The Hebden Beck starts slow and cold. Pushing out of the reservoirs of Walshaw and Widdop, it gathers its tributaries from the moors south of Haworth, where Heathcliff once roamed, before picking up speed as the land falls towards the woods around Hardcastle Crags. By the time the river has left the open moors and has reached the current upper limits of the woodland, it’s fast and dangerous – but also useful, as Abraham Gibson found when he set up his cotton mill here in the year 1800.
There are no fewer than twelve named woods in the two-mile ribbon of woodland that unfurls from the head of the valley to the point where the Hebden surges into the outskirts of the Yorkshire town of Hebden Bridge. People tend to lump together all these copses and plantations under the general catch-all ‘Hardcastle Crags’, but it seems a shame to lose the names. They speak of a patchwork of local ownership, of generations of stewardship and exploitation, whereas now they’ve all been snapped up and rendered one by the National Trust. But the names linger on, and although we wouldn’t miss the prosaic Lee, Ingham and Shackleton Woods, I think I’d like to know what prompted the naming of ‘Foul Scout Wood’. Was there one especially snotty-nosed boy who was forced to pitch his tent alone in this patch of woodland, while the rest of the pack built their fires and polished their woggles just across the valley in ‘Dill Scout’s Wood’? Was he unkempt? Unwashed? Possessed? How long did he have to live in his little tent under the trees before the wood was named in his honour?
You can always tell when a place is owned by the National Trust. It’s not just that everything is tidy and spruce – woods as well as buildings – there’s also something particular about the people who visit and the way they act once they’re in the Great Hall at Hever or on the coastal path near Bude. You could say it’s because everyone’s wearing sensible shoes, brandishing a map and drinking from a thermos flask, but it’s not just that. It’s also because of the way we behave.
Most of the time, people hesitate on the edges of woods; there’s always, at the very least, a flicker of a moment when we pause and gather ourselves before we pass from the light to the dark. It may be that primal reflex, dating back to the times when the woods held predators, but I realize now it also comes down to a question of ownership. Most people assume that, to them, most woods are out of bounds. And yet, as I stand among the Scots pines in the National Trust car park at the southern end of Hardcastle Crags, I watch countless people stride into the woods without a backward glance. It probably helps that it’s a bleak day in mid-February and there’s a soft but insistent damp chill settling from the moors, but there’s no doubt that these people feel right about being here. They feel proprietorially at home. The road is good and they are soon sheltered and muffled by the trees.
The river defines these woods. It has scoured out the sides of the valley, on which the trees cling and occasionally slip, but it also fills the air with damp and noise. Every trunk, branch, twig and last, stubborn brown leaf is slick with moisture, a mist is rising from the river and the ground and the leaves are heavy and greasy on the forest floor. Scrambling down a narrow path brings you to the river’s edge, but it would in any case be impossible to get lost in these woods. The noise of the river, in its mid-winter flood, is overpowering. Further upstream, around Gibson’s Mill, the water has been penned and trammelled, but here it hurls itself through the valley, surging over the weir and foaming against its banks. The water is a rich, malt brown, glossy with peat from the moors. It looks, somehow, good enough to eat.
I am amazed, once again, by the resilience of trees. A spindly willow is growing out of a backwater and, at the river’s fiercest point, an ash tree has fallen, its roots in the air but also still holding fast to the bank. The tree’s trunk has bridged the river and it has thrown at least a dozen branches skywards, all of them decorated with a light-green filigree lichen. Mid-stream, there’s no competition for light from other trees and the ash looks solid and powerful and a sturdy match for the pounding waters. The Vikings venerated ash trees for the speed of their growth and their power. The World Tree, Yggdrasil, which grew from the underworld to the heavens and spread its branches over the earth, was supposedly an ash tree. A massive serpent called Nidhogg coiled around its roots and an eagle roosted in its topmost branches, while a squirrel darted up and down the trunk, spreading gossip and taking messages between the two. Harts and serpents (and even, by some accounts, a goat) devoured its leaves and branches and stripped its bark, but it was replenished by the waters from the spring of Uror, sprinkled on its aching leaves by the three maids of Norn. Indeed it was.
The ash Yggdrasil
Endures more pain
Than men perceive,
The hart devours it from above
And the sides of it decay,
Nidhogg is gnawing from below.
