It was an auspicious night to climb the mountain – more than usual, for it had become a habit, an indirect way through the domestic to and fro of evenings, a small way out of the trappings of comfort. The sun hung at the low edge of the sky, casting pink light across the valley, dusty with the beginnings of mist. Only the top of the sky was clear of it, white-blue and combed with cirrus clouds that promised a frost before too long, and as the sun sank into the pooled cloud on the other side, losing its roundness, streaked with fire, the dust or mist or whatever it was burned pink for less time than it took to reach the top of the hill.

I couldn’t find the moon at first. It was supposed to be closer to the Earth today, and to rise at the exact time the sun set, so that celestial coming and going existed, momentarily, in balance. Perhaps the mist obscured the horizon. The only thing for it was to scramble up the steep path to the plateau at the top where the sky could be seen in its entirety. I should have got there sooner.

The moon was still pink, lighter and higher than I had hoped to find it, somewhere above the Golden Valley, which laid itself across the land like a rippled blanket of woods and fields. The silence to the east of the mountain, composed of sounds too distant and too many to be heard, sat in the sky like the dust-mist, occupying it. I stood still, waiting for my heart to subside from the hard climb, watching it all, listening to the nothingness, internally saluting the moon.

The dark crept in fast. I turned to go, dropping back down the north slope. The valley rang out with a multitude of sounds, perhaps because there was more in it than up on the open hilltop, perhaps because they were acoustically magnified by its shape, or some unfelt prevailing wind – for it was still, calm, the air warm for an autumn night. Sheep and bellowing cattle and quieter human voices somewhere down below all called, one over another in layers, underscored with cars and other, unidentifiable things. Headlights crept along distant hills like glowing ants. Here, in the last light, I could see far enough to get a sense of the surface of the Earth as a single thing, its creases and folds, flats and channels, features that flowed into one another, merging in polymorphous unity.

At the side of the path, the last moths fluttered out of the long grass to find the moon. The first magic mushrooms were up, matchstick-sized and pointing to the sky as if to indicate their function. I stopped for water by a stream and watched light fade. The evening resonated with life of all kinds, and the sounds attributed to it, human and non-human, although I was no longer sure I could demarcate the boundaries now. Just as the surface of the land was shaped into its anthropocene form, with its patchwork of fields and winding lanes, the deviated rivers and clustered settlements, in a way that made it impossible to separate human intervention from nature, the sounds of nature – the farm animals and wild ponies, the sudden fluster of nightjars – lay across a bed of human sounds, the rush of larger roads like a gust of wind, or distant mountain brook, the fading babble of voices that might have been the murmur of birds.

We were of nature just as nature was of us, both made up of the same stuff, of waves or energy or whatever metaphor seemed to fit in the moment. If you’d been up on the Bluff, at the moment when I wasn’t, the moment when the sun slipped away to the north and the moon crept in to the south, a moment counterpointed in pink and red, you might have said it was all the work of God or gods, for how could you fail to see the holiness in that, whatever your inclination? Sometimes the world is framed in a way that makes its magic apparent on a gut level.

For months I had been thinking about Spinoza and pantheism, all wrapped up in his phrase ‘God, or Nature’. I suppose I thought of the Green Man as inhabiting the same idea, as a point of intersection between the supernatural and natural, and felt that to know Spinoza’s ‘God, or Nature’ better would be to know the godliness or nature of the Green Man. I had read the Ethics, page by slow page at bedtime, which was not entirely relaxing, while the moon, high and white and bright, moved across the big window to cast its light across the room, nearly but not quite enough to read by. Switching on the lamp felt transgressive.

