The vigorous river that brought down the pebbles from eighty miles to the north-west was an ancestor of the same River Thames that now flows sedately two miles to the east of the wood.13 During the Pleistocene Ice Age (2,588,000 to 11,700 years ago) thick continental glaciers to the north waxed and waned by turn, diverting all Europe’s great rivers at some times, providing the source for vast spreads of gravel at others. The ancient Thames left behind a record of this complex history in its former river terraces, the remains of which are scattered around the Chilterns and the London Basin. The oldest of these terraces is close to our wood, at Nettlebed. The exotic pebbles that I found in the wood are well known from a younger terrace, a set of strata called the Stoke Row Gravels.
Thin section of a conglomerate pebble: an alien in the wood.
The village that gives that formation its name is about four miles west of the wood, high on the Chiltern plateau. It is home to a most implausible structure, a little piece of India by a village green such as Cecil Roberts would have described as being quintessentially English. The Maharajah’s Well was dug by hand 368 feet down into the chalk, passing on the way down through the overlying gravels relevant to our wood, and all at the personal expense of the Maharajah of Benares, who also supplied the exotic, elegant and ornate canopy. His gift was reciprocation for a well dug in India at Azimghur by Edward Reade (“squire” of Stoke Row) in 1831. The Maharajah remembered that Reade had told him how his little home village on the top of the Chiltern Hills was most precariously supplied with water. His remarkable gift of the Maharajah’s Well was officially opened in 1864, and did its job efficiently for seven decades.
Professor Phil Gibbard tells me that the Midland “connection” was open for well over a million years, until about 450,000 years ago. Although the huge Pleistocene ice sheets never reached as far south as the wood, their influence could not have been more profound. An icy climate sculpted the Chiltern landscape. It scrubbed the landscape to a tabula rasa on which all its subsequent history was inscribed; this marks the baseline of my natural history. I have to imagine a landscape stripped of trees. The slopes of the hills are bare, with only the hardiest herbs able to cope with the frigidity to the south of the permanent ice. Now indeed Cecil Roberts’s description of the valley up to Stonor as a “ravine” may be nearer the mark, for the Chiltern country is riven with steep-sided valleys. Cold summer streams that flow with rejuvenated force following the annual melt carve vigorously down into the soft chalk, which is still too deeply frozen to allow the tumbling waters simply to be absorbed. The streambed is choked up with flint pebbles. In Arctic latitudes I have watched just the same fitful progress of jostling stones during the brief summer—their percussion kept me awake. The legacy of the frozen era still marks the ground: not only the implausible sheerness of some Chiltern hillsides, but also valley bottoms floored even now by ancient stream gravels.
Old names were bestowed by the Ice Age, like Rocky Lane, which runs up a valley on the south-western side of the Greys estate. Then, somewhat over eleven thousand years ago, the climate warmed for good, and now I must populate the hills with trees. Pioneers at first, small willows, hardy conifers; then birch, pine and aspen; and next, and not necessarily in this order, the broadleaved trees that came to make the original wildwood: oak, ash, lime, elm, hazel and beech. Oliver Rackham tells us that the lime species he calls pry (Tilia cordata)—the small-leaved lime—was dominant in many of those early woodlands.14 It still lurks, mostly unremarked, in a few places in the Chiltern Hills, but not in our wood. About six thousand years ago “Stone Age” humans were already beginning to fell the virginal forests, where previously arboreal old age and accident had been the only foresters. The streams that had once carved the “ravines” were now absorbed into the defrosted chalk, leaving a legacy of steep dry valleys, like the one that runs from the Fair Mile to Stonor Park; though it is not quite dry, for after unusually wet winters the water table rises until streams such as the Assendon Brook reappear, bounding alongside the tiny roads and causing cyclists to swerve and walkers to chide their wet Labradors.
I hold a couple of the liver-coloured sandstone pebbles and a quartz keepsake up to the May sunshine. So much can be read from these fragments. I think of the lines from As You Like It:
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
These remarkable, sermonising samples of rocks that might have passed unnoticed are next to be added to the collection.
