Another map ties the wood more closely with Rotherfield Greys than with Henley-on-Thames. Civil parishes are the basic unit of local government, and frequently do not have the same boundaries as the ancient ecclesiastical parishes. They elect councillors, not priests, and their boundaries were sorted out at the end of the nineteenth century to make a more sensible system of local administration. Our wood lies in the civil parish of Rotherfield Greys, even though it is ecclesiastically Henley; this is appropriate to its other links with the big house. It seems that Lambridge Wood was always on the edge of some map or parish or village, which may be a good place to be to pass unnoticed. And like many other woodlands, our wood was also free from tithes: a 10 per cent levy on the income derived from the land once provided the principal source of income to support the local church. Following an Act of Parliament in 1836 a schedule of tithes was compiled across England, and in the Oxfordshire Record Office a map of 18409 portrays Lambridge Wood with considerable accuracy. The accompanying ledger prepared by a clerk in best copperplate script declares it ‘exempt’. I occasionally put a pound coin in the box at Rotherfield Greys as a token of expiation.
In 1922 Lambridge Wood was sold off from the Greys estate after a history stretching back to Domesday. We have the map detailing ‘Lambridge Farm and 160 acres of woodland’ which was sold in Henley Town Hall on 26 July to George Shorland, a rich farmer and entrepreneur who had purchased land all around Henley. The modern era of Lambridge Wood had begun, and the unbroken thread leading back to medieval times had been severed. We will meet some of the subsequent owners later on, but now I am going to take a jump to 1969, when Lambridge Wood passed into the ownership of Sir Thomas Erasmus Barlow, Bt, whose heirs owned it until as recently as 2010. I admit that the name meant nothing to me. Sir Thomas was the third baronet to carry the title, and a distinguished naval commander. In a fairly perfunctory way, I started one of those online searches that have become routine for writers, as they have for almost everybody else. I moved backwards in time as far as I could. The First Baronet, another Thomas, had been Queen Victoria’s private physician, a man who died dripping with honours, and no doubt had an outstanding bedside manner. The Second Baronet, Sir Alan Barlow, father of Thomas Erasmus, was scarcely less distinguished as a civil servant in the grand tradition, serving as Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s Principal Private Secretary from 1933 to 1934. But then I discovered something that caused the mouse to freeze in my fist. Alan Barlow had married Nora Darwin. A magical name had somehow found its way into the genealogy of the wood. If one thread had been severed, another had been established. It did not take much more research to establish that Nora was the granddaughter of Charles Darwin. So our wood, the subject of my own modest natural history investigations, had recently belonged to a direct descendant of the greatest natural historian of all time.
I happen to know another direct Darwin descendant who worked with me at the Natural History Museum, the botanist Sarah Darwin. The Darwins are an unusually distinguished clan, and the present generation respects the ramifications of the dynasty. Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus sired one of those lineages that seem to have done nothing but good in the world: the third Sir Thomas’s middle name must have been a nod in the direction of the grand old progenitor. Sarah knows the current baronet, Sir James Barlow; not least, they are both Ambassadors for the Galapagos Conservation Trust, which seeks to protect the world’s most famous natural evolutionary laboratory from further damage through foolish exploitation. In the autumn of 2014 Sarah introduced me to Sir James and his sister Monica. I met them both in our wood, and together we traced a path through Lambridge that they had not done for many years. James remembered his grandmother, who, he said, had been dandled on Darwin’s knee. So there I was, talking to somebody whose grandmother might have giggled and snuggled into the breast of the incomparable naturalist. I know that a number of generations back we are all related somehow – it is just a matter of statistics – but none of my friends or colleagues (apart from Sarah) has any direct link with Charles Darwin. It is difficult not to see this connection as a kind of blessing for the project – in the most secular meaning of that word, of course.
As we ambled through Lambridge Wood James and Monica explained that their father had been very much the conservationist until his death in 2003. Some parts of the wood (not ours) had been clear felled in rectangular plots, and replanted with conifers, mostly larch and Corsican pine. These are not natural trees to find in the Chiltern Hills; on the aerial view they show up as intensely dark-green areas quite distinct from the undulating beech crowns. The intention was to harvest the mature larch for pit props, but that project was evidently ill-conceived, since the Barlow ownership of the wood coincided almost exactly with the terminal decline of coalmining in Great Britain. Now, some of our fellow small wood owners are simply removing the larch to allow the broadleaved forest to recover. There is a great pile of conifer offcuts near the entrance to our wood; I decided to leave these fragments of mistaken forestry in order to study the processes of decay.
Elsewhere, the beech wood seems to have been left quietly to get on with being a beech wood, helped by periodic thinning. The manager of the wood was John Mooney, and the Barlows told me that they knew him as ‘Eeyore’ because of his pessimistic prognostications for making any money out of the wood. His annual accounts always finished with a thumping loss. It is as well that Barlow senior was primarily interested in good ecological stewardship, for all his correspondence from Mr Mooney is steeped in wry gloom.10 The wood was under threat from trespassers, he said, or horse riders who cut barbed-wire fences, and poachers who poached. Deer of all species curtailed almost all regeneration, and what little was left was damaged by squirrels. The whole business was hamstrung by interfering busybodies and/or charlatans from the Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England and official bodies like English Nature. In 2000 his annual summary finished magisterially: ‘It has been getting progressively worse for the past 25 years [before] hitting this nadir.’
Then Harry Potter came to the rescue. From 2001 onwards J.K. Rowling’s novels about the young wizard were adapted for the screen, and the movies were watched by countless children. Many of them wanted their very own broomstick so they could play quidditch and generally fly about the place. The heads of the broomsticks were made from bound bundles of twigs, and the right kinds of twiggy shoots could easily be cut from birch trees and regenerating stumps in Lambridge Wood. More than a century ago there was an artisan known as a ‘broom squire’ who plied his trade deep in the beech woods, so it was a traditional skill.11 Now there was an unprecedented broom boom, a besom bonanza. James Barlow said that they couldn’t supply enough to the toy trade. In the end Lambridge Wood as a whole made at least a little money, in a thoroughly ecologically respectable way.
The distribution of trees today in our patch of Grim’s Dyke Wood is likely to have been much the same when Sir Thomas bought the whole woodland, except that the beeches have had another forty years or so to increase their girth and height. Mr Mooney recorded that the wood escaped comparatively lightly from the great storm of October 1987, which flattened whole woods elsewhere (it didn’t cheer him up). Many of the beeches are between ten and twenty paces apart, close enough to provide total leaf cover in summer, although there are several small clearings, and a large one on the northern edge where felling must have been more recent. Although beech is dominant, other kinds of woodland trees are a delightful addition to the silviculture. Eighteen magnificent wild cherry trees shoot skyward on sheer trunks to the same height as the beeches. Three stately ash trees decked in yellowish bark have spawned uncountable numbers of offspring. Less noticeable are wych elms discreetly hiding among the beeches. We have a total of just two oak trees, one of them a fine specimen, the other something of a poor relation, both tall. The same number of yew trees are the only conifers in our wood; these two are just at the beginning of their long, long lives. I scratched around for hours among brambles before finding a solitary field maple, and a tiny youngster at that, but I am glad to have it in my inventory.
Then there is the understory: trees of lesser stature that