I was all set for a grand pantheistic statement of God, immanent in Nature, but the more I read of Spinoza, the lessI saw much God in it. Spinoza’s theology, in both the Ethics and his Theological-Political Treatise, is so apophatic as to negate the idea of God existing as any kind of describable entity. It reminded me a bit of the end of The Hunting of the Snark, Lewis Carroll’s under-read masterpiece of nonsense, in which the Snark, the object of the hunt, described only in nonsensical terms and notoriously slippery and unfixable, turns out not to be a Snark after all, but something else entirely, something defined only by its ability to ‘vanish away’ all who seek it:

In the midst of the word he was trying to say

In the midst of his laughter and glee

He had softly and suddenly vanished away –

For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

Just as the Snark was the Boojum all along, Spinoza’s God was only ever supposed to be Nature, Nature given a Godly tag in order to avoid inquisition at a time when both prospect and outcome of it were scarily real. ‘God, or Nature’ was a way of removing God from a description of the way in which things work, and from a description of what those things are made of at their deepest level, a way of calling for an entirely naturalistic understanding of the world untainted by divine agency.

Spinoza, a seventeenth-century Dutch Jew, was excommunicated by the Jewish authorities at the age of twenty-three and his books subsequently banned by the Catholic Church. His atheism was no secret in his lifetime. In the Dutch translation of the Ethics, even ‘God, or Nature’ was deemed too risky in evoking fits of pious violence, and so Nature is instead simply renamed God.

It is an ingenious strategy, harnessing the notion of God as creator of all things, and the notion that one must be awestruck at the divine hand at work all around, before quietly dismantling any possibility of describing what role God actually has in any of it. Spinoza sees any fixed or dogmatic description of God as a form of idolatry: the only valid way of seeing God is as the infinite substance that makes up the world.

There are points at which it looks as though Spinoza might be talking about God in some more conventionally understood sense, or in the sense of God as abstract moral Good. But even here, the term can be accurately reduced to Nature or Existence or the Cosmos or some other analogue of being. Spinoza describes a state whereby a causal thread runs through all things propelled by the laws of Nature that may not be known in their entirety, but that are scientifically knowable.

Spinoza’s determinism is shot through with a will to life, a striving to exist that characterises all living entities, rather than the mechanistic form of determinism advocated by Descartes, and you could see this life force as the essence of Nature, for ‘striving is nothing but the essence of the thing’. It felt like much the same thing as the Nietzschean Will to Power.

In both cases, even if God was dead – which was absolutely fine as far as I was concerned, for what good did monotheism ever do us beyond perpetuating power in His image and making heretics of everyone else? – Nature was ferociously alive. If Spinoza’s ‘God, or Nature’ turned out to be Godless, it was still possessed of will, a teeming of many wills, often in conflict, sometimes in harmony, all striving away to survive. Here, on this high hill that would soon become inhospitable, wild ponies moved into close clusters as night fell and errant sheep called out to find their flock. Nightjars followed moths out of the bracken towards the moon, orange now, unreasonably large and bright, and turned and dipped to eat them. A kite circled over the edge of the forest at the bottom of the hill, waiting for something. There was nothing supernatural about any of it.

It no longer seemed as though you could call Spinoza a pantheist, for the theism bit seemed a poor fit. The pantheist interpretations of his work sprung up, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the Romantic era, when the idea of God in Nature began to seem appealing as a way of depicting Nature’s limitless magic. He was definitely onto something, though, and I remained convinced it was the same something that the image of the Green Man was concerned with.

The revival of the Green Man, the revival that I had had no hand in, for it or he had been there all along, was entirely metaphysical in the grand Romantic sense as well as the philosophical sense, of there being more going on with it than might appear at first glance. If you wanted to call this God, fair enough, but if you wanted to avoid all that you could call it something else instead. You could say that Nature had a soul, or a will, or consciousness. There were options.

The philosophical equivalent, or near-equivalent, of pantheism, panpsychism, was quietly alive in the edgelands of metaphysics and philosophy of mind, a tolerated eccentricity rather than mainstream view. In the Eastern religious traditions it had never gone away, so that in the Taoist and Buddhist and Shinto and Hindu worldview it was a given that everything in the cosmos – Nature in her broadest sense – was ensouled.

