dovegreyreader scribbles

The Wood for the Trees - The Long View of Nature from a Small Wood ~ Richard Fortey

I had bought a full day ticket for the literary festival at Dartington last week and am so pleased I had booked to hear Richard Fortey talking about his book The Wood for the Trees - The Long View of Nature from a Small Wood. I had planned to read it straight through but am now opting for the month by month approach in which the book is written.

I just knew I was going to love this one.

Richard Fortey, heading into retirement from his role as senior palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, used his earnings from a TV series to buy Grim's Dyke Wood, four acres of beech woodland near his home in the Chiltern Hills. He then started to observe the wood in great detail, often forensic in depth, calling on his own expertise and that of contacts in the natural history world. The result is a treasure of a book that I had started to read the day before the event and now want to read very slowly, interspersed with walks up to 'our' beech wood which is currently in full summer raiment. I have been taking you all up there for ten years now on here, so I think you all know Berry Wood very well too...

and of course Nell loves it...

I was very excited to hear and read about solitary white bluebells because 'our' wood has them too...


As rare 'as a sober Irishman on St Patrick's Day,' suggests Richard Fortey, the white bluebell the result of a natural mutation, 'one tiny change on the DNA code and blue becomes white.' I know the places to find them and look out every year.

Berry Wood doesn't have many if any grey squirrels, in fact we were a bit upset when Rusty pegged a solitary one last year, Richard Fortey on the other hand has far too many and would probably be very happy to let Rusty (or the Gamekeeper...youngest son)  take a walk through Grim's Dyke Wood. I think my own affinity with greys goes back to the age of about five when I won Greykin a Squirrel as my very first  school prize, but sadly, as well we know, the greys are a scourge carrying a virus that has decimated the red squirrels. Nor had I realised that the greys were introduced from North America to a few estates in the nineteenth century for 'aesthetic reasons.' In fact I'm not sure I have ever seen a red squirrel in the wild so I don't feel quite so bad about finding all those grey squirrel tails in the washing machine when the Gamekeeper lived at home...he used the fur for tying into fishing flies.

Inviting all his friends and colleagues to visit I realise Richard Fortey must have an enviable Christmas card list; drawing in entomologists, archaeologists, botanists, moth experts, bat supremos and doubtless many more as I proceed through the book, all offering enthusiastic and interesting analyses of their findings in the wood. His own expertise also allowing him to delve deeply and accurately where the rest of us might just walk and wonder.

To our knowledge Berry Wood hasn't been 'managed' in any way for the twenty-two years that we have lived here and walked there, benign decay seems to be the watchword and  I certainly walk 'our' woods (maybe about two acres) with an air of familiarity rather than knowledge, but I'm going to look more closely, month by month with Richard Fortey as my guide, and see if I can notice more. No matter how often we visit (probably daily, one or other or both of us with dogs) there is always a feeling of anticipation when we reach the entrance...



I'm going to cover the perimeters too, rather than stick to our well-worn pathways, and am already on the fungus trail over the other side where I rarely walk. Imagine my excitement when I spied this new and exciting growth...



Until I realised it was a bio-degradable plastic bag in an advanced state of decay.

Never mind, if I find Britain's rarest plant the Ghost Orchid (Epipogium) I shall be well pleased, likewise Dutchman's pipe (Monotropa) and I will be dancing, meanwhile I am settling for some pennywort (I think, someone will tell me)...


And so I have moved through April, May and June reaching the chapter on July and must now slow down.

If you are fortunate enough to have access to woodland The Wood For the Trees will engage and enhance your visits. If not the book will inform and entertain as if you were walking through a woodland of your own. Richard Fortey shares Grim's Dyke Wood with an easy style that combines thorough scientific investigation and exploration with understandable explanation for the layman and enjoyable reading. His premise that 'curiosity is the enemy of certainty' suggests that despite his wealth of knowledge he has approached this venture with an open mind, making his enthusiasm and love for his little corner of England highly contagious.

This is definitely one that deserves a permanent place on the Nature Shelf.

 

 

 

 

Beating the Bounds ~ Berry Wood

'There is a ring of beeches on the hill
Lifting to the quiet evening sky
Layered tracery of green and grey,
Voicing reed - like in the hill - wind's sigh
Tales of long ago and far away.
Beneath them lies the valley wide and still....'

Margery Lea On a Hill in Shropshire from These Days (1975)
(Quoted in Silva - The Tree in Britain ~ Archie Mills) 

Looking at our beechwood from a different angle recently I came up with what I thought was a truly original and clever thought.

This is another view, of what is actually called Berry Wood up there on the top of the hill, and which sits very nicely within my Beating the Bounds square mile. It is on private land but we have access because just on the edge of the wood is the source of our spring water supply, piped underground down to our house.

The view that day reminded me a little, and then a lot of that first sighting I had of Ely Cathedral some years ago, as it floated into view across the Fens of Cambridge. 

