Home Again

3 Lapwings
3 Buzzards
2 Mallards
2 Whitethroats
1 Egyptian goose
1 Marsh tit
1 Chiff chaff
1 Nuthatch

It's a scrap of typical arable countryside, but it feels more like home than anywhere. I know it intimately: every ragged clump of scrub; every stag-headed oak. My memories live here. I'm reading Common Ground by Rob Cowen, and one particular passage stands out:

When people talk of 'knowing' or 'belonging' somewhere, this is what they mean. Familiarity comes with the overlaying of our experiences, memories and stories: there's the stretch of river where the mayfly rose; that's the owls' nesting tree; these hedgerows were once the boundaries of enclosure. We project all we are and all we know onto landscape. And, if we're open to it, the landscape projects back into us. Time spent in one place deepens this interaction, creating a melding and meshing that can feel a bit like love. In the drowsy light of the coming evening I not only see where I've walked before, but who I was when I talked there. What I was feeling, what I was thinking. And isn't this how we navigate this sphere? Creating fusions of human and place, attaching meaning and emotions, drawing cognitive maps that make sense of the realm beyond our comprehension?

To truly connect with a landscape, to call it home, is to imbue it with memory; and I would agree, it is more than a little like being in love. At a scrubby junction I recall the section of concrete tubing that I used to sit on, and which is now consumed by bramble. Just beyond is the paddock which used to be fenced. I was here with a neighbour once, and she told me to touch it. That was my first experience of electric-fence shock. A field nearby, and a time not so long ago: mid-winter, and I'm tracking a flock of finches, hoping to see if there might be bramblings among them; but each time I approach them they fly over to an opposite hedge. A medium oak standing at the corner of a field marks the limit of a walk I often took with my aunt, and this is the tree that taught me about acorns. Even the sky holds memory: here is a view that reminds me of the little planes that used to fly above, and which rarely seem to now.

I don't have a computer here. I don't watch the television. Instead, I walk. The city is distant and irrelevant. Unashamedly, I talk to myself. I wonder aloud at the earthworks that might signify ancient woodland. I spot, for the first time, a marsh tit (a misnomer, as it's most often found in broadleaved wooodland), a bird I've probably seen before without realising, and which can be distinguished from the other tits by its more distinctive call, which sounds like a sneeze: pit-choo. I watch a chiff chaff delineate its territory, its familiar echoing call one of the first I ever learnt as a child, and I see myself at ten or eleven, walking by Stockings' Wood, enchanted with the possibility of seeing something secret. A chiff chaff was singing then, too. Close by, in a hawthorn hedge, robins fight. Pheasants chuck-chuck in alarm, bursting suddenly from dense thickets of hazel and blackthorn. If any sound defines this place, it is the pheasant. The first wild animal I ever heard, in bed at night, was a pheasant. It was wild and frightening, and I had to be reassured. On my night walk here in Suffolk, the only birds I hear are woodpigeons and pheasants, the latter echoing over the fields as first one, then two, then half a dozen, call to each other, forming an invisible network in the black air. They know where I am, and they know where they are, but I'm blind.

It's here that my depression is most likely to lift. I'm free to wander, to consider plants, to listen out for rarer birds, to meditate on the landscape. I spend almost an hour in the wood; I sit on a branch, watching a nuthatch inspect the ash. The trees here all look similar: tall and straight, with few lateral branches near the ground, and it's easy to mistake the oaks for ash at first glance, as they assume the same habit. At some point, and suddenly, the coppicing stopped, and the ash shot up, forcing the oak to follow suit in pursuit of light. The birds all stay high, and this, and the lofty atmosphere, makes their calls echo more than usual. The lack of structural diversity limits the species that can thrive here, however; for the most part they are great- and blue-tits. There is nobody here to stare. Nobody tells me to get off their land. I can go where I like, and can be sure that I probably won't see anybody else. 

In the sky, lapwings call their strange, digital song, flapping almost clumsily, close to the ground. Skylarks rise high, hovering. It is the freedom, and the minutiae of this landscape and its embedded memories, that allows me to be myself.

   

Lapwings above a wheat field

Rockpool, Sutherland

Painted over a few hours. I mainly use palette knives to get the flat, broad strokes (though possibly just because they're much easier to clean!). The sky was busy and changeable, with one dark cloud threatening to break the peace.