There were, and are, granular variations in the quality of the ensoulment. You could see it in crude terms, of speaking waterfalls and shamanic trees, or on an atomic level, of all matter being made of will. This last position was getting less weird. The panpsychists were creeping out of the woodwork again.

One of them had written a book, Panpsychism in the West, which I had discovered in the British Library a month or so before the floods, before the seed of the Green Man had manifested, and then bought in paperback so I could read it in the bath. There was something compelling about it, the way it demonstrated that successive waves of thinkers held the same coherent threads of thought, so that the history of ensouled nature and the extent of its dominance across all times other than our own were mapped out as neatly as it could be. It was written economically and without undue philosophical jargon. It told an alternative story of philosophical common sense.

There was also something compelling about the idea that its author was in correspondence with the Unabomber, and had edited the only existing publication of his work. My admiration for Panpsychism in the West had turned me into something of a fangirl, to the extent that, when the opportunity to interview its author arose, my voice cracked and wavered like an adolescent choirboy’s and I sounded like an idiot, skipping all my best questions out of panic. He therefore sounded hesitant, or perhaps a little bored, although it may have been the slowness of the transatlantic phone connection, but eventually we found ourselves in conversation.

He said that it was starting to become less strange to take a panpsychist view in the academy. They were a small minority, but a growing one; things were beginning to shift. Younger philosophers seemed to feel more intuitively towards it, probably because the limits to materialism were becoming more apparent.

His own particular conception of the enminded quality of the world was rooted in a story about technology that was both radical and ancient. Technology, he said, was composed, both ontologically and in language, of the Greek terms techne and logos. Logos was the cosmic mind of the ancient Greeks, techne the process by which it was constructed. It was an ordering process, a natural law in much the same way that gravity was a natural law. I suppose you could see it as a force antagonistic to entropy, creating order from disorder, elevating the low-energy state of things in the world to higher energy and more complex forms.

Techne and logos were ideas as old as Aristotle, but the logos got lost along the way, so that our understanding of technology was specifically of human construction, and otherwise unminded. And yet technology, in its techne-logos form, was there across all scales, on scales we might be unable to access in our human-centred way of looking at things, a process driving ever-higher levels of structure that fed and grew off the energy processing of human society.

He was worried about technology in a way that most philosophers weren’t – perhaps unsurprising for someone with a sympathy for Kaczynski. He was worried that we would be subsumed in its swell, and worried for the future of other life too. I asked him how far we would benefit from taking the primitivist line, handing in our creature comforts of electricity, pharmaceuticals, transport and retreating into the woods. In a way, he said, you couldn’t do anything about it – the drive to technological order was a natural law. You could fight it and oppose it and resist it. You could try to delay it and defer it for some period of time. You could try to put limits on the process. Only retrograde actions were available to us now. We were past the sustainable point. Technological society was no longer benign.

If you were going to attempt hypothetical time travel to a better era, he thought that the ancient Greeks had a decent and sustainable quality of life, and that 1300 was probably the peak time when humans had the ability to construct the components of the good life without damaging the planet.

That was the time when the image of the Green Man flourished across the English churches. In the way he seemed to be understood today, you could read it as an understanding of the balance of man and nature; those earlier, happier Green Men of the early Middle Ages often seem to have that quality.

Animism, he said, was the functioning on an intuitive level of the same points he argued on a rational level. I had been nervous asking about it, suspecting that academic philosophers needed to police their discipline and keep metaphysics pure, away from the messiness of animism and its lack of intellect.

In an environment where Western academic philosophy sometimes looked as though it were fast becoming a subdiscipline of physics, in the wake of its submission to mathematics at the turn of the last century, perhaps metaphysicians had to be extra careful to de-woo themselves lest they be associated with dreamcatchers and unicorns and other such unrespectable entities. But perhaps the voice of the Logos was there within us just as Jaynes had described in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, there like the right-brained holism of McGilchrist, often edged out and shouted down by a world of things and concrete orders, but, quietly, there.

