Читать книгу The Wood for the Trees: The Long View of Nature from a Small Wood - Richard Fortey - Страница 8

First felling

It has been raining for several days, but there is still not enough closed canopy aloft to provide any kind of shelter. The beech trunks are sodden, and now also distinctly green: rainfall has woken up tiny algae and liverworts living on the bark, and they are growing rapidly while they can. A large log near one of the paths has been rotting away for years, and what remains of its wood absorbs water like a sponge: maybe it was a standing cherry ten years ago. A bright-yellow lobe is growing out from one side of it, an excrescence both luminous and unnatural in its brilliance, like a glowing and irregular ox tongue. Every day it seems to add another inch or so, as if licking itself into further substance. The fungus is feeding on the wood: I know it as the fruiting body of the sulphur polypore (Laetiporus sulfureus).1 I have seen it on several trees, but it does have a common preference for wild cherry (Prunus avium). When it is further developed I know it will become more like a bracket, and on its underside hundreds of tiny pores will develop, marking the ends of tubes in which its spores are produced in their millions to waft away on the lightest breeze, randomly seeking out the perfect tree on which to germinate and prosper anew.

This damp period favours natural succulence – living things that are full of juice. On another part of the log three or four bright-pink-coloured balls are the size of small children’s marbles. They too look unnatural, like dropped beads of coral that have no place in a beech wood in England in spring. Prodded with a finger, they burst like boils, spattering pink juice. My daughter hates them, despite my protestations that they have a weird beauty. They are the reproductive spheres of a plasmodial slime mould, Lycogala epidendrum.2 As its common name implies, it was once thought of as fungal, but it is not a mould of any kind, though the sliminess cannot be gainsaid. Today the balls are forming everywhere in groups on the woodpile near the barn, dozens of them. They thrive in the damp. For the earlier part of their life cycle they moved along and through the forest floor, like amoebae, in a subtle but bounded transparent body with thousands of nuclei, where they soaked up nutrients from decaying organic matter. If my daughter were to say they were creepy at this stage, that would be no less than the truth. They creep and they grow. When they have grown enough – and it is an interesting question just what it is that says, ‘Enough!’ – they change character more thoroughly than did Dr Jekyll to Mr Hyde. They glide up to a higher piece of dead wood to turn into those pink balls. At this stage the transformation is incomplete, but in a week or two the balls will have turned brown and become much less conspicuous. A few weeks later they will have transformed into masses of umber-brown microscopical spores – dust, to the eye – and will then be blown to the four winds. On another piece of wet wood I discover a weft of tiny, white, delicate gelatinous fingers hanging down like stalactites: it is another ‘slimer’ (Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa). There’s a sudden vision of the wood as a mass of almost invisible cells sliding and questing through the dampness.

The sun returns at last, and with it a gentle breeze. The weak solar rays pick out the fluttering foliage of freshly unfurled beech leaves in the softest shades of pale green – almost yellow in a certain light. On the ground lie hundreds of tiny brown bracts that had encased the nascent leaves over winter in thin, spiky buds. Now they are redundant. I examine a new beech leaf under a lens: it is fringed with white hairs more delicate than a baby’s eyelashes. It has not yet acquired anything of its summer rigidity; it is like tissue paper. On the low branches of the trees the leaves quiver gently, making tiers of light thrown into contrast against the unchanging dark of the holly. It is almost as if we were under water, and the leaves were being stirred by invisible currents. Where the sun sneaks through the forest to illuminate the cherry trees the polished surfaces of their bark shine almost silver.

Cousin John is felling a beech tree that is leaning dangerously over the public footpath. Accidents in woods caused by falling branches are very rare – most people have the sense to stay out of the woods during tornados. But beeches sometimes shed a whole branch just for the hell of it: these are called ‘widow-makers’ (they never fall on girls). We cannot have that happen to a passing dog-walker. John starts with a saw on a long pole to trim off the side branches. One of them almost touches the ground, such is the curve on the tree over the path. He can reach more branches with a chainsaw borne aloft on a staff; then, with a bigger chainsaw, the main action. The saw makes a raucous, grating racket, with something of the unforgiving persistence of the dentist’s drill about it. John is a professional, so he sports massive earmuffs and mighty gauntlets. Bystanders are reduced to making encouraging gestures and gurning amiably.

There is only one way for the tree to fall, but there is a skill to making the cuts so that it does not spring any surprises. The poor beech groans, crackles like a fusillade of fireworks, and then it is down, just like that. With a girth of three feet there is a lot of firewood to be mined. Despite its lopsidedness the tree is still very much alive, so now on the ground its branches stick up all stiff and unnatural, decked in new leaves that flutter in the breeze for the last time. They will be limp by next morning. The centre of the trunk proves to be quite rotten – black, and hollowing out. The tree would have cracked eventually, so it was as well we took it down. The fungal damage extends further up the trunk until it is visible only as a curious kind of dark hieroglyph in the centre of the log. John cuts lengths from the upper part of the tree that will be taken away in his van to be sawn into rounds, then split into logs for next year’s open fires at home. The fat end of the tree is winched into a position where we can use it as a rustic seat in future and study its slow decay. The brash is carried into the wood to rot away and return to the soil. Who would believe that one, not particularly large, tree could generate so much work?

Falling beech branches have crushed a few bluebells, but no matter, they are already showing signs of decline. The great sea of blooms has deepened to an azure colour, and still looks unbroken from afar, but the lower flowers on the spikes are already blousy and fading. Their dark-green blades of leaves have lost the vigour of their youth, and have started to become flaccid and unenthusiastic. But as one flower starts to fade, another prospers.

