Making my way down to the stream, I see that two new signs have been nailed up, each reading:
Polite Notice. This wood is private land. Please respect that!!! Do not put anything in the brook to aide [sic] crossing.
The ‘private land’ referred to is a beautiful, bowl-like grove scooped out of the bank, full of sturdy sycamores and beeches, the floor of it scattered with last year’s jennies and mast. It’s a place where, all summer, children have played hide and seek or made pendula of themselves on the rope swings, just as my son did years ago; it’s where families have come to paddle in the water. Now, this glade is to be looked at in passing but not touched.
Little by little, the acres of open, natural space around Clavicle Wood are being closed off to the public. Only last week, I found a new fence erected in one of the former fairways. Eight feet high, it sliced up the meadow diagonally, preventing all but the most determined, like me, from passing through into the next field. This too was ringed by barriers that appeared to be guarding nothing other than more fencing piled up and waiting to be distributed.
It’s the same elsewhere on the course. Dozens of acres have been barriered off, some for several years now, the empty space sitting behind bars and watched over by twenty-four-hour CCTV.
There’s no particular reason for it, other than a statement of possession. And when the only function of a fence is to carve off some piece of seemingly disused natural space that might otherwise be enjoyed, we resist.
*
The effect of natural light, colour, air and shapes on our well-being is as known to us as the effect of water on thirst. So when a faceless ‘someone’ – a fellow being, of all things – keeps them out of reach simply to prevent you from appreciating them, the affront is sharply felt. Someone might as well have cordoned off a percentage of your lungs to keep for themselves.
Perhaps I stopped short earlier. These fences aren’t only statements of possession, but of control. For ‘authority’, in whatever guise that appears – landowners, local councils – there is often great anxiety over empty, natural space. Away from roads and houses, there’s scope for sedition. There have been reports in the local news lately about kids riding motorbikes across the grassland, and periodically the broken record is played about the threat of travellers commandeering any field that doesn’t have a gate.
It’s travellers, in fact, that the present Conservative government is using as collateral in their argument about the need to crack down on trespass. Some choice lines from their 2019 manifesto read:
We will tackle unauthorised traveller camps. We will give the police new powers to arrest and seize the property and vehicles of trespassers who set up unauthorised encampments, in order to protect our communities.
The prejudice here isn’t even coded in dog-whistle politics. It’s a straightforward association of an already well-marginalised minority group with inherent criminality. But whipping up antagonism towards the travelling community is a means to a far more disturbing end, and many other ‘undesirables’ will be moved on when the ultimate goal is reached and trespass becomes a criminal rather than civil offence. It will mean that rough sleepers who set up homeless camps or those who protest by occupation can be more heavily punished.
It’s in the debate about land usage and land ownership that the same ancient battle lines are drawn time and again between those who see the natural world as a common treasury, to use Gerrard Winstanley’s words, and those who see it as a thing to be divided up and owned. That there is such a thing at all as private property, that it is possible for someone to own earth, water, grass, trees and (up to a certain height) airspace is so entrenched in our society that it is often assumed that the legal right to acquire land comes with the privilege to demand obedience. The tone of superiority in ‘This wood is private land. Please respect that!!!’ is centuries old. The outrage expressed in the three exclamation marks is concerned with a perceived lack of deference to the principle of private ownership itself, rather than any anxiety about what people might actually do should they ford the stream and venture into the trees. There’s nothing there to steal, nothing to vandalise or a livelihood to disrupt.
It’s with a sense of satisfaction that I see that one of the Polite Notices has been impolitely defaced.
Escape
At the root of all this is a suspicion about what people might use such open space for. We’re not to be fully trusted. Away from scrutiny, we act differently (perhaps not always legally), we move differently, we think differently. Shortcuts and desire lines are often severed so that we can’t transit from one place to another unseen. It’s what’s happened near Clavicle Wood. The previously unbroken greenway between the various estates around the edge of the old golf course is being gradually sectioned off into single acres here and there, so that to walk into one of these fields is to be kettled by mesh.
The establishment of so many cul-de-sacs diminishes what’s therapeutic about walking, which is the ability to do it continuously and at length. Rather than going in circles, it’s necessary to feel as if we’re escaping something, leaving routine behind and abstaining from the roles we’re obliged to play most of the time.
I think of my great-grandparents and their generation, and how the West Yorkshire moors provided respite from the mills of a Sunday. But whereas escape for them meant that they didn’t have to labour, escape for me means that I don’t have to consume. They turned their backs on the factory’s rhythms; I turn off my phone and walk away from algorithms.
In his book A Philosophy of Walking, Frédéric Gros says, ‘the walker considers it a liberation to be disentangled from the web of exchanges, no longer reduced to a junction in the network redistributing information, images and goods.’
It stands as proof to the declaration by the Director for Hatcheries and Conditioning in Brave New World, who says that ‘a love of nature keeps no factories busy’.