You could find it still if you walked up mountains and along rivers, and could find it in the flow of outdoor work – all those lesser meditations that we don’t do enough. In the woods, I moved logs into piles ready to bring in for the winter, observing the growth of fungi and the holes where insects had made homes, technologising on their own scale, and I lost myself in it.

The farmer harvested the wheat in the next-door field, the tractor looping around it on its last tour of the year, and when it left I walked across it to the river, grubby and hot and after a swim. The slopes of the bank were soft and overgrown, and I clung onto a low branch to swing myself into the water, which was dark and cool. Insects skimmed the surface and weeds fluttered about beneath it. A dragonfly skimmed the insects, getting in a meal before its fortunes turned. British dragonflies can theoretically live for months, but rarely do, being killed before their time by accidents, predation or starvation – a few days of heavy rain that grounds them and their prey soon spells the end. And here, on this autumnal day, its wings beat furiously as it helicoptered in bumps and circles and strove in search of food, hanging in the balance of existence, glowing blue-green when it flew close to the ragged edges where the sun got in.

The river was small and low, but the force of the current was strong and swept me along so that going back against it was hard work. Wild swimming usually takes a few breathless minutes to become lovely – perhaps less for hardier folk. I realised, as time passed, that on this occasion the river remained inhospitable. Swimming back around the bend, hard against the flow, I thought about the word inhospitable, and how humans use it to describe non-human things: the inhospitable landscape is often the wildest and most wonderful. I thought about the shaman and how she approached the tree for permission, and thought that it was time to get out. I was persona non grata here: it was a river for river-life, not mine, and time to go.

I had a friend who changed careers every seven years on the basis that they stayed interesting for a limited time. This phase was medical: he was an A&E doctor married to an acupuncturist, but had in previous incarnations been a management consultant and a computer scientist. These various ways of seeing working life had led to ways of seeing life at work that he once wrote up drunkenly on his managerial stash of A1 flipcharts – a life in which water molecules possessed their own consciousness, a sort of hive consciousness that formed from the institution of its constituent parts, so that the individual will of each water molecule was incorporated into a new and larger will of the body of water.

Although eccentric, and the outcome of a late-night afterparty rant, this story had never seemed particularly crazy. The assumption that only humans could possess will, or mind, was, surely, more ridiculous – and there was an elegance to consistency.

Elegance was something that seemed to attract the panpsychists. They weren’t so thin on the ground: I found another one in the UK, and collared him just as he was trying to leave for Budapest. The train ride through the Marches to see him was exemplary: winding valleys, high hills, dozing stone villages, all bathed in September light.

In Liverpool, early, I wandered through the warren of streets trying to work out where we were meeting, streets that were narrow and filled with bars and clubs and odd little shops in that second-phase regeneration mode of an urban ex-wilderness. No broken glass here, no sense of doom, just clean sunny streets, mildly fashionable, slightly dull. I had hoped to get lost in them but couldn’t, or didn’t.

I found a replica human skull in a junk shop and bought it for the woods, which were rapidly becoming over-adorned with all manner of things – toy planes, princesses, plastic musical instruments – by the children, who had started to call it the Disco Shed. Perhaps the skull would reappropriate it, although to what end I no longer knew. Perhaps I could get plants to grow out through its orifices, and in so doing create a living foliate head. If only the skull were a real skull, for then it would be truly authentic, but such authenticity would be hard to come by, and no doubt more expensive than the bargain price I paid for a piece of kit aimed at students of anatomy and dentistry, whose wisdom tooth kept falling out on the street as I dangled the inverted cranium from my right hand as I walked.

When I got to the vegetarian cafe where I was meeting the panpsychist, I put the skull beneath the table, worried that it might skew the conversation unfavourably. I don’t think he saw it. We drank tea and he talked about physics, and how effective it had been as a description of how the world works, and about how all of the technological interventions made possible by it had impacted on metaphysical belief. Physics, he said, did a great job of telling us what matter does, but doesn’t tell us what it is. All we do know about matter is that at least some of it is conscious, and it is therefore simpler and more elegant to assume that it is all conscious.