The Perfect Wood

A dryad in Prince Caspian
(illustration by Pauline Baynes)

For a long time I had an idea of what the perfect wood should look like. It came from Narnia and Enid Blyton illustrations. Trees would be large and evenly spaced, and there would be plenty of light, and soft natural lawns full of moss and moonlight. There would probably be magical beings or deities hidden in cracks or roots. Dryads, hamadryads, brownies, and fairies. If only the right person would come along, someone with sensitivity and a deep appreciation for the natural world, they would show themselves. That person was me, of course.  

The fair folk awake in Prince Caspian (illustration by Pauline Baynes)

I didn't know whether or not the scraps that counted for woodland around the torn West Suffolk countryside could ever be home to anything so wonderful, but I did try to find them. But what were 'they'? As a child they were, of course, literal nature spirits. The trees would house dryads, and the rivers naiads. As I got older, they became metaphors for something a little more dry: good ecological habitat. These wondrous, ephemeral creatures could only exist in beautiful places. That meant lush green lawns, old gnarled veteran trees, orchards and meadows. These things don't exist much in West Suffolk - or if they do, they are isolated, like the tree on its own in my story. And so I wandered, hoping to discover something special, some secret green place, without much luck. I knew, vaguely, that things had been different. That, before the agricultural intensities of the 1940s and 50s, there had been huge, thick hedges, and many more meadows, and that perhaps these creatures were in hiding from the machinery and pesticides of the modern farm environment. That's not far from the truth, of course. The things that flit and fly in agricultural countryside have crashed since most monitoring began in the 1970s due to catastrophic habitat loss, pesticides, and increasing fragmentation of relic populations. 

Wheat, a copse, and the hard baked earth
(Image copyright Bob Jones, Geograph)

Most of the woodlands, like the one pictured left, are small game coverts a few hectares in size at most, only there to keep pheasants and partridges for shooting. Many of them used to be older but were grubbed up sometime in the early twentieth century and replanted with conifers and ash in straight, neat rows to provide a ready supply of timber. Their ground flora gives their away their older origins: carpets of dog's mercury, and ancient woodland indicator, appear in spring, and there are incongruous dips and ditches or relic pollards marking what used to be the boundaries. A lot of these fragmented scraps of woodland are all but empty, but stay long enough and you might be rewarded. 

Standing at the mouth of the copse, waiting and watching. A long August day. Suddenly, from the base of one of the larger ash trees there is a jerky wren-like movement, and something spirals around and up the tree. I only glimpse it; perhaps, though I'm still, it can sense me, for it climbs the far side of the tree, out of my sight. What is it? It looked almost humanoid, like some hairy sprite.  

Treecreeper Certhia brachydactyla.
(Image copyright Momo)

There are wonderful things out here after all. They just manage to hide themselves well. The treecreeper I saw at the bottom of an ash tree is one. Another time, sitting in a copse near a green runway, a drop of water caught on the leaf of a nettle sparkled. I watched it for half an hour or more, thinking of nothing, until the sun had moved far enough behind the trees and it blinked out. 

But these woods are not perfect. They have lost a great deal of biodiversity, and they are no longer being managed for anything other than game. I still spend a good deal of time exploring them, small as they are, and most could do with thinning out. They are choked with bramble and ivy. Little or no light reaches the woodland floor, so there aren't many insects. Aside from the ubiquitous great tits, blackbirds, wood pigeons, and rooks, there's almost no bird life. When you spend enough time in wildlife-rich places, you get a feel for what makes the habitat special, and for woodlands it's a decent age and habitat structure: an even mix of young- and old-growth; shrubs and scrub; dead wood left in-situ; a rich ground flora. In contrast, the copses of West Suffolk often contain nothing but similar-aged trees, with little or no natural regeneration. They are moribund. 

Two hundred years ago, many of them wood have been like the nearby Bradfield Woods, which is a working ancient woodland to this day, and one of the best examples of sustainable woodland management in the country. Areas of the wood are regularly coppiced to bring light to the floor, where anemones and foxgloves abound. There are enormous ash stools which are thought to be the oldest living things in Suffolk. The Wildlife Trust, which runs the wood, sells poles, stakes, fencing, and firewood: a small selection, given that woods would have provided much more at one time: baskets, tools, medicinal herbs, a home for pigs, and most of the means for building a home.    

