by Roger Deakin
Ackling would often walk the beach from Weybourne to Blakeney Point and back in a day, looking for driftwood. Then he took to using only what was delivered by the sea to the door of the coastguard cottage studio. Now, he says, driftwood is becoming scarcer. Sheringham Town Council clear their beaches in quest of awards for civic tidiness, and sea anglers make fires of it at night. At one point he was even reduced to picking up lolly sticks. He tells the story of finding a hand-printed message in a bottle from a schoolgirl in Holland who had thrown it from an oilrig on a school outing. He posted a reply to the address given, printing it because his handwriting is so hard to read. The letter she wrote back, full of questions like ‘Have you got a rabbit?’ and ‘How old is it?’, clearly showed she thought she was writing to a child.
The most dramatic driftwood Ackling has seen was on a trip with Hamish Fulton to a northern corner of Iceland that took two days to reach. There they found a man living alone in a bunker constructed entirely of the driftwood that floated up from Russia. His only possessions appeared to be a chainsaw and a wealth of driftwood. Hamish Fulton and Richard Long, Roger Ackling’s contemporaries at St Martin’s in the 1960s, continue to be important influences, along with Dada, Carl Andre, and the sixteenth-century Japanese sculptor and Buddhist monk, Enku, who dedicated his life to walking from temple to temple all over Japan in a quest to carve 120,000 Buddhas. Ackling has often worked and exhibited in Japan, and the house is full of little wooden Shinto shrines of the household gods: tiny four-inch-tall boxes with a sliding front wall and a hole like a bird box for the god to go in and out, bought in Japanese street markets.
Driftwood makes a vital contribution to the sea’s ecology. It is as important to the oceans as dead and rotting trees are to terrestrial forests, but its mode of decomposition is quite different. Whereas in a living wood it is fungi that do most of the work, floating driftwood in the sea is principally eaten by animals. These energetic sculptors fall into two main groups: wood-boring crustaceans and bivalve molluscs. The first of these are the gribbles, responsible for the labyrinthine galleries of tunnels that worm their way through the surface of so much driftwood. The second group, the molluscs, are the shipworms, whose shells are specially adapted to rasp their way into the wood. Between them, they soon soften the outer surfaces of driftwood, making it more vulnerable to the splintering action of waves on rocks, more easily waterlogged, and more accessible to the secondary decay of marine fungi and bacteria.
As they gnaw their way through the outer layers of driftwood, the gribbles and shipworms leave more than half of it undigested, and reduce it to the fine wood powder that sinks into the mud of estuaries as the food known to the marine biologists as micro-detritus. Much of the sediment in the estuaries of great rivers is actually the remains of wood. Deconstructed by gribbles and shipworms, it is a major source of food for marine animals and plants. Tuna and other fish regularly congregate around floating driftwood and logs out at sea. Fishermen in the Pacific routinely look out for driftwood when fishing for skipjack and yellowfin tuna. Dolphins do the same. There are several theories to explain this. The fish may simply be seeking shade, or using the driftwood in the way cattle use rubbing posts, to remove external parasites. But it is likely that a food web grows up, with small fish following the driftwood to feed off the tiny organisms, plankton, eggs and algae, that attach themselves to it. Fish and dolphins will often use floating wood as a reference point in the ocean, ranging up to twelve miles away from it, then returning to it at intervals anywhere between a quarter of an hour and twenty hours. Driftwood, however nomadic, can even serve as the marine equivalent of a cairn.
Thus, through driftwood, the forest and the sea are intimately connected. Natural driftwood probably inspired the construction of the earliest boats, which in turn eventually broke up and provided more driftwood. Rivers rise in forests all over the world, and often run through them on their way to the sea, so the connection extends far inland from the coast. By way of return for its contribution of marine food, the sea waters the forest with rain. Trees growing close to rivers have always been the first to be felled, either naturally by storms and floods, or by foresters because they could be floated downstream easily to sawmills and ports in the estuary. In times of flood, stumps, logs and trees tend to be washed down into estuaries, where they arrest mud and form shoals. Washed up on distant beaches, driftwood forms the core of sand dunes by holding windblown sand in much the same way. Drifted trees are often found deep in the base of large dunes when a new cycle of waves erodes the sands. Even a tree, which we think of as a fixed point, rooted as anything can be to a single place on Earth, can be imagined into a drifting nomad, nibbled by fish, wandering the oceans, ending up anywhere from Southwold to a remote beach on Hokkaido.