He described himself as a fictionalist Christian, which meant seeing the Bible as a metaphor, rather than taking it as fact, and using the Christian tradition as a way into accessing a God he saw as something glimpsed through mystical experiences, such as the experience of ineffable beauty.

This sounded far more like pantheism than Spinoza did. He described the Spinozist view of the universe as a singular fundamental thing, a whole prior to its parts, known philosophically as priority monism. Consciousness, too, was philosophically irreducible, and couldn’t be explained otherwise; science could do neuroscience, describe networks of cells and areas aroused within the anatomy of the brain, and measure levels of neurotransmitters, but could not explain, and claimed to have no interest in, consciousness itself. You could elide priority monism with panpsychism to form cosmopsychism, which was my new favourite word. He hurried off to a last appointment, carrying a huge folded packing box under his arm, past the order and disorder of the city and the lives within it.

Talking to these two very brilliant men who wrote transparently about matters deserving a far greater audience, and who were very generous with their time, it was hard not to feel somewhat on the back foot. It felt as though talking about the structure of the world in a way that made sense outside the academy was a slightly heretical thing to do, and would alter it into something less valuable, something fluffy and childish. In our English-speaking world, philosophising was carried out by men in institutions and corrupted by stoned hippies in fields, and there was little to see in-between. Talking about the world’s other lives was an exercise in cult-like religiosity if it veered too far from human interest; digging for the underpinnings of what people think about the world was a suspect exercise too.

If I’d thought it through better, I think I would have asked them about Schopenhauer’s case for folk-metaphysics, concealed in the form of an imagined debate between two Neoplatonist philosophers, one of whom speaks here:

Schopenhauer’s other character goes on to cite the many abuses of religion as a counter-argument in favour of pure philosophy, perhaps a more accurate reflection of Schopenhauer himself, who was no fan of organised religion, and certainly not in its Judaeo-Christian form. Had Schopenhauer lived on to see the rising dogmatic faith in science and human technology as religion died, and the attempt by logic to kill off metaphysics entirely, perhaps there would be fewer value judgements to draw between philosophy and religion.

I had wanted to use the term ‘folk-metaphysics’ to describe the function I thought the Green Man had now, and in the end I didn’t dare do so in front of the real philosophers. I sensed the Green Man would go down like a lead balloon. Secretly, though, if some neo-pagans saw the whole of the cosmos as a goddess whose attributes had the characteristics of other, individual gods, I didn’t see that as wildly different to Spinoza’s godless Nature manifesting in all her many attributes. Some things were timeless, perhaps because they worked.

Back in May, I had caught the end of a talk at the philosophy festival – encouragingly named ‘Pagan Gods’ or something like it – where I lurked at the back, earpiece in, phone on silent, wondering how long I had before my absence would become an issue. Two men spoke onstage, one taking a line that veered between doom and practical responses to it, or to delaying it – reducing fossil fuel consumption, stopping fracking, encouraging regulation – and the other taking a more unfashionable position. He was advocating a new religiosity in our dealings with nature and the world, talking about how humans had to get over materialism in its dealings with life, basically – I thought – advocating animism, or pantheism, or something like it.

When the questions started, I wanted to ask him lots of things, and waited impatiently as people asked questions that were not really questions, but demonstrations of their tribal status as doom-cult members. These events tend to select for their audiences.

Just as the lull finally fell, I got called back to the office, and so months later I went to find him at his home in Oxford instead, where we drank strong coffee and walked along the canal side past hops and honeysuckle and quiet boats disrupted from time to time by freight trains and light aircraft rumbling over golden wheatfields in a way that oddly fed the sense of baseline calm. It was as though the mythological English countryside was dependent on its proximity to industrial society, a quieter man-made structure of squared-off fields and hedgerows than the concrete shapes of cities, which were only ever a few miles away, as though to remind you that this was as good as it got.

