Lost in the woods.

Wood; a porous, fibrous material used as a structural material by trees and other plants. It is composite of cellulose fibres embedded in a matrix of lignin. The result is a material that is strong in tension and resists compression. Each growth ring marks a year and records the climatic conditions it withstood.  It was in the branches of trees that long ago a certain species of primate evolved. In the canopy we found edible leaves and fruits and shelter. When as a species we climbed down from these protective primeval branches, with our tool making opposing thumbs, it was to wood we first turned to build the world to our liking. It is our first choice as a building material whether for houses, boats or constructing furniture.  It has been utilised to make weapons probably since the very first hominid picked up a stick to fend off a predator.

Of course as we have evolved and “progressed” we have sought other materials; ores from the ground, stone and synthetic products. Yet, despite this veneer of sophistry we still harbour a love and yearning for wooden items, marveling at its beauty and intricate graining. Indeed as infants we are bedded down in wooden cots and when we pass from this life we are returned to the ground; naturally in a wooden box. Around churches and graveyards can be found Yew trees; a long living tree that connects us with our long gone forebears. So the need for trees is physical, emotional and spiritual.

And in woods and forests, there we find a satisfaction for this need. A meme doing the rounds recently declared that “nature is my church and forests are my cathedrals”. I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. At college I studied Biology and Environmental Science; I know that forests are important as ecological reservoirs, that a rotting stump is a home for a myriad of tiny insects from which all other lives depend in a huge interdependent network. Yes this is a good enough reason to love woods and forests as well as the fact that they produce oxygen and filter carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to fix it as wood. But there is more.

There is magic in the world. Did you think it was a myth, a mere faerie tale perhaps? When I say magic I don’t mean a card trick or an illusion of smoke and mirrors. No, I mean that which we would call the fantastic; that which we would call otherworldly. It’s all a question if where to find it… the rest is down to the perception of the individual I suppose, but personally I know there is something phantasmagorical about forests.

Have you ever heard the term “Being pixie led”? It means that an individual becomes lost in familiar surroundings. The myth is that it is the “little folk”, those mischievous denizens of wild places, which are playing a trick on you. According to folklore the spell is easily broken; you take your coat off and put it on inside out, close your eyes and turn around three times widdershins (counter clockwise). Why this should placate them I do not know. It’s just nonsense right? Especially where I grew up; it is just the cider addled ramblings of ignorant yokels, and yet… let me tell you a true tale.

Growing up on the Blackdown Hills on the Somerset/Devon border, the fields about were interspersed with woods of beech and oak, while the steepest hillsides were wild with bracken, gorse and heather. Many were the hours I spent wandering those places, eager to see all that I could and just revelling in the wildness of it all. I've had tame crows hop on my shoulder and had badger cubs playing around my legs but these things aren't strange as such, although they are precious memories.

What was strange was one day walking through the woods on my way home. The skies were grey and threatening rain. I was walking down a familiar track, one I had traversed countless times before when it abruptly disappeared in a tangle of brush and bramble. I looked behind me thinking to retrace my steps, perhaps I had daydreamed myself into taking a wrong turn? But no, the path I had just walked was gone as well. I knew where I was but was unable to get to where I wanted to be! Then I recalled the spell, what did I have to lose? I chuckled to myself as I took off my denim jacket and put it on inside out, shut my eyes tight and turned three times counter clockwise.  I opened my eyes and there was the path straight in front of me. I looked at my feet and could see my prints in the mud where I had spun and their trail leading to where I had been forced to abruptly stop. I laughed again, but a little nervously this time, but also in wonder as I hurried out of the woods and headed home. It was a lesson learned that made me love the woods all the more and I got extremely protective of trees.

