Each bluebell arises from a white bulb the size of a small tomato, and produces a rosette of spear-like leaves and a single flower spike; none is much taller than your forearm. It takes hundreds to make a splash of colour. The bells hang down in a line along the raceme in a single graceful curve. ‘Raceme’ is scientifically correct, of course, but how I wish that we could refer to it as a ‘chime’. Flowers at the base of the spike open first, their six delicate petals curving backward to form a skirt that curves away from the creamy anthers; it takes a while for the whole display to be over, as each flower up the spike comes to perfection one after another. With a natural variation in flowering times according to aspect and local climate, there are a few woodland nooks where bluebells open up precociously, and others where they linger longer. But wherever they bloom, theirs is a short-lived glory; and only when they are seen in numbers can the delicate perfume they produce be appreciated. As they generally reproduce from a slow multiplication of their bulbs, rather than from seed, the masses of English bluebells seen in our woods are a reliable indicator that they are of ancient origin. Hence it is likely that the flowers that delight my eyes today have been admired for centuries from the same spot near the edge of this very wood. The temptation is to pick a great bunch of blooms, but in a vase they lose vibrancy; they need a myriad companions to assert their natural magnificence. A thrush singing in mellow, repetitive phrases from deep within a holly bush adds some sort of blessing.
This is our own piece of classic English beech woodland, gifted with bluebells, covered with trees for generations, and changing at the slow pace of sap rising and falling. When Lambridge Wood was subdivided by the previous owner our little piece of it was arbitrarily christened Grim’s Dyke Wood, after the ancient monument that passes through the wood. The new name added an irresistible whiff of romance to the sales pitch that helped us to part with our money. It is a triangular plot with nearly equal sides, two of them marked out by public footpaths. We access the north-east corner of the triangle by vehicle along a track through Lambridge Wood that leads to a converted barn adjacent to our piece of woodland; the barn has a picturesque cottage next door that will also feature in this book. On the ground, it is hard to detect a very gentle slope of the whole plot to the south, but the incline is enough to admit a magical influx of winter light in the afternoon with the setting sun. About four acres (1.6 hectares) of woodland is not exactly a vast tract of forest, but it is enough to include more than 180 mature beech trees, which I counted, and bluebells galore, which I didn’t.
Lambridge Wood sits high in the Chiltern Hills, thirty-five miles to the west of London, near the southern tip of the county of Oxfordshire. Although so near the capital, the wood could be ten times further away from it and would not gain a jot more feeling of remoteness. As I contemplate the bluebells only the occasional growl overhead from aeroplanes bound for Heathrow reminds me that there is a great urban sprawl so close to hand.
The Chiltern Hills form the high ground for a length of more than fifty miles north-west of London. They follow the course of the outcrop of the pure white limestone known as the Chalk.3 The same rock makes the white cliffs of Dover, where England most closely approaches continental Europe; the sight of the cliffs has brought a lump into the throat of many a returning traveller, so it might be thought of as a peculiarly English rock, although it is actually widely spread around the world. As limestone goes, it is a very soft example of its kind – one that can be flaked with a penknife. Even so, it is harder and more homogeneous than the rocks that underlie it to the north, or overlie it in the direction of London, and differential weathering and erosion over hundreds of millennia has promoted the relative recession of the softer rocks to either side. The Chilterns stand proud.
The scarp slope along the northerly edge of the hills is surprisingly steep, and from the top of the Oxfordshire segment there are fine long views across the Vale of Aylesbury towards Oxford in the distance. That scarp lies only ten miles north-west of our wood. Half that distance away, Windmill Hill at Nettlebed is one of the highest points in southern England at 692 feet (211 metres) above sea level.4 The tops of the Chiltern Hills are richly wooded compared with the intensively farmed lowlands on the gentle plain to the north, where a patchwork of neat green fields or brown ploughed farmland is the rule. Google Earth or the Ordnance Survey map reveal much the same pattern, whether seen from above or in plan. The high ground has long fostered special pastoral practices, in which woods played a continuous and important part in the rhythm of country life. That is why they have survived. Our tiny patch is just one small piece of a larger tapestry stitched together from irregular swatches of trees, stretching over many miles. Other kinds of farmland are interspersed, to be sure, and in some places there has been sufficient clearance for open downland. But near our patch, copse, shaw, hanger and wood dominate the landscape.
When I first walked through Lambridge Wood as a newcomer to the Chiltern Hills I was overwhelmed by a feeling of entering a realm of eternal nature. Here was the antidote to jaded city life. The woods are unchanging; they help to put our small concerns into perspective. They are restorative, havens for animals and plants; safe places for the spirit. Such a perspective drenches Edward Thomas’s rapt accounts of woodland in The South Country, and has a modern mirror in Roger Deakin’s Wildwood nearly a century later. Here is the farmer A.G. Street writing in 1933 after listing more than one disappointment of middle age: ‘The majesty of the wood remains unaltered. As I wandered slowly through it, the terrific importance of my trouble seemed to fade away. The peace of the wood and the comfort of the still trees soon iron out the creases in my soul.’5 Surely some comparable emotion lay behind the enthusiasm with which we purchased Grim’s Dyke Wood, our own piece of peace. It was a romantic (or even Romantic) notion, and not wrong in its essentials. But, as Henry David Thoreau remarked of the English poets: ‘There is plenty of genial love of Nature but not so much of Nature herself.’6 The wood has indeed given much pleasure, but much of that delight proves to be an intimate examination of nature close to. And I now know that the history of nature is not only natural history. The wood is not eternal – it is a construct, a human product. It was made by our ancestors, modified repeatedly, nearly obliterated, rescued by industry, forgotten and remembered by turn. The animals and plants rubbed along with history as best they could, mostly unconsidered except as meat, fuel and forage: the natural history was part and parcel of the human history. The result is what we see today. Romantic empathy with ‘Nature’ is all very well, but it does have to brush up against the hard grit of history, which can soon polish off any coating of wishful thinking.
So this book is both romantic and forensic, if such a combination is possible. My diary records the status of the beech trees and the animals and plants, the play of the light, the passage of the seasons, expeditions and people, and the incomparable pleasures of discovery. I have also taken samples from the wood to the laboratory to dissect under a microscope. I have invited help from experts to identify tiny animals – mostly insects – about which I know little. Add to this excursions into historical literature and archives, and much time spent scrutinising scratchy ancient maps, deeds and sales catalogues to understand how the wood fared under management for profit or pleasure, and its place in the economy of estate, county and country. I have interviewed those who have known the woods during long lives. There will be a little geology, and more than a touch of archaeology.
Several of my previous books