Patches of ground near the bluebells are covered with neatly tiered rosettes of lance-shaped leaves. A cluster of tiny white flowers crowns each tier; this plant is the perennial sweet woodruff (Galium odoratum), no taller than the bluebell. Each flower in the cluster has only four wee petals; under my lens the edges of the leaves can be seen to be lined with minute prickles that can be felt by gingerly stroking a finger along their margins – usually eight delicate leaves to a whorl. As for the sweetness implied in both the common and the Latin name, this little plant has a fragrance more persuasive than that of any bluebell. Its sweetness grows as the woodruff is dried – which it does readily. I placed a bunch in a warm airing cupboard and it was preserved in a day. Dried woodruff was once slipped between the sheets to sweeten bedding, so the sleeper might dream of woods in spring. The scent of new-mown hay is the same chemical agent (coumarin) as in woodruff, but only if that hay has sweet vernal grass as one of its components. Sweet woodruff is used to flavour traditional springtime drinks and sweets in Germany, though its German name of Waldmeister (‘master of the woods’) seems too assertive for such a refined little plant. My son thought to try it as a ‘botanical’ to flavour gin; there has been a revival in boutique spirits, and he wants to be ahead of the Zeitgeist. Although juniper berries are the traditional flavoring for gin, all kinds of refinements are possible by steeping other herbs and spices in the spirit. Experimental Batch Number One was rather overpowering, but Experimental Batch Number Two turned out to be delicious. It was presented with a tasteful label featuring the wood in spring. Grim’s Dyke Gin may yet feature in some future genre market.

Bluebell and sweet woodruff are specialists. Not every bulb or herb can thrive in our beech woodland. Timing is all. These plants have to steal as much light as they can before the canopy shuts off the sunshine. There is really no option but to flower in spring. They join the dog violet and the lesser celandine in the early shift. Wood melick, which makes something approaching a field of lively green over parts of the wood in May, will produce its nodding rod of single flowers and then fade before summer is over. The bluebells’ burst of photosynthetic activity is done even before the beech leaves mature, and the energy the plants have gained during their brief but glorious exuberance is stored in the bulb. Job done, everything above ground withers away. The lesser celandine’s3 pretty, heart-shaped leaves also enjoy but a brief existence; they soon turn yellow and shrivel. They too sequester energy in little cream-coloured, bulb-like storehouses that linger in a somewhat scrotal cluster below the ground through most of the year. I have seen similar-looking bulblets form at leaf junctions, any one of which might produce a new plant next season. The leaves of sweet woodruff and violets linger on, a little dowdily, after flowering, but the woodruff has a strong root network that can survive a major drought unharmed. I add two more pleasing spring flowers discovered from snuffling around in the wood: a discreet purple-flowered wood speedwell, Veronica montana, modestly creeping along a pathside where there is a little more light, and a pretty buttercup, goldilocks (Ranunculus auricomus), with apparently much the same requirements. Both have the kind of understated beauty that rewards a little botanical nous.

Our slowly spreading English bluebell is a marker for ancient woodlands. Stately wood spurge (Euphorbia amygdaloides) tells the same story, and I have found it in four places. It almost makes a small shrub. Its young, leafy shoots are a lovely coppery hue and slightly pendent, contrasting well with the flowering heads, which are a lively green. All spurges have peculiar flowers, unlike those of any other plant. They have none of the usual paraphernalia: no petals or sepals, and the reproductive parts are reduced to the minimum. What could be mistaken for petals are actually yellow-green leafy bracts that form a kind of cup around the minimalist sexual business. A cluster of these distinctive structures makes the flower head. Unlike lesser celandines and bluebells, the spurge plant stays on in the wood, gradually losing its fine vernal contrasts, and fading with dignity. I have seen spurge species thriving in deserts looking just like cacti, and others creeping on seashores, and yet more growing far too vigorously in my vegetable patch, so it is scarcely a surprise to find one species that likes to live in old Chiltern beech woods. All spurges carry a horrible, poisonous white sap that seeps out if a leaf or stem is broken. Once I accidentally rubbed a minute amount of the milk into my eye and danced around for two hours in excruciating agony, weeping profusely. I cannot recall such a painful reaction since they closed my favourite Chiltern pub (the Dog and Duck).

Men of letters

Writers are not a rare species. They seem to crop up everywhere, rather like spurges, although some are less poisonous. I confess that at first I thought I would have my patch of Chiltern Hills beech woods to myself. I was wrong. Over the brow of the ridge behind Lambridge Wood Barn, in the village of Lower Assendon, and just beyond the Fair Mile leading out of Henley-on-Thames in the Oxford direction, a small Tudor cottage decked in oak beams was home for several decades to a famous writer: Cecil Roberts. In the 1930s Roberts published a series of three books centred on Pilgrim Cottage: Gone Rustic, Gone Rambling and Gone Afield. I now have them all in hardback, though had I not bought Grim’s Dyke Wood I would probably never have heard of this particular author. Gone Rustic was reprinted at least six times: it was a bestseller. All the books are charming, gossipy, name-dropping confections about life in a kind of idealised Rustic. Beneath the dustjackets they have bas-relief covers with cottagey timber framing built in. Roberts’s is the same world as that in which Hercule Poirot joined genial house parties in small stately homes only to find His Lordship dead in the drawing room. It has an exact fictional match in E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels, set in a genteel part of Sussex where private incomes would pay for housekeepers and cooks, and the protagonists could concentrate on painting watercolours and choosing chrysanthemum varieties. Working-class country folk tended to have only colourful walk-on parts.