Over the years of course I began to think logically as life settled into the monotony of work and I began to forget the whole episode. Besides I was a teen then and teenage brains are wired differently. I probably just strayed from the path, that was all, and when I closed my eyes and turned I just saw the path again, but from a different angle, yes that was all it was. God, what was I like back then? Completely away with the faeries unlike now…

Last year I took my son for an afternoon’s hike in my favourite woods, the same woods I spent so many happy hours in. I thought it would be nice, just the two of us. It meant dragging him from his Nintendo DS however, much to his disgust. I hadn't been in these woods for years but I remembered the general layout of its tracks. The trees are taller now of course but I knew where we were. I knew that I wanted to avoid a particularly dense patch of dark conifers.  I remembered having to crawl underneath the branches and having my face and arms scratched by draping brambles. Yet try as we might every path we took drew us inexorably into the very place I wished to avoid. Soon I was doubled up and my lad was complaining about the brambles and the path threatened to disappear. It was then that I remembered an event from my youth. My son looked at me incredulously as I told him what had happened to me many years before, but what did we have to lose?  Besides there was “no-one“  who could see us perform our ritual, so his pre-teen coolness wasn't threatened (no human anyway!). He shook his head as he took off his fleece and put it on inside out. We spun widdershins. As before there was the path, unobscured clearly leading out of the conifer stand. We hurried along it, my son not ridiculing his silly dad this time and looking warily up at the trees now, fully expecting to see mischievous, and laughing elves!

The path led us to more open forest of mature trees. I knew where we were again; we should be coming to the stile and the way out of the woods. The topography was helping us too. All we had to do was follow the slope and… oh, a fallen tree is barring the way. No matter we can just go around it and… our feet threatened to sink into a marsh and then my son pointed out that I had not turned my tee shirt inside out. I smiled at my son’s new found sense of magic and promptly did as he urged. Once more we both thrice span widdershins and opened our eyes. The spell broken, there was the path leading directly to the stile not twenty yards away and clearly visible now, where it hadn't been before.

So go into the woods and feel the magic, tread softly and speak in hushed tones, because you may not actually be alone, but fear not; if you get pixie led, it’s just a game the little folk like to play and you know how to overcome it now, don’t you?

Another Woodland Tale.

We are a noisy species, we humans. I suppose it is because using sound is our chief form of communication. I can frame my thoughts into words and speak them to you. You hear these sounds and instead of hearing grunts and growls you discern information from my mammalian chatter. Most amazing of course is our ability to draw sounds on the page; sounds with meaning, sounds with names. You’re making sounds through your eyes right now. As you read this, a voice you hear every day is silently speaking. Try SHOUTING, go on, give it a GO. Was that louder in your head? Yet beyond the confines of the personal word within your skull, nothing was heard. Of course this is assuming that you follow the modern trend of reading quietly. Believe it or not, this only became the norm in the Middle Ages; Monastic libraries and scriptoriums must have been quite noisy places. You see watching QI does have its uses…

Interact with other species and you have to employ different forms of communication. My dog can understand a few words, his name, sit, walkies etc. But his main form of communication is smell. Messages are written and left for other dogs to read using urine.  Not having the olfactory skills (or indeed the stomach) to read his lamp-postings (see what I did there?), he talks to me with certain barks, the tilt of his ears and the look in his eyes. Yes, he really can speak to me through his eyes. Eyes are the window to the soul, or so they say, and therefore two souls can understand each other, even if they’ve never met, through their organs of sight. I have no empirical evidence for this of course, only experience...

I was in my late teens, yet again escaping into the woods seeking solitude, and wondering what I would see. This time, hearing the occasional blast of shotguns in the distance, I had climbed the slopes above our house and was in the belt of woodland between our neighbouring farm’s fields and the Steep heathlands of Bracken, Heather and Gorse that rise to the summits of the Blackdowns. I knew these woods well, had followed the hedgerow edges, the tree covered curves and promontories, knew where the big oaks and beech avenues were, the high boggy woods and the old stone pits. These were where people had once excavated stone for buildings. Now consumed, by the wild wood, they were steep sided and thicketed; not a place to stumble into, especially in the dark, but that's another story...