Maiden Ladies and Geraniums
In 1787 Mary, Dowager Lady Stapleton, moved into Greys Court as her dower house, and women dominated that establishment for the next eighty years. After she died at the age of ninety-one in 1835, Mary’s daughters, Maria and Catherine, stayed on in the big house that owned Lambridge Wood until the younger sister Catherine’s death twenty-eight years later; both sisters also lived to a great age. The intellectual ferment in London that preoccupied their neighbour, George Grote—and the circle that included John Stuart Mill—passed them by. Rather, the Church engaged them fully, and led them to charities directed at the moral and religious education of the less fortunate in the parish of Rotherfield Greys. The rents from tenancies guaranteed their gentility, if not their spinsterhood. It must have been a quiet time at the ancient house.
Mary’s son, James, was at Greys Court in the earlier days, and his friend from Christ Church, Oxford, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, stayed with him often, and wrote frank letters to his mother at Hoddam Castle peppered with observations that exactly match his surname.15 On 12 January 1801 he was describing his Christmas at Greys, “which began, woe’s me! like most other gambols, with laughter, and ended in tears.” He described the entertainments the local town had to offer thus:
Miss Stapleton, her brother, and myself, repaired in high feather to a ball at Henley, the night after Christmas, and were much amused in many ways. The company consisted of the town gentry, and the progeny of farmers in the neighbourhood; the clowns with lank, rat-tail hair, and white gloves drawn tight on hands which they knew not how to dispose of; the clownesses with long stiff feathers stuck round their heads like those of a shuttle cock, and wealth of paste beads and pinchbeck chains. They came all stealing into the room as if they were doing some villainy, and joyful was the meeting of the benches and their bums. But the dancing did them most ease; the nymphs imitating the kicking of their cows, the swains the prancing of their cart horses. But joy of joys! Tea was brought at twelve, and off came all the silken mittens and pure white gloves in an instant, exposing lovely raw beef arms and mutton fists more inured to twirl mopsticks and grasp pitchforks than to flutter fans or flourish bamboos.
There is a precision of observation here that almost mitigates the snobbery. Walter Scott wrote of Sharpe: “he has great wit, and a great turn for antiquarian lore.” Nor did the poor Misses Stapleton escape his gimlet eye. A year later he wrote:
I made out my visit to [James] Stapleton, and yawned with him for a week. They are such good dull people at Greys Court! The sober primitive women do nothing the whole day but fiddle-faddle with their greenhouse, like so many Eves, and truly they are in little danger of a tempter, for their faces would frighten the devil, not to mention men.
The only portrait I know depicting the sisters (and brother), by Thomas Beach in 1789, suggests this judgement might be unfair. The large painting hangs on the staircase in the grand Holburne Museum in Bath. The two girls are dressed rather fetchingly as shepherdesses. Their features are pleasantly strong, although there is a certain wistfulness in their expressions. Perhaps they had already foreseen their long and genteel confinement to Greys Court. We get a brief sketch of their later lives from the recollections of an old-timer published in the Henley Standard on 29 July 1922. When he was young, a familiar sight was “the old Post Chaise, with the red jacketed and booted postilion, which brought the old Misses Stapleton of Greys
Court almost daily into Henley.” They evidently kept up appearances.
The preoccupation of the Stapleton sisters with greenhouse horticulture was, I dare say correctly, observed by Mr. Sharpe. Miss Stapleton won the first prize at the Henley Horticultural Show in 1837 for “a boquet of greenhouse flowers.”16 There are still wooden-framed greenhouses dating back to Stapleton times within the brick-and-flint-walled vegetable garden at Greys Court. Catherine Stapleton was particularly expert on pelargoniums. Her knowledge was recognised by the honour of having a cultivar named after her in 1826: “Miss Stapleton.” It is still available as a variety from specialist nurseries. It has charming rich red flowers, paler at the base and decked with a single dark spot on each petal.17 I have a pot of it on my window ledge. With her botanical predilections, I am certain that Catherine walked in her own woodland. There she would certainly have found the only member of her favourite geranium family that grows in Lambridge Wood (Grim’s Dyke Wood included)—the common wayside weed Geranium robertianum, “herb Robert.” She, like me, must have bent down to examine its small, richly red flowers, and must have smelled its curious pungency, and felt the glandular stickiness of its divided leaves, so often tinted blood-red, and noted its odd, stilt-like roots. She too would have known that this herb was named for Nicolas Robert, a pioneer of accurate botanical illustration in seventeenth-century France. I can imagine sharing with her a moment’s communion over a mutual enthusiasm before the proprieties of the time sent her scurrying back to the old house.
