The morning after the rain, the clouds gradually clear, giving way to blue sky and warm sun: a perfect English summer’s day. My friend Lizzie and I walk away from the village towards Underhill, slightly uphill but not so that you’d notice. The farmer has cut a path that takes us straight across a corn field. Wheat ears brush against our legs then spring gracefully back into place. The earth is soft and sap rises through the grasses as the moisture of the night’s drenching evaporates on the warm air. Miles of cereal fields are spread all around us, relieved only by hedgerows and distant houses. A skylark is singing above, and I turn to see the wood behind the village. The plain houses of Ashwellthorpe have receded from view and it is easier now to imagine the wood as it once was, surrounded by the fields and marshes of the Anglo-Saxon settlement.
On our approach to the solid cluster of houses that forms the hamlet of Fundenhall, the fields that scroll away from the woods, with the marks of previous inhabitants imprinted on the soil, are used to human feet. The early Anglo-Saxons, when they arrived from their cold wastelands, must have been seduced by the warm climate and fertile, waterlogged land. We are walking in an anti-clockwise direction: south-east to Fundenhall, north-east towards Toprow, north-west to Wreningham, then south towards Lower Wood. From every angle I can see the wood. It is the dominant landmark in the area, the nucleus around which everything else has grown – fields, hedges, paths, roads, farms and houses, people and animals. In a landscape where hills are absent, birds of prey perch on the highest trees (probably ash) to survey the surrounding countryside for voles and mice.
The wood is about a mile to the west as we walk by a high hedge at the side of another neat field of corn. By the end of this walk we will have seen it from south, east and north. Between us and the wood, hidden under layers of earth and crops, the Anglo-Saxon burial ground lies behind Ashwellthorpe Hall, invisible now among the tranquil expanse of fields. Another skylark is singing above us, and the scents of flowers are delicate and sweet. Yellow Field Pepperwort, red Sheep’s Sorrel and Elderflower waft across the golden waves of wheat. My excitement grows at the prospect of walking in the wood again. It is hot now, well past midday, as we cross the corn fields towards Lower Wood. Although I was in it less than twenty-four hours ago, I am eager to see it in sunlight.
A row of ash and alder guard the north side. They have been here longer than any other species. We are entering by a path where tall grasses have been trodden down and the sides of an earth mound have been sculpted by the weight of many feet. Lizzie is slightly ahead and pauses to look around. In black T-shirt and shorts, she is framed by an ivy-smothered trunk and a mature ash, almost hidden under the burgeoning mass of vegetation rising above her. She looks slighter than usual and, fleetingly, as she slips into the waiting wood, she seems like a tree wraith or a wood nymph.
An ancient bank, with a ditch, surrounds the wood on all but the west side, where Lower Wood was separated from Upper. The ditch, now rank with stagnant water, would have been deepened by farmers over the centuries to deter livestock from entering the woods, but the original bank is believed to have been created in the Anglo-Saxon period. The ditch would have been dug with ash-handled spades, labour-intensive work. The farmers and peasants who toiled over it are most likely under the soil in the burial ground I mentioned.
When the ash trees have all gone, the mound will be exposed. Nothing is ever planted in this wood. The ‘Ash’ in Ashwellthorpe will be a historic reference. The ‘well’, originally ‘weall’, meaning ‘bank or mound’ in Anglo-Saxon, will remain: a lip of mud sculpted over fifteen hundred years. It will continue to accommodate the rain and silt and keep the boundary of field and tree. If the bank could talk, it could tell us who made it and why, tales of the many people and animals who have passed over it and left. When the ash trees have gone, the bank will be the sole keeper of the woods.
The earthworks will do the job they were originally intended for: to delineate the woods from the farms and maybe as a form of defence. Perhaps they were decorated with spikes or sharp implements to impale robbers and marauders crossing the woods to raid farmsteads at dead of night. Protection was much needed in the long and turbulent period of the many Viking invasions of the eighth and ninth centuries before the Danelaw was established. It seems likely that the Anglo-Saxons conceived the earthworks as part of a defence system, as they were in other parts of the country. It was common practice for earth mounds to be built around settlements as defence boundaries.
The copse is cool and welcoming after the heat of the open fields, the air heavily scented with the humus of rotting vegetation and moisture-locked soil. A little light filters though the fine canopy of ash and sallow, but not enough to dry out the wood after the drenching of the last few days. Rays of sunlight sparkle on the woodland floor. Last night the branches were dripping and bent under the weight of rain; today the boughs of the ash are still heavy and there is a sombre air among the trees. Our mood changes as we walk through them, looking for lesions on the bark of young ash. At first it is a game to try to spot the signs and I’m keen to show off my new knowledge. But Lizzie is walking fast ahead of me, and doesn’t want to stay too long to examine the diseased trees. We become silent, and I feel as I do when visiting a sick relative or friend in hospital: I want to stay and cheer them up but feel helpless.
We leave the wood to the plaintive whistle of a chiffchaff, the two notes, one higher than the other, seeming to call us back. As we stroll past the meadow towards the car, I’m aware of the trees whispering behind me. I turn back, but the sound fades. Yet as I drive away from the village, with the windows wound down, I hear it again, many voices muttering, not words or syllables, but musical notes. It reminds me of the description of the spirit chorus that the soul seers claimed to hear in Montaillou, France, in the fourteenth century. Many occupants of this wood are passing into spirit form and, clamour as they may, nothing can save them.
In my rear-view mirror, the dark body of the wood recedes from view, like a rain cloud passing by. I notice more ash with exposed antler branches and think of the many that will fall victim and die on the roadsides over the coming years.
The Science behind Ash Dieback
People up and down the country are becoming more aware of the plight of the ash and, in an area outside Norwich, scientists are working to halt the progress of Chalara fraxinea. The John Innes Centre was set up as a charity in 1910 by John Innes, a landowner and entrepreneur from London, and has since been established as a centre for plant science and microbiology of international repute funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Research Council. The original buildings date back to the 1960s, when the John Innes Centre moved to Norwich, and the newer buildings have clustered around them in regimented designs of varying styles. If I didn’t know better, I might have thought I was on the edge of a housing estate in London’s Peckham or Brixton. When I walk across the car park on the same day in June that I visit Ashwellthorpe, I see that the buildings are softened by grass and a few clumps of trees.
Dan MacLean greets me in the reception area and walks me through a pleasant outdoor garden to the laboratories. They are empty, and looking through the glass wall makes me feel as though I’m being shown an exhibit in a museum. I remember as a child going round a futuristic exhibition at London’s Design Museum of domestic life in the twenty-first century. The laboratories are a bit like that: high metal contraptions and long melamine tables, all very clinical. In fact, they resemble characterless kitchens, which need a few dirty plates and a fruit bowl to make them real. I can see four, each visible to the rest through glass panes, lending them a competitive edge – I imagine young scientists coming to show each other how it’s done. At the far end, there is a flat-fronted grey machine, called an athemizer, where samples are frozen so that they break down into tiny particles or strands that can be analysed. There are little bottles, too, covered with tin foil, filled with transparent brown liquids.
The John Innes Centre is at the forefront of the fight against Ash Dieback. Daniel MacLean works for the Sainsbury Laboratory as a bio-informatician. He analyses DNA sequences on a computer. Ash trees are famous for distorting the division between male and female because they can be hermaphrodite, and a few are. They are often thought to