According to Cecil Roberts’s account in Gone Rustic, he discovered Pilgrim Cottage in 1930 by accident after sustaining a puncture on the road from Henley to Oxford. He writes: ‘Around me the view was imposing, almost Tyrolean, with steep larch covered hillsides, and in the distance between thick beech woods nobly clothing the greensward, a ravine.’ The last may have been a reference to the gentle valley leading to Stonor. Pilgrim Cottage is still much as it was in the middle of the twentieth century. Cecil’s upstairs windows would have commanded a view of Lambridge Wood on the near skyline, so he really was a neighbour. I imagine him fussing around his garden, absorbed in his gladioli, while instructing his housekeeper to lay tea for the Marchesa, who would be arriving betimes in the Hispano-Suiza. Pilgrim Cottage, he complained, was positively deluged with visitors, all of them fascinating, making the necessary wielding of his pen a matter of some concern. In spite of all his socialising, he did manage to produce a quantity of books and much verse. The core of his Pilgrim Cottage books is provided by local history, well described, and much of it relevant to my story; and his tales of local craftsmen are invaluable. His other love is Italy, and he jumps to Venice and palazzos and the story of the Finzi-Continis at every hint of a metaphor. His interest in natural history was as perfunctory as his interest in gardening and sunbathing was obsessive. The Chilterns provided a green backdrop to his real concerns, which were always human.

Cecil Roberts had another life during the Second World War. Pilgrim Cottage and its stories had a great following in the United States. Their appeal may have been rather akin to the current popularity of sagas featuring big houses and their goings-on a century ago. Roberts was recruited to aid the war effort by giving lecture tours in America, which he evidently did with great success. The New York Times reported that ‘the best propaganda in the world is the British and the most efficient expression we witnessed were the lectures held all over the USA by the noted author, Cecil Roberts. These lectures never had the flavor of propaganda but brought more good will towards Britain than anything else.’4 His charm could obviously do its work far away from the Thames Valley.

When the conflict was over Roberts felt he had not received sufficient official recognition for his efforts. He tried to restore the balance by publishing his autobiography in no fewer than five volumes. Rowena Emmett, daughter of Mr and Mrs Plater, the next occupants of Pilgrim Cottage in 1953, told me that for many years beaming Americans would turn up at their garden gate requesting permission for photographs. ‘It was,’ she said, ‘quite a nuisance.’ The former owner did not downplay the fame of Pilgrim Cottage. He had written to the Platers advising, ‘many thousands all over the world love it, for it symbolizes England for them’. When Rowena met Cecil Roberts she was a young schoolgirl, and she found him more than a little alarming. She later realised that his manner was just very camp. A modern reading of Gone Rambling would leave little doubt about the author’s sexual orientation, with its panegyrics to bare-chested Italian sawyers whose ‘skin, tanned a warm mahogany by the Venetian sun, gleamed and caught a hundred tones and facets of light as the muscles glided with cryptic strength beneath their satin sheaths’; to say nothing of some very ambiguous poems.

I cannot help wondering how Cecil Roberts might have been regarded by the locals in the Golden Ball in those less tolerant times. Maybe they just thought he was from London. He seems to have been genuinely helpful with his time and money in the village, and nearly always described its inhabitants sympathetically. He appreciated the efforts of his gardeners, including Charles Crewe, who lived in a damp dwelling with none of the usual services on the very edge of Lambridge Wood. Roberts was determinedly anti-fascist. I was surprised to learn that his origins in Nottingham were far from aristocratic. He was a self-made man, living mostly from his prolific pen, whose name-dropping was probably an exuberant validation of his reinvention. ‘Mon dieu!’ his special and amusing spinster friend Miss Whissitt might have exclaimed. ‘Tu es une arriviste!’

H.J. Massingham is altogether more astringent. His 1940 book Chiltern Country deals with the whole range of hills in luminous language. His feel for natural observation is superb. Much of his work is driven by fury about the spread – no, the rash – of homely villas outwards from London. He mourns the ‘real England, the England in which the hills, the vales, the waters, the crops, the roads, the buildings, the natives and the rock that bore them up all on its back were intricately bound together in an organic system not unlike the human body’.5 The country cottages that have withstood the centuries – and the worthy souls who have earned their living around them for as long – are becoming overwhelmed by red-brick mediocrities planted about with shrubs that don’t belong. Beech woods become desirable scenic accessories rather than essential resources. For Massingham the country beyond Rickmansworth was irretrievable, and the country around High Wycombe was doomed. The spread of the Metropolitan Line from London into the hills was a sinister fungus that sprouted despicable edifices – suburbia: ‘the touch of it annihilates identity in place’. His ruralism stands at the other extreme to the poet John Betjeman’s sympathetic regard for what he termed ‘Metroland’, a land of healthy young women and clean semi-detached gentility.

Massingham’s combativeness is quite appealing. I think he would fain have jumped back in time way past the Enlightenment to fetch up somewhere in the late medieval period. He reserves his most eloquent writing for our piece of country, and most particularly Stonor Park, ‘the heart of the Chilterns’, where the wild spirit of the place has not yet been ousted, the views not hopelessly corrupted with eyesores. I have no proof that he ever visited our woods, but I hope he would have found the genius loci satisfactory there, too. I am certain he would have disapproved of the practice of ‘splitting’ to sell off ancient woodlands, thereby dividing the integrity of manors that had been in existence for nearly a thousand years. There is no defence, except to say that I could never have afforded to buy a whole stretch. There are plenty of very wealthy people in the hills who don’t appreciate the unique treasures they have on their land, and my small patch is much loved.

