Not so very long ago you and I were both exceptional climbers. We breezed through the trees, living, hunting and sleeping in the greenery. Bridging the gap between branches was second nature to our ancestors, and they wouldn’t have thought twice about jumping the void to secure a good breakfast.
This continued for many tens of millions of happy years. Then, one fateful afternoon, we stepped down from the heights and began our life as ground dwellers. Soon to become the baldest of the apes, we abandoned the very thing that had sustained us for countless generations, deciding instead to seek our future on two feet.
Whatever forced this great transition, climate or curiosity, the outcome has clearly been a terrible mistake. We traded brawn for brains, opposable toes for stilettos, and sacrificed instinct and sustainable habitat for an intelligence that would culminate, roughly thirteen million years later, in the ability to doubt ourselves.
Even after making the era-defining choice of no longer living in the trees, our ancestors most likely returned to them in times of need. Where else would you flee when being chased across the African savannah by the larger of the ground-dwelling predators? Indeed you might only be reading this due to the climbing skill-set of your very great-grandmother, which enabled her to escape the jaws of various ravenous beasts (or at least those unable to give chase up trees).
But there came a time when we no longer needed to ascend to survive. The invention of fire, tools and, more recently, television has made climbing trees largely surplus to human requirements. Although a number of diligent tribes continued to seek food and shelter in the canopy, living exclusively up high became a rare lifestyle choice; those still clinging to the branches in the 21st century are few and far between. Our relationship with the trees has changed from one of co-existence to increasing exploitation.
In spite of our great descent, the lure of climbing trees has persisted. Throughout history, thinkers and dreamers have returned to the forest compelled by a shared ancestral memory. Trees bring out a powerful homing instinct in many of us and we gravitate towards them, a part of us, perhaps, longing to return to our former existence. The poetic image of the dying soldier comes to mind, dragging himself to the base of a tree before expelling a final breath. Trees remain linked to our concept of a life cycle, their death and rebirth analogous to humankind’s own measurement of time. The Green Man of pre-Christian symbolism, a kind of arboreal divinity, is an enduring mark of this tie to the trees. Living faces and hollow skulls sprout leaves from mouth and ears, a relic of our former union with the vegetable world.
If we search for tree dwellers down the millennia we find curious instances of men and women climbing back into the canopy. Consider the druids, most venerated of ancient Britons and the policy makers of their day. If we credit Pliny’s Natural History, one of their sacred rituals was running up an oak tree under a full moon to cut down fistfuls of mistletoe. Only the druids were permitted to climb the hallowed trees, a sure sign of the ancients’ veneration for this noble art.
In AD 436, a slightly awkward teenager called Simeon decided to climb a pillar and spend the rest of his life sitting on top of it. Although historians have immortalised him as a man seeking spiritual enlightenment, I think Simeon was following a nagging instinct to nest. Hounded by other lost souls, he chose to escape the world by climbing above it.
Simeon’s life up high inspired a cult of pillar-squatting Christians known as stylites, ‘pillar dwellers’; others took to the trees, hiding away from the world in hollow trunks or climbing branches to nest like birds in the tree tops. Early icons display barefoot monks perched happily in the canopy, with various followers bringing them food and drink. These men became known as dendrites, ‘people of the tree’, and most famous among them was David, more formally known as Saint David of Thessalonika. He spent three years living in an almond tree, nominally talking to God but also enjoying the nuts and the view. Spend long enough in the branches and you too may find yourself beatified.
Scaling trees was certainly still commonplace in the Middle Ages. The Fates of Men, an Old English poem of the 8th century, provides a fascinating list of fatal misfortunes that might befall your average Anglo-Saxon. Most of these we can readily accept as unremarkable for the age: being devoured by a wolf, being pierced by a spear, dying through storm, starvation or war. Some of the documented fates even have modern-day parallels, like the man ‘maddened with mead’ who dies in the Dark Ages’ equivalent of a bar brawl.
In among all this misery is death by falling from a tree. It seems an odd fate to include in a list of everyday dangers:
One from the top of a tree in the woods
Without feathers shall fall, but he flies none the less,
Swoops in descent till he seems no longer
The forest tree’s fruit; at its foot on the ground
He sinks in silence, his soul departed –
On the roots now lies his lifeless body.
The bard’s lyrical account of a fatal slip implies that a number of people could still be found hanging around in the tree tops. In those heady days several different vocations might have lured our forebears back into the canopy: drovers would climb up beech and ash, collecting leaves as forage for their cattle, and medieval falconers seem to have spent half their lives chasing wayward hawks off high branches. Plucky soldiers would also have scaled the heights to get the lie of the land. Before the advent of balloons or drones, climbing a tree was as good a way as any of spying on your neighbour.
Fast forward a thousand years and some truly remarkable tree climbers emerge from the 18th century. In the forests of France and Germany hunting parties discovered several instances of children living wild, subsisting alone deep in the woods. Peter the Wild Boy, who later became a court celebrity in England, was discovered ‘walking on his hands and feet, climbing trees like a squirrel, and feeding on grass and moss’. Attempts to capture him resulted in the ‘savage’ taking refuge in a tree that had to be cut down in order to catch him. A similar story emerged in the 1790s, when three hunters came across a boy covered in scars living in the woods near Saint-Sernin-sur-Rance. Again, when they attempted to capture him the child’s first instinct was to climb a tree, from which he was subsequently dragged down. Both Peter and Victor, the second boy, were found to be living on forest flora – bark, berries and roots – and seemed to have reverted to nesting in the trees.
Although their stories have a tragic origin – they were most likely abandoned as children – both boys demonstrate the remarkable ability of humans to survive in the wild and our instinctual preference for seeking shelter in the trees. During the course of their subsequent lives, unhappily paraded as freaks, they often attempted to escape back into the forest.
More extraordinary than either case is that of Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc. In 1731, on the outskirts of the French commune of Songy, a thief clothed in animal skins was found stealing apples from an orchard. The villagers set a bulldog upon the intruder, who was said to have struck it dead with a single blow. Pursued by a mob, the mysterious figure vanished back into the nearby forest, swinging from branch to branch across the tree tops. A vengeful party was soon sent after the thief, who turned out to be a girl of nineteen living off raw meat and fish, and sleeping in the canopy of a tree.
‘The Shepherd’s Beast’, as the new marvel was known, spent the following years of her life sequestered in a series of convents. This sudden change to a cloistered living space and cooked food destroyed her previously robust constitution. Within a few weeks all of her teeth fell out and she was given her new name, redolent of Christian morality.
Unique among such cases, Marie-Angélique recovered the power of speech and was ‘integrated’ back into society, where her full story slowly came to light. She was found to be of Native American origin and had been living wild for a decade or more. Her return was considered a triumph of civilisation, and her restoration to speech a victory for rational thought. In reality, her captors had undone