by Roger Deakin
Living in the Woods
My friends rowed across the river from their island to meet me, and we unloaded the bundles of hazel from the open back of the truck. The shorter rods and the tools went into the boat, and Mike and Mana rowed them across. I had set out early from Suffolk and crossed the Thames at Walton Bridge by mid morning. The longer poles were twenty-five feet long, green and whippy, overhanging the back with a white handkerchief flapping in the slipstream. We floated them out into the river off a landing stage outside Walton Rowing Club. Lashing them together in a raft, we towed them sixty yards across the Thames to Tumbling Bay Island, leaning hard on the oars and heading well up into the current.
Tumbling Bay originated as an island swimming club in the nineteenth century. It is one of those little independent republics you find hidden away up and down the Thames, full of brightly painted hutments among the willows and pampas grass with their names tacked up on boards. Swimmers would come upriver in skiffs with tents for weekends or even holidays, cooking on a camp fire and living the life of Three Men in a Boat. The islanders always entered two rowing eights in the Walton Regatta, and its swimmers competed in races and galas up and down the Thames. There is still an annual Tumbling Bay Ball and Dinner in May, and a cricket match on the island in which it is traditional to lose the ball almost every time you hit it for six, or even for one. In last year’s match the river claimed eight cricket balls. During the war, so many tents were pitched on the island that the Germans thought it must be a military camp and bombed it, killing two campers in their tents.
Over the years a towel and a picnic spread out on the bank, with perhaps a tent or two, had grown into a colony of picket-fenced demesnes dotted about the island. ‘No Name’, the yellow wooden shack on the plot my friends Mike and Mana had recently taken over, was built in 1898 and inhabited for years by Graham Eliot, a clerk who rode a bicycle to work at the bank in Twickenham every day until he retired. At eighty he married for the first time and continued living in the shack for two more years until his bride protested. Although its back room, the bedroom, is built on stilts, the shack still had an irritating habit of floating away during floods and had to be retrieved more than once.
My friends’ idea was that when the river rose in winter spate, a bender would simply let the water flow through it, so long as it was stripped back to its skeleton in the autumn. It would also be a suitably diffident structure, blending with its wooded surroundings. Ideally, we would have got our bender wood locally, but none was available, so I had better admit that we cut the rods from my hedges in Suffolk, and from the rookery wood at Little Horkesley, and drove them over to Walton in the back of a truck.
We hauled the hazel from the river and began laying out the bundles in order of length. Then we strode about like geomancers, debating the most propitious site. Eventually we resolved on a spot near the river bank looking south, close to the landing stage to one side of the shack. A shout from over the water, and the first of the construction team had arrived. Mike rowed across to collect them and soon there were ten of us: far too many, but we made light work of it and enjoyed ourselves.
The dimensions of the structure decided themselves with a logic of their own, according to the length of the hazel poles. With the longest ones we began to create a basic frame. By laying out two poles on the ground and bending their tops together so they overlapped, we calculated that the width of the bender should be 200 inches, or 17 feet. Then we drove in holes with a steel stake and set the poles in them at opposite sides of the circle, wedging them firmly with offcuts of hazel. We had attached ropes to the tops, which we used to bend them down into an even curve and hold them fast while a third person lashed the top few feet together with sturdy garden twine. We had begun with a knot lesson, with me as scoutmaster, and everybody practising slip-knots, clove hitches and lashing. Of course, we should have made nettle rope, or used twisted bark of the small-leaved lime in the traditional Neolithic way, but we compromised with brown twine. We readjusted this first arch several times, standing back to look at it, or walking about underneath, until we were satisfied with the shape of the curve and its height. It became the template for the frame, and we raised a second arch to bisect it, lashing them together at the apex. It was eight feet high, giving plenty of headroom over a wide space inside. We now began bisecting the angles of our four-legged structure to give it eight legs and then sixteen, except that we left out the sixteenth pole to make a doorway and lashed a lintel in place crosswise above head height between the first and fifteenth pole. The idea was that the lintel, once reinforced, would eventually support a porch entrance to keep the interior well sheltered from the weather, along the same lines as an igloo.
We reinforced the skeleton with diagonals, choosing long, flexible poles and anchoring them in the ground, then weaving them in and out of the uprights and lashing some of the intersections. As we wove more and more horizontal or diagonal wands of hazel into our frame, treating it as an inverted basket, it became more and more rigid. We reached into the roof on stepladders, and it wasn’t long before the frame would easily support our weight, hanging from the roof. There is a freshness and innocence about green coppice wood that inspired everyone to a kind of free-form building that would not have been possible with the straight lines of conventional building timber. There were no architectural drawings, and no carpenters’ conventions to observe, so no inhibitions. We were making it up as we went along, as a tree seems to do. By the time we stopped work for a picnic lunch the bender was more or less complete, and we imagined various ways to make our bothy weatherproof. Canvas tenting or sailcloth would be the best, we thought, traditionally dyed red-brown in the tannin of oak bark, with insulating blankets underneath. The bender at this stage was at its most abstract. As an object of beauty it seemed an end in itself. It even seemed sad to cover it up, although it wouldn’t last long if exposed to the elements. Kept dry and protected from the sun, the greenwood frame would last several years. At the end of its natural life, it would leave not a trace on the island.
