The Wood for the Trees: The Long View of Nature from a Small Wood

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Richard Fortey. The Wood for the Trees: The Long View of Nature from a Small Wood

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

1. April

2. May

3. June

4. July

5. August

6. September

7. October

8. November

9. December

10. January

11. February

12. March

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

Also by Richard Fortey

About the Publisher

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Title Page

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Another map ties the wood more closely with Rotherfield Greys than with Henley-on-Thames. Civil parishes are the basic unit of local government, and frequently do not have the same boundaries as the ancient ecclesiastical parishes. They elect councillors, not priests, and their boundaries were sorted out at the end of the nineteenth century to make a more sensible system of local administration. Our wood lies in the civil parish of Rotherfield Greys, even though it is ecclesiastically Henley; this is appropriate to its other links with the big house. It seems that Lambridge Wood was always on the edge of some map or parish or village, which may be a good place to be to pass unnoticed. And like many other woodlands, our wood was also free from tithes: a 10 per cent levy on the income derived from the land once provided the principal source of income to support the local church. Following an Act of Parliament in 1836 a schedule of tithes was compiled across England, and in the Oxfordshire Record Office a map of 18409 portrays Lambridge Wood with considerable accuracy. The accompanying ledger prepared by a clerk in best copperplate script declares it ‘exempt’. I occasionally put a pound coin in the box at Rotherfield Greys as a token of expiation.

In 1922 Lambridge Wood was sold off from the Greys estate after a history stretching back to Domesday. We have the map detailing ‘Lambridge Farm and 160 acres of woodland’ which was sold in Henley Town Hall on 26 July to George Shorland, a rich farmer and entrepreneur who had purchased land all around Henley. The modern era of Lambridge Wood had begun, and the unbroken thread leading back to medieval times had been severed. We will meet some of the subsequent owners later on, but now I am going to take a jump to 1969, when Lambridge Wood passed into the ownership of Sir Thomas Erasmus Barlow, Bt, whose heirs owned it until as recently as 2010. I admit that the name meant nothing to me. Sir Thomas was the third baronet to carry the title, and a distinguished naval commander. In a fairly perfunctory way, I started one of those online searches that have become routine for writers, as they have for almost everybody else. I moved backwards in time as far as I could. The First Baronet, another Thomas, had been Queen Victoria’s private physician, a man who died dripping with honours, and no doubt had an outstanding bedside manner. The Second Baronet, Sir Alan Barlow, father of Thomas Erasmus, was scarcely less distinguished as a civil servant in the grand tradition, serving as Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s Principal Private Secretary from 1933 to 1934. But then I discovered something that caused the mouse to freeze in my fist. Alan Barlow had married Nora Darwin. A magical name had somehow found its way into the genealogy of the wood. If one thread had been severed, another had been established. It did not take much more research to establish that Nora was the granddaughter of Charles Darwin. So our wood, the subject of my own modest natural history investigations, had recently belonged to a direct descendant of the greatest natural historian of all time.

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