The Wood for the Trees

by Richard Fortey

  Cecil Roberts had another life during the Second World War. Pilgrim Cottage and its stories had a great following in the United States. Their appeal may have been rather akin to the current popularity of sagas featuring big houses and their goings-on a century ago. Roberts was recruited to aid the war effort by giving lecture tours in America, which he evidently did with great success. The New York Times reported that “the best propaganda in the world is the British and the most efficient expression we witnessed were the lectures held all over the USA by the noted author, Cecil Roberts. These lectures never had the flavor of propaganda but brought more good will towards Britain than anything else.”4 His charm could obviously do its work far away from the Thames Valley.

  When the conflict was over, Roberts felt he had not received sufficient official recognition for his efforts. He tried to restore the balance by publishing his autobiography in no fewer than five volumes. Rowena Emmett, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Plater, the next occupants of Pilgrim Cottage in 1953, told me that for many years beaming Americans would turn up at their garden gate requesting permission for photographs. “It was,” she said, “quite a nuisance.” The former owner did not downplay the fame of Pilgrim Cottage. He had written to the Platers advising, “Many thousands all over the world love it, for it symbolizes England for them.” When Rowena met Cecil Roberts she was a young schoolgirl, and she found him more than a little alarming. She later realised that his manner was just very camp. A modern reading of Gone Rambling would leave little doubt about the author’s sexual orientation, with its panegyrics to bare-chested Italian sawyers whose “skin, tanned a warm mahogany by the Venetian sun, gleamed and caught a hundred tones and facets of light as the muscles glided with cryptic strength beneath their satin sheaths”; to say nothing of some very ambiguous poems.

  I cannot help wondering how Cecil Roberts might have been regarded by the locals in the Golden Ball in those less tolerant times. Maybe they just thought he was from London. He seems to have been genuinely helpful with his time and money in the village, and nearly always described its inhabitants sympathetically. He appreciated the efforts of his gardeners, including Charles Crewe, who lived in a damp dwelling with none of the usual services on the very edge of Lambridge Wood. Roberts was determinedly anti-fascist. I was surprised to learn that his origins in Nottingham were far from aristocratic. He was a self-made man, living mostly from his prolific pen, whose name-dropping was probably an exuberant validation of his reinvention. “Mon dieu!” his special and amusing spinster friend Miss Whissitt might have exclaimed. “Tu es une arriviste!”

  H. J. Massingham is altogether more astringent. His 1940 book Chiltern Country deals with the whole range of hills in luminous language. His feel for natural observation is superb. Much of his work is driven by fury about the spread—no, the rash—of homely villas outwards from London. He mourns the “real England, the England in which the hills, the vales, the waters, the crops, the roads, the buildings, the natives and the rock that bore them up all on its back were intricately bound together in an organic system not unlike the human body.”5 The country cottages that have withstood the centuries—and the worthy souls who have earned their living around them for as long—are becoming overwhelmed by red-brick mediocrities planted about with shrubs that don’t belong. Beech woods become desirable scenic accessories rather than essential resources. For Massingham, the country beyond Rickmansworth was irretrievable, and the country around High Wycombe was doomed. The spread of the Metropolitan Line from London into the hills was a sinister fungus that sprouted despicable edifices—suburbia: “the touch of it annihilates identity in place.” His ruralism stands at the other extreme to the poet John Betjeman’s sympathetic regard for what he termed “Metroland,” a land of healthy young women and clean semi-detached gentility.

  Massingham’s combativeness is quite appealing. I think he would fain have jumped back in time way past the Enlightenment to fetch up somewhere in the late medieval period. He reserves his most eloquent writing for our piece of country, and most particularly Stonor Park, “the heart of the Chilterns,” where the wild spirit of the place has not yet been ousted, the views not hopelessly corrupted with eyesores. I have no proof that he ever visited our woods, but I hope he would have found the genius loci satisfactory there too. I am certain he would have disapproved of the practice of “splitting” to sell off ancient woodlands, thereby dividing the integrity of manors that had been in existence for nearly a thousand years. There is no defence, except to say that I could never have afforded to buy a whole stretch. There are plenty of very wealthy people in the hills who don’t appreciate the unique treasures they have on their land, and my small patch is much loved.