The project had been sparked a few weeks before, when Mike and I had met by chance in a London restaurant. He and Mana had just taken over their plot on the island and wanted to put up a simple shelter that would withstand floods, blend into its surroundings and serve as an occasional summer house: an English dacha. A parliament of the islanders had decreed that their structures should be temporary, or ‘low impact’. My friends dreamt of a bender, and wondered if I would help them build it. I agreed on the spot, and two weeks later Mike and I were off on a research trip to Somerset to meet the encamped woodland community at Tinker’s Bubble, near Yeovil.
The name of the place arises from the spring in a glade at the bottom of a wooded hill. Streams fan out through the woods, then join up again lower down. Here we met the dozen woodlanders and four children who live as a cooperative in tented benders, growing organic food, milling their own timber from the woods, generating their own electricity and harnessing the hydraulic energy of the stream in a ram pump to raise their water uphill from the spring. Tinker’s Bubble is a social and ecological experiment in a tradition that stretches back to Winstanley’s Diggers at St George’s Hill in Surrey in 1649. It is a self-sufficient community farm on forty acres of woodland, orchards, arable land and meadows originally purchased by the various shareholders in the project. When Tinker’s Bubble was founded in 1994, few imagined it would last more than a summer. It is hard not to hear an echo of the South Sea Bubble in its name. But, in spite of the difficulties it has faced, from the planners to the initial suspicion and hostility of the local villagers, it has survived. It has even secured five-year planning permission for a hamlet hidden in the woods on the strict conditions the residents had already set themselves: that there should be no more than twelve adult residents, and that the houses they build should tread so lightly on the land that, were they eventually to be dismantled, nobody would notice they had ever been there.
The first thing w
e saw when we arrived was the enormous vintage Britannia steam engine the community uses to drive a sawmill with a twenty-foot bench housed in a barn they have insulated for sound with dozens of mattresses in the roof and straw-bales for walls. Half the woodland was planted with Douglas fir and larch in 1960, so the milling of the harvested timber into planks and other building wood provides an important resource and a significant part of the group’s annual income. They never fell any trees until there is a market or a clearly defined use for them. The shareholders of the group decided from the beginning that they would use neither internal combustion engines nor mains electricity. They run the steam engine on sawmill offcuts and the cherry laurel they are gradually clearing from the underwood. It must be well dried, however, because burning green laurel would release poisonous hydrogen cyanide from the prussic acid contained in the sap. The other component of their motive power is a shire horse called Samson, which hauls the logs out of the woods, pulls a cart and ploughs the land for the longstraw they grow for thatching.
We followed a path past the spring and stream uphill through the woods towards an aroma of woodsmoke and the communal roundhouse, thatched with home-grown longstraw over Douglas fir planking and other timbers from the mill. Here we met Simon Fairlie, leading light of the experiment from the beginning, eloquent veteran of the Twyford Down road protest, sometime Associate Editor of the Ecologist and once a stonemason at Salisbury Cathedral. He is also a considerable expert on planning as a result of his experiences at Tinker’s Bubble, and author of a well-respected book, Low Impact Development, setting out the case for a rethinking of our planning laws that might allow people to work independently on the land and live in houses whose effect on their surroundings would be so unobtrusive as to be negligible. Simon was deep in conference on planning questions that very afternoon, sitting round a central hearth with some of the other residents, one of whom, Michael Zair, invited us to tea in his bender home. Part of the policy at Tinker’s Bubble is that, in addition to the communal space of the roundhouse, the kitchen, the orchard cider house, the washhouse and the various workshops, everyone has their own individual home.
Michael’s bender, sited high among the trees, looked out downhill through a big window set in one end. We entered through a tented porch of canvas and stepped on to a wooden floor on two levels, emerging into a warm space some twenty feet long. A wood-stove welded from an old Calor-gas bottle sent thin smoke up a ribbed pipe that twisted out through a fireproof metal plate fixed into the tenting. A table stood before the window with books and papers on it. Bookshelves lined the bender walls of hazel, which were well insulated beneath the canvas with blankets. We sat on straw bales, and Michael explained the importance of the drainage system of scooped channels to divert rainwater away from each bender. I noticed the small moats that ran around the walls and realized that keeping dry, as well as warm, must be a major preoccupation among the bender dwellers.