Ragged and poor as they are, however, these places formed my early ideas of what woods were, and I still find myself hopeful of finding some treasure - an oxlip, perhaps a houndstongue, maybe even another treecreeper - when I jump the ditch to explore one. 

Where to be

I couldn't be in a tower block sat on concrete. I couldn't be in a room whose windows faced only onto other houses. I couldn't be against a smooth, monochrome wall. 

I could be alone in a bothy or a sheiling, surrounded by conifers. I could be in a huge crumbling Victorian villa. I could live behind an overgrown garden. I could lie in thickets of bramble and blackthorn. I could be in a pillbox at night, listening to badgers. 

I could be in the smallest copse surrounded by nothing but wheat or barley. 

I couldn't be in the park surrounded by metroland homes.  

*

I feel guilty for being so self-centred in these first posts. Realising that I'm not special, that I probably won't amount to anything, no matter how much I try, hit hard. However, it was also liberating. I could be anyone and do anything and it wouldn't matter. A night cleaner, or a kitchen porter. Someone who does the washing up. What is important is not what I do, but where I do it. The where has several important criteria. It must be rural. I must be able to walk out of wherever it is, and be in the countryside right away. I must be able to get away from people - all people. Their noise, their infrastructure (insofar as this is possible). Saying that, there are acceptable cultural artefacts. 

I could be looking up at a telegraph pole dressed in ivy. I could sit inside the shell of an abandoned house watching leaves through glassless windows catch sunlight. 

The point is that they are relics. Things that eyes slide off. Things that go unnoticed. 

It seems to me that I can be around humans for only so long before I start to crave their absence. Once I would have said I was a misanthrope. While cynical, I don't think this is true. I'm an introvert, for sure. Social interactions exhaust me, and often make me bored; but there are people whose company I will always welcome. On the other hand, I never tire of nature. It doesn't ask, or require input. It can be observed. It doesn't exhaust. It gives freely to the eyes. 

What right do you have, asks my mind. You are nothing. You've not suffered, not truly. What right do you have to take up bandwidth, to waste people's time writing navel-gazing nothings. You are a nothing, and you are completely unimportant. 

Where to be is important. In my last post I examined how depression only become obvious when I was outside. It can still be a struggle, reconciling this heaviness with a love of nature. What I have noticed is that there are certain places that the depression seems immune to. Inner city parks and woods seem to help none. Perhaps it's because I can sense the city outside, and imagine the people and their activity going on around me. You would expect, therefore, that the flat bleakness of far-north-east Scotland would be exhilarating and redemptive. But something about that landscape didn't help either, and I think it is to do with openness. Hilly landscapes have a degree of closure. You can find valleys or streams with banks. The lees and scarps offer shelter and cover. On the flat moor, you can be seen and see. The landscape is just too open. 

These landscape types result in a very visceral response. Depression is not just mental. Physical manifestations include headaches, nausea, flu-like symptoms, and, of course, that general heaviness described in my last post. And so, perhaps the mind is not really like an estuary after all. If landscape can affect mind at its most vulnerable, there must be something open at all times. Perhaps the outside always has a way of getting in. 

Outside Shutdown

I was crossing a railway bridge when I realised that something was very wrong. 

This is how it seems to me, anyway. In truth, I had suspected for some time. The outside, however, is where it begins; around five years ago I was on my way home from a walk with a friend somewhere in Berkshire. It wasn't tedious or long. It promised to be pleasant. It crossed parkland and woods, and ran beside the Thames. The first few miles were perfect. Amiable chat. Beech hangers like cathedrals. I thought about the ghost orchid, which is said to exist in these parts, and where I might find it. 

After a few hours I lagged behind. It is hard, at this point, not to resort to weather metaphors. So often we describe ourselves as under the weather, or imagine a cloud above our heads, or a foggy mind. Our thinking becomes muddy. As someone who attempts to write, I don't want to be use cliché. In school we were taught about the 'pathetic fallacy', wherein inanimate objects are personified so that skies can smile and storms can rage. Descriptions like these stick out. They're empty, over-used, and lazy. So, here I will try something different.

