Nine

The Drowned Wood and the Boat with a Wood in its Heart

I’m walking through a wood and it’s slowly filling up with water. It must be spring or autumn as light falls through the tree canopy. I’m paddling through clouds and at the same time I can see stones and gravel, plant life, tree roots. I can’t tell from which direction the water is coming. And is it the sea or the river? It’s a dream sequence, and it isn’t.

* * *

I was walking with a friend and our dogs. We’d heard good things about Roudsea Woods, but we hadn’t known this. We parked by the Haverthwaite Road and walked in with the River Leven at our side. It flowed deep and dark and fast that day. I remember thinking that the dogs wouldn’t stand a chance if we threw sticks in for them to fetch, and I was extra wary as this had happened to my dog Molly, and in a small field stream at that. I’d plunged in after her. I was alone, and feelings of surprise and shock and stupidity followed as soon as I’d waded in and felt the strength of the flow against my legs, nearly knocking me off my feet. By the time I’d sorted myself out she was free, having been swept across to the far bank where she clambered out and shook herself dry. Then I’d had to squelch home through the middle of town.

There must have been rain, and plenty of it, and now all the rain that had fallen on the fells around Windermere was draining out, travelling furiously back along the Leven, which cuts a short, narrow channel given the 18 miles of lake that it drains from. After this point the river kicks north for a final, tightly curving loop before turning again and pouring out into the bay.

Minutes after entering the wood, we saw that water had begun to encroach and was filling the ground, finding hollows and drowning the bases of the oaks, ashes, hawthorns, hollies, beeches, buckthorns, hazels and yew. We were walking on a well-made path but our feet were sloshing along and I remember that we were incredulous. We walked further and the depth of water grew steadily around us. There came a point when we realised that soon the dogs would be swimming and neither of us relished the wet Wellington boot effect either, so we turned and paddled a retreat. We hadn’t known it then but given certain conditions Roudsea floods with a mix of river and seawater. Given a combination of the highest spring tides, significant rainfall in the Windermere catchment and south-westerly gales in the Irish Sea, you might find yourself stranded, forced onto higher ground and waiting hours for the road to open again.

* * *

I went to Roudsea again recently to have another look, to see what I remembered and to find out what it’s like now. My pals Brian and Astrid were voluntary wardens. We met in the car park at the edge of the wood. There’d been a high tide and parts of the road had clearly been inundated. I mentioned my first visit and Astrid responded by showing me film she’d taken on her phone of the river pouring like a waterfall, filling drainage channels and spreading out over the metalled road and onto the dip at the bottom of the car park, cutting off the only road out. On that day they had been stranded, but happily so. They had planned for it, and with the car to sit in and keep warm they’d watched the levels rise and inundate the woods and then waited until the levels fell again.

We circumnavigated the wood and it seemed familiar, as if I recognised the direction of the path from years ago. Now though, much of the path is boardwalk over the mossy, boggy sections. The path looped and dived back inside the wood and soon enough I began to feel disorientated.

At the side of the path deep in the wood we passed a small group of stone huts. They were either well built, or had been restored. The woods had clearly been used for coppicing to supply the local charcoal industry. In a coppice plantation the trees are regularly chopped down almost to their stumps to promote many new stems shooting up. Once the trunks reach a certain size they’re cut and used as fast-burning fuel in the charcoal burner pitsteads. The spin-off activity of bark-peeling was carried out by family groups who came during the summer months and stayed for periods of time. The bark was sold to tanneries and used in leather production. As well as the traditional conical charcoal-burning pitsteads, there were also similar-shaped huts, but these were intended to be more comfortable, complete with fireplaces, a place to be dry and warm in the British summer, and as Brian said, the women needed their home comforts. In the 19th century the workforce was supplemented by the poor of the parish, widows or orphans and foundlings sent into the woods by local landowners to cut and burn bracken. The resulting lye was caustic, and one can only wonder what the process did to their lungs and eyes.

Many of the animals, plants and insects found in the woods here are rare elsewhere. The tiny hazel dormouse, so rarely seen, is on its north-west limit in Europe here on the fringe of Morecambe Bay. Much of the coppicing activity that still takes place at Roudsea is to support the survival of this tiny creature. I’d seen one only once, on a walk at Allen Banks in Northumberland, a favourite weekend walk during my years in Newcastle; it helped to restore me after a week of working in inner city housing estates. There’d been a family – grandparents with two small children – crouching down and looking intently into the grass at the side of the higher path above the River Allen. The man invited me to come and have a look, and there, apparently oblivious to our giant, looming faces, a dormouse was working, weaving a nest out of short staples of dry grass in the heart of a clump of long green grass. When eventually it was satisfied, it curled up and fell asleep whilst we uttered soft oohs and ahhs.

There are otters and brown hares at Roudsea. Nightjars, hawfinches, sparrowhawks, woodcocks and marsh tits too. And a moth – the rosy marsh moth – long presumed extinct but found again here in 2005. On warm spring evenings its caterpillar feeds on the leaves and buds of bog myrtle. There’s a particular spider too, the raft spider, capable of killing small fish and even fully grown dragonflies.

