by Roger Deakin
So well does the cabin blend into the wood that I hardly notice it as I approach. Trees and cabin are all of a piece. It is built on one of the old charcoal-burners’ platforms, the wood falling away steeply below. From the plank veranda before the door I can see the river hundreds of feet below, racing over rocks. It has been sunny and very warm all day. Now, in the dusk, robins are singing all down the valley. One gives me a personal recital from an oak bough a few feet away.
The cabin is eleven feet wide and eighteen feet long, with a ridged, oak-shingled roof. It is built entirely in green oak cut in the wood here. Each shingle is cleft from a foot-long oak log and is five inches wide by half an inch thick. All the beams of the oak-framed hut have been morticed and pegged together by Cameron, who built it. The floor is of wide chestnut boards and the place is warmed by a wood-stove. I’ve been cooking on this too: kettles for tea, a tin of tomato soup heated to boiling point and ladled out with an oak spoon I made because there seems to be no cutlery. I spent a happy hour whittling it from a piece of firewood with my Opinel knife from the Dordogne. By luck, it just fitted inside my mug, so I could ladle the soup into it. I write at the kitchen table by the light of a paraffin lamp and a candle in a wine-bottle candlestick. They cast an orange glow on the oak table.
The walls of the cabin are of upright oak boards nine inches or a foot wide, with vertical weather strips fixed over the joints between the boards outside. Apart from the oak pegs in the mortices, all the fixings are forged iron nails. They bleed black stains of tannic acid where they have wounded the living oak, still half full of sap when the cabin was built. All the traditional oak-framed houses you see in English villages were originally built in green oak. The wood is much easier to cut and work, before it hardens into something more like iron with the action of its own tannin. As they season in the building, the beams flex and twist themselves into new shapes, and this is one of the things that gives timber-framed houses their organic character. People repairing oak-framed houses or extending them often make the mistake of building in dead straight lines, instead of letting the line of a roof undulate gently, so that the tiles rise and fall and rearrange themselves with the passage of time like the scales on a fish.
Above the table I’m sitting at is a sleeping gallery reached by a vertical oak ladder. There is a single stable door to the low-roofed veranda outside and a window either side of it facing across the steep valley to more woods and cliffs, and the river. Opposite the door on the back wall is a wood-burner, crackling and bumping gently now and then, and glowing deliciously when I open it for refuelling. In one corner is the axe I have been using this afternoon, splitting logs of birch and oak for the stove. They are so dry, I only needed to let the axe fall with its own weight and the shivered wood leapt apart.
Fashioning the rudimentary spoon felt a suitably Robinson Crusoe sort of activity. Creative in the most primitive sense, it purged my mind of all other thoughts but the here and now of this beautiful wood. Sitting here as night falls, all I hear is the river rushing over the boulders and stones below. The steady sound could be rain, or it could be wind in the trees. No doubt when all these come at once, they harmonize into a single chord.
The night before, sleeping in the yellow spare bedroom just under the thatch at Peter and Charlotte’s cob-built farmhouse, I had lain listening to the stream that flows within a foot or two of one end of their house. Over dinner, we had sat beside a fig tree, under the burgeoning new growth of a vine, pruned back hard last year. The sky was clear and starry. Peter brought out some oblong offcuts of Kilkenny limestone from his studio and pushed them together to frame a fire. He cooked mackerel and squid over a barbecue powered by an antique foot-treadle bellows that once supplied air to naval divers. Peter had taped a spout of iron piping to the rubber tube, which he plunged into the charcoal and oak, then pumped to fan the fire into instant red heat. We sat by the fig tree for a long time, savouring the first outdoor evening of the summer. ‘I love being outdoors,’ said Peter. ‘I would live outdoors all the time if I could.’
The cabin falls into shadow at sunset, so I move thirty yards up the hillside to sit on a golden clifftop overlooking the Teign and its wooded valley. The low sun renders all the foxglove flowers translucent pink, and the hillside bracken shines like the river. Back in the cabin, I keep the stove going, light candles, open some wine and sit out on the veranda, watching the bats go by and listening to the river as darkness falls. When it is truly dark, owls begin hooting in the wood, and fireworks boom in the distance at Teignton Fair, on the other side of the hill in Drewsteignton.
I wake up early, feeling at one with the roosting birds in the wood, perched as I am in the loft. During the night I heard only the steady song of the river, full of subtle variations played on the rocks, and the occasional bump somewhere deep inside the stove as it cooled and contracted its stove-pipe. Surveying an aerial view of the inside of the cabin from my bed, I admire the minimal furniture of the place. It is more or less the same as Thoreau’s in his cabin at Walden Pond: a table and two chairs, one for himself and another for a guest.
The wood-burner does the heating and the cooking, and there’s a high beam to sling the bedding over to air, well away from the mice, which I imagine will come out to play like the Borrowers the minute I leave. All I have brought, including food and drink, fits easily in a rucksack. This is one of those places where everything, even a single baked bean, tastes so good that you don’t need much to eat anyway, and each cup of tea is a major ritual. This was especially true of the first of the day, which necessitated lighting the stove to boil the kettle.
