Читать книгу Woodsman - Ben Law - Страница 11

Glorious day. I awoke to shafts of sunlight across my face and after a good stretch and a couple of cups of tea, I headed down to the pond for a swim. I slid in off the platform and as always was shocked by the icy-cool, spring-fed water. I had been treading water for a couple of minutes when a shape caught my attention. Turning towards it, I had the strange sensation of observing a grass snake swimming past me, just a couple of feet away and right in my line of sight. Its agility in the water was impressive and it made quickly for the far bank, disappearing amongst some flag iris.

Swimming in the pond became a morning ritual in my early years at Prickly Nut Wood. I built a small, wooden ladder and a few planks for a platform, and this allowed me to enter and exit the pond without my feet disturbing the muddy banks and clouding the clear water. The temperature of the water means a dip is usually just that, and most of my time is spent sitting on the platform observing the comings and goings in the pond.

The pond sits on the woodland edge, benefiting from the environment of the woodland on one side and the organic hay field on the other. Between the pond and the field, there is a narrow wood bank and a ditch. The ditch has been mechanically cleared many times but the bank retains its archaeological features. Wood banks were once common along the perimeter of ancient woodlands; the ditch would usually be on the outside of the wood, with the bank stretching some thirty feet back into the wood. The Prickly Nut wood bank seems narrow and may have been disturbed when the chestnut was planted some 130 to 150 years ago.

In spring the bank is abundant with primroses, bluebells and some early purple-flowering orchid. This diversity is also enhanced by the wood bank being situated both at the edge of the wood and the edge of the field. The edge between two different landscapes attracts species from both forms of landscape, and species unique to the edge environment itself also colonise the bank, often making these edge habitats the most diverse habitats in our landscape.

I have now coppiced this area from the oak tree to the pond three times, and the biodiversity and abundance have increased with each cut. But it was all very different when I first stumbled across this area. My first experience involved battling through the twisted stems of rhododendron and I did not emerge by a beautiful dragonfly-dappled pond; to the contrary, I came out at a farm rubbish dump, full of rusty metal, cans of oil and old milk crates, through which grew a few self-seeded goat willows in a large indentation in the landscape that was once a pond. I loaded a trailer with this collection of dumped items and took them to be recycled. I then hired a digger and began the process of clearing out silt and willow roots until I met the seam of clay I knew would lie waiting to be used again. Clay will hold water naturally if it is ‘puddled’. Puddling involves working the clay layer with one’s feet until it becomes smooth and creamy, creating a seal across the surface of the clay. Pigs are often used, as they naturally puddle clay with their rooting and mud-creating habits. I didn’t have a pig to do the puddling, but the excellent Wealden clay puddled up with the help of a little rain and a good amount of working between my feet. Puddling is quite labour-intensive but can be a fun social event if you pick a warm day, choose the right music and arrange a puddling party. Twenty or thirty people dancing Irish jigs in the mud at the bottom of a pond is a lot more fun than spreading out a butyl pond liner. Slowly, over the coming months, the pond began to refill until one day I noticed water lapping over the large stone I had placed in the overflow outlet. The water then flows into a network of streams until it finds the River Lod, flows on into the River Rother, then on into the River Arun and eventually out to sea at Littlehampton. With the pond naturally filled, it did not take long for the biodiversity to increase and the pond to become the haven for wildlife that it is today.

Storing water has to be one of the most practical ways we can improve and help our local environment. I am astonished how much rainwater it is possible to catch, even off a modest-sized roof. When I lived for a couple of years in a 30- by 10-foot caravan, I collected the rainwater off the roof in four 50-gallon rainwater butts that were all linked together. The butts were raised up and I drew the water off the end butt through the caravan wall and out through a tap into the sink. These butts supplied all the water I needed for washing up and to run a shower throughout the whole year. Even when they began to run low in summer, it took just one big thunderstorm and they were all filled up again.

If you measure the area of the roof of your house and multiply it by the average local rainfall for your area (available from your local meteorological office) you will be able to estimate the average volume of rainwater you could be collecting from your roof. I have two buried 10,000-litre tanks that irrigate all the vegetable gardens and that are often overflowing. You will most likely be surprised to find how much water you could be harvesting from your roof.

It is easy to become complacent in England about water, as often we have lots of it. But droughts are not uncommon, and as our climate seems unpredictable and unsettled it would make sense for every home to be maximising their water-storage options. It should be compulsory for every new home to have water storage as part of the design.

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My first year at Prickly Nut Wood was one of observation. Of course, I cut wood, built myself a basic shelter and drew water from an old catchment well within the woods, but beyond that I came to observe.

It was the late 1980s and I had been travelling in South America, predominantly searching for solutions to the leaflets that kept appearing through the letterbox telling me an area of the Amazon rainforest the size of Belgium was being destroyed every day. Such a scale of destruction of rainforest was hard to contemplate. I felt inadequate in Sussex discussing the fate of our planet amongst friends and wanted to do something to help. The irony, of course, being that my travels made it clear to me that I needed to focus my work locally. And so I ended up at Prickly Nut Wood, just a couple of miles from the letterbox where the leaflets had arrived, the ones that sent me, young and headstrong, to the other side of the world. The story of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho describes a similar realisation.

What my travels abroad showed me was a pattern. The pattern of the forest dweller. In the Amazon rainforest, and later in Papua New Guinea, I spent time with people who were children of generations of families who had dwelled within the forest. I met people to whom the forest was an extended map of provisions. They knew where to find medicinal plants to treat their ailments, they knew where migratory species would arrive and when, they lined their pathways with fruit-producing trees to eat from and harvest whilst on their journeys to visit friends or neighbours, and they built their houses from timber growing around them. These forests were rich in biodiversity, and the knowledge and lore of the forest had been passed on by its human inhabitants. Children grew up learning the different uses of plants, and where to find and harvest fruit-growing trees without realising they had learnt it. Education came through being brought up in one place, knowing that landscape, and being fully integrated into a way of life that was simple, although, of course, this life was not without its hardships. This tradition of the forest dweller being a natural form of woodland management seemed to be missing from the way forests were managed in England.

At Prickly Nut Wood, I wanted to live as a forest dweller, but I had not grown up as one and had no one to show me the lore of the land. I had to learn it through experience and observation, and I also had to transfer the pattern observed in diverse tropical rainforests to the woodlands of the south of England.