The Tree of Life, in other words, existed in a perpetual churn of growth and decay, pain, loss and creation. Odin, the King of the Gods, is said to have hung himself from this tree for nine days and nine nights, where he had one of his eyes pecked out by ravens, gaining an inner eye, or wisdom, in exchange. He was presumably happy with the deal, and the pagan Norsemen who worshipped him spread their own sacred trees across their lands; or so we believe, because they left almost no trace of their world other than their decaying boats, looted treasure and hundreds of millions of silver coins, exchanged with traders from the East for the traumatized peoples they captured and sold as slaves. At the most sacred tree of all, on the site of a massive temple in Uppsala in Sweden, the eleventh-century writer Adam of Bremen tells us that every ninth year the worshippers would hang nine male heads of every living creature from its branches: dogs, horses, sheep, rats, men… their blood would drench the leaves and placate and soothe the gods. Or so said the Christian Adam, eager to spread word of the utter barbarism of his pagan ancestors. But it’s interesting, isn’t it, that the Vikings, who worshipped the Tree of Life and believed that every tree had its own spirit, and that this spirit flowed through every living creature, were also the most notorious butchers, rapists, murderers and dealers in staggering quantities of enslaved men, women and children – despite what the revisionists may claim. Hugging a tree is not an automatic path to love, enlightenment, peace and harmony, although further to the East, the Buddha’s sacred bodhi tree does not carry quite the same stench of slaughter.
Anyway, it’s likely that the Vikings most valued the ash tree for its bountiful production of long, straight, supple shafts for their spears and bows. The ash pollards well, although if you are thinking of making yourself a spear, or perhaps a longbow, you should cut it before the sap starts rising in the spring. It’ll last longer – and fly truer. Left to their own devices, unpollarded or coppiced, ash trees don’t grow straight. Their young growth might, but after a while they have a tendency to meander. Branches droop and it’s only the black-budded tips that curve upwards. The Vikings may have made use of the ash for war, but in Britain people believed that the ash had the power to heal. They spooned its sap into their babies to make them strong, scraped and drank its bark to cure constipation, and passed their weak and ailing children through a cleft in its trunk to infuse them with the strength of this deep-rooted tree. There is more magic associated with the ash than any other tree. It was even said by Pliny that waving a full-leaved branch in the air would ward off snakes; or, in John Gerard’s Herball, or Generall Historie of Plants (1597), that ‘if a serpent be set between a fire and ash leaves he will flee into the fire’.
Now, of course, the ash tree is in the news for all the wrong reasons. In 2012, panic gripped the land because the media and, to its eternal shame, the government, had at last noticed the arrival of ash dieback disease, the grim and seemingly unstoppable fungus Chalara fraxinea that was spreading through British woods, from the East, and killing most of the ash trees in its way. It is depressingly easy to find numerous references to ash dieback in books and articles from long before the government decided to announce its presence, and there’s no doubt the authorities had a good chance to try and stop a disease that is now beyond their control, but almost nothing was done until it was already too late. Ron Freethy writes about ash dieback in Woodlands of Britain in 1986; that’s about twenty-five years (twenty-five years) before the government took hold of the stable door and rather resentfully pushed it half-closed. As Freethy perkily notes, in blessed ignorance of the impending two decades of blinkered and ideological stalling: ‘the cause has not yet been positively identified although the Department of Forestry at Oxford University are currently researching the problem’. I wonder how they got on.
Oliver Rackham is very clear that the root cause of ash dieback is globalization: the unfettered free movement of goods, services, people and, disastrously, plants and trees around the world. There are more restrictions now, but they are still inadequate and reactive: as with ash dieback, by the time the government’s bureaucracy has ground into action, the damage is usually done. The opening-up of borders to non-native trees and other plants has had dire and bitter consequences for almost every corner of the planet and its local ecologies. In Britain, Rackham tells us in his last, short book The Ash Tree, ‘about as many introduced tree diseases have appeared since the 1970s as in all the years before’. As the drumbeat of world trade quickens, governments have always seemed keener on barking about some imaginary red tape, or cossetting the insatiable needs of big business, than they have on protecting our native habitats. Until very recently, you could buy invasive species on Amazon and eBay. Perhaps you still can. In the last one hundred years the losses have been harrowing, all across the globe, brought on by plant diseases and insects inadvertently (or even deliberately) introduced into vulnerable populations, from the pines and oaks of Kyoto, to the red oaks of the United States, the eucalyptus of south-west Australia, the pine trees of Crete, the plane trees of France, European cypress trees, the alders, box, horse chestnuts and larches of Britain, and now our oaks (threatened by acute oak decline) – it’s a desperate, heart-wringing list. Whole forests are disappearing – and we always react too late. Rackham even gives us the answer: we should ban the import of trees commercially. Simple as that. Small numbers are fine, but only so they can be properly checked before they’re allowed in. What has happened instead is that ash dieback disease has been helped on its way by fresh plantings of infected, imported ash trees, snuggled into the soil across every part of Britain. We’ll never catch it now.