Outside

(in)

There is no way

(out)

Inside

Imagine the mind as an estuary. It is filled with channels and rivulets along which the seawater runs. Twice per day (or four, depending on where your estuary is), with the tides, it is inundated. This healthy waxing and waning can be seen as the mind interacting with its environment normally. On this particular walk, I finally understood that there was a blockage. Water was not flowing. That's not to say it was empty. In fact, it was full. Thoughts that had accumulated over weeks and months crowded for space. Nothing new was flowing. The thoughts were disabling. They were exhausting. They told me things that I had often wondered, but this time they convinced me. It's pointless, they said. You can't do it. Nothing is worth anything. Give it up. 

About five miles into the walk I wondered if I could go on. Stone-like thoughts were so heavy that they made my legs feel weak. It hurt to look up. There was too much light, too much green, everywhere. I wanted to stop, find somewhere dark, and cover myself with bracken. Eventually, perhaps, I might take root in some moist dell where moss could cover me, and there be still. My head lolled as if on a thin stalk. I was tired beyond imagining. I couldn't talk. I couldn't even pretend to be interested in the villages we passed. Another small anxiety sprung up: how could I explain it? But I couldn't, and didn't. I let my friend go on ahead. I made no attempt at catching up. Perhaps he was too polite to question my sudden lethargy and sullenness. When we got to the car I pretended to sleep. Back in London, I half walked, half stumbled across the railway bridge. A small thought saw its chance. Jump off, it said. It didn't explain itself further. 

I got myself to the smallish double room that I was renting at the time, and climbed into bed. I knew that the word for whatever was happening to me was, beyond doubt, depression. I suppose I also knew that I should concentrate on the things that were outside my mind: the sea of things that now meant nothing. I listened to the boards creak as the heating came on. I listened to my own measured breathing. I tapped the windowsill, and listened to that. 

I remember the jay. So sudden, so unexpected. It came to the window and perched on the sill for a second, perhaps less. Nothing in its beak. Magpie-sized bulk of metallic blue. Pupil framed in orange. It cocked its head and left for the sycamores at the end of the small, stony garden. Then the blue tit. Or was it coal? It came each morning, tapping at its shadow in the glass. Bird alarm. A charming patch of white on its nape. 

The outside had betrayed me. I felt something similar a few months before, while identifying sedges in Wicken Fen. Again, I was with a friend, and again I wanted more than anything to be alone. Every plant around me was mocking. I didn't know what they were, and there was not enough space in my mind to think about them, much less apply any kind of botanical knowledge. You'll never be good enough. You'll fail. Ever since, 'fail' has been the stone that weighs the most, that cracks into hundreds of fragments which accumulate in the estuary. It comes with something desperate, as if each failed opportunity deprives me of a chance to succeed. 

I won't call it the black dog. Dogs, in all their moods, are welcome company. Depression is not a beast, but nor is it a permanent weather system. It is not a thing in itself. It is an invisible force which acts on things. It sucks and saps. It brings stones together and fills you with them. It creates dams and blockages. It stops the outside getting in, and keeps the inside from getting out.     

Night Sounds: Birds in Suffolk, Hedgehogs in Lincolnshire

It’s almost three in the morning, and I stand at the edge of one of the most remarkable places in Cambridgeshire. Part of the fertile East Anglian farmlands, Cambridgeshire is flat and intensely agricultural. There are certainly interesting places here: Wicken Fen, the National Trust’s first nature reserve, donated by Charles Rothschild, is one of them; and the late Oliver Rackham studied the ancient woodland fragments around Cambridge itself, which hold huge populations of the true oxlip – a plant that is found only on the Cambridgeshire-Suffolk borders.

Like all woodlands here, the one I stand before is small. At barely five hectares, it has been dug and ripped at the seams to create profitable wheat fields. The remnants of a wood bank lie to the south, one of the few indications that once it was a much larger working ancient wood.