  Just over a century before Cecil Roberts was pottering around his garden in Lower Assendon, John Stuart Mill was exploring our Chiltern countryside with a far more scientific enthusiasm. The philosopher and political theorist was equally a dedicated and scholarly botanist. Very few people can instantly recognise rare plants like wintergreens (Pyrola), but J. S. Mill was one of them. From his early days he was a close friend of George Bentham (nephew of Jeremy), who would become one of the greatest botanists of the Victorian age. Mill made an expedition in France in search of poorly known flora. His house in Kensington Square in London was virtually a herbarium. Some people who are not naturalists find it odd that famous thinkers, poets or mathematicians might derive as much pleasure from the minutiae of natural history as from the fields of endeavour that made them famous. Vladimir Nabokov was as serious about blue butterflies as he was about writing novels, but certain critics relay this fact as a kind of eccentric footnote to the life of the artist. Doubtless they perceive that less time frittered away with the butterflies might have resulted in one or two more novels. Can they not see that the taxonomic eye applied to recognising the subtlest nuances of difference in butterflies is the same eye that spots the deceptions and evasions in human motivation? The capacity to make accurate observations is a special genius, and it is not limited to focusing on one particular bipedal subject species.

  In 1828 J. S. Mill undertook his own bipedal tour that passed through our part of Oxfordshire.6 Open fields yielded abundant white-flowered wild candytuft, “one of the commonest of all weeds” (Iberis amara), which is now a rare plant—I eventually ran it down myself on clear ground on Swyncombe Down, nine miles from our wood. His record of thorow wax (Bupleurum rotundifolium) might be one of the last for the county: this species is close to extinction in Great Britain, and Mill noted its rarity even then. On 5 July he approached Henley from Nettlebed: our patch. You may imagine the pleasure his subsequent writing gave me.

  The woods are the great beauty of this country. They are real woods, not copse, that is, they are not cut down for fire-wood, but allowed to grow into timber, though not to any great age, nor are there, as far as we could perceive, many very large or fine trees among them…We stopped at the White Hart, Nettlebed for the night, and in the evening walked down the hill by the Oxford Road towards Henley. It passes through a fine forest-like beech wood, and on the whole the ascent to Nettlebed from Henley is far more beautiful than any thing else which we have seen in its vicinity.

  I cannot prove that John Stuart Mill walked exactly along the footpath past our wood, although it is hard to see how a woodland ascent towards Nettlebed from Henley could have taken any other route. His praise for its beauty is not the least of it. The woods he described are very like those that still flourish today in this corner of the Chiltern Hills; the same stately “forest” of mature timber trees, but yet lacking any truly ancient giants such as survive in old parkland or as parish boundary markers. My wife and I discovered a massive ancient beech pollard along a path in Nettlebed that must have been four hundred years old at least, all gnarled and knobbly and hollowed out. There are a few in the area. But no, Lambridge Wood was a working wood two hundred years ago, a beechen grove permitted to grow on to timber, but not to senility. We shall see, however, that nothing is f
orever, and our wood would have had different employment in earlier and later times.

  Nor can I prove that John Stuart Mill walked through the wood in the company of George Grote, but I like to think that circumstances favoured it. They were friends already in the early 1820s. Mill was both an admirer and a reviewer of Grote’s writing, and particularly his monumental history of Greece (1846–56) in twelve volumes:7 a work not perhaps as beloved as Gibbon on Rome, but with a similarly vast reach and ambition. The two prolific writers shared what might broadly be called liberal and reformist views, and were Utilitarians. The seat of the banking Grote family was Badgemore House, which has been mentioned as the estate adjoining Greys Court directly to the east. Part of the Henley end of Lambridge Wood was within that estate; tracks ran onwards into our part of the greater wood. George’s father was fond of country pursuits, and went hacking on horseback through our woods and onwards to Bix. Young George (then still a banker) and his wife would make the forty-mile journey from London to spend ten days with his parents, and on one occasion Mrs. Grote drove all the way in her own one-horse vehicle while her husband rode for four hours separately on horseback.8 Although George Grote was much attached to Badgemore, in the days before the railway it was hardly a practical commute. By 1831 it was clear that the country house should be given up, and George left for the metropolis to devote more time to reformist politics. We shall see that all the manor houses surrounding our wood had political connections with the capital at one time or another.