Just over a century before Cecil Roberts was pottering around his garden in Lower Assendon, John Stuart Mill was exploring our Chiltern countryside with a far more scientific enthusiasm. The philosopher and political theorist was equally a dedicated and scholarly botanist. Very few people can instantly recognise rare plants like wintergreens (Pyrola), but J.S. Mill was one of them. From his early days he was a close friend of George Bentham (nephew of Jeremy), who would become one of the greatest botanists of the Victorian age. Mill made an expedition in France in search of poorly known flora. His house in Kensington Square in London was virtually a herbarium. Some people who are not naturalists find it odd that famous thinkers, poets or mathematicians might derive as much pleasure from the minutiae of natural history as from the fields of endeavour that made them famous. Vladimir Nabokov was as serious about blue butterflies as he was about writing novels, but certain critics relay this fact as a kind of eccentric footnote to the life of the artist. Doubtless they perceive that less time frittered away with the butterflies might have resulted in one or two more novels. Can they not see that the taxonomic eye applied to recognising the subtlest nuances of difference in butterflies is the same eye that spots the deceptions and evasions in human motivation? The capacity to make accurate observations is a special genius, and it is not limited to focusing on one particular bipedal subject species.

In 1828 J.S. Mill undertook his own bipedal tour that passed through our part of Oxfordshire.6 Open fields yielded abundant white-flowered wild candytuft, ‘one of the commonest of all weeds’ (Iberis amara), which is now a rare plant – I eventually ran it down myself on clear ground on Swyncombe Down, nine miles from our wood. His record of thorow wax (Bupleurum rotundifolium) might be one of the last for the county: this species is close to extinction in Great Britain, and Mill noted its rarity even then. On 5 July he approached Henley from Nettlebed: our patch. You may imagine the pleasure his subsequent writing gave me.

The woods are the great beauty of this country. They are real woods, not copse, that is, they are not cut down for fire-wood, but allowed to grow into timber, though not to any great age, nor are there, as far as we could perceive, many very large or fine trees among them … We stopped at the White Hart, Nettlebed for the night, and in the evening walked down the hill by the Oxford Road towards Henley. It passes through a fine forest-like beech wood, and on the whole the ascent to Nettlebed from Henley is far more beautiful than any thing else which we have seen in its vicinity.

I cannot prove that John Stuart Mill walked exactly along the footpath past our wood, although it is hard to see how a woodland ascent towards Nettlebed from Henley could have taken any other route. His praise for its beauty is not the least of it. The woods he described are very like those that still flourish today in this corner of the Chiltern Hills; the same stately ‘forest’ of mature timber trees, but yet lacking any truly ancient giants such as survive in old parkland or as parish boundary markers. My wife and I discovered a massive ancient beech pollard along a path in Nettlebed that must have been four hundred years old at least, all gnarled and knobbly and hollowed out. There are a few in the area. But no, Lambridge Wood was a working wood two hundred years ago, a beechen grove permitted to grow on to timber, but not to senility. We shall see, however, that nothing is forever, and our wood would have had different employment in earlier and later times.

Nor can I prove that John Stuart Mill walked through the wood in the company of George Grote, but I like to think that circumstances favoured it. They were friends already in the early 1820s. Mill was both an admirer and a reviewer of Grote’s writing, and particularly his monumental history of Greece (1846–56) in twelve volumes:7 a work not perhaps as beloved as Gibbon on Rome, but with a similarly vast reach and ambition. The two prolific writers shared what might broadly be called liberal and reformist views, and were Utilitarians. The seat of the banking Grote family was Badgemore House, which has been mentioned as the estate adjoining Greys Court directly to the east. Part of the Henley end of Lambridge Wood was within that estate; tracks ran onwards into our part of the greater wood. George’s father was fond of country pursuits, and went hacking on horseback through our woods and onwards to Bix. Young George (then still a banker) and his wife would make the forty-mile journey from London to spend ten days with his parents, and on one occasion Mrs Grote drove all the way in her own one-horse vehicle while her husband rode for four hours separately on horseback.8 Although George Grote was much attached to Badgemore, in the days before the railway it was hardly a practical commute. By 1831 it was clear that the country house should be given up, and George left for the metropolis to devote more time to reformist politics. We shall see that all the manor houses surrounding our wood had political connections with the capital at one time or another.

As for contemporary writers, Richard Mabey’s memoir of Chiltern countryside9 is centred on a region not very far from Lambridge Wood, while Ian McEwan described a long walk through our chalk country in his 2007 novel On Chesil Beach. This area of southern England proves to be almost as crawling with writers as with other invertebrates.

Hard grounds

The ground in this part of the wood is crunchy under my boots. Beneath a few of last year’s fallen leaves and under the questing loops of bramble shoots there appears to be nothing but rock. I am attempting to dig a hole to explore the surface geology, but my spade refuses to make any progress. Its blade twists and complains against a barrier of stones. I will have to employ my geological hammer to solve the problem.

The pick side of the hammer starts levering up lumpy flints, some bigger than my fist. They leave the damp ground reluctantly, with a sucking noise. Where I hammer downwards into the growing hole, sparks fly where steel meets flint. Briefly, there is a smell of cordite; in the days of flintlock pistols that smell would have been a familiar one. Flints were used to strike the spark that ignited gunpowder before a shot could be made. Our flints are embedded in reddish ochre clay that tries to hold on to them, clay that can easily be rolled into a coherent ball between the palms of my hands, and sticks to the fingers. The exterior of most of the flints is white when wiped clear of its clay coat, but where the hammer has shattered one of the larger flints its interior is strikingly black, and mottled in patches. It is a hard rock, but a brittle one shot through with flaws. Much of the wood is effectively floored with flint. Of the chalk of the Chilterns there is no sign.