I’ve taken to checking the ash trees I meet for signs of ash dieback, although I’m not even entirely sure what I’m looking for: black spots on the leaves, leaf wilt, black strips on the bark, death… Right now, there are more ash trees in the UK than there are people. Imagine if we lost them: the emptiness that would open up in our woods, hedgerows, fields, streets and parks; the void in our hearts. I am just old enough to remember the desolation of Dutch elm disease in this country, but not old enough to have understood the anguish. And anyone aged under fifty would not know or feel what we lost then. Some of the elms have suckered and are growing again, although the beetle that brought us Dutch elm disease is still prowling the countryside, settling on any elm shoot that dares show itself above the hedgerows, like a low-flying drone taking out a succession of startled meerkats.
Rackham believed that the ash tree would prove resilient to dieback. Maybe we’d lose several million trees, but some would survive and recover. His book was published just in time to acknowledge the next threat to the ash: the emerald ash borer, a green beetle from East Asia that has already destroyed about forty million ash trees in the United States and is likely to account for the rest – all of them – even though the American authorities are now releasing millions of Chinese wasps to eat the beetle’s larvae and eggs. It’s like the old woman in the song who swallows a fly, and then a spider (to eat the fly), and then a bird (to eat the spider) and so on – until at last she swallows the horse (she’s dead, of course). We could follow this arms race of pests and their predators, with who knows what consequences, or we could learn to nurture and cherish what we have.
Humanity and the ash tree have lived together in Britain ever since the last Ice Age. About five thousand years ago, when there was the first great wave of elm deaths, the ash moved quickly to fill the gaps. It has been spreading ever since, given another boost in the 1970s when most of the remaining elms were killed. Now it looks like it’s the ash’s turn, because if the dieback and the beetle don’t get it, then, tragically, it turns out that our booming populations of deer will: ash saplings are their favourite foodstuff. We are going to miss the ash. As well as spears and bows, the toughness and elasticity of ash has made it perfect for any kind of handle (axes, garden forks, spades), oars, shafts, crutches, ‘the felloes that make up wheel rims’ (or so says H.L. Edlin), ladders, pulley blocks, snooker cues, cabinet making, and so on. Its ability to absorb shocks makes it perfect for frames (the first vans and buses all used ash), but it also bends well. The wings of the Second World War Mosquito aircraft were made from ash. Its timber is beautiful: creamy white and wonderfully supple, smooth yet resilient. Here’s John Evelyn:
In short, so useful and profitable is this tree that every prudent Lord of the manor should employ one acre of ground with Ash or Acorns to every twenty acres of other Land: since in as many years it would be worth more than the land itself.
The ash is one of nature’s friendliest trees – its Latin name, Fraxinus excelsior, is a shout of joy and wonder – and if I linger over the ash, it’s only because I’m going to miss it. It’s an achingly lovely tree – the Venus of the Forest – and so happy to please. Nicholas Culpeper tells us that a decoction of young ash leaves in white wine ‘helpeth to break the [gall] stone and expel it, and cure the jaundice’, but it also serves to ‘abate the greatness of those that are too gross or fat’. And if you place an ash leaf on a wart and recite (perhaps nine times) ‘ashen tree, ashen tree, pray buy these warts on me’, you can expect them to disappear; although if you live in Cheshire you are more likely to rub the warts with bacon, cut a notch in an ash tree and put the bacon in the hole – in time, the warts will leave your hand and appear as discoloured bumps on the tree’s bark. A bunch of ash leaves in your home will protect you from witchcraft; newborn babies must always be blessed with a bowl of ash leaves in water; and all farmers should know that they only need to bury a shrew in an ash tree for the twigs and leaves taken from that tree to cure their sick cattle. As I say, there is more magic associated with the ash than any other tree. It is the best of luck to find an ash leaf with an even number of leaflets springing from its stem: there are usually nine or eleven, one at the top then four or five pairs lower down, but if you can find one with an even number, then put it in your glove:
The even ash-leaf in my glove
The first I meet shall be my love.
I don’t know why we’re not doing more to try to save our ash trees, although Rackham is no doubt right when he says it’s too late. But after the flurry of panic in 2012, most people have moved on and are gloomily accepting what feels to be beyond our powers of influence. The Forestry Commission is urging us to wash our feet (and our children’s and dogs’) after every walk, but if you suspect that not everyone is following this advice, then the battle is already lost. The ash was always considered a calm, thoughtful and rather modest tree: of all the trees in the woods, its leaves are invariably the last to arrive, and it’s devastating to think that we’ve done so little to help. The famous, perky little rhyme is misleading – I’ve never seen ash leaves appearing before the oak’s – but it may also soon be redundant:
Oak before ash, in for a splash.
Ash before oak, in for a soak.
Although on this damp February afternoon near Hebden Bridge there are of course no leaves of any kind on display, unless we count a few sprigs of preternaturally early woodbine twirling around a sodden sycamore stump.