Part Three
DRIFTWOOD
The Woods and the Water
It is early evening when I pull over above the river at Le Lézard Bleu, the village bar in Vieusson. When I turn off the engine, a wave of nightingale song rolls up out of the valley, riding over the deeper music of the mountain water racing along the winding avenue of a riverside forest. All along the river, invisible nightingales are singing in every bamboo and sandy sallow grove, in the walled cherry orchards on the alluvial soil of the flood plain, beneath every stone village crawling up the hillside. I am heading upstream along the valley towards Olargues, crossing high-arched bridges over this river, the Orb, built to accommodate its spectacular winter floods. From the balcony of the bar, glass in hand, I look down over a quickening bend in the river, a crook of pebbled banks, half obscured by willows. I have never heard so many nightingales. Some may even be heading for Suffolk. I have come to meet them halfway.
I go down a track quietly to the river, lean against the trunk of a poplar to get closer to the birds and listen: the drone of a motorbike coming up through the hairpin bends of the valley, the hollow clatter of water over pebbles, the hissing of bamboos, the slight rattle of poplar leaves overhead and, above all this, the astonishing volume of nightingales at close quarters. Do I imagine it, or are the birds singing faster than in Suffolk? They are masters of the pregnant pause, but seem to be hurrying, as French speech often seems more rapid. Has spring subverted the musical discipline? But it is an illusion, a function of the contrapuntal effect of so many birds singing in a single valley.
The riparian forest is an almost unbroken ribbon of wet-loving trees and shrub that follows the Orb and its tributary, the Jaur, for many miles through the steep hills of the Hérault. Much of the woodland is almost garrigue: ash, alder, goat willow, holm oak, strawberry tree, suckering elms, spindle tree, dogwood, elder and white poplar are woven together into a rich limestone scrub by a tangle of wild hops, dog-roses, bramble, traveller’s joy and white bryony. Further up on the hillsides, terraced vines, olives and almond groves reach up towards the dark mountain ridge of the Espinouse.
At Olargues, everyone inside the noisy restaurant is watching Barcelona play Real Madrid, while outside, the rossignol assails the night air. I throw my hotel windows open and lie in bed listening, far too excited to sleep.
In the clear morning I set out from the hill hamlet of Maroul, taking a path past a graveyard full of heart-shaped white enamel memorial plaques that flash in the sun. To my left hand, tiny terraced cherry orchards stand along the head-high bank above the path. To my right, blinding yellow thickets of the broom they once used for thatch round here, lichened rock and, somewhere below, the sound of a rushing stream. I ask a little girl in a cottage garden: ‘Is this the right path out of the village?’ ‘Yes, this is where there is a pool in the river, and fish, yes, this is the sentier.’ The child’s clear gaze and the succinct detail of her reply enchant the place for me.
At the river pool I sit on a boulder and test the water. It is cold but bearable, and I decide to defer the pleasure of bathing and explore a little. Green lizards dart away into old terrace walls that contain chestnuts and walnuts above the pool. On the other bank, meadow
brown and yellow brimstone butterflies waft about a tiny meadow, naturally walled by boulders. The sudden blue of jonquil jumps out of the trees, against pure white strata of stitchwort. I push on through more broom, clambering about derelict chestnut terracing of limestone crisp with dead leaves, until I find myself on a path well trodden by the hooves of wild boar. An orange-tip butterfly goes by, riding the thermal that rises off the edge of a terrace to one side.
Back at the bathing hole I am made painfully aware of the first holly I have encountered. A little whirlpool of beech mast endlessly rearranges its pattern of seeds and tiny fragments of twig. I slide in off the big smooth limestone rock and float like a trout, facing into the current. Sun glows through the leaves of chestnut, walnut, rowan, ash, maple and a solitary cherry. The tracks of wild boar are all round the shallows between clumps of yellow-green euphorbia and herb Robert. The pool is needle-cold and soon washes away the long journey here. I notice something I have seen before: a cloud of gnats gathering over the water, attracted, perhaps, by the warmth of my body. It is easy to see how a gnat-cloud might be seen as a dancing naiad, a water sprite.