We walked close to a pylon where a nest platform for ospreys had been built. A pair had come in two years ago and tried to breed, but the nest platform was destroyed by high winds. Undefeated, they came back this year and raised two chicks – another successful pair for Cumbria.

We seemed to walk for hours on paths or boardwalk that led over and under and around the mosses, or raised hills, rocky ground and even passing caves. I’d begun to think I’d never see the bay again. Maybe Roudsea did work a kind of magic; I wouldn’t be surprised. Overhead the sky was turning orange. These clear winter afternoons, when the days are short, produce such dramatic skies towards the end of daylight. At last we came to the edge of the bay and walked out of the woods onto a grassy, sodden margin. The tide hadn’t been high enough to encroach into the wood, but it had clearly covered the marshy fringes. With the tide recently ebbed, the muddy edges of the bay were wet, glistening, speaking. We stood in the middle of a small bay looking south over the sands. The light was changing, deepening to pinks and reds. There the viaduct dissecting the Greenodd estuary was a dark line against the rosy sands and their illuminated, sky-reflecting channels.

I walked onto the mud, just a couple of feet or so, and that was far enough; the stuff was so wet and soft that my boots began to sink almost immediately. I followed a line of indecipherable tracks leading out onto the mud, but they came to an abrupt end; something here had taken flight. Shelducks gathered on the side of a channel. Across at Greenodd, traffic moved at speed along the road where it passes beside the coast. The number of times I’d driven along there, never thinking that just across the inlet was this beautiful, secluded bay, and this wood, and dormice making nests, spiders eating fish and ospreys making new lives.

* * *

There’s something unsettling about finding horses, and large ones especially, in a field with a footpath running through it. We stood at the gate eyeing each other up, the two horses, me and Steve. They seemed OK. They liked having their noses rubbed and I guess they were hoping for the bribe of a carrot or a mint – neither of which we had. Fifty yards on and there was the stile leading out of their field: the Cumbria Coastal Way following the flood embankment to Foulshaw. After my visit to Foulshaw on that perishing cold spring day, I wanted to walk along the embankment to join the dots, but now it looked as if we might not be able to get through. I looked around to see if anyone had spotted us and might offer some reassuring words. There was a solitary cottage behind us. We’d walked past it and seen a pair of ginger cats sitting on top of a wheelie bin, and a car on the gravel, but no other sign of life except a bright pink sheet on the washing line.

We figured the horses must be alright so eventually I opened the gate and moved through, closely followed by the dog. As soon as we did, the horses started tossing their heads and moved towards me. In her usual state of panic with the unfamiliar, Milly ran circles round my legs. The horses put their heads down to inspect the dog; she really wasn’t doing us any favours. With the horses four times my size, I thought better of it and retreated again, beaten.

We retraced our steps back along the footpath towards the unnatural and unrelenting mechanical drone of the pumping station that drains the farmland of Ulpha. Beyond it the main drain ran straight out to the bay, carrying away water from the fields. To the seaward side of it, pools of seawater remained, probably left behind by a recent high tide that had inundated the fields. A heron took off from the channel and further along a cormorant on the steep banking held its wings out to dry.

At Ulpha, at the very edge of the bay, there’s a wood on a craggy knoll named, appropriately enough, Crag Wood. We went into the wood through a gate, hoping for another route towards the banking. A sign on the gate read, ‘The Woodland Trust – Welcome’. We felt better already.

It had been a strange autumn. Plenty of rain, cloud layers blocking out the sun most days, and no frost to speak of yet. The trees seemed to have taken on the mood by turning as one in a sudden shift from green to uniform brown. There’d been none of the fiery and dramatic deep reds or golden yellows of most years.

We walked into the wood through leaf litter up to our ankles, noticing the same phenomenon here of the leaves yet to fall being a uniform dull brown. There was a sense of the primordial about the place though; it felt untouched, unmanaged. Fallen trees remained toppled, leaning, caught on neighbouring branches or crashed and broken on mossy rocky outcrops. I guessed that this showed the unbroken strength of the wind here as well as the age of the trees. But more too, the importance of new environments made from old, of fungal spores radiating out along dying timber, colonising and creating life. Beetled bark undermined, peeling, dying, and giving nutrients for insects that depend on dead or decaying wood for part of their life cycle. I’d read that around 13% of animals and plants in the UK depend on deadwood habitats. There were the usual broad-leafed woodland trees: mostly oak, some beeches, birches of course, as well as holly, with gorse at the fenced limits.

A few minutes’ walk through the wood and we came to the edge of the bay and a wooden bench. What a place to sit and be, with the wood to your back and the bay in front. A curlew lifted from the edge of a channel close by and took to the air, warbling its alarm call. Further out on the bay another curlew lifted and together they moved laconically towards a more distant channel. Small cliffs gave way to the sands, and rocks were jumbled below at the sea-edge. Oak trees grew out from the cliff top, holding their limbs over the sands, and the bases of their trunks grew more horizontally, tight to the ground as if ballast for the weight carried above. Their roots were partially grounded and partly clinging, exposed, to the crag itself. Many of the branches that cantilevered out over the sands had become broken, or rather had been torn off; life here was hard.

