by Roger Deakin
Our spirits rose again, however, when we discovered the native wild gladioli, still growing where the Tomes say they should, concealed under bracken near the Bishop’s Dyke. Circling into Woodfidley, we made for an old oak stretching out impossibly long horizontal branches, surrounded by birches. In late spring we used to search its creviced bark for the caterpillars of the merveille du jour moth. And in August, Barry sometimes used to take the lepidopterists digging under the tree for the buried chrysalises of the moth. Over Crater Pond we saw an emperor dragonfly, and further on, among the old oaks and holly under-storey of Woodfidley, we came upon an ancient stag-headed oak in a cloud of hornets, hoverflies and butterflies. Sap dribbled and cascaded from pencil-sized boreholes all over its trunk, darkening it with glistening syrup that was plainly irresistible to the insects. The tree was still living, but its massive old frame was clearly weakened, and it seemed to be slowly bleeding to death. It was like an elderly bull elephant being eaten by ants.
It seemed amazing that so much succulence could spring from such dry ground. I thought of the prostrate lion on the Tate & Lyle golden syrup tin, alive with bees, and the motto: ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’. Close up, we watched dozens of tipsy hornets, red admirals, speckled woods, commas and peacocks staggering about the carcass of the old tree, sipping for all they were worth at this Happy Hour. This, explained Barry, was a goat moth tree, host to the big wood-boring larvae; these live in galleries inside the sapwood for four years before pupating and emerging as adult moths. Generations of goat moth larvae had stag-headed and deformed the oak. We stood and watched the hornets, marvelling at the striped beauty of these much misunderstood insects. I have never found them aggressive, although one should treat their nests with respect. As artists in papier mâché, they are unrivalled, chewing up wood to a fine pale grey pulp and creating great insect architecture in their nests. Compare the flowing, exuberant design of a hornets’ nest to the work of Frank Gehry, and it is hard to escape the conclusion that buildings like the Bilbao Guggenheim may have been inspired, however unconsciously, by the humble hornet.
Going through the woods, we were never far from the song of grasshopper warblers, our Hampshire cicadas, in the sallows of the bogs and marshes. Turning north into Denny Wood, we trod the soft floor of golden-brown beech leaves and noticed how open and empty of new growth the forest was. We had passed through a little grove of free-standing hollies, much nibbled by deer and ponies, possibly the remains of an ancient holly holm, the characteristic holly thicket of the New Forest. The constant browsing had deformed the trees into wonderfully complex, contorted, outlandish shapes.
We noticed the conspicuous absence of natural regeneration within the woods, whose canopy was dominated by the tall beeches, long ago coppiced but now grown to a good sixty feet. A clear browse line some six feet off the ground was a sign that plenty of deer were still browsing in the forest from which they were officially banned by an Act of Parliament: the Deer Removal Act of 1851. At that time, according to Colin Tubbs in his ecological history of the New Forest, there were probably seven or eight thousand deer in the forest, mostly fallow deer, with three or four hundred red deer. These are about the same figures as for 1670, when the first census was conducted in the forest. Such a large population needed to be fed artificially with hay, especially during hard winters. At least 6,000 deer were officially killed after the 1851 Act, and many more unofficially, but some inevitably remained, and the population seems to have risen gradually to about 2,000. Up to 800 a year are still culled. Roe-deer may have become extinct in England in the fourteenth century but were reintroduced from the nineteenth century on, and there are now probably some 300 of them in the New Forest, as well as muntjac and sika.
When he rides through the New Forest in October 1826, William Cobbett asks, in his usual practical, sceptical way,
What are these deer for? Who are to eat them? Are they for the Royal Family? Why, there are more deer bred in Richmond Park alone … than would feed all the branches of the Royal Family and all their households all the year round, if every soul of them ate as hearty as a ploughman, and if they never touched a morsel of any kind of meat but venison! For what, and FOR WHOM, then, are deer kept in the New Forest?
