Wild Cherry Jam
It is not easy to gather a quantity of wild cherries if the crows are determined enough to get the lot, but after this windy day many little clumps have found their way to the ground, inviting me to make something from them. I know that they do not all have to be fully ripe and red—those that are an attractive apricot colour are perfectly fine for cooking. Cherry stones (pits) contain a small measure of a cyanic compound, much like bitter almonds, but I cannot find any evidence that there is enough to cause any harm. The stones also provide pectin to help the jam set, so if all the stones are removed before cooking, jam sugar containing pectin must be used instead. This is probably the more reliable method. The stones have to be removed from the flesh, tapped with a hammer and placed in a tied muslin bag if they are to be employed as a source of pectin. Some recipes recommend cracking the stones, extracting the kernels and cooking those with the flesh, but this is very fiddly. The quantities of ingredients depend on how many cherries can be gathered, but the sugar should be about 75 per cent of the weight of the cherries. The stoneless cherries go into a pan (with the stones in a bag if they are the pectin source), and a good squeeze of lemon juice is added. I then cook them until the fruit is very soft. At this point the sugar has to be added and the whole brought to what cookery books always describe as “a rolling boil,” which sounds like a medical condition. The setting point is reached in ten minutes or so. If the mixture is reluctant to set, it can still be used as a delicious dressing for ice cream.
5
August
Thunderstorm and After
At first the wind whips up the leaves into a squally frenzy, as if some inundation were rushing in to swamp the wood, accompanied by a sound like crashing waves. I briefly close my eyes and I am right by an ocean, and each pulse of wind is another breaker that passes across the canopy. The pull of wind on leaves exactly mimics the roll of breakers over pebbles, that hubbub of motion, as one pulse of energy melds with its successor. The mew of a red kite in the gusts is so like the cry of a seagull. Grumbles of thunder somewhere to the north are followed by flashes of lightning and a mighty crash, apparently coming from the sky immediately above me. The storm is so close that I am sent scurrying back to my car as heavy rain begins to fall. It is safer to sit this one out. Fortunately, I do not have long to wait.
The thunderstorm passes as quickly as it arrived, and then the sun plays through the trees with sudden and exceptional clarity. As the leaves are teased by the breeze, their shadows dance with something of the constrained unpredictability of flickering flames. The effect might be described as kaleidoscopic, except that there are only two colours: green and gold set against the dark wall of holly. The high tree crowns rather shimmer in the intense light. A portrayal of the wood as “magical” does not seem overblown for once, as if Peaseblossom, Cobweb and their fairy friends might suspend the laws of physics here just for a few minutes. A girl on a pony passes along the path, the pair sashaying together like a strange dark ghost through the shade, and hardly visible. Implausibly large glistening raindrops still hang off twigs, like pearls. Newly flooded puddles provide dimpled and approximate reflections of it all.
Rain brings out large slugs from their moist hiding places in the shadier part of the wood. The biggest of them all is a great black slug, Arion ater, which is longer and chunkier than my middle finger. A deep-orange variety of the same species somehow looks more unwholesome as its mucus coating glistens in a sunbeam with lubricious succulence. I turn one slug over to watch the involuntary contraction of the foot on which it glides, a contraction that momentarily almost halves its length. Its foul taste is a guarantee that no predator will regard it as a treat, for all that it is a mass of muscular protein. After it is restored right-way up, within a few seconds its two pairs of tentacles re-inflate, the longer, upper optical tentacles orientating the confused mollusc in a trice, while the lower sensory tentacles will soon “smell” out a mushroom or decaying plant stem for luncheon. Off it glides, purposefully. Another large, but more slender, greyish slug is distinctly black-spotted towards its front, more black-striped behind, like a pinstripe gone wrong. The leopard slug (Limax maximus) is no predator, but unlike its eponym can change its spots—or at the least is very variable in colour. I have found its spherical eggs clustered under rotting logs, resembling a pallid brand of caviar. Once I saw its crepuscular mating dance, during which a pair of slugs hang from a twig by a thread of mucus, creating a pas de deux of unsurpassed sliminess, a sight not everyone would find erotic.