It doesn’t matter, though, because at any time of year, and despite my grim brooding over the ash, this little patch of woodland down by the weir in Hardcastle Crags is one of those elusive places that bathes and soothes the spirit. A magical place, seemingly like a thousand other places across Britain – a wood, a river, a track – but somehow there’s more. The path turns a bend, following the river, and comes to a cluster of Scots pine trees. It’s dry here – or relatively so – with a blanket of needles on the forest floor. There should be red squirrels. Or deer. Maybe it’s the calming draughts of pine resin, although the scent is muted in midwinter. The river is calmer and on the far bank there are some plump black birds with white bibs – dippers – hopping on the stones, sipping at the water. A young silver birch tree perches on the river’s edge, its greedy sprays of twigs filling the sky. You’ll want to stay here for ever.
Round the next corner, nailed to a beech tree, the National Trust has left a familiar notice:
Although They May Look Natural, Most Of The Trees You See Here At Hardcastle Crags Were Planted In The 1870s. Beech, Sycamore And Scots Pine Were Planted, None Of Which Are Actually Native To West Yorkshire.
By Selectively Felling Small Areas Of Trees, Particularly Conifers, We Will Gradually Restore The Woodland To A More Natural State.
Over Time This Work Will Improve The Structure Of The Woodland, Helping Create Better Conditions Both For Wildlife And For Our Visitors.
Or, as Gerard Manley Hopkins would have put it, had he been in charge of sign-writing at the National Trust:
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
Oh let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Hopkins, from ‘Inversnaid’
As we know, people whose task it is to protect the wildness and wet are more passionately concerned than ever with what is ‘natural’ and ‘native’. The words are used three times in five sentences in the National Trust’s notice – and it shows how far we have come since the days when the guardians of Britain’s forests thought it was acceptable to poison (yes, poison) the native trees and cover the land with conifers. Now the conifers are to be rooted out. And not just them, but also the non-local beech and the foreign sycamore trees. I had been admiring one of these renegade beech trees earlier. It had looked much older than its 140 years – the trunk was far wider than my embrace and its thick, slippery roots had taken up more than half of the path – but now it seems as though its days are numbered, along with all the other interlopers. I wonder, what will be planted in their place? Oak, of course, it gets everywhere; but also maple, wild cherry, hawthorn and blackthorn. Will they now bother with ash? Perhaps wild service trees, so that five hundred years from now someone will triumphantly identify an ancient forest. Oliver Rackham can get rather impatient with the new tree planters, who lazily replicate the same species mix wherever they go. He says they need to be much more sensitive to the local ecology. But of course it depends how ‘natural’ the National Trust wants to be. They could take the end of the last Ice Age as their jumping-off point, and then it would be an unbroken stretch of hazel and lime, with beaver, lynx and elk thrown in for good measure. It’s easier to nail a notice to a tree than to agree on what is ‘natural’, especially after thousands of years of human intervention. But, on reflection, I am profoundly grateful that they are trying. We all want to get back to Eden. Even if we have to build it ourselves.
Natural or not, the woods around Hardcastle Crags have been copiously colonized by something called the hairy northern wood ant and I am keen to find these creatures. February, of course, is not the best time to be ant hunting – they should be hibernating, or sheltering underground from the Yorkshire chill – but these ants are hairy and, more importantly, northern, so I don’t see why they shouldn’t be out and about. They’re not southerners and it’s not snowing, so I am sure they’ll be scurrying about industriously, protected by their thick winter fur. In fact, I have a very clear vision of the hairy northern wood ant, sashaying single file along the forest floor, their long glossy coats swinging from side to side like a pack of well-groomed, miniature Afghan hounds.
Their nests, when I find one, are huge – easily over one metre tall – a suggestively hairy, shaped dome of pine needles, twigs and forest debris. There is no sign of any ants, although I stare at the crevices for many long minutes, waiting for one to appear. I don’t prod the nest with a stick because I’m aware that this ant, as well as being northern, can spray a nasty jet of ammonium if provoked, and I fancy it would be quite easy to get its hairy back up. Consulting my book, I am disappointed to discover that the only part of Formica lugubris that is remotely hirsute is its eyebrows. In fact, given its surly Latin name, I now see that there is no chance of me seeing a hairy northern wood ant in winter. It’ll be holed up in its empty den, bleakly contemplating the awfulness of life through the bottom of a bottle and lugubriously twitching a pair of shaggy Russian brows. The furthest south you’ll find one of these wood ants is in the forests of southern Wales – they like it cold and damp – and I wonder what will happen as the climate disintegrates and drought and storms become the norm. Perhaps they’ll adapt. And moult. Or migrate. Most likely they’re one of the thousands of species that are facing extinction worldwide. But as I turn for home, I can’t help but feel a twinge of irritation: if they’re not going to come out and show themselves on what is, frankly, a really quite mild February day, then what is the point of them being so hairy?