  As for contemporary writers, Richard Mabey’s memoir of Chiltern countryside is centred on a region not very far from Lambridge Wood,9 while Ian McEwan described a long walk through our chalk country in his 2007 novel On Chesil Beach. This area of southern England proves to be almost as crawling with writers as with other invertebrates.

  Hard Grounds

  The ground in this part of the wood is crunchy under my boots. Beneath a few of last year’s fallen leaves and under the questing loops of bramble shoots there appears to be nothing but rock. I am attempting to dig a hole to explore the surface geology, but my spade refuses to make any progress. Its blade twists and complains against a barrier of stones. I will have to employ my geological hammer to solve the problem.

  The pick side of the hammer starts levering up lumpy flints, some bigger than my fist. They leave the damp ground reluctantly, with a sucking noise. Where I hammer downwards into the growing hole, sparks fly where steel meets flint. Briefly, there is a smell of cordite; in the days of flintlock pistols that smell would have been a familiar one. Flints were used to strike the spark that ignited gunpowder before a shot could be made. Our flints are embedded in reddish ochre clay that tries to hold on to them, clay that can easily be rolled into a coherent ball between the palms of my hands, and sticks to the fingers. The exterior of most of the flints is white when wiped clear of its clay coat, but where the hammer has shattered one of the larger flints its interior is strikingly black, and mottled in patches. It is a hard rock, but a brittle one shot through with flaws. Much of the wood is effectively floored with flint. Of the chalk of the Chilterns there is no sign.

  Just down the hill beyond the Fair Mile I know that chalk underlies everything. When the dual-carriageway road was repaired, great masses of the white rock were dumped on the side, and I picked out a typical, conical fossil sponge called Ventriculites from the rock pile. Even within Lambridge Wood, further downslope towards Henley, a mysterious excavation known as the Fairies’ Hole (marked on even the oldest maps) is undoubtedly dug within the white limestone. The rock that makes the whole range of hills, “the rock that bore them up all on its back,” as H. J. Massingham said, is an understory of chalk. Within the chalk, hard flints form discrete layers, but they never dominate completely. This flint was ultimately derived from fossil sponges within the chalk that had internal skeletons made of silica struts. The silica was first dissolved, and then re-deposited in flinty layers as the original chalk ooze gradually hardened and transformed into the rock we see today. Whatever underlies Grim’s Dyke Wood on the higher ground evidently also lies on top of the chalk formation, but is largely made of flints derived from it, all stuck in a matrix of sticky clay. This deposit is called, unsurprisingly, clay-with-flints, and in the wood the flints are dominant.

  Clay-with-flints caps the chalk in many parts of the Chiltern Hills.10 It is the product of many millennia of slow solution and weathering-away of the chalk; it is what is left behind when everything else is removed. Chalk is weakly soluble in rainwater, which is why water derived from an aquifer in the Chilterns leaves a limescale deposit behind in a kettle. After a very long time, as the chalk naturally disappears, the originally scattered flints become concentrated. Flint is insoluble; in fact, this form of silica is well-nigh indestructible. It can be tossed into rivers or buried in gardens for centuries, and emerges unscathed. It will outlast the Chilterns.