The deck of the veranda feels warm to my bare feet when I climb downstairs. Blackbirds are singing all over the wood, a greater spotted woodpecker flies along the bottom of the valley, and a pair of buzzards ambles past, flying at the same level as my breakfast table. The sun lights up the leaves like stained glass, dancing on the mossy trunks of oaks, reflecting highlights off the river. In a wicker chair beside the door, I notice every living thing that comes past. Bees on their way to a clump of foxgloves to my right. A dor beetle that keeps turning up, clambering over shivers of oak where the wood is chopped. A red admiral sails past. A yellow brimstone. As soon as the wind gets up, the insects disperse into the wide clearing of bracken, bluebells, stitchwort, foxgloves and saplings of silver birch before the cabin. A squirrel comes close to the door, quite bold, looking for crumbs.
Later, as I sit reading in the afternoon sun, a pearl-bordered fritillary comes and settles on my book, enjoying the reflected sunlight. Insects are often attracted to the brightness of books. At home in my garden, dragonflies and damselflies often settle on the page, and will stay there for some time. Such moments are leisure for them as well as for me. What else could they be doing but resting and sunbathing, perhaps even catching up on some lost sleep? I can never decide whether insects and small animals are profligate with their energy or highly economical. A fly will apparently buzz about far more than it really needs to, but a spider will sit still in its web for hours on end, only stirring itself to race out and capture a snagged fly, or to flee some danger. Spiders will build communal webs across whole fields, covering them in dazzling lakes of early-morning dew: as massive an expense in work and materials as when Christo wrapped up the Reichstag.
The Sacred Groves of Devon
At King’s Nympton I had an appointment with the Green Man in the church, up a path near the village pub, the Grove. He is a reticent figure, always half hidden in the woodwork or carved stone like a wren in a hedge. Inside the church I lay on my back along the seat of a pew, peering up into the half-light of the timbered barrel-arched nave roof. Each of the cross-joints in the gingham of beams was adorned with a carved oak boss about a foot square: an ornamental device to create an illusion of seamless timbering. Adjusting to the dimness, I began to make out the leaf-masked face of the Green Man looking back at me in half a dozen different shapes. With him, concealment is everything. He hides high in
the church roof, or crouches in carved misericords beneath the seats of choir stalls, where choirboys stuff their sweet wrappers. In King’s Nympton Church, with my head crammed against its thousand-year-old north wall, I knew I was being watched.
It must have been strange for a fifteenth-century craftsman to find the Green Man taking shape like Pinocchio under his chisels and gouges, to see him staring back from the workbench with the leaves bursting forth from his mouth, ears, nostrils, even sometimes his eyes. The leaves flow from him like poems or songs. He himself is a kind of folksong. Everyone knows it, but each singer has a different, personal version, a variation on the theme. ‘I am not elderly,’ says the Green Man in one of Jane Gardam’s enchanting stories about him; ‘I am the Green Man.’ He is the spirit of the rebirth of nature. He is the chucked pebble that ripples out into every tree ring. He is a green outlaw and he is everywhere, like a Che Guevara poster.
The eight oak columns of the fan-vaulted rood screen stretched into out-curving branches crowned in a rich, leafy forest canopy, with here and there a face in the leaves. At the back of the church stood a massive twenty-foot rustic ladder made from a single oak cleft in two, leading up into the belfry, and, in the porch outside the giant oak door, I gazed in astonishment at thirty-six foliate roof bosses in yet another extravagant display of the skills of the King’s Nympton carpenters and wood-carvers of the fifteenth century. Each individual boss was, as children say, ‘the same only different’, and the structure must have contained ten or twenty times more oak than was practically necessary to support the modest lead roof. The worn stem of a fallen Celtic cross that forms the threshold would once have marked this spot as sacred years before the church stood here. The holiness was surely bound up with trees, oak in particular, as the glory of the porch roof alone made plain. Even the hinges of the box pews were forged into acorns, and there was evidence that the Green Man had marched to the Great War with the King’s Nympton men in the Devonshire Regiment. In the roll of the dead was the name of Private Sylvanus Hill.