Darkness arrives quickly in February. There is a brief moment when everything turns orange, the rocks and ferns, the pink-tinged sycamore bark and the last golden leaves of the beech, but then the colour leeches out of the wood. The pathway back down, which had seemed enchanted on the way up, is fading and uncertain and I am suddenly aware of the loud urgency of the river’s call. The path offers choices that hadn’t seemed to be there on the way in and there are forks and trails that must be invisible when travelling in the other direction. It is always too easy to get lost in the woods. The dark shapes in the undergrowth are rhododendrons, whose days at Hardcastle Crags are surely numbered, and then, looming out of the murk, a massive grey larch blocks the way. It’s the ugliest of winter trees, a conifer that drops its needles, leaving a gaunt and jagged profile with clusters of dessicated cones. It seems drained of all life, of any possibility of a return to life, in a way that no other deciduous tree ever does, even in midwinter. Perhaps it really is dead. Sudden oak death (which affects the larch) emerged in South Wales recently, and has led to the felling of over six million trees in an effort to delay its spread. The first part of the disease’s name, Phytophthora ramorum, literally means plant killer; a variant, Phytophthora kernoviae, arrived in 2003 to colonize rhododendrons and beech trees. There’s not much in this little paradise that isn’t at risk.
Our delayed (and probably ineffectual) response to the mutating diseases of globalization is one self-inflicted problem; but as I follow the throaty gush of the Hebden Beck back into town, it’s easy to remember that the greater threat, and the one that is going to amplify everything else, is the looming catastrophe of our collapsing climate: just ask the people of Hebden Bridge, whose town (at the time of writing) has now been flooded three times since 2012, most recently in the winter of 2015–16 when their streets, shops, businesses and homes were deluged by several feet of floodwater and the emergency services fought in vain to find a route through the waters to reach them. There are very specific, local reasons why the floods are multiplying here. This is Yorkshire, after all: the rains fall and the rivers run fast. There will be floods. But the lovely, dark, rich colour of the Hebden Beck? That comes from the peat that is being washed off the moors in unprecedented quantities, because there’s almost nothing left to hold it in place. The area around Walshaw Moor is a blanket bog of extraordinary global rarity: and much of it is right here, on the moors above Hardcastle Crags. But the landscape is not as nature evolved. There should be trees and shrubs in the gulleys and drifting and dotted across the moors, their roots stabilizing the soil. Instead we have unleashed the sheep – and they have cropped the place bare. Worse, we have dug channels to drain the moor and we are now burning it every year to keep the heather low so that the grouse – yes, the grouse – can flourish (but only until the day they are driven towards the blazing shotguns on the Glorious Twelfth). The town of Hebden Bridge is flooding, and the moor is drying and dying, to give pleasure to a bunch of entitled country house fantasists.
Of course, that’s far from the full story. It rains a lot here – and as the climate warps, and much of the rest of the planet dries, we are going to thank our lucky stars that it does. But the area needs better flood defences (walls, channels, banks) and the moor needs more trees – just as it needs to be left free to perform its natural function as a massive sponge, free from burning and drainage. It has become commonplace to point out that most flood defences are being built in the towns, while almost no effort is being put into averting the floods further up the hills, but that is surely the better way. We should plant reeds, shrubs and woodland; create ponds, gravel pits and lakes for run-off. Drive back the sheep and the grouse. Release the beavers! They’ll do the job for free. It’s not like any of this is surprising. Humanity has known about deforestation and soil erosion for thousands of years – indeed, Plato looked out at the mountains above Athens, which were once covered with trees, wildlife and flowers, and were now arid, infertile rocks, scoured clean of topsoil, and wrote:
In comparison of what then was, there are remaining only the bones of the wasted body… all the richer and softer part of the soil having fallen away, and the mere skeleton of the land left behind.
He could be writing that today, standing on a hillside in China or Europe, India or Indonesia, watching the trees tumble and the soil slip and slurry from the land. But there’s still time to save the hills above Hebden Bridge.
