seen between two trees. It is due west down a ride, exactly opposite the full moon, already risen next to Burgate Church.

  Lichens in ashes, including a weird cancerous one that sends the branches mad and ‘hairy’. Deer damage to young ashes and the bark of hornbeam.

  A patch of wild redcurrant bushes. A memorial stone to Jimmy Hammond, ‘who worked on the estate for 50 years’– died 1998 – at ‘Jimmy’s Ride’.

  Hazels that have got away into trees with trunks six or eight inches in diameter like birches.

  Some singled oaks with big swollen bases where they were once coppiced.

  Too many deer, not enough woods.

  At Burgate, the ash that grows entirely round the iron fence is eighteenth-or nineteenth-century – and grafts its own branches together.

  The baling twine of the old gamekeeper’s gibbet is still there. Dead stoat on the ground – or was it a squirrel?

  Much as I enjoy the process of writing and the exercise of my own skill and craft in getting it right, none the less I would often prefer to be a jotter.

  Jottings, in their spontaneity and complete absence of any craft, are often so much truer to what I actually feel or think at a given moment.

  29th March

  Brilliant swimming day – essentially chilly, but very warm in the sun, gardening like mad, lighting a bonfire – a good one of blackthorn, and prunings from various plums behind the barn and outside lavatory, and roses and bushes and vines round the garden walls. The bike ride into a cool north-easterly light breeze slowed me down, and it took forty minutes, not thirty. The wood people have moved in properly and cut down some of the trees to make more space and laid a double rampart of plaited hedge.

  What a dastardly tool is the strimmer – hardly a glimmer.

  30th March

  A huge, sweeping, grass-trembling wind, swaying every tree and playing fugues along the hedgerows. It clatters the tops of the willows together like hockey sticks and beats down all the dead twigs. It carries down dead boughs from the ash and tears off sallow boughs.

  The cries of boys float in from the wide ocean of the common, where they ride their skateboards before the wind, making sails of their anoraks by spreading their arms like yardarms.

  The wind has demolished my polytunnel, tearing the polythene at the brittle seams and ripping it off. Blue tits cling to the peanut feeders hanging wildly from a garden plum tree, feeding nonchalantly as they’re thrown about violently, riding the storm. The bamboo is laid nearly flat, showing the silver sides of its leaves like white flags of surrender.

  Then, as darkness falls, so does the rain, lashings of it. Then hail, battering, clattering, on the northward windows out of the black night.

  All night the wind toils round the house and in the trees and hedges, tugging the ash tree this way and that, dancing its branches like a puppet, shaking and tugging at it as children do with puppets.

  Suffolk used to be much more public, communal in feel and life. It used to be hillbilly country. Now it is private.

  April

  2nd April

  The source of a river, a tear duct of the earth.

  The source of a river is always a matter of particular fascination. Its very mention brings out the explorer in all of us.

  I have wandered into a small, rushy field in Redgrave, where sheep graze and the paraphernalia of shepherding is strewn about the field. There’s an ooze in the ground, a wet patch that squelches as you walk over it.

  A sparse thinning of birches and sallows. It is a source of the Little Ouse, and the Waveney. Redgrave Fen.

  The brook at Heveningham that runs down from outside the Low House at Laxfield becomes the Blyth, and the great Blyth Estuary at Blythburgh.

  In Gittings Wood. Strong, cold, north wind blowing. I go up the side of the field, uphill, and cross over a young wheat field to the wood. It has a wood bank and a deep ditch, and as soon as I enter the wood I am struck by the enormous carpet of lily-of-the-valley leaves, and wood anemone in flower, studded with the deep blue of violets. Bluebell leaves, and, further into the wood, herb Paris. Also town hall clock, and blotched leaves of the early purple orchid – hundreds of them, many browsed by deer, flowers just beginning to bud. Primroses, although not very plentiful. Very big ash stools, a few hornbeam stools at the south-west end of the wood. Mostly very high ash coppice that has shot up forty or fifty feet and sways about in the wind, the tops crashing and clattering, and the sound of the wind about and outside the wood.

  Clacking of the ash stems together. Many ash stools six or eight feet wide, and several open circular stools.

  8th April

  I am well on the way to becoming a tree myself. I put down roots. I sigh when the wind blows. My sap rises in the spring, and I turn towards the sun. My skin even begins to look more like bark every day. Which tree would I be? Definitely a walnut; an English walnut, Juglans regia, the tree with the greatest canopy.

  Conservation can only concern itself with what is past and gone, not with the future. Yet, if that is the case, why flood new wetlands in the hope of attracting more bitterns to nest? Why landscape Redgrave Fen in the hope of more raft spiders and otters and dragonflies? Why not devote a lot more care and attention to the wild western end of Mellis Common? It is a huge area of some seventy to eighty acres that is almost entirely free of the pressures on wildlife associated with human presence around the perimeter.

  At the eastern end of the common, you have increasing numbers of people and their pet dogs and cats, all disturbing the common in one way or another.

  The hedges along the common from Hall Farm to Stonebridge Lane are almost exclusively blackthorn, with elm now suckering back, some hawthorn, the odd field maple, and bramble and dog rose.