Just down the hill beyond the Fair Mile I know that chalk underlies everything. When the dual-carriageway road was repaired great masses of the white rock were dumped on the side, and I picked out a typical, conical fossil sponge called Ventriculites from the rock pile. Even within Lambridge Wood, further downslope towards Henley, a mysterious excavation known as the Fairies’ Hole (marked on even the oldest maps) is undoubtedly dug within the white limestone. The rock that makes the whole range of hills, ‘the rock that bore them up all on its back’, as H.J. Massingham said, is an understory of chalk. Within the chalk, hard flints form discrete layers, but they never dominate completely. This flint was ultimately derived from fossil sponges within the chalk that had internal skeletons made of silica struts. The silica was first dissolved, and then re-deposited in flinty layers as the original chalk ooze gradually hardened and transformed into the rock we see today. Whatever underlies Grim’s Dyke Wood on the higher ground evidently also lies on top of the chalk formation, but is largely made of flints derived from it, all stuck in a matrix of sticky clay. This deposit is called, unsurprisingly, clay-with-flints, and in the wood the flints are dominant.

Clay-with-flints caps the chalk in many parts of the Chiltern Hills.10 It is the product of many millennia of slow solution and weathering-away of the chalk; it is what is left behind when everything else is removed. Chalk is weakly soluble in rainwater, which is why water derived from an aquifer in the Chilterns leaves a limescale deposit behind in a kettle. After a very long time, as the chalk naturally disappears the originally scattered flints become concentrated. Flint is insoluble; in fact, this form of silica is well-nigh indestructible. It can be tossed into rivers or buried in gardens for centuries, and emerges unscathed. It will outlast the Chilterns.

To estimate the thickness of the clay-with-flint capping I walk slowly up from the end of the Fair Mile to Lambridge Wood along Pickpurse Lane (see comments on highwaymen), digging with my hammer into the bank until the telltale milkiness goes out of the soil. There are other signs to look for. Old man’s beard (Clematis vitalba), the nearest thing in the British flora to a liana, only grows on chalk – it will not tolerate clay-with-flints. Wild marjoram is no more forgiving. Plant roots sense chemistry with the exquisite palate of a connoisseur. Both the indicator plants grow in abundance near the bottom of the lane and fade away upward. By the time all evidence of chalk has disappeared I conclude that very roughly twenty feet of clay-with-flints must lie above. That is sufficient to make the thin soil on the high ground neutral or acidic compared with the alkaline soils on the slope and in the valley bottom. This saddens me, for many of the more glamorous plants love chalk: the whitebeam tree with big simple leaves with shining undersides; cheerful yellow St John’s wort; and many an orchid. I shall just have to live without them – I cannot argue with geology. Now I also know why our footpaths can become like quagmires after too much rain. That layer of impermeable clay does not drain well; it likes to make ponds. Some corner of our wood will always be damp.

Back to Grim’s Dyke Wood. I decide not to try to excavate much more of the recalcitrant stony ground. Instead I shall use the holes I have made to put down beetle traps, burying a few cups half-filled with lethal Dettol to ensnare night crawlers. As I tidy up, a different stone surprises me. Lying on top of the ground by a beech trunk is a pebble the size and shape of a goose egg. It is purple, and it is certainly no flint. Under my hand lens I recognise it immediately as hard sandstone. I soon see more examples of a similar cast, liver-coloured, always rounded off to make satisfactory hand specimens, by which I mean something that sits easily in the palm. They are all strangers. There is no rock formation I can think of in the Chiltern Hills, or in the Vale of Aylesbury beyond, or even further afield beyond Oxford, that might produce such pebbles. They have all their corners chipped off until they are satisfyingly elliptical in outline, and smoothly rounded at the corners. This is a form sculpted by long sojourn in a lively river; erosion has knocked them into shape little by little, polishing repeatedly over a very long time. How could they have got here, into the middle of our beech wood? There are other strangers too. A white pebble that might be a pigeon’s egg, judging from its shape and size; it’s another form of silica – resembling flint, but with a dense, swirling milky whiteness. Vein quartz, I will wager. It might have originated from a vein within granite or snaking along a fault fracturing other rocks. There is no source for such vein quartz anywhere around here. Strewn on top of the clay-with-flints are a bunch of lithological vagabonds from afar.

I decide to investigate further. At the Natural History Museum a skilful colleague cuts sections through my errant pebbles. Microscopic examination should show what they are made of, and reveal the secrets of their derivation. The samples are sliced using a diamond saw; then a thin sliver is mounted on a glass slide and reduced in thickness so much that light can penetrate the minerals that make up the rock; they can now be examined under a petrological microscope. I learned my microscopy skills as an undergraduate in a dusty laboratory in Cambridge, and distant memories stir as I stare down the eyepiece.

The vein quartz pebble proves to be typical. Under the microscope it shows as an irregular patchwork of grey or slightly yellowish crystals, with trails of tiny bubbles. It could have originated from several geological sites. However, one sample has several good pieces of similar-looking rounded vein quartz embedded within a chunk of the sandstone, like plums in a pudding. Maybe the quartz pebbles were derived from the same sandstone formation, only a part of it that was much coarser – a conglomerate, in geological terms. The pebbles must have been incorporated into the sandstone from some still older source. The sandstone itself is curious and distinctive. The individual sand grains are clear enough as masses of rounded outlines under the microscope, and they are of similar size to those that might be found on a beach today. But they are glued together by dark-red cement, without doubt full of iron. This is the mineral that gives the pebbles their rich red colour. The sandstone is recognisable, and it can be run down to its source. The pebbles must be Triassic in age (about 235 million years old), and they come from the English Midlands.11 The old name for them was from the German – Bunter sandstone12 – and they date back to a time when Britain was hot and arid and the geography of Europe had an utterly different cast. As for the indestructible milky quartz pebbles, some of them originated from the erosion of still older rocks long before they in their turn became incorporated into the Bunter sandstone; they might be as old as a billion years. Enmeshed under our own beech roots we have pebbles that account for a quarter of the history of the earth; and they arrived in the Chilterns by water, without question.