Fiddleheads
Ferns have subtle beginnings. As the bluebell leaves fade to little more than slime, ferns push out their new fronds. In the larger clearing, fresh shoots of brambles seem to unfold their leaves even as I watch. Every early shoot—Dylan Thomas’s “green fuse” if ever I have seen one—is almost soft, and downy, and I have nibbled one and found it pleasant and nutty. Today, the backwardly curved spines lining the veins on the underside of the newly unfurled leaves are already beginning to harden—soon they will be capable of delivering a scratch. The bramble patch is impenetrable and intimidating, and the new growth will serve only to thicken its dense conspiracy. Amidst the scrubbiest part of it are dry, brown, fallen fronds of last year’s male ferns (Dryopteris filix-mas). From their centre new growth rises assertively. Rebirth started obscurely a month ago as a cluster of dark knobs. Each one soon rears up of its own accord into a fiddlehead, a kind of self-unwinding spiral that uncurls upwards into the spring sunlight. It is rather like that irritating party toy with which children love to blow raspberries at their friends. At the fiddlehead stage it is said to be edible, and I can see a bruised crown where deer have treated the new growth as a seasonal snack. Even now some of the fronds are opening out, like some unfathomable piece of origami, unsheathing the elegant, pinnate blade that will see the year out. The clustered male fern fronds triumph over the brambles. Once the fronds are fully dark green they will be primed with the poisons that have helped them survive since before the dinosaurs; and then their spore packages will ripen in tiny curved organs beneath each leaflet.
Under drier beech another kind of fern is less difficult to reach, and is more delicate: a buckler fern (Dryopteris dilatata), with a triangular frond, finely divided, and broadest at the base. It seems too fragile for such a challenging place where little else grows, and even its fiddlehead is more tentative. The shaft that bears the growing frond is delicately clothed in brown, chaff-like flakes. And now on the ground all around this fern so much more brown chaff: little purplish-tan clumps of defunct stamens no bigger than a fingernail have dropped down from the canopy. This is all that remains of the inconspicuous beech flowers. They have already done their job far above me, though the beech leaves are still so new. The greatest trees have the least spectacular flowers.
A “fiddlehead” male fern.
It may seem unlikely that beech leaves could contribute to a delicious alcoholic drink, but I have made a liqueur from them for several years, and most of my guests are surprised it is so easy on the tongue. Beech-leaf noyeau can be made in early May when the leaves are freshly unfurled. They are still pale green and soft to the touch—they can be rolled up like cigarette papers. Any tougher and they are bitter. I try to exclude as many of the little brown bracts that originally enclosed the leaf as I can. It takes an unexpectedly long time to pick enough fresh leaves to lightly fill a plastic bag. Once back in the kitchen, I stuff a preserving jar quite tightly with the leaves, until it is rather more than half full. Then they are covered with gin (or vodka) until the jar is about three-quarters full. I do not use a high-class brand suffused with many exotic botanicals, but the cheaper stuff from that supermarket shelf marked “Youths and Alcoholics Only.” I leave the sealed jar for a month to steep. Then the leaves are removed, allowing all the liquor to drain off. If there are any funny bits floating about, now is the time to remove them. For a whole bottle of gin (700 ml), the next ingredients are 200 grams of sugar, around 200 ml of brandy and 250 ml of water. After boiling the water to dissolve the sugar, the resulting syrup is allowed to cool completely. I then add the syrup and the brandy to the beech-leaf elixir and put the mixture back in the preserving jar, preferably with half a vanilla pod. By Christmastide it should be a lovely golden colour. Only a very cynical person would say that it tastes of brandy and vanilla.