  The hedges along the boundary from Stonebridge Lane west to Furzeway are, again, almost all blackthorn, with some individual hawthorn bushes or trees, a few ash, elm as the second species now suckering back and doing quite well, a single holly, two hazels at the far west end near a large ash tree, sallow, some little elder and bramble. The hedge bushes and trees have been coppiced to the ground, and a species mixture has been replanted in a different, regular pattern, to create a hedge that will eventually mature into a very different-looking ‘standard conservation hedge’, that is to say a mix of dogwood, hawthorn, blackthorn, field maple, holly and hazel. All these species are represented to a greater or lesser extent in other parts of the parish, but here the character of the hedge is that it is predominantly blackthorn.

  Incidentally, there always was a lilac tree in this hedge, and it has now been removed. This is unpardonable. The lilac was much loved, an entirely accidental arrival (there is another in one of the hedges along Pye Meadow on the boundary of my land), and it was part of the local distinctiveness of the hedge.

  William Morris’s principle of repair, rather than restoration, applies to hedges. You should repair the hedge by planting what was there before; not new species or varieties.

  It is a sad fact that all our recent wars have been ignominious affairs, and modern agriculture has been much the same: doing dreadful things to the land that you know in your bones a
re wrong, but that you end up doing, as a duty, all the same: dropping the cluster bombs, or polluting the fields and the rivers with poisons.

  What we need is the farming equivalent of conscientious objectors: people who are prepared to stand up and say, ‘No, we won’t do this any more’, at whatever personal risk.

  Certain things, objects, implements, I make over and over again. Chairs for bums, spoons for lips. The love-spoons the Welsh carve so intricately out of hedge hawthorn are presented for the pleasure of the lips. I have exchanged spoons many times with a loved and adored woman, often from a far-distant country, and it is like kissing. And the chairs, so lovingly scooped and scalloped with a bespoke shave, stroking the tough grain of the elm to accommodate the desired buttocks of a loved woman.

  Burgate Wood. The moated island site of the old manor is sixty yards square and raised a good six to ten feet above the level of the rest of the wood. More nettles grow on it than in the wood around it, perhaps because the ground has been disturbed, and perhaps because it is enriched with the compost and detritus of five centuries of human habitation. At one corner I stand inside a huge circular ash coppice, cratered and ruined, with a maple coppice to one side of it, both shooting up fifty feet, the crater twelve feet wide. The wood floor here is mossy and soft. Searching for just the right camping spot, I circle round and round, feeling the ground for a perfectly level place underneath the grasses, dog’s mercury, nettles, blue ground ivy and, appropriately, lords and ladies.

  Stepping off the island, I find myself in a dark part of the wood full of the biggest, most ancient hornbeams, all pollarded very close to the ground, no more than three or four feet up, yet with trunks twelve feet in girth.

  One enormous tree, which must rise to sixty feet, throws such dense shade that beneath it is a circle of bare brown leaf mould twenty yards in circumference. The tree has thrown up twenty-one winding pollard poles, steely and serpentine, all held firm by the pitched guy-ropes of the tree roots, stretched taut on the twelve-foot-diameter trunk.

  Inside, a pigeon nest, the bare skull of a rabbit, picked clean, perhaps, by a hawk. It must have carried the rabbit head to the nest and devoured it safely off the ground.

  The ghost of the manor house on its raised bosky mound haunts me. For five centuries, the De Burgate family inhabited this place. The nettles are signs of their occupation, their night soil, discarded bones and seashells, their compost and even their old clothes. The rags of time. I found an ancient whelk shell, tossed from a banqueting table eight hundred years ago, dissolved to a fragile chalky filament in the bank of the moat.

  Deciding on a place to sleep, I went round and round in circles like a cat about to curl up in the sunshine. This circling into a nest must be something all mammals share, a subtle appraising of the terrain, assessing the minor but crucial questions of the presence of a molehill, an outcrop of flint or a clump of nettles. I wanted a dry spot as high as possible above the surrounding wood, and chose a natural dish of earth in the shade of a ruined and cratered coppice stool, an atoll of verdant leaf mould, surrounded by a reef of apparently rotten wooden islets that somehow sprouted huge muscular poles of ash that wove their way diagonally upwards towards gaps in the canopy.

  Little things assume a greater importance at such times: the knuckle of root that could press into your ribs and keep you awake all night; the angle of your view into the rest of the wood, and on to the moat, a watering hole.

  Lidos are more fun than swimming pools. Lidos are to swimming pools what cathedrals are to churches. They are much more fun, they leave a lasting impression, and they cost a lot more to do up these days. ‘Fun’is the word you immediately associate with lidos. Nobody here can ever quite agree whether to say ‘Leedo’or ‘Liedo’ (a place for lying down in the sun). It is one of those words, like ‘toilet’that we have borrowed from the Continentals, and tried unsuccessfully to Anglicize. ‘Toilet’sounds much better as toilette in the original French. And ‘lido’ sounds much better in the original Italian.