Cobbett sees the keeping of deer as simply ‘another deep bite into us by the long and sharp-fanged Aristocracy’. Pointing out that the New Forest is a piece of public property, a common, and that ‘there is no man, however poor, who has not a right in it’, he questions why any man may be transported if he goes out by night to catch any of the game. Cobbett thinks it absurd that the public purse should pay the Commissioners of Woods and Forests to farm hay and feed it to the deer, and at the same time pay them to plant young trees which the same deer would eat. Twenty-five years later, the 1851 Deer Removal Act was designed to address that very question.
Deer, ponies and cattle are fond of eating saplings in the woods. When experimental enclosures have been fenced off inside the beech woods, many more young trees have grown, but the majority have been the shade-tolerant beeches. The greatest inhibitor of regeneration within Denny Wood is the shade cast by its own canopy of beeches, which will eventually come down, either naturally or felled, letting in light and sparking a new cycle of mixed woodland regeneration. George Peterken, our schoolboy fern-surveyor, later returned here as a graduate to begin the work on the conservation of natural woodlands for which he is now famous.
Every so often we passed dead beeches standing in ruins, much perforated by the woodpeckers we heard calling, questing for insects and larvae. Barry described how ingeniously a woodpecker is adapted to go vertically up trees. To keep its body braced close to the trunk, the keel of its breastbone is unusually shallow, the legs short, the feet and claws splayed, with sharp hooked toes pointing back in the opposite direction. The bird even insures itself against falling backwards by digging in its short, stiff tail feathers against the bark. The tongue of a woodpecker is long and barbed at the tip, with filaments that will hook larvae out of their galleries in the wood and into its Black & Decker bill.
As we crossed the Station Heath on our way back, I checked the damp peat for sundew plants, and they too were still there, leaves unfurled so an unwary insect might trigger their honeyed, deliquescent tentacles. Purely in the interests of science, I used to keep two or three of them, filched from Beaulieu, in flowerpots on our kitchen windowsill. My mother gamely tolerated them, along with the odd praying mantis on the net curtains, smuggled home on the Train Bleu from Menton, where my French pen-friend, Jean-François, lived. I loved the bright-green mantises, part plant, part insect, with a swivelling triangular head and eyes like the Mekon in the Eagle comic. I suppose, as entertainment, the gladiatorial struggles of the flies on the kitchen window stood in for horror films at the time. But nowadays, when they film this sort of thing and call it ‘natural history’ on television, I find it cheap and loathsome. Beaulieu and the New Forest affected me now, as in my schooldays, all the more profoundly by being so intimately known and, at least partly, understood. We were a kind of tribe, this stretch of wild country was our dreaming, and Barry our sage and chieftain. We even spoke a secret Linnaean language with its own poetry: Drosera rotundifolia, Impatiens nolitangere, Myosurus minimus, Dolomedes fimbriatus. Even ‘insectivorous’ rolled nicely off the tongue. But privately I knew nothing could be more evocative than ‘sundew’. Like the layers of springy sphagnum moss that grew in the peat bogs, the Tomes grew by gradual accretions into something of lasting value. Between us, we set down some of Beaulieu’s stories, charted them on a map of our own making that each of us still carries in his head and learnt some of the New Forest’s distinctive language: what Keats calls ‘the poetry of earth’.
On his way over to Beaulieu village from Lyndhurst on Tuesday, 17 October 1826, Cobbett rode across our Campsite Heath and Black Down, skirting the bogs with Woodfidley over to his right, and then through Tantany Wood two miles further on. The foragers he most often encountere
d that day were not cattle, ponies or deer but pigs.
A little before we came to the village of Beaulieu (which, observe, the people call Bewley), we went through a wood, chiefly of beech, and that beech seemingly destined to grow food for pigs, of which we saw, during this day, many, many thousands. I should think we saw at least a hundred hogs to one deer. I stopped, at one time, and counted the hogs and pigs just round about me and they amounted to 140, all within 50 or 60 yards of my horse.
Commoners were allowed to turn out their pigs in the forest during two months of the autumn to feed on the beech mast and acorns. These rights of pannage still exist. It was a way of sweeping the forest of the early green acorns of October that might otherwise have poisoned the cattle or deer.