Bats!
Claire Andrews has installed her bat monitors. She strapped the recording devices on to our trees about ten feet off the ground, one on the oak by the clearing, the other on a big beech in a sheltered part of the Dingley Dell. They are painted in camouflage colours, and are inconspicuous once in place. They are like discreet garters hitched up on the legs of the trees. Over the next week or so they will record the ultrasonic echolocation noises used by bats to detect their prey, along with their calls one to another.
When I was young I could hear the “squeaks” of bats, but now I am sadly deaf to such crepuscular cries; yet I have seen dancing, shadowy shapes of bats hunting over our clearing outlined momentarily against a darkening sky, black against indigo. How appropriate is the German word for bat—Fledermaus, “flitter mouse”—which exactly captures these stuttering dashes across the heavens.
It is impossible exactly to identify a species of bat in flight. Our recording machines are attuned to pick up the high-frequency cries of these most elusive mammals. Different species “squeak” at different frequencies and with different cadences, as they locate and home in on their prey, especially moths. They use echoes to build up a map of their surroundings, rather as the sonar system installed in ocean-going vessels is used to visualise the sea floor. Bats are exquisitely attuned to avoid obstacles in their way, so negotiating a contorted flightpath under our trees poses no problem. Some of their prey species (among them noctuid moths, which are common in the wood) have evolved organs adapted to “hearing” their approaching nemesis, and will take evasive action if they detect pursuit, such as dropping rapidly downwards from their flight trajectory. Evolution often works as a kind of arms race, with ever more sophisticated methods of attack provoking ever more subtle lines of defence. We need not wonder at the extraordinary auditory organs of the long-eared bats, bizarre though they might appear. These bats “whisper” with low amplitude and short duration to fool their prey, and they need exceptional hearing from massive ears to detect the tiniest sounds made by insects that they may pick up directly from leaves. By day, all bats hang themselves up like folded umbrellas in secluded roosts. Claire has already spotted several holes in beech trees, and, elsewhere, loose pieces of bark that would afford suitable hideaways. There is nothing to do now except leave the contraptions to do their work.
More than a week later, we feed the digital chips from the recording devices into Claire’s computer. Time is ticked off along a chart that reels out on screen the batty history of the glades as night falls. Here is a series of calls from the main clearing at 8:26 p.m. precisely, registering at 45 kilohertz, following sunset seventeen minutes
earlier: they appear on the chart as a succession of reverse “J” shapes, rather like the strokes of an italic pen. “The one you’d expect,” says Claire. “Common pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pipistrellus).” At 8:39 another batch of short calls appears showing a rather similar shape, but at a different pitch of 55 kilohertz. “That’s the soprano pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pygmaeus). It ‘sings’ at a higher frequency.” Claire tells me that the soprano was only named as a species separate from the common pipistrelle in 1999, which seems extraordinary. How could a British mammal elude recognition for so long? We have known all the others for two centuries. Evidently, the two species are extremely similar small brown bats, although they are now known to have different breeding and feeding strategies. As with a lie detector, their voices gave them away. By artificially tuning down the frequencies on the computer we can “hear” the bat calls for ourselves, and appreciate their different pitches.
At 9:39 a different pattern appears on the screen; it belongs to one of the Myotis bats, which are not possible to discriminate on sound alone. Claire believes that our visitor is either the whiskered bat or Brandt’s bat, but trapping would be required to say which species. No matter, we will not be following that course. At 10:02 the sopranos return to sing different arias, which show up as sine waves on the screen. These are social calls, aural visiting cards to signal to the group; when rendered into sound I hear repeated chirrups. At 10:12 the distinctive pattern of a noctule bat (Nyctalis noctula) appears on the screen; this is one of the largest bats to live in Britain.
The Wood for the Trees Page 6