Again, there’s more. The blanket bog is not just a water sponge, it’s a carbon sink: it absorbs and holds huge quantities of carbon. When the moor dries or is burned, that carbon is released into the atmosphere. This is terrible news for our efforts to stem the effects of what most people are still calling ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’, although both terms seem far too gentle (even rather pleasing) for something that is more likely to resemble the Ten Plagues of Egypt. As I write, not far from here the county council of North Yorkshire has given the go-ahead to the extraction company Third Energy to frack for shale gas in Ryedale near the village of Kirby Misperton. That decision is going to directly affect the amount of flooding we can expect here in Hebden Bridge – and all over the planet. Every climate scientist in the world would agree (well, ninety-seven per cent of them and counting). It is unfair to blame the put-upon local councillors, even if they did receive over 4,375 objections to the scheme and only 36 in favour. There is huge pressure from our governments, and their friends, all of them desperate for fracking to get under way: there’s gas and large quantities of short-term cash to be extracted and funnelled out of the area. Apart from the fact that the locals would probably prefer not to live in an earthquake or cancer zone, nor for hot flames to pour from their tap next time they run a bath, we all need to agree to leave fossil fuels in the ground. If we burn them, much of the world will flood. Other parts will scorch and die. We know this. We’d rather not know (it’s so exhaustingly responsible and grown up), but we have to learn to say ‘no’. Honestly, though, these local NIMBYs with their health-and-safety concerns, and their desire to live in a picture-perfect, fresh-air Yorkshire village. Frack ’em.
The weird thing is, that this fracking decision was taken in the middle of so much good news about renewable sources of energy. The cost of solar panels is plummeting. Offshore wind is booming. Longer-term electricity storage is within reach. More than forty per cent of Denmark’s energy comes from wind, while Portugal generates more than fifty per cent of its energy from renewables. The Chinese are now the world’s largest producer of solar power. On the day I write this, the Germans have supplied almost all of their domestic electricity needs through renewable energy. This is not a story you’ll hear trumpeted in oil-addicted Britain. I suppose the old-time energy companies are scurrying to extract what they can before economic reality catches up with them, or perhaps before they’re sued for wilfully poisoning humanity. Who knows, maybe they’ll be prosecuted for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court. Some of them have known for decades that their actions were destroying our climate and our health, but they carried on regardless. Is that a reasonable definition of ‘evil’? To know that your actions are killing millions of people, displacing tens of millions more and polluting whole ecosystems, but you suppress the information and press on regardless? I think it may be.
So instead of fracking, we should be embracing renewables; and we should be planting. The world needs its woods more than it needs a quick fix of gas. We know how useful trees are: they exude oxygen, stabilize the soil and make the rains fall. They provide shade from the sun and shelter from the storms. The vast majority of species on earth, from the jungles to the oceans, rely on trees for nourishment and life itself. I know we do. And as we merrily pump carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the forests are doing what they can to mitigate the madness, sequestering over one thousand billion tons of carbon in the trees and in the soil around their roots. The woods of Hardcastle Crags shouldn’t be an isolated strip in an overgrazed, swaled desert of bog and farmland; they should be part of a great, nationwide patchwork of interconnecting forests. ‘Only suicidal morons,’ snarled John Fowles, ‘in a world already choking to death, would destroy the best natural air-conditioner creation affords.’
Sometimes, it is surprisingly hard to find peace in the woods, but it is always good to try.
*
Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There’s more of wisdom in it.
Wordsworth, from
‘The Tables Turned’
On a close, grey day in mid-June I arrive at the edge of Glover’s Wood in Sussex, a couple of miles west of Gatwick Airport. I am eager to lose myself in the trees – no, more than that, I want to hear the sweet music of the woodland linnet and bathe in its native wisdom – but instead I am fretting about the noise of the planes as they rumble and screech and accelerate overhead. Is it because of my age, or is it the age we live in, that it can be so hard to get lost in the woods? If it’s any consolation, even William Wordsworth, the greatest of nature writers, could sometimes struggle to feel anything for the natural world:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;–
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune…
Wordsworth, from
‘The world is too much with us’
Glover’s Wood is genuinely ancient, semi-natural woodland, although all of it has been thoroughly worked, chopped and regrown over many centuries. There are four large ponds in the wood, and this part was once agricultural land – fields and hedgerows and cattle wading in the water – but they are now given over to oak, ash and hazel, dragonflies, mosses and something called the ‘elongated sedge’. It’s possible that the wood was also part of the first flourishings of industrialization, in Tudor times, when iron ore was smelted in furnaces in the woods with fuel taken from coppiced hornbeam and oak. Running through the wood there’s a steep valley, or ghyll, caused by a stream cutting deep into the native limestone, and both English Nature and the Woodland Trust (to which about one-third of Glover’s Wood belongs, with the rest in private hands) are sure that the sides of the ghyll are areas of primary woodland – in other words, they have been continuously wooded since Neolithic times, even if they’ve been considerably mucked about with. It’s a lovely place to be, in mid-June, when the hawthorns have bloomed and the creamy blossom has given way to clusters of hard, green berries, and the grasses are high and laden with seed and cuckoo spit. I am sitting on the edge of the ghyll, on a tangy bank of wild garlic, and I’m staring at a dead, rotting wild service tree that has toppled forwards into the fork of a coppiced hornbeam, and my dog is noisily eating the grasses with a side-order of garlic (she – we both – may regret that later), but all I can hear is those passing planes, and all I can really feel is a distracted buzz of low-level agitation. The fumes of the car journey are still with me and it is so hard to leave behind the grit and babble of the city.