Barry and I went the same way as Cobbett next morning, following the river past the big pond in Beaulieu village and past Buckler’s Hard, where the navy built and launched its warships from New Forest oaks. We arrived close to the sea, as Cobbett did, at a farm by the ruins of St Leonard’s Chapel and a huge tithe barn. He had, in fact, been misdirected there by a man in the village, but he was delighted by the views of the Solent, the Beaulieu River and the Isle of Wight, pronouncing this to be a far more beautiful place than so-called Beaulieu itself and therefore the original beau lieu. He also proceeded to give the farmer, a Mr John Biel, the benefit of a short lecture on the Norman etymology of ‘Bewley’.
We followed a lane south and crossed fields to the sea past cowering, wind-blown hedges of oak and blackthorn that looked out of place on this calm, glorious morning. There was no one else on the beach, no sign of human life except the tops of sails just visible sliding in and out of the Beaulieu River, and the driftwood along the tideline. Squinting against the morning sun across the flat calm Solent, we made out the silhouettes of dozens of yachts off Cowes: a distant forest of masts and sails that not long ago would have been wooden, crafted from straight-grained spruce, but were probably almost all aluminium or carbon fibre.
This being a remote and more or less private beach, its flotsam had escaped being tidied. It is part of Lord Montagu’s estate, a nature reserve, and most of its visitors are birdwatchers. Every now and again we encountered their improvised encampments of driftwood benches, places to munch sandwiches, unscrew thermos flasks and exchange intelligence of the latest arrivals. Driftwood and the rich bird life along this shore are closely connected. Flotsam gives shelter to sandflies and other food for the small flocks of wading birds that kept wheeling in like a single organism, landing or taking off on the instant in perfect unison: sandlings, ringed plover, gadwall and dunlin. All were feeding along the shore, keeping a wary eye on a peregrine at rest on a post in the river mouth.
The lonely spit of shingle runs out a mile or so between the saltmarsh and the sea to the mouth of the Beaulieu River. We made our way along it, Barry shouldering a telescope and tripod, which he set down now and again for us to observe the birds. Across the sparkling Solent, the undulating landscape of the Isle of Wight with its wooded hills, fields and hedgerows looked far too homely and inviting ever to have been the prison it was to my great-uncle Joe.
The wonderful thing about driftwood is the way the action of the sea etches the softer wood between the lines of grain, revealing the sinews, bleaching it to a pale grey, smoothing it, rounding all edges and corners. You want to pick it up and handle it. Responding to just this impulse, I lifted one side of a handsome slab of pine twice the size of a loaf, with beautifully sea-rounded corners. Given time, the sea would probably sculpt it into an oval. Beneath it in a hollow was a long-tailed field mouse and her nest. She stood her ground beside it as two or three of her young, half grown already, did just the right thing, escaping efficiently into the cover of the next-door clump of samphire. Embarrassed to have disturbed the family in so remote a spot, I gently returned their roof into position, wishing there were some way of reassuring them that this was a genuine mistake and they were quite safe. The look of hurt, uncertainty and puzzlement in the mouse’s face has stayed with me. So has her courage in standing by the nest, decoying us from her young. It is salutary to be reminded of the extent of your own power and your potential for accidental brutality.
Halfway along the spit a makeshift flagpole flying the French flag at half-mast announced a driftwood den like a bowerbird’s nest. All sorts of flotsam had been gathered and assembled into a surrealist installation. A wigwam of driftwood spars lashed to the central totem pole was encircled by a pattern of grey sticks laid out like basketwork and punctuated by such objects as the flip-flop sandals and trainers that seem perpetually to ride the waves, Coke cans, garish cork or plastic lobster-pot buoys and the armoured white carapaces of spider crabs that abound on this beach. This was the work, Barry thought, of ‘the Cottage Pies’: these were the weekenders who appeared every Friday night in a row of estate cottages the other side of the marsh, and who came under observation through the birders’ telescopes during their idle moments.
Driftwood being free, like sand and sea, the temptation to play with it is strong. As with sandcastles, it seems to bring out an Aboriginal architectural urge in people, as well as a need to leave behind a signature on the beach, however ephemeral. Driftwood fires are unusually beautiful, especially at dusk, because the salt in the wood burns green and blue.
