1
Goliath—England
It is a gray, damp winter’s day in the heart of the New Forest. Pillows of limp copper bracken fringe the edge of a muddy track. Two men dressed in simple forester clothing, wearing heavy hobnailed boots, stand to one side of the trail. The first leans on a tall, straight-handled shovel next to a freshly dug hole. His companion kneels next to a bushy four-foot-tall sapling lying at his feet. Its root ball is wrapped in hessian sacking tied with string, which he removes to reveal a compact clod of dark earth containing the young tree’s soft, fragile roots. Lifting the sapling by its stem, he brushes some of the soil free to expose the root tips. The sapling is then gently lowered into the waiting hole and held straight as the first man backfills it, gently bouncing the shovel to help break the dense loam to evenly fill the gaps between earth and roots. He gently heels in the surface soil, compacting it just enough to hold the sapling steady, but leaving it spongy enough to allow air and rain to penetrate.
As the two men move off to repeat the process with a second identical sapling, which is resting on bracken on the other side of the track, a third man carrying two pails of water approaches from the direction of a stream. He kneels next to the newly planted sapling, and his rough hands sculpt a crude moat in the soil around its base, before slowly filling it with water. He waits for the soil to suck it all down and the moat to drain, before filling and refilling until the water sits on the surface of the earth, and he can see his face reflected against the sky.
By the time he returns again with replenished buckets, the others have finished planting the second sapling. He carefully waters it while his companions carry bundles of cleft chestnut palings from a nearby cart. Within a couple of hours both saplings are circled by five-foot-tall fences, protecting the soil at their feet and shielding their foliage from winter-hungry deer. The men know all too well that the first few years will be crucial for these young trees, and satisfied that they have given them the best chance they can, they collect their tools and head back to the cart. The sound of their voices and the crack and lurch of the carts gradually fade away, and the two trees are left alone in silence to guard the track.
Behind them lies an enormous plantation of young English oak trees. But unlike the anonymous, leafless rank and file stretching away into the drizzle, these two saplings are New World ambassadors fresh from California. Nurtured and raised from seeds collected in the Sierra Nevada six years earlier, they hail from an exotic tribe of giant trees that will change the face of the British landscape for hundreds, if not thousands of years to come.
The drizzle soon turns to rain but as the skeleton army of young winter oaks grows dark in the wet, the verdant emerald foliage of the young evergreens begins to shine.
It was back-to-back AC/DC and Aerosmith on the stereo as we sped round the single-lane bends of the New Forest in Paddy’s beaten-up old Vauxhall. I was sixteen years old and feeling pretty rough. It was too early in the morning after the night before, and Steve Tyler’s singing wasn’t helping, nor was Paddy’s driving. Apart from the occasional pony standing in the middle of the road, the empty tarmac seemed to demand that Paddy gun his long-suffering car as hard as he could. Matt was crashed out on the backseat behind me. I turned away from the road ahead, opened the window, and gazed out at the trees flashing by. The closest were moving too fast to focus on, but behind them, in the depths of the forest, I could see the huge, silver-smooth pillars of ancient beech.
Paddy was in his element on these roads, but just as I was about to ask him to slow down, for the sake of his car’s interior, he spun the steering wheel to the right, yanked the handbrake, and catapulted us across a cattle grid. The car’s back end slid out before gripping suddenly on the tarmac of a small side road. Dropping the speed, Paddy rested his chin between his knuckles atop the steering wheel. The stereo was now off, and he was gazing up at the sky through the windscreen. Matt had been woken by the cattle grid and now had his head completely out of the window. All three of us were peering skyward with awe and excitement. We were here at last.
I leaned out through my window and breathed deeply. We were curb-crawling through a straight avenue of the tallest trees I’d ever seen. Rows of huge, straight trunks lined either side of the narrow road, their dark bark deeply fissured and corrugated with the rough texture of ancient cork, and their branches holding up the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral of dappled leaves. Light was filtering through in slanted shafts of heaven, almost as solid as the tree trunks themselves. After a few minutes we pulled over to the side of the road.