He had started out as a biologist and then as a journalist specialising in farming. He had written a fascinating book about the ingenuity of trees, and was gung-ho about using terms like ingenuity that, to most of his biological contemporaries, strayed into the heresy of anthropomorphosis – the defining of all allusion to consciousness as human-like. He thought that people needed to think more philosophically about both biology and farming; he wanted to set up a School of Enlightened Agriculture, an exercise that was dependent on reclaiming a metaphysical understanding of life.

He had allies who were Christian and Muslim theologians, geneticists and environmentalists, and had the closest understanding I had found yet of all the things I saw entangled in the Green Man. He wanted to set up a School of Perennial Wisdom too, a way of teaching those threads of metaphysics that seem to persist through time, outside of today’s silos of academic philosophy and organised religion.

In his most recent book, a refutation of the aggressive takes on Darwinism that he saw as yoked to neoliberal ideology – the bitter life-and-death competition for resources that propelled the clockwork of life – he argued for conviviality, in its etymological sense, the possibility of life alongside life, living peaceably, using its will to organise constructively. You could say, were it not for the anthropocentric pitfall of the term, that it was a humane vision of the world.

Spinoza made a similar case in his Ethics: that the institution of the State could and should be used to regulate the many wills of people in pursuit of greater harmony. He was a progressive too. All these ideas, good, workable ideas, never seem to die, but are reincarnated across time and place, and yet we never seem to be educated in them. C had a point. He invited me to be part of the School of Perennial Wisdom. I agreed. I suppose I joined his cult.

The next day, I took my car in for its MOT, and wandered about the garage yard in the bright morning sun, looking and waiting, inspecting the shells of former cars for signs of the lives that had once inhabited them with their roadmaps and thermos flasks, old horseboxes and ambulances decked out with bunk beds and curtains, an old-school booster seat that must have dated to my childhood. In the middle of it was a poured concrete ramp, and I climbed up to get more sun, standing at the top where my shadow fell across a patch of vegetation, slightly larger than life. Here were long grasses and vast docks with leaves bigger than my head, buddleia and little thickets of young mountain ash, ivy climbing an old lamppost and making its way into a nearby trailer.

A farm supply truck, consumed with rust, had a tiny, three-leaved oak seedling growing at its rear right-hand corner, leaves already turning at the edges. I felt a tenderness towards it and the likelihood of its survival that one might feel for the smallest puppy in the litter or a baby born too soon. Oaks are impressive survivors, in it for the long game, but the chances of getting a root stock through all that iron, despite the best efforts of the elements to dismantle it, looked slim.

Give it time, though, and anything was possible. Another truck, a glorious yellow Dodge twice my age, lay at the periphery of the yard with a dead tree inside its windscreen and sturdy brambles growing through the vent at the top of its bonnet, sprawling their fat fruit in a fan across its window like a harvest tableau. I climbed up a couple of dead tyres and ate my way through them, huge and firm and perfectly ripe. If the Green Man was consumed, in time, by nature, so too were van and truck and car, dismembered by rain and air and plants in less than a human lifespan.

It was time to go back to see them – the Green Men, foliate heads – whatever it was possible to call them. I went for the local triumvirate, to Abbey Dore, Kilpeck and Garway, mostly because it was easy to do but also because I liked those ones best of all.

It was good day for it: mid-September, still warm, hazy-skied, the roads quiet on a Friday afternoon. Along the roadside, cow parsley faded next to willowherb fluffed with late pollen and tall brown skeletons of hogweed. The fields were shorn to stubby gold, some still host to round bales of hay that seemed to wheel to and fro as I passed. Everywhere was hay: the lane up by the mountain was strewn with the stuff after some overambitious farmer had piled the trailer too high, and a load of it sat dumped on the bank of a ravine. The sun had shone for a week or so now, and hay had been made, and barns at roadside farms glowed with it as the last bales of the season were stashed away ready for the winter.