Almost every seashore plant seemed to be here: bright-yellow long-horned sea poppies were still in flower and so was the pale-pink sea rocket. Sea holly, sea beet, sea campion, cliff samphire, sea spurge and the sea kale, which Lord Montagu is said to eat, all clambered about the shingle, sheltered in little driftwood alcoves, their colours accentuated against the pale silver of the pickled wood. On the marsh behind the shingle bank, mauve beds of sea lavender and the deep crimson foliage of the burnet rose, while across the water at the very mouth of the river the peregrine continued to sit sentinel on his post.
Oak Apple Day
At nightfall I walked a mile uphill through cornfields out of Great Wishford towards the greater darkness of Grovely Wood stretched along the sleeping ridge. It was a perfect starlit night, nearly a new moon, and the chalky track, lined with cow-parsley, shone luminously in the darkness. A dozen yards inside the wood, in the long grass of a bank above the track, I found the perfect camping nest. It commanded a view of the cart-way descending to the village, yet, once inside the bivouac bag, I was hidden by the steepness of the bank. I roosted in that instinctive blend of weariness and vigilance familiar to the unofficial camper. Badgers soon began squabbling noisily in the wood, joined now and again by the hoarse bark of a fox. But when all fell still and I lay gazing at the stars, the dew was audible as it fell softly on the oak leaves around me, and on my face, and I drifted towards sleep.
It was the eve of Oak Apple Day, and the annual reassertion of rights to collect wood in the Royal Forest of Grovely by the villagers of Great Wishford in accordance with a charter granted to them in 1603. The charter affirms that their rights to the wood have existed ‘since time immemorial’, usually taken to mean since well before Domesday. In all seriousness, it requires the whole village to ‘go in a dance’ to Salisbury Cathedral six miles away once a year in May and claim their rights and customs in the forest with ‘The Shout’ of the words ‘Grovely! Grovely! Grovely! and all Grovely!’ The villagers’ right to take away as much ‘deade snappinge woode boughs and stickes’ as can be carried or hauled in a hand cart was still exercised by some of the older parishioners until recently. But what seems to be the most ancient rite, with clear pagan undertones, is to cut green boughs of oak on Oak Apple Day, carry them into the village and decorate the doorway of each house and the church tower. The custom is to begin the rite early, hence my presence in the night wood.
At this stage I knew little more about Grovely Wood than what the map had told me. I knew it lay high above the fork of the rivers Nadder and Wylye three miles from their confluence at Wilton before meeting the Avon at Salisbury, and that there were 2,000 shadowy acres of it, draped east–w
est along the top of the chalk ridge. Its nearest edge, where I was ensconced, is just under a mile outside Wishford. I also knew that I was encamped on a minuscule percentage of the property of the Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, Lord of the Manor and Ranger of the Forest, whose ancestors had from time to time attempted to deprive the villagers of their right to firewood.
In the middle of the night I was woken by footfalls on the track below. Someone walked right by me in the dark and disappeared into the wood. It was twenty to four and I was too comfortable to stir. A poacher? Rustic insomniac? At ten to four the first light began to glimmer, and a few rooks left the wood through a dense mist. The bats were still flying as the first skylarks rose above the fields below. I lay listening to the cuckoo. Then, at five minutes to four, the rough band struck up in the village below: a cacophony of everything noisy that would serve to wake the citizenry. It was not a pretty sound that rose up the hill through the mist. Bass drum, hunting horn, saucepan lids, football rattles and the old church bell on a trolley were all trundled in ragged procession from house to house and vigorously sounded until the lights came on. It was all trick and no treat.
Blackbirds and thrushes were by now in full voice in the woods, and by four o’clock I was up and gazing across the deep sea of mist that hung across the valley of the Wylye. I turned round to witness a green figure, half-tree, half-stag, striding towards me down the track out of the wood fully enveloped in antlers of leafy oak boughs. This wodwo wished me a cheery, almost casual ‘Good morning’ and passed on. I caught him up and discovered he was bearing two choice boughs: one for his house and another, the ‘Marriage Bough’, to be hoisted up the outside of the church tower and hung out to bless the season’s marriages with fertility. He explained, from somewhere inside the leaves, that no bough thicker than a man’s arm may be cut.