Michael took us out visiting. We met Gary and Bonnie with their three young children in a domed bender beautifully warmed by a wood-stove. There was always a porch, a liminal space between outside and in, essential to conserve heat, and a floor of rugs and carpets. No two benders could ever be quite the same, and we encountered ingenuity everywhere. Mary was living in a perfect miniature geodesic dome of hazel rods joined at the intersections of the hexagons by starfish of copper plumbing pipe flattened at the centre and held together by a thumbscrew nut and bolt. Each hazel rod had been whittled to fit snugly inside its sleeve of copper. Becca’s bender was domed and canvas-clad with a polythene roof-light, the canvas roped and pegged into the ground against the wind. It was walled at one end with cob, and it too was moated with little drainage channels. All the shelters made use of salvaged windows, and several were attached or guyed to trees. They were collages of different materials: ash and hazel coppice from the wood for ridge poles and framing, tarpaulins and rope from farm sales, windows and doors from salvage yards. Rope was clearly of the highest importance, wrapping the benders in tarpaulin like fragile parcels, secured to trees or wooden tent pegs. A yurt was under construction, and at a discreet distance in the wood stood a compost toilet. All the woodlanders were cheerfully tolerant of our intrusion, and of the fact that we had arrived incongruously by motor car.
It was sobering to encounter people living out their ecological politics without a hint of compromise. If they were fundamentalists, they were the most peaceful and liberal imaginable, and surely we should all be treating the fundamentals of our existence with equal seriousness. All they wanted was to live the woodland life as simply as possible, working hard and mostly doing without things they couldn’t make or grow themselves, or which might be ecologically damaging. But far more important was their practical demonstration that there is another way to live, on terms of greater intimacy with the woods and land – slower, more deliberate and benign: a quiet assertion of greenwood values.
The New Forest Revisited
Having lost touch since schooldays, I had written to Barry Goater from the farm of the Essex lepidopterists, by the wood at Little Horkesley. I had immediately received an invitation to come down and stay in the New Forest and revisit our old haunts around Beaulieu. Barry is now in his seventies and has retired from teaching to concentrate on his entomological work and his writing, living with his wife Jane in the house where he grew up on the edge of the New Forest in Chandler’s Ford.
Barry reintroduced me to the Beaulieu Tomes, the record of our ecological labours. He now keeps them in his study, which is lined with the classic wooden entomology cabinets made by Hill & Company. Behind the glass-panelled doors are tiers of drawers full of mounted specimens of his beloved pyralid moths, and others. Barry brought out the two books, and we looked through them. Tome One chronicles our botanizing, and Tome Two records our zoological adventures. Each loose-leaf volume is bound in brown cardboard canvas-backed covers in an ingenious stationery contraption called ‘The Loxonian Binder’, in which two bootlaces passing through the holes in the lined paper are drawn tight and cleated under a pair of snail-shaped springs in the front, as though you were in a dinghy and had just gone about.
As Barry, Jane and I walked up the track across the heath to our old campsite, we passed Gentian Valley, and, reassuringly, the deep blue marsh gentians were still there, in flower, half hidden in the heather. But gorse had taken over the campsite hollow, so there was no clue it had ever been there. We crossed the wooden bridge over the railway cutting and turned downhill past the Scots pines on Black Down, following the path to the spring. It was still there and flowing well enough, but fenced off by the railway company and inaccessible.
As we headed towards the pony corrals, I asked Barry why we never seemed to find many adders in such an ideal habitat for them. He said all the snakes in the New Forest had declined, even grass snakes and the smooth snake, which was always rare, because people persecute them like wasps or hornets. We found the pony pens rebuilt in smart new wood and gravelled over. There was not a trace of Myosurus minimus. Down at Shatterford Bottom, on the other hand, the rare unsexed cuckoo flower colony was doing well, having apparently disappeared for years in the meantime when Railtrack built a fence there. A bit of it must have survived to bring it through the crisis and multiply.
When we reached First Bog, we lay flat on the wooden bridge and searched the peaty water for the aquatic lesser bladderwort, another of the local insectivorous plants. It was still there, and so was the bog myrtle. But at the next bridge, over Second Bog, the water looked black and oily where it had once been golden clear. The rare intermediate bladderwort had disappeared, and so had the splendid ten-spine sticklebacks. ‘I love Hampshire and the New Forest,’ said Barry, ‘but I grieve for what is happening here.’ Through mismanagement by the Forestry Commission, the forest upstream of the bog, and the bog itself, had been extensively drained and the streams dredged in an attempt to gain more grazing. This has caused the local extinction of the sticklebacks. Later, realizing thei
r mistake, they dammed it and reflooded it, blocking the essential flow that had always kept the water clear and oxygenated. The raft spiders had also disappeared.