These vagrant molluscs remind me of their relatives, snails—or rather, the lack of them. Not one escargot worth marinating in butter has been found in Grim’s Dyke Wood. Even the common and variable grove snail (Cepaea nemoralis), which is often as brightly striped as a Henley Royal Regatta blazer, makes only a desultory showing at the edge of the wood. I have been on snail hunts and found only minute species. Under rotting logs the sole snail commonly found is a tiny form called the round disc (Discus rotundatus), whose name, whether in English or Latin, describes its appearance very well. Seen under a hand lens it is very pretty, ribbed with growth lines, and marked with regular brownish stripes. The glass snail (Oxychilus cellarius) is hardly larger, and so thin-shelled it is practically transparent. A hairy snail (Trochilus hirsutus) is decorated with a fine fuzz. The total species list is only eight.
In my garden, not so far away from the wood, stout common garden snails queue up to graze my vegetables, and no Hosta would stand a chance of growing to maturity unchewed. I was puzzled by this apparently inexplicable contrast, until I worked out the geology. Big snails need calcium carbonate (limestone, chalk) to make their shells. The thicker the shell, the more lime is required. The veneer of clay-with-flints in the wood has all the lime leached out of it. Only the thinnest-shelled, tiniest snails can get the mortar they need to build a home. Soft, unpalatable slugs have no such prohibition, as they do not need to build a shell.
To test my hypothesis, I visited the Hambleden Valley just downriver from Henley in Buckinghamshire, with its lovely chalky landscape. A footpath at Pheasant’s Hill leads up into airy woodland. On the pathside, chalk-loving plants like old man’s beard (Clematis vitalba), dog’s mercury (Mercurialis perennis) and the charmingly named ploughman’s spikenard (Inula conyzae) soon told me I was on a different soil from that in our wood, even though both beech and ash trees were as abundant. I confess to a moment of wood envy—I really liked this patch of sloping ground. There were also empty snail shells, big ones, to left and right, all belonging to species absent from our wood. They obviously had no trouble finding what they needed to secrete their homes. There was even a thick-shelled, ornamented and turreted form, the round-mouthed snail (Pomatias elegans), that had enough calcium carbonate left over to make a protective door to cover its aperture. The mystery of the rarity of shells in our wood is really no enigma: lime is just one of the hidden controls on what lives where. Grim’s Dyke Wood simply does not have enough of it to make big snails.
—
FAMILIARITY DOES NOT BREED contempt; rather, it breeds discrimination. On my perambulations through the wood, now all freshened after the thunder, I love to plod around on a ritual beat with my eyes swivelling left to right, looking for anything that has changed since the last time. This slow walk is never exactly the same; there is always something new to recognise. Near the south-eastern corner of the wood, one of our largest beech trees is surrounded by a natural mossy garden on a gentle bank. Growing out of the moss today is a stinkhorn (Phallus impudicus). It was not there a week ago. As with the round disc snail, its Latin name provides a precise description of the organism: it arises from a white sac, which could be appropriately described as scrotal; above this rears a pallid erect member of average (occasionally generous) penile dimensions, the whole capped with a glans, but one decorated with greenish slime. Phallus is only the first part of the name; as for the second, impudicus means “stinking” (in Latin), so what I have before m
e is a “stinking phallus.” And it really does smell: of something ripely rotten, like bad meat or dumped offal perhaps. The stinkhorn is one of the most curious productions of nature; and it is a fungus.
Down on my hands and knees I soon find a second individual at an earlier stage of growth, snuggling in the moss. It looks exactly like a white, round egg, about the size that might be laid by a particularly ambitious hen. It is quite firm to the touch, though the white skin feels a little flexible, like pigskin. When some of the moss is removed, I reveal that the egg is attached to a thick, somewhat elastic white thread that runs horizontally near the surface of the soil. This is the business end of the fungus, a mycelial thread that connects the fruit body with the network of fine filaments that feed off decaying wood and leaves in the surrounding woodland. So the stinkhorn arises (I am tempted to say gets an erection) from the egg. Its stem quickly extends and carries the pyramidal “cap” aloft, smothered in green gunk.