I dry off in the sun on a warm, grey boulder that seems to melt into the roots of two old friends from home, an overhanging walnut and a hazel. It takes time to bring these wild walnuts into focus. It dawns on me that they are all along the river banks, self-seeded in the black alluvial soil from nuts washed down in the winter floods, lodging in rock fissures. Walnut seedlings sprout enormous tap roots that will dive in and anchor them almost anywhere. The trees don’t declare themselves immediately; they mingle with the ashes, whose pinnate leaves and grey bark can look so alike, especially in their early years. A bright-green caterpillar swings out over the water from the walnut on a long strand of cobweb. I float out a walnut boat, wondering if one of the fish will appear. Perhaps they are trout.
Filling my water bottle at a tributary spring near by reminds me of Gérard Depardieu in Jean de Florette. The capriciousness of natural water supplies in hill country like this, and access to them, can dominate entire lives and village relationships. I notice that lizards lie in wait beside the spring-puddle, waiting to pounce on flies when they alight to drink. It’s the same on the paths: wherever even a trickle of water crosses them, a lizard will be waiting for an unwary fly or butterfly.
Leaving the pool, I follow what must be a pack-horse or droving track four feet wide through the old chestnut terraces, between drystone walls called calades. Old chestnut trees overarch it from the terraces, and its floor, thick with their dried, toasty leaves, is littered with the hedgehog shells of chestnuts. Every few yards the fresh, damp excavations of the leaf mould suggest foraging wild boar: the original pork scratchings. Some of the tracks leading up into the mountains are very old. Those known locally as drailles, just wide enough for a pack horse or a trickle of sheep, were for transhumance: leading the animals to the summer pastures high on the mountain, and back to the shelter of the valleys for winter. The further I go, the more ruinous the track. It must have fallen out of use years ago. Further on, a small ruined cottage or shed stands among the chestnuts, so camouflaged in ivy I scarcely notice it. Its roofless walls are of limestone, and what is left of the floor is chestnut. There’s a stone chimney at the back and a fireplace in the cellar-like lower storey, beneath a single upstairs floor supported by heavy chestnut beams. This is, I realize, the chestnut-harvesting equivalent of a Kentish oast house: a miniature chestnut-drying house, a secadou. In fact, the chestnut harvesters would light a deliberately smoky fire downstairs to dry and smoke the chestnuts, piled into the upper floor, at the same time. Most of the hillsides of the valley of the River Jaur around Olargues were planted with terraces of chestnuts, which was the main source of the flour that was ground from the nuts. I have chestnut bread with me in my rucksack, bought at the bakery in Olargues, and very good it is too.
The chestnut leaves are so dry and tough they seem not to decay very much, and it is easy to stumble into deep drifts of them in the hollows, mixed with the spiky husks. Some of the coppiced chestnuts are enormous: sinuous and half ruined by now, they spiralled as they twisted towards the light in their youth. And there are giant stumps and boles five feet across. As I gain higher ground, still following the track along a ridge above the stream, chestnut gives way to beech, and lovely hangars bearing clouds of bright-green new foliage rise out of the ginger biscuit-brown of the steep hillside forest floor.
In a deserted mas, a simple farmhouse halfway up the mountain, I catch sight of a pigtailed man in his mid thirties splitting firewood 200 yards away across the valley of a small stream. I pause beside the log pile I assume is his to eat my sandwich, wondering if it would be too intrusive to go to talk to him. I am curious about his life here and the wild life of the woods, but, like him, I am also happy with my own company. He has a rainbow-painted house-truck full of cats, with a tarpaulin bivouac pitched over the back doors. It is parked beside an old white Renault Four on the track where I have stopped. From the underpants and khaki shorts on his washing line, I deduce there is no woman in residence. He has chainsawed the chestnut logs into professional-looking cord lengths and secured the stack with stakes. He has also dammed the stream into a pleasant-looking pool above the footbridge to the house. He must have seen me, and disappears inside, so I too move on quietly.
Most of the chestnut trees went into decline years ago, infected with the fungal ink disease, or with canker, and there has been a mass retreat from the old mixed farms of the mountains and hills, leaving ruined houses as well as trees. The half-rotten, dying trees hold on to life stubbornly, adapting, sending up new shoots from the base: becoming coppice trees. Higher up, the beech-trunks are all pale silver, like the rocks, and I meet a bright metallic dor beetle on the path. It is iridescent blue, black and green all at once, like the smart new cars in Montpellier. Higher still, the beechwood floor is blue with jonquils, and tobacco-brown with leaves and beech-mast husks. The boar have been stripping bark off the stubby, sturdy little mountain beeches, but still they cling on.