The air was heavy with the spicy citrus smell of conifer resin. It was early but the thermals on the surrounding heath were rising, sucking cooler air in from the nearby coast and filling our nostrils with the smell of the sea. High above, invisible in the deep green, I could hear a chorus of goldcrests. The living colonnade we had passed was a double row of tall—very tall—Douglas firs imported from Oregon. These were probably some of the oldest in Britain, judging from their size. A noble species of tree, true aristocrats. But not the trees we were here to visit, apparently. Paddy and Matt had other plans.
Both of them were looking across the road into the timber-dense forest, trying to see something deep inside. Peering in, I caught a glimpse of two giant hulking shadows in the green twilight. Before I could get a better look, Paddy had popped the car trunk open with a clunk. I looked down into a tangled nest of old rope, metal buckles, and leather straps. Both Paddy and Matt were climbers. But whereas Matt was in his element on rock, Paddy was training to be a tree surgeon and was all about the trees. Matt had his own gear, a pretty, Gucci-looking rock-climbing kit: a brightly colored rope, slippery and smooth like an oiled snake, accompanied by a bunch of shiny metal bling.
But the kit Paddy had brought along for us couldn’t have been more different: two skeins of ancient hawser climbing rope, two ragged harnesses, and a motley bundle of jangling carabiners—some of them clearly homemade. The ropes were stained dark green by algae, tree sap, and chainsaw oil, their twisted strands rubbed smooth and shiny by the friction of countless hands. Hand-me-down kit, too old and knackered to be used for work anymore.
We were still years away from government legislation designed to ensure that climbing kit was maintained in good condition. So in 1991 when a tree surgeon retired a climbing rope from service, it was generally for very good reasons. Chainsaws and ropes don’t mix well, and as I ran the loops through my hands I felt the frayed puffs of saw-damaged fibers, an accumulation of nicks and cuts that gave the thing a moth-eaten appearance. But if the ropes were bad, the harnesses were far worse. They each consisted of two wide belts of tattered canvas and leather. One belt to go round the waist while climbing, the other to slip under the backside like a swing seat. Neither harness had leg loops, and both stank of hard work and fear, a heady mixture of stale sweat, oil, gasoline, and tree sap.
Shouldering the gear, we crossed the road and entered the forest. I hopped over a ditch and breathed deeply, filling my lungs with the peppery spice hanging in the air. My muscles began to relax after the jarring car journey. Paddy and Matt carried on in silence, making a beeline for something farther in. I followed and emerged from the shadowy colonnade into an open grassy ride. As the branches cleared, I beheld two of the most astonishingly beautiful, massive trees I’d ever seen. They were unlike any other trees nearby and stood like sentinels on either side of the open ride. Living obelisks at least 160 feet tall, they were a clear hundred feet taller than the oaks in the wood beyond them. The top third of their tapered canopies was bathed in morning sunlight, but their enormous flared trunks were still shrouded in shadow. The one on the right appeared to be a little shorter, with a sharper, less weather-blunted top than its companion. But the other tree was a veritable giant. I couldn’t help imagine what the view must be like from way up there, perched high on its shoulder. I knew we had come here to climb a tree, but seeing as I’d never climbed one with ropes before, I thought this was one hell of an introduction. To attempt to climb one of the biggest giant sequoias in Britain on my first-ever foray was jumping in at the deep end, to say the least. I just hoped they had a good plan for how to do it, because I didn’t have the faintest idea.
Paddy and Matt had almost reached its base now. Their silhouettes merged with the shadows at the giant’s feet. They looked tiny—like astronauts approaching an Apollo mission launch pad. By the time I joined them, Paddy had uncoiled his rope, which lay in open loops at his feet. He was trying to lob an end up and over a branch some thirty feet above his head. Again and again the small bundle of rope slapped against the tree with a hollow sound before falling back to earth at his feet.
I ran the open palm of my left hand across the bark. It was soft and yielding. A thick, fibrous coat that drummed when I tapped it. From about head height to the ground, the trunk flared out wildly, disappearing into the bare compacted soil with a circumference at least twice that of the trunk twenty feet up. A few roots broke the surface of the ground in a frozen tangle, but who knew how deep the rest went.
Paddy wasn’t having much luck, and it was beginning to dawn on me that our adventure might fall at the first hurdle, when Matt delved into his rucksack to produce a pair of ice axes. He waved them with a flourish. It had clearly been his plan to use them all along, but I eyed them suspiciously.