The vigorous river that brought down the pebbles from eighty miles to the north-west was an ancestor of the same River Thames that now flows sedately two miles to the east of the wood.13 During the Pleistocene Ice Age (2,588,000 to 11,700 years ago) thick continental glaciers to the north waxed and waned by turn, diverting all Europe’s great rivers at some times, providing the source for vast spreads of gravel at others. The ancient Thames left behind a record of this complex history in its former river terraces, the remains of which are scattered around the Chilterns and the London Basin. The oldest of these terraces is close to our wood, at Nettlebed. The exotic pebbles that I found in the wood are well known from a younger terrace, a set of strata called the Stoke Row Gravels.

The village that gives that formation its name is about four miles west of the wood, high on the Chiltern plateau. It is home to a most implausible structure, a little piece of India by a village green such as Cecil Roberts would have described as being quintessentially English. The Maharajah’s Well was dug by hand 368 feet down into the chalk, passing on the way down through the overlying gravels relevant to our wood, and all at the personal expense of the Maharajah of Benares, who also supplied the exotic, elegant and ornate canopy. His gift was reciprocation for a well dug in India at Azimghur by Edward Reade (‘squire’ of Stoke Row) in 1831. The Maharajah remembered that Reade had told him how his little home village on the top of the Chiltern Hills was most precariously supplied with water. His remarkable gift of the Maharajah’s Well was officially opened in 1864, and did its job efficiently for seven decades.

Professor Phil Gibbard tells me that the Midland ‘connection’ was open for well over a million years, until about 450,000 years ago. Although the huge Pleistocene ice sheets never reached as far south as the wood, their influence could not have been more profound. An icy climate sculpted the Chiltern landscape. It scrubbed the landscape to a tabula rasa on which all its subsequent history was inscribed; this marks the baseline of my natural history. I have to imagine a landscape stripped of trees. The slopes of the hills are bare, with only the hardiest herbs able to cope with the frigidity to the south of the permanent ice. Now indeed Cecil Roberts’s description of the valley up to Stonor as a ‘ravine’ may be nearer the mark, for the Chiltern country is riven with steep-sided valleys. Cold summer streams that flow with rejuvenated force following the annual melt carve vigorously down into the soft chalk, which is still too deeply frozen to allow the tumbling waters simply to be absorbed. The streambed is choked up with flint pebbles. In Arctic latitudes I have watched just the same fitful progress of jostling stones during the brief summer – their percussion kept me awake. The legacy of the frozen era still marks the ground: not only the implausible sheerness of some Chiltern hillsides, but also valley bottoms floored even now by ancient stream gravels.

Old names were bestowed by the Ice Age, like Rocky Lane, which runs up a valley on the south-western side of the Greys estate. Then, somewhat over eleven thousand years ago, the climate warmed for good, and now I must populate the hills with trees. Pioneers at first, small willows, hardy conifers; then birch, pine and aspen; and next, and not necessarily in this order, the broadleaved trees that came to make the original wildwood: oak, ash, lime, elm, hazel and beech. Oliver Rackham14 tells us that the lime species he calls pry (Tilia cordata) – the small-leaved lime – was dominant in many of those early woodlands. It still lurks, mostly unremarked, in a few places in the Chiltern Hills, but not in our wood. About six thousand years ago ‘Stone Age’ humans were already beginning to fell the virginal forests, where previously arboreal old age and accident had been the only foresters. The streams that had once carved the ‘ravines’ were now absorbed into the defrosted chalk, leaving a legacy of steep dry valleys, like the one that runs from the Fair Mile to Stonor Park; though it is not quite dry, for after unusually wet winters the water table rises until streams such as the Assendon Brook reappear, bounding alongside the tiny roads and causing cyclists to swerve and walkers to chide their wet Labradors.

I hold a couple of the liver-coloured sandstone pebbles and a quartz keepsake up to the May sunshine. So much can be read from these fragments. I think of the lines from As You Like It:

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

These remarkable, sermonising samples of rocks that might have passed unnoticed are next to be added to the collection.

Maiden ladies and geraniums

In 1787 Mary, Dowager Lady Stapleton, moved into Greys Court as her dower house, and women dominated that establishment for the next eighty years. After she died at the age of ninety-one in 1835, Mary’s daughters Maria and Catherine stayed on in the big house that owned Lambridge Wood until the younger sister Catherine’s death twenty-eight years later; both sisters also lived to a great age. The intellectual ferment in London that preoccupied their neighbour, George Grote – and the circle that included John Stuart Mill – passed them by. Rather, the Church engaged them fully, and led them to charities directed at the moral and religious education of the less fortunate in the parish of Rotherfield Greys. The rents from tenancies guaranteed their gentility, if not their spinsterhood. It must have been a quiet time at the ancient house.

Mary’s son James was at Greys Court in the earlier days, and his friend from Christ Church, Oxford, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, stayed with him often, and wrote frank letters to his mother at Hoddam Castle peppered with observations that exactly match his surname.15 On 12 January 1801 he was describing his Christmas at Greys, ‘which began, woe’s me! like most other gambols, with laughter, and ended in tears’. He described the entertainments the local town had to offer thus:

Miss Stapleton, her brother, and myself, repaired in high feather to a ball at Henley, the night after Christmas, and were much amused in many ways. The company consisted of the town gentry, and the progeny of farmers in the neighbourhood; the clowns with lank, rat-tail hair, and white gloves drawn tight on hands which they knew not how to dispose of; the clownesses with long stiff feathers stuck round their heads like those of a shuttle cock, and wealth of paste beads and pinchbeck chains. They came all stealing into the room as if they were doing some villainy, and joyful was the meeting of the benches and their bums. But the dancing did them most ease; the nymphs imitating the kicking of their cows, the swains the prancing of their cart horses. But joy of joys! Tea was brought at twelve, and off came all the silken mittens and pure white gloves in an instant, exposing lovely raw beef arms and mutton fists more inured to twirl mopsticks and grasp pitchforks than to flutter fans or flourish bamboos.