All round North Tawton, along the valleys of the Taw and the Yeo, I had freckled my map with pencil rings and underlinings to highlight a remarkable concentration of two things: churches containing masks of the chameleon Green Man, and places called Nymet, Nympton or Nymph, of which there are at least thirteen. Never quite shaking off the field mouse feeling of being watched, I circled through Nympton St George and Nymet Rowland, then went a few miles south to the populous churchyard of Sampford Courtenay. Stepping into the church was like entering a grove of oak, its arched, wagon roof was so exuberantly timbered. ‘Look at the strength of our faith,’ it said. I found seven faces of the Green Man, including a magnificent one in the chancel almost directly above the altar, bearded and saintly-looking, and another with a fishtail for a beard. The rest were, as Jane Gardam says, ‘all wrapped up in leaves like a Greek dinner’. Elsewhere in the roof, a sow suckled her litter, and on two of the bosses a trio of hares chased each other in a circle. In a neat illusory device worthy of Escher, they shared between them only three ears, which formed a triangle at the centre of the design, yet each animal seemed to have two. The same trompe L’œil motif appears in seventeen churches across Devon. Because it was the final animal to bolt from the standing corn as the reapers approached the last of it at the centre of the field, the hare was identified by the old country people as a version of Ceres, the corn goddess, escaping in disguise. In Galloway, according to Sir James Frazer, the reaping of the last standing corn was still called ‘cutting the hare’ when he published the 1922 edition of The Golden Bough. And hares are well known to go mad, lunatic, in March at the swelling of the moon when the corn seed must be sown. Chasing each other in a moon-circle on the roof boss, the trinity of animals suggests the three phases of the moon: waxing, full and waning. Like the pig and her piglets, they are another manifestation of the life and fertility the good folk of Sampford Courtenay wished to invoke and perpetuate in the fields through the oak carvings in their church. Some of the carpenters along these Devon river valleys would acquire reputations for their skill in fashioning wood and travel more widely. Close to my home in Suffolk, in villages like Huntingfield and Wingfield, the flamboyant de la Pole family made angel roofs of oak in the churches of their manors, and even took Suffolk carpenters to Ewelme in Oxfordshire to make one there.
I found more hares, and a haunting, bearded, deathly pale Green Man wearing a Dionysiac crown of grapes, gagged and blindfolded by the giant leaves springing from his eyes and mouth, in the church at Spreyton. At South Tawton, the Green Man gurned down from every other roof boss just above rows of lyrical carved angels along the leafy oak roof plate. Nowadays such an inspired conjunction would be called ‘multiculturalism’, but, as Ronald Blythe says, ‘the Green Man is no enemy to Christ.’ In his dazzling chapter ‘The Nature of Gothic’ in The Stones of Venice, John Ruskin celebrates the freedom and independence enjoyed by every workman in the Medieval Gothic ‘system of ornament’, contrasting it to the state of slavery of the workman on the building sites of the Greeks, Assyrians or Egyptians. The approach of the Christian church- and cathedral-builders was, by contrast, liberal and relaxed, ‘Christianity having recognized, in small things as well as great, the individual value of every soul’. It was consistent with the true, humble spirit of Christianity freely to acknowledge human frailty and unworthiness by encouraging its expression in the shaping of stone or wood. ‘And it is, perhaps, the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture’, says Ruskin, ‘that they thus receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfection, and betraying that imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole.’ In praising the Gothic, Ruskin is arguing for a return to the dignity of labour. He sees the new industrial mechanization of his nineteenth century enslaving the very souls of its people, workers and consumers alike, by shackling their self-expression. ‘Look round this English room of yours,’ he exhorts his readers, ‘about which you have been proud so often … Examine again all those accurate mouldings and perfect polishings, and unerring adjustments of the seasoned wood and tempered steel … Alas! If you read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged African or helot Greek.’
What makes Ruskin’s writing on the Gothic so electrifying is that he interprets it politically, seeing it as a positively revolutionary force just where we least expect to find one, in our medieval churches and cathedrals:
And on the other hand, go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children.
Listing six defining characteristics of the Gothic, Ruskin begins with ‘Savageness or Rudeness’ and includes the love of natural objects and the ‘disturbed imagination’ that leads to the grotesque. Ruskin suggests that the best of the grotesque, which he calls ‘that magnificent condition of fantastical imagination’, is almost always composed of two elements, ‘one ludicrous, the other fearful’. Like the two masks of Dionysos that still represent the modern theatre, the Green Man is both playful and terrible. He is at the same time comic and tragic, or, as Ruskin puts it: ‘the grotesque falls into two branches, sportive grotesque and terrible grotesque’, pointing out that ‘there are hardly any examples which do not in some degree combine both elements.’
In the lava-flow of leaves that gushes from him, the Green Man is clearly uttering something. But what is the meaning of his green speech-bubble? It sounds very like the call of the wild. And yet he often seems more anguish
ed than joyful. This is not the open face of Robin Hood lifting his horn to his lips: more like Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The spirit and energy of the grotesque is essentially satirical, and lives on in our time in the work of Gerald Scarfe or Ralph Steadman. And if the Green Man often looks deathly at the same time as overflowing with life, that is because paradox is his very nature. Since he is life itself, the thing he utters, or ‘outers’, is the living green of the woods in spring. He carries the spirit of Dionysos himself, whose haunts are woods and wild places, and who is never seen except as a mask left hanging in a tree.
Many of the carpenters who carved the North Devon Green Men must have known each other; may even have been related. The carvings all date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As contemporaries from different parishes, the craftsmen would have compared notes, and ‘The Green Man’ or ‘The Three Hares’ would have been handed down as a kind of repertoire from father to son. You see hints of some of their own Devon looks, or those of their neighbours: faces you could still see in the old farming community that survived, more or less intact round here, into the early 1970s. These are the faces that loom out of Ted Hughes’s Moortown Diary in ‘She has come to pass’, a poem about a livestock sale:
“A whole day
Leaning on the sale-room gates
Among the peninsula’s living gargoyles,
The weathered visors
Of the labourers at earth’s furnace
Of the soil’s glow and the wind …”