“Are you serious?”
“Got any better ideas?” he said.
I hadn’t. But it seemed an insane idea that was likely to end up with him in a crumpled heap at the base of the tree. This wasn’t an ice climb; he had no top rope to hold him or any opportunity to screw in anchors as he went. Until he made it up to the first branches he would be on his own, exposed and at the mercy of the unknown strength of the tree’s bark. The machined, aggressive metal spikes seemed in stark contrast with our soft organic surroundings. It just didn’t feel right to me—not because the spikes, vicious as they were, could damage the tree in any way. The bark was way too thick and padded for that. No, for me it had more to do with respect. This tree was a living entity, an organic being, not some inanimate lump of geology to stab full of holes. An abstract deference to the tree mingled with a superstitious desire not to tempt fate, jumbled with my nervousness at not having climbed before. But of course I couldn’t articulate all these feelings properly. And even if I could, the others would have just called me a pillock and pressed on regardless.
Matt clearly had no such misgivings as he whacked both axes several inches deep into the tree before bending down to strap on a pair of crampons. He stepped up and dug his toe spikes in. He was off. Thwack, whack, step, step. Thwack, whack, step, step. The tapered trunk rising to the vertical made his situation look even more precarious as he climbed higher. He’s going to kill himself, I thought. If he slips . . .
But he didn’t. I had to hand it to him—he got a tricky job done swiftly and with style. It isn’t a technique I’ve ever seen used by a tree climber since. Probably because without a flipline going around the trunk to stop you falling backward, it is verging on suicidal. But a lot of daft things seem like a good idea when you’re sixteen years old.
Matt made it up into the branches. The lowest ones were all dead, so he carried on up into the living canopy before tying in, kicking off his crampons, and lobbing the axes down to the ground. One of them buried itself up to its handle in the leaf litter.
Paddy was next. He tied the end of his rope to Matt’s. Matt hauled it up, passed it over the base of a branch, and threaded it back down to him, its sinuous end writhing back down along the fissures in the bark like a hunting snake. Paddy was up there in a flash. Bracing feet against trunk and hauling himself up hand over hand like a monkey. I knew there was no way I was going to measure up to these two on this, my first-ever proper tree climb. Paddy pulled my rope up in turn and threw it over a branch ten feet above him. Its end dropped back down to me, and I clipped it into the two metal triangles on the front of my harness. I was now attached to a branch fifty feet above me.
“What do I do now?” I called.
“Take that small loop of rope and wrap it twice around the main climbing rope, then back through itself. The way I showed you,” he shouted down from his perch. He wiggled the rope and I did as he said. I’d just made a sliding knot known as a prussic.
“Clip the other end into you with a carabiner. No, not there; on the front: here!” he said, hooking his thumb through his own harness rings.
This was the basic, age-old climbing system that Paddy and every other tree surgeon used every day at work. Tree-climbing techniques had not progressed an inch since the 1960s, but it was all still brand-new to me. I was still too preoccupied with trying to shake off the fog of a heavy night to think through what I had to do next. Taking a firm grip on the bronze-burnished rope, I used my right hand to slide the frayed knot up a foot or so.
As I transferred my weight from the ground to the rope, its elasticity pulled me onto my tiptoes. I stood teetering, trying to find my balance. It was clear that I had to commit fully. So, staggering toward the base of the tree, I slid the knot farther up the rope until both my feet were planted firmly against the trunk. I was now barely inches above the ground, but the rope had me. Until I reached the first branch I would be relying on this one saw-gnawed thread to support my whole weight. I swiveled my hips from side to side, trying to get comfortable in the harness. Without any leg loops to prevent the belt from sliding up under my arms, I had to lean back fully, almost horizontally, to maintain balance. I took a deep breath and arched my back. Without any other handholds, I was hanging like a clumsy spider on a thread, the rope dangling me wherever it wanted. All I had to do was climb it. Simple. In theory, at least.
After a slow start I got into a rhythm of bracing both feet against the tree trunk while sliding the knot up to capture a few inches of progress. I repeated this procedure again and again, until I was sweating freely despite the morning’s coolness. Every time I pulled down on my climbing rope, it rubbed over the top of the branch high above to dislodge a fine green dust that floated down through the morning light. It filled the cool air with a soft, earthy aroma.