There is a precision of observation here that almost mitigates the snobbery. Walter Scott wrote of Sharpe: ‘he has great wit, and a great turn for antiquarian lore’. Nor did the poor Misses Stapleton escape his gimlet eye. A year later he wrote:

I made out my visit to [James] Stapleton, and yawned with him for a week. They are such good dull people at Greys Court! The sober primitive women do nothing the whole day but fiddle-faddle with their greenhouse, like so many Eves, and truly they are in little danger of a tempter, for their faces would frighten the devil, not to mention men.

The only portrait I know depicting the sisters (and brother), by Thomas Beach in 1789, suggests this judgement might be unfair. The large painting hangs on the staircase in the grand Holburne Museum in Bath. The two girls are dressed rather fetchingly as shepherdesses. Their features are pleasantly strong, although there is a certain wistfulness in their expressions. Perhaps they had already foreseen their long and genteel confinement to Greys Court. We get a brief sketch of their later lives from the recollections of an old-timer published in the Henley Standard on 29 July 1922. When he was young a familiar sight was ‘the old Post Chaise, with the red jacketed and booted postilion, which brought the old Misses Stapleton of Greys Court almost daily into Henley’. They evidently kept up appearances.

The preoccupation of the Stapleton sisters with greenhouse horticulture was, I dare say correctly, observed by Mr Sharpe. Miss Stapleton won the first prize at the Henley Horticultural Show in 1837 for ‘a boquet of greenhouse flowers’.16 There are still wooden-framed greenhouses dating back to Stapleton times within the brick-and-flint-walled vegetable garden at Greys Court. Catherine Stapleton was particularly expert on pelargoniums. Her knowledge was recognised by the honour of having a cultivar named after her in 1826: ‘Miss Stapleton’. It is still available as a variety from specialist nurseries. It has charming rich red flowers, paler at the base and decked with a single dark spot on each petal.17 I have a pot of it on my window ledge. With her botanical predilections I am certain that Catherine walked in her own woodland. There she would certainly have found the only member of her favourite geranium family that grows in Lambridge Wood (Grim’s Dyke Wood included) – the common wayside weed Geranium robertianum, ‘herb Robert’. She, like me, must have bent down to examine its small, richly red flowers, and must have smelled its curious pungency, and felt the glandular stickiness of its divided leaves, so often tinted blood-red, and noted its odd, stilt-like roots. She too would have known that this herb was named for Nicolas Robert, a pioneer of accurate botanical illustration in seventeenth-century France. I can imagine sharing with her a moment’s communion over a mutual enthusiasm before the proprieties of the time sent her scurrying back to the old house.

Fiddleheads

Ferns have subtle beginnings. As the bluebell leaves fade to little more than slime, ferns push out their new fronds. In the larger clearing, fresh shoots of brambles seem to unfold their leaves even as I watch. Every early shoot – Dylan Thomas’s ‘green fuse’ if ever I have seen one – is almost soft, and downy, and I have nibbled one and found it pleasant and nutty. Today, the backwardly curved spines lining the veins on the underside of the newly unfurled leaves are already beginning to harden – soon they will be capable of delivering a scratch. The bramble patch is impenetrable and intimidating, and the new growth will serve only to thicken its dense conspiracy. Amidst the scrubbiest part of it are dry, brown, fallen fronds of last year’s male ferns (Dryopteris filix-mas). From their centre new growth rises assertively. Rebirth started obscurely a month ago as a cluster of dark knobs. Each one soon rears up of its own accord into a fiddlehead, a kind of self-unwinding spiral that uncurls upwards into the spring sunlight. It is rather like that irritating party toy with which children love to blow raspberries at their friends. At the fiddlehead stage it is said to be edible, and I can see a bruised crown where deer have treated the new growth as a seasonal snack. Even now some of the fronds are opening out, like some unfathomable piece of origami, unsheathing the elegant, pinnate blade that will see the year out. The clustered male fern fronds triumph over the brambles. Once the fronds are fully dark green they will be primed with the poisons that have helped them survive since before the dinosaurs; and then their spore packages will ripen in tiny curved organs beneath each leaflet.

Under drier beech another kind of fern is less difficult to reach, and is more delicate: a buckler fern (Dryopteris dilatata), with a triangular frond, finely divided, and broadest at the base. It seems too fragile for such a challenging place where little else grows, and even its fiddlehead is more tentative. The shaft that bears the growing frond is delicately clothed in brown, chaff-like flakes. And now on the ground all around this fern so much more brown chaff: little purplish-tan clumps of defunct stamens no bigger than a fingernail have dropped down from the canopy. This is all that remains of the inconspicuous beech flowers. They have already done their job far above me, though the beech leaves are still so new. The greatest trees have the least spectacular flowers.

It may seem unlikely that beech leaves could contribute to a delicious alcoholic drink, but I have made a liqueur from them for several years, and most of my guests are surprised it is so easy on the tongue. Beech-leaf noyeau can be made in early May when the leaves are freshly unfurled. They are still pale green and soft to the touch – they can be rolled up like cigarette papers. Any tougher and they are bitter. I try to exclude as many of the little brown bracts that originally enclosed the leaf as I can. It takes an unexpectedly long time to pick enough fresh leaves to lightly fill a plastic bag. Once back in the kitchen I stuff a preserving jar quite tightly with the leaves, until it is rather more than half full. Then they are covered with gin (or vodka) until the jar is about three-quarters full. I do not use a high-class brand suffused with many exotic botanicals, but the cheaper stuff from that supermarket shelf marked ‘Youths and Alcoholics Only’. I leave the sealed jar for a month to steep. Then the leaves are removed, allowing all the liquor to drain off. If there are any funny bits floating about, now is the time to remove them. For a whole bottle of gin (700 ml) the next ingredients are 200 grams of sugar, around 200 ml of brandy, and 250 ml of water. After boiling the water to dissolve the sugar the resulting syrup is allowed to cool completely. I then add the syrup and the brandy to the beech-leaf elixir and put the mixture back in the preserving jar, preferably with half a vanilla pod. By Christmastide it should be a lovely golden colour. Only a very cynical person would say that it tastes of brandy and vanilla.