We are always told that finding a wild service tree is a sign of an ancient wood – and there are plenty of them here, in Glover’s Wood, mostly lurking in the hedgerows, but also standing meekly among the more boisterous holly and hornbeams. I’ve only recently trained myself to recognize one. It’s a solitary, spindly tree, rather shaggy around the boughs, with demure bouquets of small white flowers in June and hard little mottled brown fruits in the autumn. These fruits (called checkers) were once added to beer to sweeten its taste, and on their own could even make a destabilizingly strong alcoholic punch, which is probably why you may sometimes find yourself drinking in ‘The Checkers’ pub, although it’s best not to order a pint of their finest Sorbus torminalis. John Evelyn, among others, is in no doubt that the fruit is good for the digestion and a safeguard against colic and dysentery, but he is also eager to tell us that water distilled from the flowers and leaves is a helpful cure for the ‘green-sickness of virgins’. The timber is hard and long-lasting, useful for spindles and screws, and it’s also a fine charcoal tree, but it has never been of much general use because it’s so rare. I like its name, ‘wild’, and its underdog appeal, and I like the way the one I’m staring at now is slumped so comfortably in the arms of the coppiced hornbeam, not sleeping but rotting, its coarse bark prised open by scuttling woodlice and crumbling onto the forest floor.
There’s a slow-moving stream at the bottom of the ghyll with a solitary young holly growing on the far side. A robin is balanced on the top, bouncing up and down, ruffling its feathers, looking here and there in its quick-eyed way, dipping at the stream before flurrying back to another branch. There’s no one here apart from me, the panting dog, and the busy robin. Two eyes, shaped like something you might see painted on the prow of a Greek fishing boat, have been carved into the trunk of the hornbeam, although when I look closer I can see that it’s not a carving but natural growth – an accident of art. Still, I think, that’s a lucky sign, surely – and at that moment it’s as though the wood has slowed and opened and birdsong emerges at last from the depths of the trees, and also, even louder, from overhead in the thick, close-leaved canopy; and it’s then, right then, that I become aware of the heady reek of wild garlic, and damp leaves, and the soft gurgle of the stream, and the insistent peep of the robin (which is now beseeching my attention from a tree stump just three paces away), and there’s so much moss everywhere, creeping over the hornbeam and wild service tree, and mounded in deep-green, billowy piles by the side of the stream, smelling rich and loamy, that I have to resist an urge to roll and bury myself in it; but more than that, there are huge tangled haystacks of honeysuckle in full bloom, engulfing a hornbeam sapling, topping a twenty-foot holly tree and looping over the nearby hazel coppicing. I have no idea how long I have been sitting and brooding on this bank, oblivious to the birdsong, the moss and the honeysuckle. It’s not as though it has all just suddenly arrived, because everything has been here all along, obviously, and it’s me who has been elsewhere – disconnected and out of tune. Although, to be clear, that’s not to say that any part of this wondrous woodland scene could actually care less what I think or am feeling.
Right on cue, another plane screeches overhead, tearing at the forest canopy. It’s easy to see why so many scientists are now saying that the earth has entered an entirely new geological epoch – the Anthropocene Age – defined by the fact that the planet’s ecosystems and geology have been permanently altered by human activity. There’s no place on earth – not even its atmosphere – that hasn’t been changed by our relentless expansion; and this wood, that only a moment ago seemed permanent and timeless and teeming with life, now feels unbearably fragile. Measured by body mass, over ninety-five per cent of the world’s vertebrates are now either human or dependent on humans for their existence – sheep, cows, chickens and pets – and just five per cent are wild animals, a tiny, dwindling number of tigers, frogs and otters. Even one hundred years ago, you could have flipped that percentage. Humanity (or a small, privileged part of humanity) has set the whole planet to work for its gratification. In fact, if you want to visit a place where the wildlife is flourishing, the best you can do is head for the area around Chernobyl, the site of the world’s worst-ever nuclear disaster. With the people gone, the trees, wolves, elks, lynxes, eagles and wild boars have returned in numbers not even seen in the nearby nature reserves. In the absence of farmers, foresters, hunters and car drivers, and our everyday chemicals and pollutants, nature is finding a way back – just so long as we’re ready for the Giant Mutant Bison that, ten years from now, will almost certainly be rising with a righteous bellow from the radioactive earth and marching on Moscow.