Walking with pathlessness, aimlessness, for extended periods of time, is the antithesis of capitalism’s intentions for us. If we wander, we can’t be governed.
*
Right now, there’s a pressing need for green space. Social distancing is routinely cited as the way in which we will slow the pandemic. Therefore, it stands to reason that it’s in heavily built-up towns and cities that we most need places like Clavicle Wood or common land. It’s especially vital in the towns and cities of the North, in which living conditions are the poorest and coronavirus infections the highest. Put a map of England’s most deprived areas next to a map of COVID hotspots and they are almost identical. Manchester, Burnley, Blackburn, Oldham, Salford and Rochdale, for example, feature on both.1
Many of these places have parks and open green spaces, but there have been stories recently of local councils being forced to sell them to pay for frontline services, the budgets for which have been systematically cut by central government over the years of austerity that followed the crash of 2008. It’s one of the cyclical ironies we have to deal with that the spaces which might well provide some palliative for physical and mental ill health are being flogged off to fund services overstretched by physical and mental ill health.
*
Despite everything that occurred during lockdown, there was a degree of optimism that the shock and upheaval of the pandemic might prompt us as a country to take stock; that this crisis might lead us to tackle other longstanding issues and engender a new era in which we thought differently of one another and of the places where we lived.
Many of us have felt this desire, but to translate this calling to live more compassionately and thoughtfully into widespread and lasting societal change is almost certainly doomed to failure. More democracy, more collective ownership, more spaces in which people can just ‘be’ remain anathema to those who control the system.
The ‘self interest’ that John Clare decried is still with us, and the folk song of those who, like him, objected to the Enclosure Acts is, sadly, as relevant now as it was then:
&
nbsp; The law locks up the man or woman,
Who steals the goose from the common,
But leaves the greater villain loose,
Who steals the common from the goose.
Pessimistic as it may sound, in the post-COVID world the relentless pursuit of power and money by the self-serving plutocracy at the top will continue unimpeded, blind and deaf to any concerns about the environment or our well-being. If what’s happening to the fields around Clavicle Wood is anything to go by, then if and when the next pandemic comes, there will be fewer places to escape to than there are now.
Change
I come to the meadow on the other side of the wood and find it, for now at least, unencumbered by fences. It’s still knee deep in grass and thistles, there are bees and damselflies, but things are starting to die off in the quiet unstitching of summer’s work. There’s little birdsong, apart from the robins, the ragwort is wilting, and the flowers of the cow parsley have desiccated to little brown rattles. I pass a sycamore, one half apple-green, the other half yellowing to the colour of Bartlett pears.
I don’t think I’ve ever been as attentive to the smaller increments of change as I have this year.
It’s this intimacy with place which allows memories to be pinned to it more intensely. In Cecil Day Lewis’s poem ‘Walking Away’, the memory of his son starting school is associated with – and perhaps prompted by – the ‘leaves just turning’. And so for me, when I see this sycamore at this point in its transformation next year, or the year after, or for as long as I’m here to return to it, I’ll recall the feelings that I have now about my son leaving for university a couple of days ago. Pride, parental anxiousness and a longing – for something I can’t quite identify.
But it’s being here, specifically, that gives those emotions weight.
In Clavicle Wood he is a little boy making dens, an older boy with a broken collarbone, and he is also, astonishingly, a man.
It’s no coincidence that Day Lewis’s poem is rich with natural imagery. The son is first a ‘half-fledged thing’ and then a ‘winged seed’; the new place in which he finds himself is a ‘wilderness’ where he must tread his own path. We’ve long seen ourselves, our brief lives, mirrored in the natural world. It is the oldest metaphor for the necessity and normalcy of change. ‘Nature’s give-and-take,’ as Day Lewis puts it. ‘The small, the scorching / Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay’.
Natural metaphors appeal to us because the change they allude to is cyclical rather than permanent. In fact, because nature always appears to be in the act of returning to where it was, we perhaps feel it has a kind of perpetuity. Its patterns endure whatever.
Even if that’s untrue, it’s a seductive idea and one that’s given me a great deal of solace throughout my life. Whatever was happening, I could rely on nature to be there and allow me, for a time, to align myself with its behaviours and so become something else, or nothing at all.
In The Living Mountain, a memoir of her life spent among the Cairngorms, Nan Shepherd expresses a similar feeling: ‘The mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.’
The natural world often feels like the best of companions – reliable and available, welcoming even after long periods of separation, never wanting anything from us.
Which is why the first few days of lockdown felt like a sudden bereavement. Everything had changed without me having had time to prepare for it. The plans that I’d made to spend some time in the Lake District to diffuse a gnawing sense of restlessness had to be abandoned. And just as I might have recalled time spent with a loved one, I began to relive certain walks: Helvellyn the previous May, Bowfell on a glowering October afternoon, the long trudge I’d made from Grasmere into Far Easedale only a few weeks before everything came to a standstill.