As I climbed higher, I felt the rope become sticky with sap. This helped me grip and added friction to my top anchor, effectively reducing my weight. I was now above the tapered base and hanging perfectly vertical against the bark. Again I marveled at how soft and yielding it was. Hard to the touch, but then spongy as I pressed against it. I had a sudden desire to take off my shoes and socks, to feel the tree’s skin against my feet and feel its life flowing through me. I’d never live it down, though, so I leaned forward to press my cheek against it instead. It was now warm in the sun and the bark felt soft and friendly, like the bristles of a huge prehistoric animal that was allowing me to clamber onto its massive back. I was entering another realm, a place of safety and retreat, and experiencing a kind of baptism—my first immersion in the canopy.
I climbed slowly—not entirely by choice. My technique was halting and lacked the confidence and rhythm that comes with experience. At thirty feet off the ground I reached the first branches, a dead thicket of light-brown, powder-dry snags. They vibrated with a hollow sound when I tapped them. Although they looked fragile, they were surprisingly tough, and I found that by placing my feet at their base, I could use them as a ladder. Cautiously, I started to climb the tree itself. I transferred my weight from my harness to the branches, relying on my rope to catch me, should one of the branches pop.
Paddy and Matt were now only ten feet above me. Matt stood balancing like a gymnast on a branch, his chest pressed against the tree as he peered up its stem to select the best route. With his left arm hooked over a branch, he used his right to throw a bundle of rope higher and was soon off in a flurry of clinking carabiners. Paddy was sitting on a large branch to my left, finishing a crumpled roll-up. Rather than stub it out on the tree, he pinched the cherry between his nails and slid the burnt roach down into his sock. I hauled myself up next to him and looked up at the receding form of Matt scampering like a squirrel from limb to limb above us.
The tree eventually swallowed him from sight. The only sign was an occasional shower of fine dust drifting slowly down through the scattered sunshine, and the constant wriggling of his rope hanging next to me. On the other side, Paddy was in his element. He climbed every day at work, come rain, hail, or shine, and usually did it with a chainsaw strapped to his belt. This really was child’s play to him. Watching him climb, I became acutely aware of how tightly I was gripping the tree and how tense my muscles were. My hands ached from my rictus grip on the rope, and my neck and shoulders were cramped. I tried to physically relax myself and lower my center of gravity. I began to feel myself unwind a little, to sink lower down onto the branch. But it took a constant, conscious effort, and the harder I tried, the more it seemed to elude me. Every now and then my whole body would spasm with a grab reflex as if I was on the edge of falling asleep. My muscles would ratchet up to clamp the tree with a violent jolt I could not suppress. Paddy broke the silence with a cough:
“Right. Okay—happy?” More of a statement than a question, and I replied that I’d like to hang out there on my own for a while.
“No worries—follow us up whenever, and if not—see you in half an hour or so when we get back down.”
There was no way on earth he was going to let a rock climber beat him to the top of one of England’s biggest trees, and he was off in hot pursuit. Paddy and Matt just made it all look so easy.
I was of two minds. At sixty feet up I was currently level with the surrounding oak canopy and could sense that only a few feet above me, just beyond where the sequoia’s cone-laden branches were swaying lazily in the breeze, was a world-class view. But I was literally still trying to come to grips with my new environment and pretty nervous about venturing beyond the familiar security of the surrounding oaks. So that’s where I stayed. Perched on a branch a third of the way up, feeling the tree’s massive bulk sway around me, almost imperceptibly, in the morning breeze.
All around me the lower limbs of this huge giant stretched out and curved down in long graceful arcs. They rose back up at their tips to become almost vertical. Dense clumps of cones nestled within shaggy dark foliage twenty feet out from the trunk. Some were old, brown, and cracked where they’d spilled their seed in past years. Others were smooth, shiny, and light green, pregnant with promise. I set myself the challenge of trying to reach one. I shuffled out along my perch, and as I began to slide down the curve of the branch, it flexed and sagged beneath my weight. The branches were big, but felt surprisingly brittle, and I soon reconsidered, inching my way back up toward the trunk. Somehow I needed to keep my weight in the harness rather than on the branch. I needed to re-anchor my rope higher up so that it could support me fully as I tiptoed out away from the trunk.