Our momentum is frightening. Right now, the well-funded operators of Gatwick Airport are lobbying to be allowed to add another runway to its capacity – to make room for all the extra flights they calculate that we will want to be taking. The local YIMBYs are protesting (yes, in my backyard I would like to be able to live without the tiles from my roof being shaken off every seven minutes and for the air I breathe to contain a reasonably non-toxic mix of oxygen and nitrogen, but without too much extra, climate-destroying carbon dioxide, please). It is baffling, that with the world’s scientific community united in agreement that our fuel-burning, airport-expanding activities are going to destroy our planet, we are still giving the time of day to people who want to carry on with business as usual. For sure, it’s understandable that most of us are daunted by the changes that will be needed, although the majority of them are undeniably positive – fresher air, fewer floods, clean energy, a growth in community, more worthwhile jobs and a shared sense of purpose. More woods! But carrying on as though nothing is happening is easier for most of us (while it’s still possible). We need leadership – someone to help us move the box of chocolates to the other end of the table and out of our addicted reach. And we need to remember that the hot air emanating from the climate-change deniers is just that: the outpourings of a bunch of overindulged charlatans, none of them scientists, with a childish resentment of being told what to do by others who are more qualified. We should turn our backs on these shrieking attention-seekers – the newspaper columnists displaying themselves at the bars of their cages, the needy opinion formers sniggering at the chance to say something different, the corrupt ex-ministers suckling at the oily teat of big business, the asset owners and energy companies funding fantasy, made-up science – and get on with the grown-up business of fixing this mess without them.
Spring came early this year. I know that’s ‘weather’ and not ‘climate’, but there was something especially unsettling about standing in a London garden in mid-January, with the hot sun on my back, daffodils blooming in the flowerbeds and a swarm of fruit flies streaming from the overheated compost. The woods are going to be devastated by these changes and every expert agrees that the trees and their accompanying species need as much time as we can buy them to adapt to what’s coming: the earlier springs, the floods and droughts, the erratic winters. And we need to build stepping stones of nature so that every scrap of diversity is utilized. We should fill our cities and towns with trees and cover the land with woods. The first land mammal to become extinct because of man-made climate chaos – the Bramble Cay melomys, an eager little rodent that lived on a tiny island on the Great Barrier Reef – simply ran out of space as the waters rose.
All of this is hard to imagine, as I walk in the green heart of Glover’s Wood. The aeroplanes are still rumbling overhead, but it’s cheering to come across a decaying Woodland Trust sign, with its perky acorn symbol and reassuring map and succinct summary of its plans for the wood. Their volunteers have been busy coppicing, and widening the rides, opening the canopy and encouraging back wild flowers such as the greater butterfly orchid and the goldilocks buttercup. Rare woodland butterflies are returning (I keep an ignorant eye open for the silver-washed fritillary). They are leaving the fallen trees to rot, so that the invertebrates flourish and the birds feast and thrive. This place is loved and popular. There are benches near the ponds, dedicated to people who cherished the wood: ‘In memory of Dr Clare Tarplee,’ one reads, ‘1962–1999, who grew up in the Mole Valley and loved woodland.’ And this one, ‘dedicated by a loving family to the memory of Dot and Chas Wren who once owned this lovely little piece of England.’ Thank you, Mr and Mrs Wren (or Mr and Miss?), your gift has enhanced many lives. Throughout the wood, there are little camps and dens, where children have been playing and grown-ups have been practising or demonstrating their forest skills. The place feels well-worked, and used, as any wood should.
Above all, there’s a peace here that feels beyond anything that Gatwick can throw at it. I sit on one of the benches and stare at the green hornbeams and let myself be soothed by the woodland magic. The crumbling remains of a vast coppiced tree are in front of me, the roots covered in moss and soil, old branches and trunks sprawled in every direction: the whole thing looks as though it has risen from the earth, alien, like it shouldn’t be here, or like a giant squid flopping its last on the shore. My dog has disappeared, tracking an imaginary squirrel. Leaning over the pond is a hornbeam, its branches hanging low over the sedge, its lizard-like, pinkish trunk covered in little stumpy clusters of twigs and soft-toned leaves. The hornbeam is an unassuming tree, but it’s strong, with a hard wood that holds its long thin branches horizontal to the ground. It has a very strokeable trunk, I realize. My dog comes back, another failed hunt completed, and as I sit here, breathing in the wood, people drift by, nodding and friendly, or lost in their thoughts. The Woodland Trust was founded in 1972 by Kenneth Watkins, a retired farmer, who had become angry about the wholesale planting of conifers and the loss of his local copses in south-west England. Since then, the organization has planted over thirty million trees and is guarding over one thousand woods. They are just one of several charities dedicated to the protection and proliferation of native woodland. If you love woods, it is reassuring to remember that you are not alone. And it is also good to know that in the battles ahead to save our woods and ancient trees (and, indeed, much more than that), there are many millions who feel the way you do.