Around dusk, there was a drop in the wind, and coppery clouds pulled slowly overhead, their high cold bosses still struck with the light of the low sun. Then it started to snow - light flakes ticking down through the air, settling on every upturned surface. A flake fell on the dark cloth of my jacket, and melted into it, like a ghost passing through a wall.
Snow! I had loved old woods in snow for as long as I could remember. Winter woods were realms of austere beauty and tremendous adventure to me: the snow-bound chase out of which the wolves run in John Masefield’s
The Box of Delights
, the frozen forests of the Snow Queen’s Narnia, and the wildwood in the Wirral through which Sir Gawain travels on Christmas Eve, during his quest to find the Green Knight, after sleeping out on bare rock and under waterfalls. ‘A thick forest, wild and drear . . . of great hoar oaks, a hundred together, of hazel and hawthorn with their trailing boughs intertwined, and rough ragged moss spreading everywhere.’ Roger and I had once tried to work out the route Gawain would have taken through the Wirral to reach the Green Knight’s Chapel. As far as we were able to tell, he would now be able to make the whole journey by A-road in a single day, sleeping in a bed-and-breakfast if he wanted to make a weekend of it.
In a clearing, I found a big storm-felled birch, prostrate but alive. It had been blown over two or three years earlier, I guessed, from the extent of the growth since then: an ordered row of healthy branches which shot upwards from the main trunk. Flat brown semicircular fungi clustered on the trunk’s southerly flank, like embedded coins. I walked round to the root bole. As the tree had fallen, it had torn up in its roots a circular cliff of mud. The upper rim of roots had dried as hard as rock, and had turfed itself over, providing a roof of a foot or more. The snow was coming faster now. I cleared an area at the foot of the bole, cast around for fallen pine branches, and layered them so that they formed a springy mattress. Then I leaned larger boughs against the sides of the bole to provide a rough triangular porch.
I was glad of the shelter, even within the wider shelter of the forest. From inside the den, warm in my sleeping-bag, I watched the snow fall beyond the roof, more heavily and more softly, and it seemed strange that so much motion could provoke so little sound. In those minutes before sleep, I felt accommodated by the forest, and watched it move into night: the dark settling like a fur on every object, the dropping snow, the quick adroit movements of birds between trees. I thought of what Nan Shepherd, the Scottish novelist and poet, had once written of the Cairngorms: ‘No one knows the mountain completely who has not slept on it. As one slips over into sleep, the mind grows limpid; the body melts; perception alone remains. These moments of quiescent perceptiveness before sleep are among the most rewarding of the day. I am emptied of preoccupation, there is nothing between me and the earth and sky.’
To understand the wild you must first understand the wood. For civilisation, as the historian Robert Pogue Harrison writes, ‘literally cleared its space in the midst of forests’. For millennia, ‘a sylvan fringe of darkness defined the limits of its cultivation, the margins of its cities, the boundaries of its domain, but also the extravagance of its imagination’. Although the disappearance of the true wildwood occurred in the Neolithic period, before humanity began to record its own history, creation myths in almost all cultures look fabulously back to a forested earth. In the ancient Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, the quest-story which begins world literature, Gilgamesh sets out on his journey from Uruk to the Cedar Mountain, where he has been charged to slay Huwawa, the guardian of the forest. The Roman Empire also defined itself against the forests in which its capital city was first established, and out of which its founders, the wolf-suckled twins, emerged. It was the Roman Empire which would proceed to destroy the dense forests of the ancient world.
The association of the wild and the wood also runs deep in etymology. The two words are thought to have grown out of the root word
wald
and the Old Teutonic root
walthus
, meaning ‘forest’.
Walthus
entered Old English in its variant forms of ‘weald’, ‘wald’ and ‘wold’, which were used to designate both ‘a wild place’ and ‘a wooded place’, in which wild creatures - wolves, foxes, bears - survived. The wild and the wood also graft together in the Latin word
silva
, which means ‘forest’, and from which emerged the idea of ‘savage’, with all its connotations of ferality.