I’d watched Paddy and Matt bundle their ropes up into small coils before throwing them with easy accuracy over the branch they’d wanted. But even this was a lot harder than it looked. When I finally got the rope over the branch I was aiming for, there wasn’t enough weight on its end to come back down to me. I pulled it back and it slunk down to coil around my head and shoulders.
Attaching a spare carabiner from my harness to weight it down, I pulled through a few coils of slack and tried again. This time it went over and came back down nicely, but it also slid down the branch to end up six feet out from the trunk. I put my weight on it, but the branch began to sag. I unclipped and whipped the loop of rope back into the base of the branch next to the tree stem. If I kept some weight on the rope, I could hold it in place so it didn’t slide down the curved bough.
Very slowly I stood up to balance on my branch. While leaning back in my harness I brought my right foot behind my left and began to walk backward toward the cones hanging on the canopy edge. Keeping my feet facing the tree, I twisted my upper body far around to the left to see where I was going. With my right hand tightly gripping the sliding knot, I inched it down the rope. I held my left arm out, fingers grasping in air for the cones still five feet away.
My right leg was beginning to tremble. I was only fifteen feet out from the trunk, but I felt exposed and unbalanced. Forcing myself to let go of the rope completely, I bent my legs into a crouch to lower my center of gravity. The tremble now moved up to my thighs as I held the posture, but I felt much more in control, much steadier. I was able to cover the remaining few feet and take hold of the end of the branch. The unripe cones were hard to pick off the branch, so I settled for one of the older ones instead, plucking it away from its stem before dropping it down inside the front of my T-shirt. I swiveled back around to face the tree, and headed back up the branch.
Halfway up, my left foot slipped on the smooth, dust-slick surface. I fumbled my grip and found myself swinging, spinning on the end of the rope, back toward the trunk. Before I could think, I hit the tree with a dull thud. The force of the impact was a shock, but the soft bark cushioned it kindly. Looking around, I could see that I’d fallen only a few feet. Rather than undermining my confidence, the soft landing relaxed me and left me trusting the climbing kit all the more.
I braced my legs against the tree, hanging in my harness next to the branch I’d fallen from. The tree was now swaying more noticeably in the breeze, its huge bulk rolling softly from side to side. As I hung limp in my harness, I enjoyed the drag and pull of this gigantic living thing.
Down below me, the tree didn’t appear to be moving at all. The bottom third of the trunk was rigid and it seemed I was hanging in a liminal zone between earth and sky, as if the ground was gently relinquishing its iron grip, and the tree was breaking free to become a creature of the air. I closed my eyes to fall into its embrace. All I could hear was the gentle sigh of the breeze through conifer needles and the occasional creak from deep inside the timber.
When I looked up, a bright-blue sky stretched high above me. I had long since lost sight of Paddy and Matt but could hear their voices drifting down to me, occasional laughter bouncing off the branches. They must have been well above the surrounding oak canopy by now, and I could only imagine the view up there in the gods. But at that moment, I knew I wasn’t ready to climb higher. I was proud enough of my first branch-walk. I lifted my T-shirt up at the front to pull the cone out for a closer look.
It was dark brown, and its crisscrossed cracks held hundreds if not thousands of infinitesimally small seeds. I tapped a dozen or so out into the cup of my hand. Each one no more than a mere flake of paper-thin wood, with a graphite-gray pencil stripe down the middle. I took a deep breath and blew the little pile of seeds out through my fingers into the canopy beyond, where they fell like fairy dust. How could something as massive and perfectly formed as this tree have grown from such a minute speck of dormant life? I dropped the cone with its remaining seeds back down inside the front of my T-shirt and relaxed into the silence around me. I felt incredibly peaceful, full of positive energy. Despite spending most of my childhood with nature, I’d never been so much inside nature as I was right then. As I swayed gently in the arms of the tree, I felt connected to the very earth itself.
A flurry of dust and debris from above brought me back to my senses. A few seconds later I heard the hollow bangs of climbing kit on timber. Matt and Paddy were wild-eyed, pumped up, and on top of the world, and I looked up at them with envy. But there was no way I would make it to the top of this tree without getting some more climbs under my belt first.