I wandered down to Dore Abbey, noting that the pink flowers on the next-door garden wall had faded, so that only one remained, noting the quiet in the air, the way the birds seemed to sing sedately. I did not really know why I was there, and just walked in, finding it empty, and seeing for the first time the height of the ceiling and the colour of the walls, and the signs requesting donations to keep it – I did not know what the donation would keep it from. Falling down, perhaps, or becoming deconsecrated and sold off? I noticed how the transept at the back where the Green Man lay was strewn with other fallen stones, and wondered whether they fell or were removed. Next to the Green Man was a woman of the same size, serene and lovely, an ideal consort, and many other bits of ornamentation and idolatry, all broken.

The reasoning behind Dore Abbey’s demise was pragmatic rather than puritanical, with the abbey dismantled and its stone sold after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Somehow, the ornamentation was saved, perhaps because it was not useful as a building material, perhaps because some inner sense or superstition prevented the images from being used in desecrated form.

When I touched the Green Man, ochre pigment came off on my hand, a pigment that dated to before Henry VIII and perhaps long before him, a remnant of the colour that lit up the Cistercian abbey in its original form. The Cistercians were renowned for their brightly painted monasteries. They also consecrated work and saw it as holy endeavour, breeding sheep at Abbey Dore to create the finest woollen cloth for export to Italy. When the Norman Conquest opened up passage across England and Wales, they sought out unobtrusive places to establish monasteries, places where an agricultural business could be run to sustain monastic life. God was in work, and the work of the land, the growing and making of things. It seemed pretty appropriate for an order whose spiritual practice lay in cultivation to have an emblem of man and plant overseeing the holy work, a smiling emblem, the golden colour of the harvest.

In the field behind the abbey, bounded by the low, slow Dore, ancient bits of farming equipment – harrows, ploughs: vast, rusting, useless things – lay in the long grass. A footpath crossed the river, fenced with uncharacteristic enthusiasm on the other side. Something in the woods above caught my eye: the red doors of an Underground train. I followed the path but couldn’t escape it, and made my way back to the car. I drove a little further down the road to a layby where, if I clambered onto the car roof, I could see the train in its entirety, along the hillside, deep in the woods. I inspected the map.

The area to the west of Abbey Dore and north of Ewyas Harold was marked out with masts and had no footpaths crossing it. I remembered driving down the A465 at night and seeing the huge, bright masts lit up like an alien colony, and remembered the shadow of something S had once said when we driving down to Garway about a weird military base there where they mocked up terrorist situations and nuclear war and, probably, alien invasions too. Perhaps I should have brought her with me again for guidance: it felt as though she knew these places in a way I only glimpsed.

S’s theory was that places with the greatest beauty, the places whose psychogeography drew people to them, the places whose energy, if you wanted to enter feng shui-type paradigms, was strongest, were a threat to imposed order. They offered a nourishment beyond material things, a nourishment that could be neither bought nor sold. They had a dissidence about them.

There seemed to be a pattern, she said, at least in Herefordshire, a county unusually rich in places of ancient spiritual significance, of building big, bleak, soul-destroying things beside the beautiful places, as though to make a stamp of authority upon them. You could think of loads of examples if you put your mind to it – the huge satellite observation station along Watkins’s first ley down the Golden Valley, or the way Llantwit Major, the site of St Illtyd’s first Welsh monastery, got turned into an RAF dormitory town. Maybe the MOD had a ley-only building policy. Maybe you could make anti-leys from lines of missile storage facilities or out-of-town business parks if you put your mind to it.