Then I notice two or three fat flies dining enthusiastically on this substance, sucking at it with their mouthparts, like cartoon gluttons slurping soup. The pong is explained. These are carrion-loving flies, connoisseurs of rot and decay. This is their meat and drink. They smell a rotting shrew or mouse. The fungus has fooled them into dining on its microscopic spores, which they will spread through the wood in their droppings.1 Once smelled, the fetid stinkhorn’s aroma is not easily forgotten. I have several times tracked down what Sacheverell Sitwell called the “horned god of the coven” from catching a whiff of it by the wayside. Curiously, at the egg stage there is no smell. The baby fruit body crouches like a nut inside the egg, surrounded by faintly coloured jelly. The crunchy bud is edible raw. It creates quite an impression on a fungus foray2 if, after pointing out the mature fungus in all its glory, the foray leader scoops up an egg, peels out the stinkhorn embryo and pops it into his mouth.
Romans and After
I have explained why I think the wood did not exist in the late Iron Age. I would like to discover when the distant progenitor of the wood that now covers Grim’s Dyke first began to transform the landscape. I was brought up with a naïve tradition that the Roman Conquest of AD 43 brought civilisation to Britain, and I admit that my vision of the average Roman was probably heavily influenced by having to study Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Book 3, for my school examinations, and by several toga-rich Hollywood confections, probably featuring Charlton Heston shouting “Hail!” to other Romans almost as handsome. What is now known of the earlier tribes who peopled our landscape proves that they had many attributes associated with advanced societies, including complex trade links that already rooted deeply into continental Europe. Most historians accept that the conquering Romans had the advantage of being militarily superior to everyone else, and highly organised; that there were battles that quelled important Iron Age redoubts like Maiden Castle in Dorset is proved unequivocally by the discovery of British skeletons still carrying direct evidence of the hardware that killed them. Our Celtic tribes in the Chiltern Hills may well have delayed their oppressors for some time before they were subdued; it is unlikely that the old chiefs would have compromised a clear prospect over the hills to spy out the enemy—no new trees to conceal the view.
A less violent transition is recorded in other sites where “Romanisation” may have happened progressively over many years. The Romano-British as a whole were a people transformed as much as conquered. At the time of the construction of Hadrian’s Wall in AD 122 this process had probably advanced as far as it could. By then, a new Roman road had been constructed running straight on lower ground parallel to the ancient Upper Icknield Way at the foot of our local Chiltern scarp, with villas all along the route. By the second century, villas were also occupied at locations scattered variously over the Chiltern Hills, and at special sites where the River Thames might be crossed. Two of these villas are very close to the wood. One at Bix is under a mile away.3 Another pair of villas in what is now the village of Harpsden lay only two miles to the south. A few pieces of good Roman jewellery have recently been unearthed between Harpsden and Bix by people using metal detectors.
A large complex of buildings, including a high-status villa, has been re-excavated at Yewden, about three miles to the east of the wood (close to my “snail walk”), and located at a former ford across the Thames; this was evidently a site of considerable strategic importance. A wealth of archaeological evidence uncovered there indicates an occupation spanning three centuries. The most extraordinary, but disturbing, discovery was a large number of skeletal remains of what are termed “perinatals”—infants who died after thirty-eight to forty weeks’ gestation. They are regarded as infanticides.4 One interpretation of this grisly archive is that the babies are the bones of unwanted offspring originating from a brothel that supplied “R&R” for off-duty soldiery. There is other evidence from Yewden attesting to the presence of military men who had served the Empire abroad, such as scarab talismans from Egypt.
However this history is eventually decoded, it is clear that our region of the Chiltern Hills was no longer part of any kind of wildwood in Romano-British times. It is inconceivable that those who lived at Harpsden were unaware of their near neighbours at Bix. Surely it is not mere speculation to envisage these people visiting one another to exchange gossip and goods; that is what our species does on Sunday afternoons. The Roman buildings in Harpsden, which are located in a valley, were probably built over newly felled forest. I like to think that the high ground at Bix remained open from Iron Age days, but I have no particular reason to support this supposition, other than the propensity for idleness that is another characteristic of many of our kind. If a widely held view that villas were built over the sites of preceding farms is correct, then the underlying landscape was comprised of fields rather than woods, and the familiar usage probably continued. The summing-up in my court of speculation is that Grim’s Dyke Wood had probably not become established in Romano-British times.