  I remember how upset the commoners of Dungeness –Dunge Beach –were at someone moving in and fencing off a piece of the beach next door to Derek Jarman’s cottage. Jarman made his garden –but a wild one in a wild way, which would shade off into the wilderness of the beach, into the natural profusion of plants growing there.

  Little picket fences have begun to appear all over the local commons –Wortham Ling, Wortham Long Green –fencing off bits of ‘take’–poached land.

  13th April

  A voyage by bike down Stubbings Lane in Burgate/ Ricking-hall. A really wild, Rogue Male-ish lane full of dense thickets of blackthorn. A blackthorn jungle, a stockade, armoured by lethal venomous thorn as painful and threatening as anything Australia can offer.

  I turned off the little side road by a modern steel-clad barn standing on its own at the top of a low hill near Burgate Wood and Burgate Little Green. I cycled down the uneven track of a green lane, fringed by hedges and trees, mostly blackthorn and elm, now suckering back again into new life. Field maple, dog rose, dogwood. The lane ran downhill and turned to the left, where it opened out into a ‘long green’, a wide area of grazing, now partly colonized by blackthorn, which enclosed little grassy glades where odd discarded car wheels and batteries suggested travellers had camped here in the recent past. A small blackthorn forest. Sound of chiffchaff song. Perhaps blackcaps later on. The lane continued for a long way: through Stubbings Green, with the sites of more than one extinct house or barn (Imple House and Procter’s Barn no longer exist, yet are shown on the 1926 Ordnance Survey). The apparently lifeless floor of a blackthorn copse – impenetrable, the avalanche of blossom on top. A sloe paradise in winter, November/December.

  Puddles, a stream becoming almost a rivulet with the strong brown flow of recent rains, brooklime, stitchwort, fool’s watercress along its banks, cowslips and primroses by the track. Then a huge long-felled oak tree lying on its side in the hedge. Why did no one plank it up into timber? Its presence is a sign of the relative affluence of the Suffolk farmers: they couldn’t really be arsed to haul the tree out to the sawmill.

  I eventually emerged from the lane to discover a brick-built warehouse building that might have been a power station but obviously wasn’t, and a pair of farms, badlands places with all the signs of bad farming and outlaw backwoods enterprise – broken farm machinery in a great dump on a concrete pad, more concrete, an old derelict Land Rover, its blue paint washed out by acid rain to a streaked pale blue, and a series of huge open-sided sheds filled with mountains of black spent mushroom compost. A whole mountain range of it in heaps outside on yet more concrete pads and an ancient Hymac digger that once belonged to ‘J. Green & Son, Yarmouth’. The inhabitants of the farm had obviously had dealings with garden centres, because representatives of all the least likely trees and bushes to plant round a Suffolk farmhouse in the depths of the wild had been planted everywhere: eucalyptus, pampas grass, and a 25-foot-high date palm grew at one end of the house. How it had survived the Suffolk winters I don’t know.

  A sudden warm, sunny day after a long, very cold, frosty spell. Full moon shining on the new blossoming plum in the garden, moon reflected in the perfectly still moat on a clear, perfectly still night. An American bomber plane flies straight towards the garden high overhead, its three lights shining forward, so the plum seems illuminated from both sides: by the moon to its right, and by the US Air Force, returning from Iraq, to its left.

  Distant barn owl in Thornham Wood, and the toads in the moat, like old men snoring in an upstairs room as I walk home from the pub down a village street. Distant toads, distant owls.

  The magic of outdoor skating is all too rare a pleasure these days. As a child, I remember skating all the time every winter. As soon as winter clamps down with a big frost, you are in another world.

  One great source of the magic must be that you are walking on water. Then, as you acquire some skill in the art, the joys of flight. The sheer pleasure of flying across the i
ce. Some of the record times in the fenland skating races have been extraordinary – 2½-minute mile in 1885.

  The experience of skating is so intense that it stays with you. The cold frosty wind rushes into your face, up your nostrils. The whole pond becomes a musical instrument, with the ice as its sounding board. There is a music of skates, a rhythmic ‘swish’ as the blades cut through the virgin surface of the black ice.

  Looking down into the ice, studying it, the little bubbles fossilized, trapped in mid eruption. The sheer contrast of the static, frozen world of ice with the explosions of energy and movement in the skaters.

  There is always a special magic because it is available only as a rare, occasional pleasure. Hence, it is romantic: an extreme case of that very English thing – deferred gratification. For that reason, it is all the more memorable.

  Weather conditions, too, are extreme – and the body responds to the cold with vigorous secretions of hormones and endorphins.

  The world is made vivid by the reflected light of snow and ice. Skating is one of those words that may be relied upon to trigger a flood of memories.

  On Mellis Common, which has twenty-four ponds, there was always skating – and at night, after the farm work was done, the villagers would gather with lanterns and Billy Battell’s old wind-up gramophone and skate and skate. Also at Dickleburgh, on the water meadows – shallow and flooded. Big bonfire on one side to illuminate the ice.

  Memories – somehow it is the vividness and freedom that we remember more than the chilblained toes, or bruised knees or sacral vertebrae. I long ago acquired the knack of padding up well with several layers of trousers before venturing on to the ice. Not only wrapping up but padding up too.