First Harvest & Stockhill Woods - To The Trees Edition #66

On the isle of Glastonbury, the harvest is already happening. In a friend’s garden, I watch pigeons gorge on elderberries. They bob and pluck at the dark clusters for hours, fill their necks to spilling point, then tumble off somewhere, perhaps to feed their squabs, and return promptly to continue their banquet.

Squirrels are hauling in the hoards of hazel and beech nuts leaving their cracked casings upon the lanes. They scatter nut caches all over the place, often forgetting where they have left them. These collections, if lost in favourable locations, form the next generation of saplings, creating new woods all over the place. Busy too are the Jays tending the oaks in a similar fashion, popping acorns in the ground as if purposefully planting them, taking care to look around and ensure nobody is watching as they conduct these private affairs. To state it bluntly; the trees employ creatures to fulfil the job of scattering around their potential offspring.

The badgers sort out the haw, cherries and plums and those who live in the Abbey take part in a more refined harvest, the fallen arils from the Abbey’s yew trees, along with their toxic seeds, which they pass rather quickly out the other end, planting new yews hither and thither.

Creatures of all kinds gather in the orchard to get drunk on the ferment of early fallers, while blackbird, thrush and wren busy themselves on the borders, fidgetedly picking at the ripening bramble.

Above the fields, swallows slice low arcs a wing’s beat from the floor on the hunt for their airborne harvest. Their mid-flight manoeuvres deny the eye as they weave and dive. The word fly doesn’t do them justice, they are made of the air itself, bird-shaped blades of summer’s breeze who dance with the firmament. Dozens gather in a tall dead hawthorn on Stone Down, chattering endlessly, preparing themselves for their long journey south, come August’s end.

***

Earlier in July I headed off-isle to visit Stockhill woods. I am not particularly drawn to coniferous woods, they lack the interesting understory of deciduous woodlands and can feel like gloomy unnatural places, but I have walked here a few times and find the history of the underlying landscape quite compelling. A newly planted spruce woods is interspersed with boundary beech trees, stone walls and banks from previous enclosure layouts, the woodland floor is dotted with the craters and piles from medieval lead mining activity.

Its history feels dense and heavy. Technically there should be no wood here, we should be wandering across an open landscape with its ancient tumuli visible to the horizons. That said, this somewhat constructed woodland sitting upon a somewhat desecrated ancient cemetery, makes for an adventure through varied environments with some abrupt and surprising changes in scenery.

The density of the spruce woods, for the most part, deters much else other than bracken and spindly understory trees form growing beneath it, but on the edge, and in certain areas of the wood where beech has been planted along boundaries, or swathes of spruce have been chopped down, isolated pools form, rich with activity and colour. Here, walls of spruce wood tower high on all sides, the trees stand like rows of wintery mourners, peering over their fallen comrades, while the bare ground between them is given fresh life, turned to pioneer tree species, wild flowers, bracken and bramble.

For acres the wood is a labyrinth, bearings are easily lost without a hint of a horizon, and the sun’s position becomes difficult to discern amongst the dark looming giants. Beneath the spruce, the raised trails are webbed with exposed roots and can be quite difficult to traverse, one has to place their foot carefully in the spaces between the protruding roots. The ground feels spongy and hollow and makes a muffled thud underfoot, digging beneath the surface reveals decades of fallen needles compacted into thick, springy layers. These paths are made by spruce.

As the trails meander through the trunks they fall away into circular craters, the scars left by lead mining activity dating back to roman times and continuing until around the 1700s. The holes are now filled with bracken and moss, the occasional holly, and saplings of beech and oak, struggling for light beneath the dense, spiny ceiling. Some are used as cosy hides with branches enclosing them as a roof, fun daytime play areas, though I wouldn’t like to spend the night.

The sprawling spruce wood is crossed by long straight tracks. Along the main ways, the scenery can become repetitive, rows of spruce corral the route and can feel oppressive and over bearing, but then, a turn at the tracks end can suddenly shift the mood, from tall spruce into an area of beech wood, then a narrow hallway lined with bramble and dancing butterflies, next into an open corridor of felled spruce, then along an old, crumbling stone wall, the boundary of forgotten fields now lying as deep and lost as I am within this green maze – the landscape and flora is surprisingly various if one takes time to look beyond the evergreens.

In places, the sun is completely lost and on both sides stands a wall of woodland too thick to pass, the way forward looks exactly the same as the way back, the wood dissolves direction and the slight disorientation becomes a part of the Stockhill experience where a wrong turn can take one a long way from one’s intended path and one half expects bowie to appear through the walls with his crystal ball.

The next turn reveals a starkly different pool of of light and colour, a sudden glade of rowan dotted with a bumper crop of berries spiked by the pink floral pyramids of rosebay willow herb, so strikingly juxtaposed against the colours of rowan and complimented again against the spruce green surrounds.

Stockhill has its charms. The outside world feels far away, sealed beyond the ranks of trees, one half expects to see creatures appear that are of a kind as equally unfamiliar and spliced as the landscape from which they emerge, perhaps oddly evolved by the presence of lead, chimeras that have had to adapt quickly to this quickly changed environment.

The historical layers here are palpable. Beneath the young spruce trees destined for timber, stand older beeches. Beneath the beeches, stone walls and ancient banks once used to mark out fields. Below them, the craters and spoil heaps from lead mining. And deeper still, the ceremonial landscape: the burials, the mounds, the artefacts now held by roots.

***

Back on the Isle of Glastonbury, I take in all I can of these last weeks of Summer, enjoying the observation of developing fruits, the falling orchards, the abundance of butterflies and the last days of heat and shine.

The hills, combes and hedgerows have erupted in a show of colour. The apples, red and green, now start to drum upon the earth. Grandmother lime’s plumping green berries are soon to brown. Haws redden and the elderberries ripen in black bunches, the berries of Guelder-rose are half orange turning to red in the most satisfying of gradient transitions. Beech is browning and the acorns are bright green, a notable percentage of them have galls.

The hogweed’s seeds bronze, while the nettle seeds dangle and the doc heads stand tall and rusty red-brown beside them. Ragwort continues with its bright yellow flowers, while the pink flowers of the great hairy willow herb transform their elongated ovaries into pods of seed, splitting open to release upon the breeze, seeds dangled upon the most delicate silken threads.

Until next time.