I took up night walking as a teenage misanthrope not far from here, in the similarly arable landscape of West Suffolk, keen to explore the world without light or people. Night sounds provided a background to my thoughts; in and of themselves they meant little to me. I couldn’t tell, then, whether a particular grunt was badger or hedgehog. I simply needed to escape. Now, however, after years of practice, I know what’s around me. Voles and field mice tunnel through the long grass at the wood’s edge, making occasional combative squeaks. From far off, near the village, a female fox calls. Further still can be heard the motorway, a constant, rushing noise.

The wood itself is a repository of sound, a subtle orchestra of crackling, snapping, and rustling. Wind plays on the leaves.

And then I hear what I am waiting for. The wood’s own flute. The nightingale.

I walk towards it.

*

Several years ago, the summer I left university, I was briefly employed as a field assistant for a friend’s PhD. Titled The value of agri-environment schemes for macro-invertebrate feeders: hedgehogs on arable farms in Britain, the job involved spending two weeks in another East Anglian landscape: the wide, open fields just north of King’s Lynn. This area, on the Lincolnshire-Norfolk border, is a strange place. Farms stretch out to that curiously-shaped rump which forms the Wash. It is a depopulated area, and one of the cheapest rural places to live: you can still buy a three-bedroom house here for £60,000.

Each night, at around 9pm, we drove to the study area around a village called Gedney Drove End. The name seems to perfectly conjure the feeling of this place: it is an edge, a place nobody comes for holidays, slowly being carved out by the sea, and its rural inhabitants are leaving. It reminds me of Caithness, in northern Scotland – another vast, flat landscape.

And here, until the pre-dawn, we tracked hedgehogs.

There were four of us, but we worked alone, each assigned to a quadrant of several fields. The hedgehogs had been found a few weeks before, and a radio-transmitter was attached to each (a process of gluing the tiny transmitter, with its serial number, to a hedgehog’s back), along with a small red light. We set off on our own, with our receivers, our maps, and our headlights, and we recorded, once per hour, the location of all the hedgehogs we could find.

They turned out to be predictable beasts, sticking to the same route each night, which traced the edges of the fields, where the margins had been left. This particular area benefited from an agri-environment scheme in which the field edges were left wild, so that long grass and nettles, aided by fertiliser run-off, dominated. The headlight cast a flat white light over an area not much larger than a couple of square metres. Copses and lone trees stood as darker shapes against the sky, which was not quite black.

From somewhere in the brambles a snuffle and shuffle.

I stop, hold my receiver high, sweep it around, and listen for the stronger beep-beep-beep that signals the hedgehog. Mark a cross on the map, and walk on.

Uniquely, we have been given access to the entire farm. Nowhere is out-of-bounds. When I was younger, and first started to leave my bedroom in the early hours, it didn’t occur to me to stray from the paths. I suppose I imagined even at that hour there would be an angry farmer ready to chase me through the barley. But here I was alone and free. How strange, and delicious, to be solitary in the night. To be given the gift of free roaming. In the free time between each route I ran across stubbled fields. I turned off my light, and crept through small oak and ash woods. A devilish excitement held me: I could do anything and not be seen, for there was nobody around, except my three colleagues, for miles.

For the most part, however, I was content to wander, and to listen. I began to distinguish sounds: there was the barn owl with its sudden and horrific screech, and the softer, gentler tawny owl. Horses blew their lips. The hedgehogs themselves were often surprisingly loud – especially when mating.

But there were subtler sounds, too. The difference between wheat and oilseed rape in a breeze. The rattling of loose silver birch bark. Claws against oak. My own feet tearing grass, docks, nettles and willowherb, and then scuffing against the baked, ridged track made by a combine years before.

*

An eruption of pigeons startles me. The comical whistling of their wings as they fly up en masse is somehow more sinister in the dark.

The nightingale’s song, one of nature’s most revered and inspirational sounds, is my only guide. I have no torch, no phone light; and the Moon is waning and covered by scudding, fibrous clouds. I do not know this wood at all – my friend, a far better naturalist than I, and the chief executive of the local Wildlife Trust – told me that nightingales occupy the gravel pits and willow scrub which are dotted around the county, and that this is one of the places they settle in during the Spring.

It is hard to describe the song without resorting to cliché. Beethoven and Wordsworth knew that it was liquid, that it spoke to the soul, pouring in through the ears. There is something fluid about it, but there is something very robin- or thrush-like, too (unsurprising, since it’s a close relative) and that makes it not otherworldly, but more familiar than I had expected. Still, I can’t help thinking of dryads and wood elves. It feels very Tolkien-esque here.