The wood and the wild are connected, too, because as the forest has declined, so too has the world’s wildness. Eight thousand years ago, early in the Holocene, Britain was a dominion of trees. Forest spread across it from coast to coast. The cover was not continuous: records of pollen, weather, and contemporary studies of the behaviour of colonising trees in the presence of wild herbivores, now suggest that the forest was broken and in places savannah-like, with glades and open areas of grassland present long before the first human beings arrived. But its extent was vast.
There have been many periods in the history of these islands when this wood - the deepwood, as I came to think of it during my time in the
Coille Dubh
, or the wildwood as the botanist Oliver Rackham calls it - was all. The most recent of these periods, and the wood-reign out of which humans would emerge, came in the final centuries of the last Ice Age, when the glaciers, which for thousands of years had covered all but the southern parts of the land, began their retreat.
To conceive of the history of these millennia, you have to reset the chronometers of your imagination, and to think in ice-time and in tree-time. You have to imagine the air temperature rising over years. The fall of heavy warm rain on the grey backs of the glaciers. The blue glacial prows that marked the outworks of the ice, some of them hundreds of feet high, beginning their northwards retreat. The noise of those centuries, near the frontline of the glaciers, would have been prodigious: the screams of rending ice, the roars of calving ice.
The glaciers receded. Fifty miles a century, roughly speaking - half a mile a year. They left behind them a transformed terrain: diminished hills and deepened valleys. Furling out from their snouts were blue meltwater rivers, which harrowed channels through the raw earth, and filled lakes the size of counties.
At the height of the last glacial period, the ice had been so dense and extensive that its weight depressed the land beneath it into the earth’s mantle. Think of that: it caused an entire country to sink down into the earth. Conversely, so it was that when the ice melted and its weight was lifted from the land, the bones of the earth rose - in some places by hundreds of feet. Geologists call this effect ‘isostatic rebound’. The rebound was most pronounced in the north of Britain, where the ice had been most massive; on the south coast, by way of counteraction, the coastline dipped.
As the ice melted, and the land tilted, the oceans grew. For glaciation had stored a significant proportion of the world’s water. The run-off from the melting ice across the northern hemisphere joined the oceans, raising sea-levels by nearly 400 feet in places, and transforming the map of the world. Among those transformations was the cutting, sluicing and filling of the channel between what is now England and what is now France. The ancient land-bridge of chalk, weald sands and clay was gouged over out by rivers. As the sea-levels continued to rise, the water flooded up the river valleys, ate at the hills, and eventually overran the bridge entirely. Britain was islanded: the archipelago was made.
The ice retreated up through the land - lobes, fingers, sheets, reversing irregularly, northering. The land it left behind was at first entirely barren. Bare drifts of till, comminuted rock, a glittering domain of boulders, pebbles, sand and clay, rich in metals that had been filtered and sorted by the ice’s latticework. Pools of silver water gleaming in the hollows. Sphagnum bogs thickening in the pools, and the bogs becoming stew-pots for mats of heath.
Meanwhile, on the knolls left barest by the ice, on fertile mineral soil, freshly broken by the glaciers and not yet rain-leached, the deepwood began to found itself. Dwarf forests first, of willows, birch and pine, relatively arctic trees, easily dispersed, finding shelter from the glacial winds in depressions and niches.
The wood deepened, keeping a steady distance from the ice: alders in thick stands along the river valleys, willow on the boggy ground, oak, lime, hazel, ash and hornbeam, and through it all a scrub, filling the aisles of the wood and thronging its borders.
In this way, there emerged a youthful, supple forest, new-born out of the glaciers. The blue ice gave to the green wood. Where the wood caught fire and burned, as it did at times, the energy of suns was returned to the air.
I woke in my Black Wood den early the next morning, after a long and broken night. The snow had stopped falling, and lay everywhere in voluminous drifts. It was so soft and light that nothing could move trackless upon it. It kept all marks. Even loose leaves that had dropped on to the snow had settled down into depressions of themselves. As I walked, it flattened and creaked beneath my feet. The wood’s few sounds were muffled, as though their edges had been rounded off. Where streams of meltwater ran in gulleys, little hills of snow had formed on the stones and branches and islands in the streams, around which the water ran in intricate deltas. The forestry tracks, which I came upon here and there, had been smoothed into white avenues.
