16 March

Late yesterday evening we took the children up to the wood. Not our exclusive wood, you understand, but partly ours, in a way. Back in 1999, the villagers and all the schoolchildren planted up a native broad-leaved wood to commemorate and celebrate the millennium. Although it was supported by the Greenlight Trust, the whole project was truly community led, with the villagers finding the site, carrying out all the fundraising, designing and planting, and taking on the maintenance of the wood. The field chosen for the site slopes gently to the east, above the village, and from the clearings you get great views of the village and the rolling arable farmlands. Prior to the wood being planted, it was a meadow where horses grazed, and was owned by my irascible old farmer who I’ve mentioned in a previous blog. To the west, south and east the wood is surrounded by farmland. To the north are some farm buildings and grazing pasture. An old track, bearing the name of my farmer, leads from the centre of the village up to the entrance of the wood. What marks this little piece of woodland, (only 1.21 hectares), as special is that the wood has been planted as a model of the village. Around 200 oak trees were planted, representing each village house. Wide grassy rides represent the roads. A beautiful thicket of yew and holly – already tangled and magical, like a miniature version of Sleeping Beauty’s forest -marks the site of the church. Bell Stay Bottom is an ash coppice planted to provide future stays for the church bells. Everything planted here is native; sweet chestnut, hornbeam, field maple, white willow, black poplar, lime, hazel, blackthorn, hawthorn, dogwood and spindle. Wild flowers carpet the tracks and verges in the early summer; celandines and heartsease, meadowsweet, dog rose, poppies and columbine.

We come here in all seasons. We help on the ‘maintenance weekends’; sharing a thermos of coffee with people who we don’t see for the rest of the year, children playing all around us. We picnic in the summer, when there’s no breath of wind to stir the leaves, and the swallows swoop and slice far above. We come blackberrying in the autumn, and high kick through the leaves. In winter we come to find the berried holly and mistletoe and shiny sloes, along with most of the village, and take our sledges to the steep slope just outside the boundary. We come in spring just to look, really, and outdo each other with our observations: “Look, the first cowslips! The first bluebells! I saw it first – no I did!” (And that’s just us parents). We rarely come in the evening, but yesterday was too perfect a day to resist. The children are like frisky lambs, racing as ever to find the tree that is our house, in this parallel sylvan world. James sometimes lets his sister get their first, but the urge to win is sometimes overpowering at eight, and today his long limbs glide towards the tree, Katherine’s plump little legs staggering along behind. The fates smile on us today, however; the indignation of losing doesn’t result in storms of tears, but in beams of triumph; “I winned Mummy, I came second!”

Right in the heart of the wood, in the clearing that doubles as the village green, stands a sculpture. Or a satute, as the children are wont to call it. We are lucky to have a sculptor of some renown in the village, a Royal Academician, no less and he designed and donated it to form the centrepiece of the wood. ‘The Gift’, on it’s granite plinth, is abstract; people mostly see it as symbolising the protection and comfort of dwellings and communities, with a tall bronze form leaning paternally over a group of huddled, smaller shapes. For James, it’s always been God and us. For Katherine, it’s a mother with her children. For both, it’s something to climb up and picnic beneath, since none of the trees are venerable enough as yet to take this role.

Although we know that the wood is well used, we always arrive to a watchful silence. Never a soul visible. Hence we have a slightly proprietary feeling about the whole place. Once we decide to head home, however, then people emerge. Dog walkers, families out strolling. They edge tentatively through the hedges, like shy fauns. Maybe they’ve been here all the while; for a small place, it stretches magically to allow everyone their space.

The long term intention is to let the trees develop naturally and become high forest, with minimal human intervention. The possible effects of global warming aside, it’s not too hard to imagine it in the future, the trees gnarled and ancient, the forest leaves a dense canopy, the paths overgrown. I’ve often marvelled at the unselfish foresight of those long-dead people who planted stately avenues and arboretums in the past, knowing that they would never see them as they intended them to be seen. I feel long-sighted myself, sometimes, in this wood; it’s surely a gift from our village to the future.