By Katy Ewing
I start out the front door and down the three steps onto the rural A-road we live beside. It’s busy at this time, 3.30: school runs, farm vehicles, wood lorries. We’re in a 50-mph zone, but it’s not always adhered to. I cross the road and head up towards the woods, trying to avoid being seen, as always.
I’m surprised by how cold the wind feels on my face, my body. I know I should have changed out of the damp walking clothes I had on but I didn’t want to risk missing the fast-moving twilight. We got back from our daily pandemic exercise walk at about 3.15 and the sun was already low.
I really wanted to be at my woods for twilight today, November’s last day. These woods I found seven years ago when I’d needed a way to get out the door, a way to be a creature alive in the green world; these woods I’ve been getting to know, learning to feel. The idea of twilight would add new layers of experience; the two truths at once, the dog becoming wolf. And today is the full moon, an eclipse, and my menstrual cycle just about to make me bleed. I’m at an age or stage where my cycle is still regular but I have started to know some seismic shift in hormone patterns. It seemed that dusk today would be particularly double, cuspy, raw, difficult. Feeling.
Just before I get to the woods, I hear a military jet approaching, seeming to crack and rip the atmosphere, a terror, hard not to flinch from it. I see it for a couple of seconds, emerging from behind the trees I’m approaching and flying almost parallel with the ex-railway track avenue, with the road. The cold wind shivers through me.
I leave the road and enter the woods by a muddy farm track that leads into a field, which I duck off within a few feet, down into a scrubby roadside understory. Iron rods of an old estate fence jut out of the ground threateningly, near the odd broken bottle, empty beer can. Around three months ago, a tipi shaped stack of cut branches taller than me appeared near the start of the woods, where it is still farm track, and more human influenced. I look to see if any offer themselves as staffs from the smaller ones at the outside. I only see one of approximately the right size, so I lift it to see how it handles. It is wet, cold and heavy, too recently alive, and without a good holding place, so I put it back. I head in, stepping over rusty fence wire, and on towards my known trees.
First the old sweet chestnuts. Two of the largest I’ve seen and each with a different, equally distinctive shape. The first has three main trunks, falling away from each other, and its many fallen large branches form a barrier on the path. A barrier to humans anyway, a clear path does exist. Since becoming ill in 2017 with severe balance issues, I’ve had to adapt the ways I move through the woods. Using badger or deer paths where I have to bend down and duck under can leave me nauseous and ill for days or could even tip me into who knows what sensory future. So now I have to make my own way through, find gaps that are more my size, although I’m always reluctant to influence the shape of this surprisingly human-free place, make human paths with my journeys, so I try to step carefully.
Looking down to place my feet I see the ground is thick with dulled gold sweet chestnut leaves, spiny split nut cases.
The second sweet chestnut I call the treegod. It has this form like a tall, many-armed deity, splendid in all seasons. I go close to touch the trunk, the spiral of thick rivuleted pink bark with pale blue-green sheen of algae. It’s dry, cool.
I’m drawn uphill, under the lime trees that reach right down into my face and once pinched my glasses in August as I tried to struggle through the leaves and bracken, presenting them to me the next day when I returned.
Now it’s not far to the great beech tree. I stop above it by the dyke. There’s a bird shriek from the field towards the river, but I can’t identify it. I’ve become used to walking with my husband, who knows these things. A pair of red kites check me out from above, flying against the wind.
My feet feel the instability of fallen round dyke stones under the leaf litter, on the edge of painful, and somehow combining with the cold wind to add to a sense of rawness. I look downhill to the great tree’s trunk; it will be sheltered.
I carefully make my way down; the leaves are slippery and my walking shoes are old. And always I have to watch out for holes in the ground. When I first found these woods, I was alone, and under this tree I found what I was sure must be a badger sett. Seven years later and it’s clear this entire wooded hill is mined with holes and tunnels used by badgers, rabbits, foxes, rats. We’ve seen them on trail-cam footage. You can hear the hollowness of the ground when you walk here in drier seasons.
Down at the beech tree I’m closer to the main road again, but above it. I lean against the side that faces away from the road, looking uphill. I can see the scuffs my feet have left in the leaf litter coming down, a direct narrow little track. Beyond that, above, is the dyke. It’s a beauty. While researching to know this place I’ve seen and photographed beautifully handwritten receipts from 1824 in the library archives for dyke-building and maintenance, and for trees and their planting, and in my mind these receipts help to layer my knowledge of this place as created by early nineteenth-century landowners with my experience of it as taken back by the living world. All paths leading to this existence, right now.
I squat down at the base of the tree, my back against its trunk. The solidity of a great tree is like no building could ever be. I’m cradled in the buttress. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. Become aware of my body, supported here, breathing. I feel my feet rooted to the earth, reaching away down into the hill. Giving strength, taking goodness. I feel my body as if a channel for this earth goodness, immovable like the tree’s trunk. I feel my hands and head as if gathering from the sky. I keep breathing. I’m sheltered from the cold wind here, but the sound of it in the tall trees is amazing; it moves them in a mass and their bodies creak and crack.
I still hear sporadic traffic, and though I mindfully try to not name or label the sounds, I recognise a probably school bus, an empty wood lorry. A full wood lorry going in the other direction.
I expect to smell that incredible fungal leaf-mould smell that I love in deciduous woods, my paradise of sorts, but it’s so faint I might be imagining it. Maybe because of the cold, or maybe the air movement. At one point there comes a smell of sheep, and I hear them baaing from the field across the road. A bit later I smell warm malty animal feed after a large vehicle passes below. I open my eyes and see that the darkness has increased. The dyke above is dark where moss-covered and striking white where patches of lichen have thrived.
Some far-off dogs start barking, at least a few large fields away.
I realise that because I’m squatting, my feet and ankles have become uncomfortable, so I stand up as quietly and gracefully as I can, keep leaning against the trunk. I’m getting cold now, staying so still. I’d like to get my body moving again. I wonder if the moon is risen yet, and decide to walk uphill to see if it’s visible over the dyke. But first I thank the tree for having me, and on a whim, kiss it. To my lips, the bark feels unexpected, skin-like, dry and cool, but with a soft roughness.
At the top of the hill, I look over the dyke and see no moon. I look back into the dark woods, wonder if I should make my way home. I often end up feeling a bit suspect out on my own like this, trying to know particular place, being here just for the being. Developing a sense of deep attachment to someone else’s wee scrap of woodland. I came for this dusk though, and I decide to stay here for a bit longer, keep feeling.
I see a little bird hop closer in the scrub, I think it’s a robin, but it’s too dark to be sure. It’s checking me out in that way though.
Suddenly I realise I’m really very cold, too cold. I’m not sure what I was hoping for here, but I know I’m reluctant to start home, as if there is more I must do. But I can’t make myself ill for it and somehow a line has been crossed in that direction. My hands feel like they’ve been making snowballs, and my body feels like a sudden winter snagged me and pulled me in. That’s it, I start off down the hill towards the chestnut trees.
Then I remember I wanted to bring back a token. It’s very dark under the trees now. What will I even be able to find? There are damp leaves and empty sweet chestnut shells, but they’re all a bit wet and disintegrating. I look around for something that I can carry, again hoping for an offering. Then I see it, a stone that looks extremely cube shaped, a few inches across. And when I pick it up, I realise it’s light and is in fact a square cut-off end of fence post, slightly reclaimed by the woods, wet moss and dark soil. Perfect, I pocket it.
Out of the woods, finally I see the golden full moon rise over the farm gate and into the trees’ branches, like a birthing. I take a quick photo for social media, for my records, for my deeper knowing.