Half-buried in the root bole of a fallen pine, I found a flat oblong stone, made of fine alternating strata of white and fume-blue. I worked it out from the earth, and brushed it clean of frosted mud. It fitted my palm. I closed my fingers around it and moved on, feeling it give weight to my hand. The sky was clear and pale, and the light took a cold brightness from the settled snow. I walked through the forest, heading southwards and upwards, towards the crags that rose to 2,000 feet above the trees.
I reached the south-western edge of the wood around ten o’clock, and began the climb to the summit of the crags. The snow lay ridged upon the heather stalks, and the ascent was hard and slippery. Triangular patterns of ice had formed on the peat-mud’s surface. The bigger pools had frozen in shaded concentric layers, so that they seemed charts of their own depths. There was a bite to the air, and I was glad of my wool jumper.
I reached the summit, sat on a boulder and looked down upon the white landscape. The breeze carried up bird calls from the forest below. Light flurries of snow were being blown across the hillside below me, and I could see other such flurries moving miles to the north and west. In their intervals, the sun was rich and hot, firing through blue-gold breaks in the cloud. White peaks receded to the north. Invisible to my south was Schiehallion, a peak whose form so closely resembled an isosceles pyramid that in 1774 the astronomer and mapmaker Nevil Maskelyne had made it the subject of an experiment to determine the Earth’s density.
Only the long loch remained snowless, but by reflection it too had taken on the silver-white colour of the day. On a rounded hill above the loch, patches of plantation forest had been clear-cut, so that the hill resembled a skull that had been shaved in preparation for an operation.
The human shallowing of the deepwood began around 4000 BC, with the dawn of settled agriculture. During this Neolithic period, human intervention supplanted climatic change as the chief influence on the forest’s nature. By tool, by browsing animal and where possible by fire (for relatively little of the vegetation of Britain and Ireland was flammable) , those first farmers began to drive back the forest, freeing up areas of tillable land, then hoeing and hand-ploughing the cleared ground to found pasture. During the Bronze Age, woodsmanship techniques became more sophisticated, and wood was used to make trackways across fen and bog, to create artificial islands or crannogs, to construct wattle huts and to smelt bronze, as well as for religious purposes including the erection of so-called ‘woodhenges’: formations of buried upright tree-trunks.
The deepwood has been in decline since the beginning of the Neolithic. It is thought that England reached the hinge-point of being half woodland during the second millennium BC, in the Bronze Age. The Domesday Book records the forested area of England to compose about 15 per cent of the total land surface. In the two and a half centuries that followed, an expanding population put more pressure on the forest. By 1497 - the year John Cabot sailed from Bristol to America and saw ‘closely packed, deep, dark forests standing silent and unbroken along the coasts’ - the tree cover of Britain and Ireland had largely been replaced by field, pasture, meadow, moor, heath and bog.
Trees were also required for combustion and construction. Ships and houses were to be built, and timber was needed in considerable quantities to make the charcoal used to smelt iron. ‘Before this nation . . . there were many great woods full of all sorts of wild beasts,’ observed the finely named John Manwood - an expert on forest law, and Elizabeth’s judicial officer in charge of the New Forest - in 1592, ‘but after the same came to be inhabited, the woods were, by degrees, destroyed, especially near the houses, and as the land increased in people, thus the woods and coverts were daily destroyed . . .’ So thoroughgoing was the deforestation in Scotland, that by the seventeenth century Scotland was a net importer of timber. In Ireland squirrels became extinct. Gone were the chieftain elms and the giant ashes, gone the stately pines.
It was in the twentieth century that the deepwood came to its true end. During its course, forests were depleted at unprecedented speed across the western hemisphere. In Britain and Ireland, the two wars led to almost unregulated clear-felling. Half a million acres of broadleaf forest were felled in the years 1914 to 1918 to meet war needs. Techniques of woodsmanship and forest husbandry - regular cutting, coppicing and pollarding - that had been developed over centuries lapsed from practice. In the thirty years after 1945, the ‘locust years’, nearly half of the remaining ancient semi-natural forest remained was lost to plantation, development and the plough.