I drove down the lane at the end of the housing estate at the edge of Ewyas Harold, past the man in dark glasses standing still on the pavement carrying a black carrier bag, past the end of the speed limit to where the fences began. High, steel fences on both sides, and behind them tall trees – leylandii or something like it, dense and tall and perfectly uniform, blocking all view of what lay behind them. There was a gap to get to the staff car park, but only cars and a Nissen hut and a sign stating MOD property were visible before the high trees resumed. A man in a fluorescent jacket walked, or patrolled, the lane with a big dog. I passed a mast, an enormous thing with a big head made of arcs of steel, indescribable from memory – there was no way I was stopping to get a closer look, or take a photo, for I had the sense that it would be noticed, and would not go down well. Further along, two high gates were blacked out in polythene, like giant barbed-wire bin liners, labelled GATE 5. I could only speculate. On the right, a farm piled high with hay and sleepy cows materialised. It was the end of the road. Just beyond the T-junction, a black car waited with a man in it, also in dark glasses, who may or may not have been a farmer.

The lane to Wormelow was marked out with gold-edged oaks, fields sleepy with cows, the whole place in a hazy slumber. It was reality as nostalgia, a corner of England little altered over centuries, dozing next to the strange and secretive technologies of power. It would all change in time: the human tracks of roads and cables would grow or move or be overcome by some other trace of life. It was as though techne, the cosmic drive to greater order, would change this last bit of land into some other form eventually, yoking it into some new and unimaginable power, human or not.

On to Kilpeck, where sheep grazed the castle mound and nestled in the crook of the ruins, one of which I climbed in a vain attempt to get a better view of the masts. The ruins of a Norman motte-and-bailey castle, once the edifice of a new and technologised military force, now crumbled into land again. The Normans conquered England and made their marks on Archenfield, but beneath it all along were other ways and lives, lives that, unsubsumed, flourished in the edges and the woods. No power was omnipotent, even in its own time, for even suppressed things seethe beneath the surface, and rise and bring about falls and revolutions. Change, as Heraclitus never really said, is the only constant.

Past the holly and the hawthorn, hung with berries, past the yew, its deadly fruit and ivy-covered base, past the twisty oak whose leaves were gold and going. The Green Man above the door did not stand out to me now, but existed within the interconnected Celtic knot of creatures that formed the doorway in their interconnected lives. Life – being tied into the knotty continuity of it – was his function, taking part in the grand bestiary of existence.

At Garway, where, for the first time, I took the correct road without getting lost, smoke rose from a woodburner somewhere and the sides of the lane to the church were thickly garlanded with blackberries and haws. I didn’t know what to think about Baphomet, so I climbed onto a chair with a cross-stitched Silver Jubilee cushion on it and embraced him, hoping for a sacral rush of magick, which never came. My small act of cushion-desecration seemed trivial in the grand scheme of things, given all the bad PR endured by both Horned Beast and swastika in the religio-fascist Common Era.

The woman, and I am certain it was a woman, who painstakingly cross-stitched the cushion would no doubt have been horrified at the defilement of her pure intent, but what of the intent of the stonecarvers whose own spiritual intent, unknowable now, had been relegated to heresy for centuries? If I’d been more organised I could have done a proper Crowley sex rite, but I wasn’t in the mood, and needed to get back and take the washing in before it got dark.

At home, the vines hung heavy with grapes I hadn’t picked and hop bines brushed the washing line. I took the laundry down and folded it, sitting on the edge of the path at the top of the garden as the bats swooped at mosquitoes in the dusk. I went inside, where I found an email waiting.

In the spirit of research, I had put a message out to The Company of the Green Man, an organisation that brought together Green Man enthusiasts of all kinds. Here was a reply:

In the end, it turned out that the cult of the Green Man had meant exactly what I had hoped it would. It had needed no further intervention. It had been there all along, hidden at the edges, doing its own thing, like a wild man of the woods.

And in the woods, at the end of the woods, I found my father, who found new reasons to be there: investigating the drainage of the ditch beside the embankment, examining the trees, clearing old bits of brush. I wasn’t sure that there was any need for him to rationalise it. In the woods, as the nights drew in, my son would insist on lighting bonfires at the end and gather around them, alone or with other small boys, moving between the shadows of the trees in search of sticks and climbing onto log-piles to see the newly risen moon. It was often difficult to convince them to come back across the road into civilisation.