I have lived in villages all my life and worked part
and full time on various farms throughout my teens, so going for walks
across the fields is as natural as breathing to me. I have lived in the
present location for over 20 years now, but, since starting on the Druidic
path, country walks have taken on a whole new perspective.
As I leave the main road behind and begin a walk around my local area,
I emerge from a short wooded section into open fields next to the canal.
The walk starts here really, after paying respects to the three Willow
sisters leaning over the water. There is a lovely spring under a hawthorn
bush that runs winter and summer. on the bank running down to the canal.
I often pause to listen to its tiny trickle under the ivy-covered roots,
intertwined with briars and nettles.
Overlooking a slight bend in the canal is another multi-trunked hawthorn
tree. So heavy was its yield of berries last summer, it appeared red
rather than green when seen from a distance. Further along appears a
forlorn sight… a lightning-blasted oak. Once an upright healthy
tree that my partner and I used to greet and sit under regularly, one
of last summer’s thunderstorms cast a bolt of lightning that split
it from crown to ground. Shards of bark were scattered all around it.
It stood creaking and groaning for a matter of weeks until strong winds
broke the still-leafy tree in two. One half fell into the canal, and
the other crushed several hawthorns standing in the field. We imagined
that tree would be growing there for hundreds of years, attaining huge
girth and crown. It lies now a shattered wreck, leafless, lifeless and
brown; a gnarly reminder that the stoutest promise can come to naught
all too quickly.
The field itself, though containing many interesting features such as
springs and low-lying areas that form winter ponds, is not a natural
landscape. This area was completely reshaped during the canal excavations
200 years ago. Surrounding fields were raised by many feet by the dumping
of the digging spoil and the local stream diverted into a culvert, though
the original watercourse remains as an odd- shaped ditch along a present
field boundary.
In one corner stands a hollow, contorted beech tree, obviously scarred
by lightning many years ago. Though more fortunate than the oak, it survives
solitary and lonely; the only beech in the surrounding area. It was this
tree that inspired me to make a bullroarer during our work with Air last
year. One day last spring, I was listening to a solitary brown leaf from
the previous autumn whispering and rattling in the wind, still attached
to a twig high in its crown.
There is a small, steeply sloping area of woodland next to the canal.
There is evidence of an old byway / road running through it, judging
by parallel lines of ancient cut and laid hawthorn trees. Apart from
this, it has been left to grow as it pleases, since the canal cutting
time and the decline of a local ironstone industry. The ash, hawthorn
and sycamore grow close together, the ground covered in ivy. There are
a couple of crab apple trees, blackthorn and elder too, that give cover
for the pigeons, magpies, squirrels, rabbits and occasional muntjac that
can be found there. A less frequent visitor is a sparrowhawk that I have
seen hunting between the trees a couple of times.
This is no ancient woodland with trees like cathedral arches above;
it is not a forest splendour that people flock to admire (luckily perhaps!);
but it is a small, wild corner near where I live. I can walk there in
ten minutes, I can ground, meditate and find peace among its modest cover.
I did a self-initiation there in a glade a few years ago; for the last
few years, I have done solo Samhain rites there late in the autumn’s
evenings. I know the place, it knows me, and I can feel and notice very
quickly if things are different for whatever reason. I regularly pick
up rubbish which I find and take it home. I am a one man fly-tipping
patrol! Adjacent to the field stands the largest ash tree I have ever
met; a truly massive tree that has probably observed the canal navigators
come and go, the ironstone quarrying come and go, and probably a lot
of other goings-on beneath and around its huge canopy.
Walking further along the field path, there is the brook that goes underground
to feed the canal. Along its banks grown oak, ash, willow, hazel, hawthorn,
blackthorn, crab apple, elder, ivy and field maple. It runs silently
through the cress-choked channels, babbling excitedly in the freedom
of emerging from a culvert under the farm track. The pathway itself goes
to Nun Wood, named after an ancient nearby priory long since vanished.
There are other paths criss-crossing it, which used to be old roads between
the villages and the quarry workings, also long gone. These green ways
are quiet now, used as bridlepaths, reverting to only feeling the tread
of hoof and paw, rabbit’s foot and crow claw. In the quiet of evening
you can still feel the jingle of harness and creak of iron-shod wheels.
Lapwings squeak and tumble in courtship over the fields, larksong and
magpies’ chatter fills the air. The lookout rook caws danger, falls
from the tree and flies in the opposite direction. Rabbits’ white
scuts vanish into the hedge bottom as a solitary buzzard soars high above.
I hear the ocean roaring in the branches of an ash tree, the crow’s
nest aloft sailing under the clouds.
Later, a pale blue sky darkens to aquamarine; a gold and pink sunset
to blood red. Colour drains from the landscape into the ditches and brook,
gurgling away into the night. The moon appears in the black pool under
the willow tree, white, crossed by shadows of branches. The heads of
the horses bow down as they sleep standing still, their rear hooves click
together as they change legs to rest after a hard day at the riding school.
The steamy, sweet-smelling breath of the cattle hangs in the air under
the hawthorns, as they sit chewing the cud as I pass by. The headlights
of cars negotiating the bends and hills on the Stoke road arc out across
the land like beams from lighthouses over the sea. I slip unnoticed along
the hedgerows, back into the spinney on my way home. As I leave the field
path, the large oak on the green, spectacularly floodlit by orange street
lights, welcomes me back into the village.
Wilf
March 2005