Bats!

Claire Andrews has installed her bat monitors. She strapped the recording devices on to our trees about ten feet off the ground, one on the oak by the clearing, the other on a big beech in a sheltered part of the Dingley Dell. They are painted in camouflage colours, and are inconspicuous once in place. They are like discreet garters hitched up on the legs of the trees. Over the next week or so they will record the ultrasonic echolocation noises used by bats to detect their prey, along with their calls one to another.

When I was young I could hear the ‘squeaks’ of bats, but now I am sadly deaf to such crepuscular cries; yet I have seen dancing, shadowy shapes of bats hunting over our clearing outlined momentarily against a darkening sky, black against indigo. How appropriate is the German word for bat – Fledermaus, ‘flitter mouse’ – which exactly captures these stuttering dashes across the heavens.

It is impossible exactly to identify a species of bat in flight. Our recording machines are attuned to pick up the high-frequency cries of these most elusive mammals. Different species ‘squeak’ at different frequencies and with different cadences, as they locate and home in on their prey, especially moths. They use echoes to build up a map of their surroundings, rather as the sonar system installed in ocean-going vessels is used to visualise the sea floor. Bats are exquisitely attuned to avoid obstacles in their way, so negotiating a contorted flightpath under our trees poses no problem. Some of their prey species (among them noctuid moths, which are common in the wood) have evolved organs adapted to ‘hearing’ their approaching nemesis, and will take evasive action if they detect pursuit, such as dropping rapidly downwards from their flight trajectory. Evolution often works as a kind of arms race, with ever more sophisticated methods of attack provoking ever more subtle lines of defence. We need not wonder at the extraordinary auditory organs of the long-eared bats, bizarre though they might appear. These bats ‘whisper’ with low amplitude and short duration to fool their prey, and they need exceptional hearing from massive ears to detect the tiniest sounds made by insects that they may pick up directly from leaves. By day, all bats hang themselves up like folded umbrellas in secluded roosts. Claire has already spotted several holes in beech trees, and, elsewhere, loose pieces of bark that would afford suitable hideaways. There is nothing to do now except leave the contraptions to do their work.

More than a week later, we feed the digital chips from the recording devices into Claire’s computer. Time is ticked off along a chart that reels out on screen the batty history of the glades as night falls. Here is a series of calls from the main clearing at 8.26 p.m. precisely, registering at 45 kilohertz, following sunset seventeen minutes earlier: they appear on the chart as a succession of reverse ‘J’ shapes, rather like the strokes of an italic pen. ‘The one you’d expect,’ says Claire. ‘Common pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pipistrellus).’ At 8.39 another batch of short calls appears showing a rather similar shape, but at a different pitch of 55 kilohertz. ‘That’s the soprano pipistrelle (Pipistrellus pygmaeus). It “sings” at a higher frequency.’ Claire tells me that the soprano was only named as a species separate from the common pipistrelle in 1999, which seems extraordinary. How could a British mammal elude recognition for so long? We have known all the others for two centuries. Evidently, the two species are extremely similar small brown bats, although they are now known to have different breeding and feeding strategies. As with a lie detector, their voices gave them away. By artificially tuning down the frequencies on the computer we can ‘hear’ the bat calls for ourselves, and appreciate their different pitches.

At 9.39 a different pattern appears on the screen; it belongs to one of the Myotis bats, which are not possible to discriminate on sound alone. Claire believes that our visitor is either the whiskered bat or Brandt’s bat, but trapping would be required to say which species. No matter, we will not be following that course. At 10.02 the sopranos return to sing different arias, which show up as sine waves on the screen. These are social calls, aural visiting cards to signal to the group; when rendered into sound I hear repeated chirrups. At 10.12 the distinctive pattern of a noctule bat (Nyctalis noctula) appears on the screen; this is one of the largest bats to live in Britain.

Meanwhile in the woodland glade, deep under the beech trees, both types of pipistrelle are dominant, but Myotis bats are also flitting through. A distinctive low-amplitude signal identifies the brown long-eared bat (Plecotus auritus), and proves that these most delicately adapted hunters are passing under the canopy at 11.16. Claire had expected the long-eared species to appear in this habitat; despite its exotic appearance, it is not rare. This extravagantly outfitted bat may well roost in Lambridge Wood Barn at the edge of Grim’s Dyke Wood. The same site would suit a large, and much more uncommon, bat whose signal was identified at 8.40 the following evening: the serotine bat (Eptesicus serotinus), a species quite capable of demolishing the big nocturnal beetles that abound under the beeches.

We add them all up. Six different bat species are exploiting the insect life in Grim’s Dyke Wood, which must surely be a sign of a generally healthy environment. There may even be a seventh. Claire found one brief signal that might – possibly – have emanated from a snub-nosed, moth-hunting barbastelle (Barbastella barbastella), a protected species, and one of Britain’s rarest bats. I earnestly wish it to be in our wood, but I know well the emotion naturalists experience as ‘the pull of rarity’. It is always so tempting to recognise a more uncommon option. I must rein in my enthusiasm. Until we put up another monitor and get definite evidence from longer calls, the barbastelle bat is ‘unproven’.