Looking down at the woodland from the ridge, I see the beech woods stand out bright green against the soft mauve of the chestnuts. On the way down again to Maroul, I do all the things lone walkers do: race myself and stride out to rhythmical chants of ‘John Brown’s Body’ or the sort of nonsense doggerel that arises from the thought that a snake might be sunning itself on the path: ‘What could be badder/Than the zigger-zagger/ On the back of an adder?’ It was perhaps just as well that I hadn’t met a soul all day.
Pyrenees
Autumn comes late to the wooded southerly slopes of the Spanish Pyrenees. The mountains are a natural climatic boundary between the rest of Europe to the north and the African Sahara to the south. My friend Andrew Sanders and I have climbed through the leafy fireworks of mixed beech, oak, maple, chestnut and hazel woods in a bright-blue morning up a steep track from Cantalops, an agricultural village in the foothills, to Requescens, a hamlet that is really a long farmhouse, extended down the generations, with a small bar-cum-restaurant, the Cantina, in one end.
Coming in sight of the place, we enter the circle of a hillside wood pasture of cork oaks. A dozen white geese graze outside a two-storey wooden shed with a worn staircase visible inside. Some of the oaks are deep ox-blood red where the sock of cork has recently been peeled, the year’s last two digits painted white on the tree as a reminder of its next date, in just under a decade, with the cork-harvesters. The grass is well trodden and manured with crusty cowpats. This is the home pasture for the cattle now out browsing in the woods. Entering the level farmyard, we are greeted by four dogs. An old mongrel bitch ambles over gently. The others, barking half heartedly, are chained beneath a big horse chestnut. A pointer slinks away back into the shadow of a firewood store under the house. One half of the old stone building is a magnificent ruin like a monastery, in the shade of a giant plane tree and a small lawn above the rocky ramparts looking south for miles across the hazy Catalan hi
lls all the way to the sea.
Inside, the Cantina is all dark-brown woodwork and cream walls. The woodwork still bears the brush-stippled imitation grain once fashionable in the thirties. The corner cupboard, door and window frames, skirting boards and beams have all had the same ambivalent treatment, as though wood itself were simply too crude to leave unadorned. Cats lie outside the door and two woodmen sit talking in an even darker inner bar. We warm ourselves with coffee and press on.
It takes us three more hours to reach the top of the Puig Neulos, via a ridge from the Puig des Trois Thermes, along tracks through mixed deciduous woodland in a state of autumn carnival. For as far as we can see, the southern slopes are clothed in the rusty hues of hippy pullovers. Up high in the snow, ridges stretch away to east, west and south in a bloom of rosy-purple light glowing behind the pencilled outlines of the hills and mountains. To the west, Canigou and the higher mountain-tops are swimming in mist. Hollies, browsed over the years by cattle to domes or cones, hunker down either side of the ridge. Bonsai hawthorns no more than waist high crouch against the winds and snow. The small pale fawn or brindled cows are stocky and long-bodied, with half-moon horns. They clank about the glades mostly unseen, wearing bells on leather collars. These rare animals are Alberes, the local semi-feral breed of the Albera Massif, the Catalonian Eastern Pyrenees. There are no more than 900 of them in six herds, three of which live in the woods around Requescens. They divide into two tribes: the fawn Fagina Alberes and the Black Alberes. Only 350 Fagina Alberes and 100 Black Alberes are considered pure-bred animals, with the sire bulls reduced to six: four Fagina and two Black. This is, officially, an endangered breed. The cattle live half wild and raise their own calves in the woods. They are hardy and long-lived, and so essential to the ecology of the slopes, helping prevent forest fires by browsing and clearing the undergrowth, that the Catalan national park authority sponsors their husbandry. Andrew says this is his idea of the classical wood pasture of Virgil’s Georgics. The place feels timeless enough, but the reality is that, as with most hill and mountain farming today, running a herd of Fagina Alberes makes little economic sense. They say the breed has never recovered from a disastrous epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease in Spain in 1774, and it is something of a miracle that any Alberes at all exist today.