Yes, I decided, there is definitely something cathedral-like about our wood.

We have been trying to work out how 'our' wood survived the storms of 1987 and 1990 when so many others nearby were decimated. This wood, just outside Tavistock, which we used to live very near, and now pass on every journey home from town, was a similar picture of eye-catching symmetry until that night, and how devastated we were to see it the next morning. Even now, twenty five years on, it remains a ragged sorry sight, still in recovery...

Somehow our wood survived. Perhaps it was not quite in the direct path of the storm at its fiercest, who can know.

There is a calculation that involves measuring the girth of a beech tree at about eye-height and then doing some fancy maths to arrive at an approximate age for the tree, and on that basis we reckon some of ours are about a hundred years old. Not ancient, but old enough for us to imagine the planting taking place on the brink of the Great War.

Roger Deakin calls them 'The Sacred Groves of Devon' in his book Wildwood, and it's not hard to see why, or how our little clump could be seen as one too.

We enter by its west door...

...and without realising it I realise that we respect the silence, talking in hushed voices as we walk the natural naves and aisles. Even if we call the dogs we somehow do it sotto voce....we wouldn't dream of shouting up here.

Looking upwards only reinforces the likeness to a Cathedral as the web of branches that spans the 'roof' weave myriad natural designs...

More reminders of Ely Cathedral...

At certain points the trees soar upwards endlessly, seeming only to reinforce the likeness... the lofty grandeur of a Cathedral nave...

 I mean its obvious...surely all Cathedrals were modelled on this...

Ely...

St Magnus on Orkney...
 
Exeter, nearby to us here...

I thought again of the soaring 'tops' of Berry Wood and was very thrilled with the originality of my analogy....I'll write a blog post about all that I thought, I'm right on it with this idea.

That was until I picked up Beechcombings by Richard Mabey and discovered that the analogy and comparison of beechwoods to cathedrals is as old and well-worn as my wellies.

Not so original then, but never mind, it still holds true.

We wander up to the woods every day with the dogs, and debate whether this tree or that has only just fallen down or has it been there a while... we can never decide. Did we see it last time or didn't we...

and on one particular day we watched the stormlight without..

Whilst behind us, a different world within, dazzling sunlight to the rafters...

'There is forgetfulness within this ring,
Where memory's steeped in calm and thought is stilled.
For they the secrets of old earth enfold
Within their shadowed forms whose crowns are filled
With lustre of the west and evening gold,
And in the listening silence seem to sing.' 

 

And we are watching the ground very closely indeed, because our very own stained glass is starting to peek through...

In fact by May these green shoots will be our very own peal of (blue)bells, resonant and vibrant enough to grace any well-respecting Cathedral.

I can't wait to see them this year.

 

 

 

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Beating the Bounds... the Churchyard

Down the Deep Lanes ~ Peter Beacham with photographs by James Ravilious.

On This Day... Roger Deakin

'An invasion of light...' ~ Kathleen Jamie

Every mid-February
those first days arrive
when the sun rises
higher than the Black
Hill at last. Brightness
and a crazy breeze
course from the same airt-

This quote from a poem entitled The Dash, from Kathleen Jamie's latest collection The Overhaul reminded me.

I had read Kathleen Jamie's book Sightlines last March. If I was on a desert island Sightlines is one of the books I would want to hand for the way it makes me notice things I never have before, and in there a piece entitled Light also about those February days...

Every year, in the third week of February, there is a day, or, more usually, a run of days, when one can say for sure that the light is back. Some juncture has been reached, and the light spills into the world from a sun suddenly higher in the sky.

It was March and I had missed the day for 2012, but I wrote this on the page...

It has now been confirmed that in 2012 the UK had something like 172 days when more than 1mm of rain fell. We could barely remember a dry day, and Nell and Magnus, now both eight months old, had known no other than wet. Day after day we have traipsed around after muddy paws, Magnus, eighteen years younger and more sprightly than the Dowagers, showing us exactly how high and across what an agile cat can climb. Nell meanwhile acquiring a plimsoll line of mud around her middle and needing a daily hose down before coming back indoors, and our boots likewise hosed off and lined up to dry every day in front of the Aga.

Frankly it has been relentless, and with an energetic puppy to house-train and walk regularly, a very hard winter of work after enjoying those few rare days of summer we had...oh for some dry.

We have been all eyes for those days of Light.

Slowly the evenings draw out and it is possible to walk dogs at 5pm...then 5.30, but still it rained and the sky glowered down on us.

And then suddenly, on February 14th, no sooner wished for than granted..

and we walked to the woods with the sun on our backs and it felt warm... almost hot...

and Magnus spotted it too, eschewing the basket for the sun puddle on his little mat on the kitchen table...

'...and though scalding
to our wintered eyes
look, we cry, it's here.'

I'm sure we still have days of cold and wet to come but have those days arrived your way too...

And if you are in the Southern Hemisphere does something different happen, but still you sense that change...