However on this day it was bright and sunny, during the college summer holidays, if I recall correctly. I let my feet lead me. I came to the edge of the woods – a hedge of Beech trees and a ditch carved into the red earth and rock by winter rains. It was very deep and difficult to get out of. Jumping across the ditch I followed the curve of the slope. I liked to walk the woods as quietly as I could, still do in fact, although my children who accompany me these days tend to underline my “humans are a noisy species” statement.

I slipped between branches, walked on the balls of my feet, trod as lightly as possible, as I practised my woodcraft of avoiding the snapping of twigs and a tell-tale trail showing my passage. I climbed up through a stand of Ash trees, avoiding the brambles that hung down from the lower branches; I endeavoured not to crush the thick waxy leaves of the wild Garlic now past their flowering, likewise the drooping foliage of the blue bells, their glory spent. Atop the mini summit I looked back through the light dabbling canopy, now at eye line, to see glimpses of the fields and the grazing cattle below. I heard a rustling behind me. I turned and saw her.

She came to a sudden stop, bursting through the undergrowth, four feet in front of me. Her eyes were fearful, her dark nose glistened, and her red flanks rose and fell quickly showing she had been travelling at speed. She, of course, was a Roe Deer.

We both froze, her ears twitched. We both held each other’s gaze, unblinking. I stared in wonder and I saw her fear dissipate in her eyes; I stood on two legs, yet I was not a threat to her. She knew, she saw it in my eyes. The spell was broken when we heard human voices through the timber to the right, behind her. Her ears suddenly quickly twitched back and forth, as did the flesh on her legs, her instinct to run returning. Still holding each other’s gaze, I understood her need to escape and blinked to give her answer, releasing her eyes.  Her head turned, and with a near silent bound, she disappeared into the woods to my left. I was left smiling but my smile disappeared when I heard the voices through the trees again. I had come into the woods seeking solitude and these interlopers had broken it. I don’t know why, but something inside me told me to avoid meeting whoever the voices belonged to. They were noisy and lacking in fieldcraft, or so it seemed…

I followed the deer’s path eastward a short distance and then, hearing voices behind me, struck south, up the slopes to the edge of the heathland, abandoning stealth for speed. On the edge, between wood and moor, I ran as lightly through the chest high bracken as possible, doubling back westward until I reached a long abandoned and overgrown hedge that ran up the slopes to the summit of the hills. I relaxed, on the far side of it; once  more I was alone. I looked back the way I had come and then I saw them.

Two men, both dressed in cammo. In their arms they carried broken shotguns. They were following my path through the bracken. It was then that I realised that they had been hunting the deer and had picked up my trail; following the sound of my passage through the woods and my carving of a path through the virginal bracken. Hunting deer with shotguns though? That was plain wrong.
I remembered when, two months before, the neighbouring farmer and I had gone shooting rabbits for the pot, on the edge of these same woods. We had failed in our expedition but we had come across a recently deceased deer. It had suffered terribly before it had died; its skin and flesh blasted and torn on its flank. My companion had shaken his head and muttered angrily. “Shooting a deer with a shotgun? You should use a rifle.” He had said, patting the 0.22 in his hand. “Using a shotgun on such a beast, it’s so wrong. It won’t kill ‘em outright, not unless you’re feet away. This poor bugger probably ran for miles until the shock of her wounds killed her. What a waste and a shame.”

I wondered if these hunters were the self-same culprits. Well then, I’d lead them a merry dance. Nothing on two legs knew these woods like me.

Uphill and downhill they followed me; through the deepest thickets, through the boggiest parts of the woods. You needed to know where to put your feet and which rotting logs could take your weight; otherwise you could all too easily sink into the treacherous stinking mud, in which the birches struggled to grow in without drowning.

I tired of the game eventually and headed for home through the fields, running doubled up, keeping low behind the thick hedgerows. I looked behind me, but of the hunters there was no sign, they hadn’t left the woods. I hope they enjoyed the hunt as much as I had. That ditch carved by the winter rains WAS awful deep… ;)