I leaned forward and walked my hands up the tree trunk as I stood up to balance on the branch. Paying out some rope, I bent my legs to jump up and grab the large limb above me. I pulled myself up with both hands, swung my left leg over, and pushed up with my forearms to get on top. Draping my left arm around another branch to steady myself, I wrapped a short climbing sling around it and clipped in. Undoing my rope, I let it fall and unravel from the branch below before pulling it up to lob it over a different branch ten feet above. I was making my way quickly up toward the middle of the tree, and I smiled to myself as I swiftly passed the highest point I’d reached three years earlier. It was a glorious late afternoon in autumn. The low sun seemed to scatter its light through a prism to set the forest ablaze. I glanced up through the backlit branches. Night was coming and I needed to be quick.
After our first climb together, Matt, Paddy, and I returned to the real world back on the ground. I never saw Matt again—I moved school and we drifted apart—but even while I was away at sixth form I’d returned to the forest as often as I could to climb trees with Paddy. The New Forest offered almost endless potential for us. You could climb five different trees a day for life and not scratch the surface. Paddy and I were partners in a never-ending quest to find the ultimate climbing tree.
I was now studying photography in London, living in Tooting. I kept my climbing skills up by messing around in the trees on Tooting Bec Common while my mates sat in the sun at the lido. But my heart was always in the New Forest, and whenever I had the cash or the time I jumped on a train at Waterloo to head back west. Southampton was the threshold for me: beyond lay the world of trees and home. The farther away from London I got, the more charged and focused I became. I loved living in London; it felt like being inside a huge organism that breathed and beat with a rhythm and zest for life that were hard to find elsewhere. But I always felt it took more from me than it ever gave back. And from the moment I returned to my Tooting digs until the moment I could jump bail again and escape to the woods, I felt as if I was running on an auxiliary power source that dwindled all too fast.
I had stepped off the train in Brockenhurst that lunchtime and cut fast through the forest on my own toward Goliath. Paddy and I had named the tree after our first climb, three years previously, and this was my first time back since. I was a pretty good climber now, but I had been saving up the return to Goliath until I was fully ready. I didn’t want anything to stop me from exploring those massive branches as I pleased, or prevent me from enjoying the epic view from the top that I’d been imagining for the past three years.
Soon I was eighty feet up, and looking down the trunk I could see the forest floor begin to deepen into shadow. But high above me I could still make out the very tip of the tree still bathed in rich autumnal light. It promised to be a clear night. The distant traffic noise had long since faded and instead I could hear tawny owls, the surrounding firs echoing with their plaintive woodwind hoots. I also caught the occasional guttural groans of rutting fallow deer. If the rain held off, the noises would probably continue through the night.
I was exactly halfway up the tree, at its very center, where the branches were biggest and where they writhed around each other. The dense canopy of foliage down the outside of the branches hid everything beyond the tree. I was cocooned inside Goliath: the perfect place to rig my hammock. Suitable anchor points were everywhere, and I even had a perfect view east over the tops of the surrounding trees where the sun would rise in the morning. I pulled up my trailing rope, the heavy bag on its end bumping and bouncing off branches below. Flipping a short nylon sling around a branch, I clipped my rucksack in and pulled out a lightweight camping hammock made of fishnet nylon. I strung it tight between two huge branches that stretched out from the tree stem into the canopy. It looked pretty flimsy and was obviously designed for use closer to the ground, but there was no reason it shouldn’t hold my weight eighty feet up. Still, I’d keep my harness on all night and sleep with the rope clipped into its anchor above, just to be safe.
I was still pretty warm from my climb, but the sun had now set and the sweat was already beginning to chill on the nape of my neck. The wind had dropped and evening shadows were crawling up the tree trunk from below as the branches above began to blur into an impenetrable tangle in the fading light.
Sitting on a branch, I removed my boots and tied the laces together. I hung them over a branch next to the hammock and tucked my trousers into my socks. Under my T-shirt I put on a thermal vest, and over it I pulled a thick sweater. My sleeping bag flopped down like an animal skin when I prized it from my bag, and it smelled as musty and damp as ever. I’d bought it third-hand from an army-surplus store five years earlier, a German Cold War design with a rubberized waterproof outer skin and warm padding inside. It even had sleeves for my arms and a double-front zip—perfect for sleeping in a hammock while remaining attached to a climbing rope. I wriggled into it and pulled up the rubberized hood, which fit snugly over the top of my woolly hat.