As much as it was comforting to escape into those memories, it was distressing to think that I had no idea of when I’d be able to return to the fells. From the railway bridge near Clavicle Wood, I’d look north on clear days and pick out the ridges of the Langdale Pikes. They seemed ineffably distant.
At the very moment when I needed the constancy of those places amidst the upheaval, they were out of bounds. And this is the anxiety we feel when any natural space which has been so vital to us in that way is made inaccessible. To imagine a life which consists only of the very things which make us seek out the moors, mountains and woods in the first place is unsettling. It would be unbearable to have no distance from which to look at how we live and see that the thousand things we dress up as imperatives are actually insignificant. A life lived among nothing but what is man-made, and therefore shaped in order to shape us in return, feels limited and futile, whereas if we experience life happening in wild, unmanaged places, it can feel expansive, even transcendental, no matter how small the physical space. It’s not by accident that in Buddhist stories, satori – that glimpse of true ‘seeing’ – often occurs in a natural setting.
There’s a Zen koan from the writer Dōgen that goes: ‘Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.’
Koans are not unlocked by logical thinking but by awakening a truth already dimly known. In this example, the first observation and the last seem to be identical, but although the act of looking is the same, the perception of what is seen has changed. The journey begins with indifference – the mountains and rivers are merely background scenery – but this isn’t where we end up. Enlightenment does not return us to apathy but shows that things simply are as they are, free of the religious or metaphysical concepts we lay upon them, alive in the same way that we are alive.
I hesitate to use the word ‘oneness’ only because of the connotations attributed to it as being specious or pseudo-spiritual. But I can’t think of another word for those moments alone in a wood, or on the ridge of a mountain where I’ve felt that little ‘I’ inside the skull evaporate. To say that we are part of the nature we (falsely) perceive to be ‘out there’ isn’t poetic or philosophical, but a statement of fact.
It’s a few days later and I’m back in Clavicle Wood on what will probably be the last warm day of the year. The sun comes in at all angles like crossed swords of light. Where it’s sieved by the leaves, it ripples on the trunk of a dead oak tree, itself liquid-looking from the gnarled repairs to its bark. The twists and eddies of colour make it seem as if it were poured into shape.
In the shade here it’s noticeably cool, the air a little damp in the encroaching autumn. Even in the space of a few days, more leaves are looking singed and mottled. The sycamore at the edge of the meadow has changed again, more yellow than green. The feelings I had about my son leaving home are bound up in a moment that has now passed. But they will be returned to me, if the wood remains.
Buddhism teaches that suffering arises from attachment and, following that logic, I perhaps shouldn’t rely so much on Clavicle Wood. And yet it feels important that it stays as it is. Not only because part of my life is here, not only that it has the potential, like all natural spaces, to check our sense of self-importance, but because we flourish by spending time with what is strange to us. It does me good to know that on the other side of the railway line, there are miracles.
September 2020
Postscript
It’s now February 2021, we’re in the midst of another lockdown and Clavicle Wood is all but gone. Tree-felling began on my eldest son’s birthday in December and has continued on and off ever since. Not to clear the way for more housing, as I anticipated, but to remove trees along the cutting before they cause problems on the railway line. Everything within about forty feet of the track has been chopped down, reducing the wood to little more than stumps and saw
dust. Because it has been such an excessive, insensitive cull, it’s hard to think of this as anything other than a preventative surgery of the crudest kind: like cutting off a person’s hand on the pretext that they might assault someone, sometime in the future.
Perhaps the hope is that those of us who loved the wood will be assuaged by the fact that this area of the defunct golf course is now being regenerated. A billboard heralds the arrival of ‘New Village Parklands’ with twenty-seven wildlife ponds and five miles of footpaths.
Part of me is glad they aren’t just going to build over everything, but it’s clear that this ‘improvement’ of the landscape is geared towards selling the new houses that are springing up in the vicinity. The old fairways have always had a monetary value, but now that they are being remodelled there’s a more tangible sense of their profitmaking potential. They are slowly being reshaped with revenue in mind; pruned and groomed to attract prospective house buyers. Neat ‘parklands’ are far easier to sell than a scruffy woodland or miles of sprawling, open fields.
So much is lost in this gentrification, most notably the freedom to wander and be spontaneous. Now that Clavicle Wood has been decimated and many of the grasslands around it fenced off, our routes through the green space that is left will be much more prescribed. We’ll be funnelled between the boundaries of private properties, directed around driveways.
But this is our lot. Seeing how quickly the space around me has been physically altered, I think now that we suburbanites will have to arrive at a feeling of belonging not through what is fixed, but through a constant recalibration of our relationship with topographical change. Perhaps there is a response to be made in the form of the dérive. By finding new ways to navigate whatever parcel of land we’re eventually gifted by the planning committees, by disrupting and disorientating in some way the lines that we’re supposed to follow, we can continue to know the difference between a path that’s made for us and one that we discover for ourselves.
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