Like most birds, nightingales prefer messy places. Restricted to dense young-growth habitats, they favour blackthorn and willow scrub, which are relatively rare environments in this increasingly tidy, homogenous landscape. They sing from the dense tangled heart of the wood, and I know that no matter how close I get, I will not see one. Rather, it will seem as though the wood itself is singing.

Once my eyes have adjusted, and I can just make out the path before me, I start walking. My world is small, even smaller than it was with my headlight, when I sought hedgehogs.

I should not be here. This wood is privately owned, and in danger of being grubbed out, but I feel some of that night-recklessness that I did in Lincolnshire. I know that I am alone, that no gamekeeper is going to point his rifle at me through a gap in the trees. This wood is small and unlovely, and few people know it exists.

The song is, in some ways, like a radio transmission. It seems to come from everywhere. I turn a circle, slowly, but my ears are not very good receivers. At a certain point I pause. A second song starts up, quietly, as though its singer is practising for the real performance. This second melody runs into the first, strengthening it, acting as an amplifier. Two flutes in an orchestra, or a confluence of two small brooks.

I leave the relative safety of the path and find a gap in the thorns. My eyes feel pressed, as if they want to retreat further into my skull. The trees are close, and the noise I make as I sweep aside branches and leaves silences the rest of the wood, which makes it seem, more than ever, that I am shrinking into an ever smaller, but watched, space. It is strange to think that the wood is so small. The song, which has a cathedral-like resonance, makes it seem much grander.

It grows stronger.

I step out into a small clearing by a row of long-ago coppiced hazel. Behind them is an impenetrable thicket of blackthorn and hawthorn. I can go no further. I am as close to the nightingale as I will ever be.

For a moment I fear the song has finished, but, suddenly, eerily close, it begins again. On my other side, in another thicket, the second joins it.

I stand, and then sit, and then lie next to a log. Inside the log, no doubt, dozens of saprophytic insects are going about their business. Above me is the sky, starless.

All around me, the wood is singing.

An abridged and edited version appears in EarthLines Magazine, issue 12.  

The Tree on its Own (A Story)

I wrote this very quickly, and submitted it unsuccessfully to a couple of literary journals. Unsurprising, for it's sentimental, without much depth. It was meant to capture a particular patch of arable land around Suffolk, where I grew up. I've always been curious about what it might have looked like before the hedges were grubbed out and the fields made larger.  

‘Birdseyes,’ Grandma says. ‘Not fishfingers – the flowers I mean.’

She wades through long, dry grass and laughs a dry, long laugh. Looking for their little blue heads at the edge, where they used to be by the old compost heap.

The garden is wild now, but poorer for it. Nothing but bramble piled on top of itself, making the air beneath it dark and lifeless. A single crooked path leads to the end, and what little green grass there is shines with the weight of her footsteps. Four walks a day, sometimes five if her pin isn’t playing up.

Beside her, Peter seems lost. She pulls on his hand. ‘You know what I’m talking about?’

Peter shakes his head. Picks at the dry, red patches on his fingers.

Thorns snag at her pleated dress, tear her stockings. Her feet are melting.

At the foot of the compost bin, where her daughter puts all the grass cuttings after she has mown, there is a tangle of green not-yet-flowers. Once, she knew the shape of their leaves, and how it could tell you the name of the flower.

‘Smothered,’ Grandma says. Peter watches as she kicks away the clods of heavy grass that his mother left on the ground. The wooden frame, once white, is now dark and peeling. The bin has not been emptied for months, and he knows that there will be worms and other creatures at the bottom of it.

He points at something blue, a single dot against the ground, but it is just a fragment from a milk carton lid.

Grandma coughs like a crow. She keeps her eyes on the ground. She says, ‘Gone. Ever so dainty, they were. Birdseyes.’

At the very bottom of the garden is a narrow gap which leads onto the field.

‘Tell me about daisies,’ Peter says. Grandma is quiet too often, and needs reminding of her voice.

‘Oh, daisies. Yes, we always used to make daisy chains. Daisies – you know that comes from “day’s eye”, don’t you? Because they open in the morning and close at night, just like eyes.’

