part0005

I grew up three miles from a haunted wood: Oxney Bottom, a name which still gives me shivers. You’ll find it on the road from Deal to Dover on the Kent coast, though it’s not a place you’re likely to stop. Apart from anything else, you’d be unwise to try to pull over in what has long been an accident blackspot. For sure, you can approach the wood on foot, but the land is privately owned and footpaths will only skirt you round the edge. But if you did somehow end up in Oxney Bottom, you could tell straightaway that there’s something uncanny about it. The road curves as it dips and takes you down into a hollow. Whatever the weather, it’s suddenly darker and colder here. Maybe it’s just that that creates the chilling atmosphere. On one side of the road, there’s just a thin fringe of trees and behind them the agricultural land Kent is famed for. But on the other side, the trees are thick enough to imagine that looking at them five hundred years ago would be the same as looking at them today. There’s no sign of the eighteenth-century house, or the ruined chapel, or the well where a young girl fell to her death in the 1960s.

There’s a grey lady—the story runs—who will come out of the woods at night, limping into the oncoming traffic and then melting into the air. It seemed that everyone I knew as a teenager knew someone who had a tale about the grey lady. I never met her myself, not even the time I found myself alone in the wood at night, walking home from Dover’s pubs after sacrificing the last train to last orders. Despite the late hour, there was a steady enough stream of cars. Foolishly, I didn’t have a torch, so after a car had passed, I was in near total darkness. And once the thrum of an engine receded, I could hear the remarkable soundscape of the woods in the dark: the breeze in the foliage and the rustle of unseen creatures accompanying the noise of my own breathing and footsteps. To add to the gothic ambience, there’s a kennels a few hundred yards along the road from the wood. The night was punctuated by the distant sound of barking dogs. There might even have been an occasional howl. The grey lady was on my mind too, of course. It all made for an exhilarating experience: a mixture of myth, ecology, topography and my own body’s instinctive reaction to a sense of peril created not just by the immediate threat of drunk drivers (of whom there were a great many in those days), but also by the cultural associations of forests with beasts and ne’er-do-wells. Indeed, Oxney Bottom has long been connected with smugglers and highwaymen, though there are no beasts there more menacing than a badger or an owl.

Haunted woods are places where narrative and environment are merged, where the imagination and landscape are rooted together. We are used to hearing that broadleaf forest is among Britain’s most biodiverse habitats, but woodlands are also some of our culturally richest locations. Britain’s many forest phantasms are a crucial part of our (super)natural heritage. At a time when woodland is under huge and growing pressure from the demands of development, it is worth thinking about ghosts as part of the irreplaceable value of such places. If Oxney Bottom was bulldozed to make way for a service station, what would happen to the grey lady? Would she be condemned to haunt the forecourt and restrooms, finally buying a bag of charcoal briquettes before fading back into the netherworld from which she came? Biodiversity offsetting has emerged as a controversial mechanism through which the ecological impacts of infrastructure projects can be mitigated: you cut down some trees here, and plant some more over there; kill some weasels in one location, but make a home for some hedgehogs somewhere else. But what about offsetting ghosts?

On one level it seems facetious to think about the supernatural world as something that might be taken into account in planning applications: as if ghosts have rights, or the undead might launch a legal challenge against HS2. On another level, however, history, folklore and narrative are ways in which woodlands become meaningful to communities and come to form part of the cultural value of specific environments. These are aspects of our experience of nature that cannot be offset; the history of a place cannot be traded off against the history of another place; you can’t erase the history of one location and just put some more history somewhere else. Weird woods are singular places with very specific energies.

The twelve stories in this collection demonstrate the imaginative allure of Britain’s weird, haunted or sinister woods and trees. Some of the stories’ locations are real, some of them are imagined. There are tales that take place in dark forests—among the classic terrains of gothic fiction—and tales of single trees possessed of a curious force or ghostly presence. There are trees and woods that form part of country estates. There is also a story about an orchard, and one about urban trees. The tales gathered here take us from England’s South Downs to Scotland, from Wales to London, up to Yorkshire and down to Hampshire’s New Forest. Some of the stories exist more nebulously in unnamed locations. The question of development—the clearing of an old forested domain in the name of improvement—is an important part of the narrative of some stories (those by M. R. James and Algernon Blackwood most explicitly), but is studiously avoided in others: as if weird woods might continue to exist as spaces out of time, enclaves of a deep past where the old gods linger and progress is held at bay. With their roots reaching deep into the earth, trees encapsulate the tense relationship of history and modernity. Many of Britain’s trees sprouted before the internet existed, before phones, TV or radio; some sprouted before cars, trains or newspapers. There are trees that predate the magna carta ; Britain’s oldest tree (probably the Fortingall Yew in Scotland) could predate Christ by some 1,000 years. Trees incite the imagination to connect to other worlds, and put human dramas in a longer historical perspective.