Empires decay, but rarely in grand style. When the era of the Roman Chilterns came to an end around AD 410, there was no single cataclysm. Local Britons did not immediately give up all the trappings of civilised Roman life, and pass over a threshold labelled “Dark Ages” to emerge 650 years later into medieval society. However, by the end of the fifth century and the beginning of the sixth the old order had disappeared. The population had declined after the prosperous centuries. Even coinage—always the archaeologist’s best evidence—was abandoned for a while in favour of barter and theft. Christianity had been spread from Rome in the second century, but now polytheistic paganism returned to England, as invading tribes moved in across the Channel from Germany.
The earliest such people to settle around the Chiltern Hills had been mercenaries brought in from northern Europe at the beginning of the fifth century to help defend what remained of the Roman state centred on St. Albans (Verulamium), and there is archaeological evidence for subsequent Saxon villages in the Vale of Aylesbury and at several places along the Thames. In these early, chaotic times the Saxons avoided the Chiltern highlands for more than 150 years; the hills became what has been described as a “British reserve.”5 Our wood was part of the area that held out against the invaders. A number of historians have considered that this redoubt required some kind of centralised political organisation, a last gasp of Rome from St. Albans, but it is more likely that the incomers left the area well alone, in the control of tough local warlords. I imagine a warrior stalking through Lambridge on his way to spy out the land from the top of the scarp slope, his ideas of the old Roman days already refracted through several generations of desperate circumstances. Was a golden age still remembered around the campfire? Or did the crude necessities of survival erase shared traditions, rather like barrows obliterated after centuries of the plough? After 571, contact with other relict British areas was cut off by a more organised Saxon assault; the high Chilterns became an enclave. In the plains and valleys beyond the hills the local populations were absorbing new language
and new ways. The English tongue was evolving. The British in the hills could not hold out for much longer.
The Chiltern Hills were finally settled by the Saxons in a piecemeal fashion after about AD 650. With the passage of another two hundred years the pattern of the countryside we still see today had been established. This is the period to which we must look for the beginnings of Lambridge Wood. In the British Library is a late-seventh-century document called The Tribal Hideage that uses the term “Chiltern” (Ciltern saetna) for the first time, so even the identity of the chalk upland itself can be traced to this period. England was becoming organised again.
Our own area was on the margins of the emerging powers of Mercia and the West Saxons. The settlement of Bensington lay at the foot of the Chiltern Hills a little distance to the west, and was a frontier of great importance—more prominent than Oxford in middle Saxon times. According to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Cuthwulf captured it from the Britons in 571. Today, Benson (as it has become) is principally known as the place that regularly records the lowest temperatures in England during cold snaps, although it does still have a warrior presence, in the guise of a modern air force base. In Saxon times, Benson and the surrounding area of the Thames Valley was a focus for both earthly power and spiritual regeneration. Just a few miles upriver, at Dorchester-upon-Thames, St. Birinus (d. 650) set out to convert the heathens of Wessex to Christianity. His abbey became a site of pilgrimage for centuries—sadly, his supposed relics were probably bogus.
The Mercian King Offa defeated the West Saxon King Cynewulf of Wessex near Bensington in 779, so there could be change at the top. At the bottom of the social heap it is likely that the remaining Britons were enslaved, or maybe employed as swineherds in the woods. And this mid-Saxon period may well have been when the woods returned to something like their aboriginal state. During their confinement within an enclave, the enduring Britons likely followed upon the early patterns of farming that had been prosecuted in Roman and even Iron Age times. When they were flushed at last from their Chiltern haven and put to work elsewhere, parts of the high land that were not immediately useful reverted to scrub, and eventually to woodland. Scrub appears very quickly on fallow land; I have observed fields becoming impassable brush after only a decade if blackthorn, hawthorn and bramble are allowed to have their way. The return of high canopy might take eighty years, to judge from the trees in our own wood. At this stage, shaded woodland floors would soon naturally clear themselves of all but specially adapted flora. The ancestor of Grim’s Dyke Wood established itself on the feather-edge of Saxon civilisation, and thus began its own trajectory through history. The wood is as old as, or even older than, the great Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, proving that the endurance of art can be tracked by the life of trees; the perpetual regeneration of forest parallels the timelessness of literature.
The Wood for the Trees Page 12