At the edge of the field is a puddle, with something blue floating in it. Peter bends down to see that it’s a tiny butterfly. He slides his finger beneath it, watches mud swirl around it, and lifts the butterfly out.

Grandma shakes her head. ‘Gone, that, too.’

On his finger the butterfly looks even more dead, so Peter puts it back in the puddle. It looks proper there, somehow.

‘Common blue,’ Grandma says. Little lines appear on her top lip as she says ‘blue’. ‘Do you know that one? S’pect they don’t teach you any of that, now.’

She wants to tell him about the birds. She can hear them in the hedge, dunnocks and sparrows mostly, and blue tits making their way along it to the bigger trees. Robins stick to the gardens. She used to tend the garden, before her back started troubling her, and the robins would wait on the fence or the elder tree, flitting down to find worms when they thought she wasn’t looking. Somehow, though, the words get mixed up in her throat before she can speak.

‘There are three things,’ Grandma says. ‘I s’pose that’s the first.’

They walk across the field, and she tells Peter what it was like before the hedges were grubbed out.

Thick, green, smelling of may and hay, sweet, almost too sweet. So many leaves. And on the ground: ragged robin, lady’s smock, all the other ladies (bedstraw, lords and).

‘What happened then?’ Peter asks.

‘The combines came,’ she says. She scuffles her feet on the corn, ripping out as much as she can as she walks. ‘They said we needed more crops.’

Yellowhammers sing about bread and cheese. Great tits sing about teacher.

Teacher knew all the names, not just some. All the names and all the uses of plants – plants that would cure headaches and nettle stings, plants that could calm you or alleviate sadness.

‘She tried, all the same. She did try. But you see we didn’t have the nature reserves back then, so there was nothing we could do. We couldn’t try and make it into one.’

Before the stile that crosses onto the church path is a dry, cracked edge. All fields have edges, but not all edges are forgotten like this one.

‘There,’ she points. A small sea of flowers, almost purple. ‘Birdseyes.’

Peter kneels, but there is no scent. He runs his hand over them, through them, reaching down to the parched ground beneath. Next to them are some horseshoe prints. The horse that made them was probably dead by now. It is a lonely place, and Peter wants to leave.

‘That’s the second thing.’

‘What’s the third?’

‘The tree on its own,’ says Grandma. She is suddenly afraid. She hasn’t walked so far in a long time, four years at least. The pin in her leg is aching, and field dust sticks to her arms. But it is important to show him.

They turn left, and walk along the footpath. The land to either side is flat and wide, with scattered oaks and lonely hummocks of bramble and blackthorn. ‘Dropped by birds.’ The sky is open, the clouds vast. On one side is the wheat, and the wind ripples it like the sea, makes it seem like there are many small animals running or swimming through it. 

The path isn’t really a path. It is just the narrow band of grass between the fields, and bordered by ditches. It leads to nowhere except the tree.

Grandma stops, and Peter looks up. There are trees all over the place, but this one is special. It is huge, black against the sun. It has no leaves. It reaches out, and in its shade is another bare patch, like a beach, cutting into the field.

‘Is it dead?’ he asks.

‘No,’ Grandma says. ‘It’s there.’

She wants to tell him about the machines, and how they seemed to eat the hedges. How she worried, cried herself to sleep for the birds, their nests and their eggs. How she skipped work at the hall to look for survivors, and how there was nothing but jagged roots and earth.

And yet the tree on its own was left, as if the machines could not bring themselves to remove it. Perhaps it had just been forgotten. Perhaps, not being green, it did not matter.

I start with a definition.

Scowle: a topographical feature particularly (and perhaps uniquely) associated with the Forest of Dean.

I imagine a scowle to be a kind of dell or hollow with high mossy and fern-laden banks, dripping and dark, earthy and verdant. I have never been to the Forest of Dean, and I have never seen a scowle, but I have experienced dark and disquieting woodland corners, and I think they may describe what I hope this blog to be: an exploration of landscape and ecology.

Much has been, and will continue to be, written about landscape. It forms a large sub-discipline of cultural geography, is studied in art history, literature, and geology. This blog won't be academic. I'm not sure what it will be, but I can see the path ahead, just about.