The muddy sediments of the bay were wet right up to the edge of the land, though the water in the channel seemed to move in two directions at once. We watched a while, taking bets on whether the tide ebbed or flowed and then, with the result unproven, we wandered on. At the far side of the wood we found a straightforward way over a stile and through to the footpath. We’d come at just the right time; much earlier and the way ahead would have been blocked by the sea. Large puddles remained in the grass where the tide had been. I negotiated my way around a wide pool then I was on open land again. There was the field and the horses, their backs turned towards us and the bay.

Steve began throwing sticks for the dog into the edge of the tide. She was doing that collie crouch, with eyes fixed on the stick, and within minutes of chasing she was filthy. We walked on towards Foulshaw, the land here a mixture of fields for cattle and stands of scrubby willow. Walking on the top of the bank, our view was expansive. In the middle distance the characteristic pale surface of Foulshaw Moss, beyond it the great stone bluff of Whitbarrow. Although it was only just after two-thirty, the sun was lowering over the bay, colouring the newly exposed mudflats yellows and oranges and greys. Huge shafts and bands of sunlight fell onto the retreating sea and were reflected back again. Milly wanted to be in the water but it was too far out now; we threw the stick onto the very rim of the bay and into puddles of water to wash her clean again. She bounded on up to where the path passed between stands of gorse.

Water wicked down into the oozing mudflats. A heron took flight from its position underneath Crag Wood and drifted out towards the railway viaduct where it crosses the bay from Arnside to Grange. Light seeped underneath the supporting pillars. I heard a train in the distance, and as we turned for home, it came rattling over the bay, sunlight from the far side illuminating each window as it passed above the sea.

* * *

On our way back through the trees I saw something through a screen of low-growing holly, something lying in the field next to the boundary of the wood. I scrambled out of the wood, making my way down a twisting path into the field. An oystercatcher took off from rocks below. Working its pied wings furiously, it jinked away along the coast.

I walked towards the remains of what seemed a large fishing boat. Each of its two decks were split wide open, its diaghram a mass of broken and split timbers. It was as if it’d been attacked by some mythical-sized beast and had its innards pulled out. The boat must have been in the field for years, quietly imploding in on itself. I wondered how and by what means it had come here. It was close enough to the bay, only a matter of yards, to have been floated up on a high tide and it was evidently old, though I doubted it’d been abandoned in the times when the bay was still navigable.

Milly raced on and began sniffing the ground around the timbers. I passed a raft of detritus spread on the ground, oil drums rusted to the colour of red earth, concrete blocks, sheets of corrugated iron and wooden fences subsumed by the grass. Trees, especially the birches, had started to colonise the field and willow was growing in the damper earth. Briar stems wrapped themselves around the piles of stuff and there were rosehips, lush and red and out of place.

Someone had placed a rough wooden structure up against the boat as if for a gangway, though I couldn’t imagine the timbers were able to take any kind of weight at all. The gunwales had all but disappeared so the hull timbers protruded like ribs from a carcass. The wheel-house had gone completely, assuming there had been one, and the remains of what looked like a broad mast poked up, sawn off and level with the fore-deck. In the middle of its shattered deck, a section of keel had burst through like a knife in the boat’s back. There was something wretched about a boat this size, lying broken-backed, abandoned and burdened by land. It seemed an ignoble end.

The hull was a grimy Indian red colour and a dividing band of white paint described the boat’s circumference. Above this it had been painted a bright turquoise-blue, though this only increased the sense of poignancy I felt; that someone had chosen this optimistic shade for their boat… and now look. Further round still and the planking of its hull was springing open as though the strain of resting at this angle was too much to maintain. There were areas of the hull where the paint was even more distressed; it had become fractal, cracked and the edges of it were lifting. It was as if a bloom of green lichen was spreading, colonising, not fading and disappearing. Timbers from the boat lay scattered on the ground, wood that had been steamed and pressed into shape, manipulated with skill and attention to detail. I thought again of an animal carcass, the remains left behind once the scavengers had had their fill.

But there was something else too. As I came round to face what remained of the deck, I saw again what I’d failed to fully take in. Growing from the heart of the boat, the place where great rents and clefts were filled with broken timbers, a grove of trees had taken root. Six birches, that great coloniser, their slender white trunks growing tall and straight up out of the wreckage. It brought to mind the Spanish galleon found preserved, or petrified, in the swamped forest of Gabriel García Márquez’s great novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. This was an image that had stayed with me since I’d read the book years ago, the galleon found during an expedition to connect the community and their village to the wider world. For the central character, José Arcadio Buendía, the galleon was a symbol of the sea being close by, yet it was never found. The party returned to their community, defeated. Here at the edge of Morecambe Bay was as great a mystery: the finding of a boat in a field with a wood growing from out of its heart.

In the tops of the birch trees and held at their very tips, a small constellation of remaining green and gold leaves, pinned into place and just on the turn. Later I thought of the world turning slowly on cold, clear winter nights underneath the Plough, Orion’s Belt and the Pole Star, witnessing and guiding the boat to its ultimate end; the long, slow journey back into the earth.