Moreover, in many of the stories that follow, woods seem to conspire against humanity. That forests should be pitted against human ambition is a long-established notion that is woven into the geographies of culture. If the city is the conventional home of civilisation and politics, the forest is something like its opposite. Robert Pogue Harrison in his seminal study Forests: The Shadow of Civilization explored how as far back as the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (from around 2100 BC ), “forests represent the quintessence of what lies beyond the walls of the city” (17). In some situations this makes the woods a welcome refuge from the world of human affairs. Shakespeare’s As You Like It has the exiled Duke Senior gladly ask “Are not these woods/ More free from peril than the envious court?” (2.1. 3–4). The sense of joy the Duke and his companions discover in the Forest of Arden might even have a medical basis. Today, we know that forests are good for us. Shinrin-yoku , a Japanese nature therapy known in the West as forest-bathing, has attracted a good deal of press over recent years as an antidote to stressful lifestyles. Immerse yourself in the woods; breathe; reconnect; heal. The benefits forests offer to human health (both mental and physical) mirror the global ecological benefits forests provide as key ecosystems in the attempt to get a grip on climate crisis.

But in most of the tales here, trees are no safe haven. Rather, they are places of violence, bewilderment and death: the majority of the stories here include a tree-related human demise. Bad things happen in the woods, and not just in the stories in this collection. Mainstream cinema turns time and again to the forest as a place of horror. Think of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004), for example, in which the woods are home to strange, unspeakable creatures who appear dead set against the human community. There’s no doubt that such imaginings affect the way we view woods away from the screen. For a time in my twenties I lived in a caravan in the New Forest while working at a youth hostel. One night I found a group of American backpackers lost in the woods, scared out of their wits. As I tried to locate them to guide them back to the path, I heard one remark with forced jollity, “This is so Blair Witch”, as if their experience of England’s woods had come to be defined by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s 1999 film of three students beset by a malign force in the Maryland forest. It seems collectively we remain under the sway of the many phobias of the woods: dendrophobia, hylophobia, nyctohylophobia (the fear of trees, forests and forests at night, respectively). If we feel like this, maybe we should just cut them all down. Woodland clearance in the past has undoubtedly had a philosophical and theological dimension as well as a practical purpose. Chipping away at dense forest, cutting back the wilderness, subduing the land had the force of making the world a more human and a more Godly place (and as evidence of this, there is more than one story in this collection that identifies trees and woods as the domain of the devil).

How then do we reconcile the contrary energies at work in our imaginings of forests? How can we make a claim for the cultural significance of woods when so much of our literary and cultural history teaches us to see forests as anti-human spaces?

Although it may seem a contradiction, it is precisely because of the opposition to comfortable humanist notions that weird woods hold a vital place in ecological ethics. We think of the world as such a resolutely humanised place that there is a growing movement to give the current geological era our name: the Anthropocene, or the age of man. But even man-made forests (even perhaps commercial timber plantations) are not entirely human zones. Even if capitalist modernity is changing everything about the world (and not in a good way), other lives endure. There are still other perceptions at play. For small creatures, a tree is a world and a forest is a universe. To pay attention to those lives, we need to think beyond ourselves and put our species hubris in perspective. There is an urgent, ethical demand for humans (or at least the privileged few that hold the greatest sway) to feel less at home in the world and less entitled to impose their will on nature. It is one of the functions of good writing to generate discomfort, to prod us out of our tired ideologies and familiar assumptions. Perhaps, therefore, the most significant effects we might take from these stories would be to feel more like aliens in the world and through that to tap into the world’s strangeness.

Weird woods, then, may help us to think again about our place on the planet. They also have a good deal to tell us about human crucial issues. Edith Nesbit’s ‘Man-Size in Marble’ and Mary Webb’s ‘The Name-Tree’ takes us into something we might call feminist tree politics as the women in the narratives find their struggles against patriarchal authority painfully amplified among trees. E. F. Benson’s ‘The Man Who Went Too Far’ brings a consciousness of anxieties around the expression of sexuality into his mystical tale of the New Forest. Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Tree’ shows how for all the investment in specific localities of the stories in this collection, trees can also provide an occasion to think through questions around global politics and national identity in the context of empire. Several of the stories encourage a sense of class consciousness, especially in relation to rural labour and aristocratic land ownership. These are not separate or competing elements of the collection, but an integral part of the texture of weird woods, where human and more-than-human dramas unfold together.