  To estimate the thickness of the clay-with-flint capping I walk slowly up from the end of the Fair Mile to Lambridge Wood along Pickpurse Lane (see comments on highwaymen, this page), digging with my hammer into the bank until the telltale milkiness goes out of the soil. There are other signs to look for. Old man’s beard (Clematis vitalba), the nearest thing in the British flora to a liana, only grows on chalk—it will not tolerate clay-with-flints. Wild marjoram is no more forgiving. Plant roots sense chemistry with the exquisite palate of a connoisseur. Both the indicator plants grow in abundance near the bottom of the lane and fade away upward. By the time all evidence of chalk has disappeared I conclude that very roughly twenty feet of clay-with-flints must lie above. That is sufficient to make the thin soil on the high ground neutral or acidic compared with the alkaline soils on the slope and in the valley bottom. This saddens me, for many of the more glamorous plants love chalk: the whitebeam tree with big simple leaves with shining undersides; cheerful yellow St. John’s wort; and many an orchid. I shall just have to live without them—I cannot argue with geology. Now I also know why our footpaths can become like quagmires after too much rain. That layer of impermeable clay does not drain well; it likes to make ponds. Some corner of our wood will always be damp.

  Back to Grim’s Dyke Wood. I decide not to try to excavate much more of the recalcitrant stony ground. Instead I shall use the holes I have made to put down beetle traps, burying a few cups half-filled with lethal Dettol to ensnare night crawlers. As I tidy up, a different stone surprises me. Lying on top of the ground by a beech trunk is a pebble the size and shape of a goose egg. It is purple, and it is certainly no flint. Under my hand lens I recognise it immediately as hard sandstone. I soon see more examples of a similar cast, liver-coloured, always rounded off to make satisfactory hand specimens, by which I mean something that sits easily in the palm. They are all strangers. There is no rock formation I can think of in the Chiltern Hills, or in the Vale of Aylesbury beyond, or even further afield beyond Oxford, that might produce such pebbles. They have all their corners chipped off until they are satisfyingly elliptical in outline, and smoothly rounded at the corners. This is a form sculpted by long sojourn in a lively river; erosion has knocked them into shape little by little, polishing repeatedly over a very long time. How could they have got here, into the middle of our beech wood? There are other strangers too. A white pebble that might be a pigeon’s egg, judging from its shape and size; it’s another form of silica—resembling flint, but with a dense, swirling milky whiteness. Vein quartz, I will wager. It might have originated from a vein within granite or snaking along a fault fracturing other rocks. There is no source for such vein quartz anywhere around here. Strewn on top of the clay-with-flints are a bunch of lithological vagabonds from afar.

  I decide to investigate further. At the Natural History Museum a skilful colleague cuts sections through my errant pebbles. Microscopic examination should show what they are made of, and reveal the secrets of their derivation. The samples are sliced using a diamond saw; then a thin sliver is mounted on a glass slide and reduced in thickness
so much that light can penetrate the minerals that make up the rock; they can now be examined under a petrological microscope. I learned my microscopy skills as an undergraduate in a dusty laboratory in Cambridge, and distant memories stir as I stare down the eyepiece.

  The vein quartz pebble proves to be typical. Under the microscope it shows as an irregular patchwork of grey or slightly yellowish crystals, with trails of tiny bubbles. It could have originated from several geological sites. However, one sample has several good pieces of similar-looking rounded vein quartz embedded within a chunk of the sandstone, like plums in a pudding. Maybe the quartz pebbles were derived from the same sandstone formation, only a part of it that was much coarser—a conglomerate, in geological terms. The pebbles must have been incorporated into the sandstone from some still older source. The sandstone itself is curious and distinctive. The individual sand grains are clear enough as masses of rounded outlines under the microscope, and they are of similar size to those that might be found on a beach today. But they are glued together by dark-red cement, without doubt full of iron. This is the mineral that gives the pebbles their rich red colour. The sandstone is recognisable, and it can be run down to its source. The pebbles must be Triassic in age (about 235 million years old), and they come from the English Midlands.11 The old name for them was from the German—Bunter sandstone12—and they date back to a time when Britain was hot and arid and the geography of Europe had an utterly different cast. As for the indestructible milky quartz pebbles, some of them originated from the erosion of still older rocks long before they in their turn became incorporated into the Bunter sandstone; they might be as old as a billion years. Enmeshed under our own beech roots we have pebbles that account for a quarter of the history of the earth; and they arrived in the Chilterns by water, without question.