Now came the tricky part: getting into the hammock without capsizing. I pulled open the taut green mesh sides and wedged my bum into the gap. Swinging my legs up and over, I tucked my feet down into the net before wriggling my shoulders in to lie on my back. I clasped my hands behind my head, so my elbows could push the sides of the hammock away from my face, and lay there, gently swaying. The owls were still hooting. Darkness now filled the canopy, but as I looked out through the black silhouettes of shaggy foliage, the stars began to appear against an ultramarine sky. Cold and distant, they seemed to hang like fairy lights on the tips of the branches curling up into the heavens.
I pushed my fingers through the netting, pulled the sides of the hammock up together, and clipped a spare carabiner through them. I was now completely cocooned, like a long green caterpillar, hanging nearly a hundred feet in the air. For a moment I savored the wonder of it, but soon my exhaustion overtook me and I fell headlong into a deep sleep.
Around two or three in the morning, I awoke with a start. The ghostly memory of a tawny owl perched on the branch two feet away from my head lingered in my vision. Had I dreamt it? An owl hooted its answer from twenty feet above me, before silently floating out into the moonlit void beyond. The three-quarter moon was riding high in a clear sky. My world of branches was crisscrossed in a fine filigree of silver and black, while the forest beyond seemed draped in white satin. I could hear the distant groans of the rutting deer: the perfect autumnal night. This was it—this was the moment—the whole reason for spending a night up here. I wanted to relish and savor the experience for as long as I could, but before I knew it I had sunk back into deep sleep once again.
The next time I awoke it was morning. The sun had just risen, and its warmth was seeping out across the surrounding canopy to burnish the skin of the green seed cones hanging beside me. The tawnies were now silent, but the fallow deer bucks were at it with renewed vigor. They’d had a busy night. The distant nasal whine of a high-powered motorbike broke the spell. I could track its movements along the forest roads by the sound of its gears and acceleration. Rummaging through the bag hanging next to me, I pulled out a fat thermos of tepid baked beans for breakfast.
Swinging out of the hammock, I removed my socks and took a moment to reacquaint myself with where I was. The tip of the tree above was already bathed in light, but looking west, the tops of the surrounding oaks were still in shadow. Barefooted, I began to make my way up toward the top of Goliath and the promise of a fantastic view. The handholds and branches led me in a natural spiral as I wound higher—moving toward the summit, where tree simply stopped and sky began. The branches grew denser as I climbed. It was becoming harder to squeeze my bulk between them. And while the base of this monolithic tree measured several meters in diameter, up here its smooth trunk was now thinner than my waist. Ten feet below the top, I stopped and threaded the rope around the main stem for added strength. The brittle branches were now no thicker than my wrist, and the ground was a very long way down. I deliberately avoided looking at the view and focused on the climb until I was finally right at the top.
Wrapping my right arm around the tree as if it were the top of a ship’s mast or the neck of a friend, I pulled my rope tight, leaned back in my harness, and turned around to face the rising sun.
I shall remember that sight until the end of my days. I was 165 feet aboveground, at the top of the tallest tree anywhere in the forest, with the surrounding blanket of canopy stretching away to the horizon in every direction. To the northeast I could see the spire of a church; to the south the world seemed to end suddenly with an abruptness I realized must be the coast. The Solent, lying beneath a shimmering azure beyond. I could also see the Isle of Wight’s tall white cliffs and the chalk stacks known as the Needles rising from the sea.
To the west and a hundred feet below me lay a vast ocean of oak trees glowing gold and orange in the morning sun. Way beyond that—right at the very edge of sight—lay a thin strip of purple haze, which must have been open heath lying on the forest’s western fringe. Goliath’s immense shadow lay across the top of the surrounding trees like a huge black monolith, crushing everything beneath it.
The view was more wonderful and enticing than anything I had imagined. I had made it there at last, and looking out over the trees from my perch, high on Goliath’s shoulder, I saw that there was an entire canopy-world out there beyond the borders of this forest, just waiting for me to explore.