Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

by Roger Deakin

  Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

  ‘Roger Deakin was unique; he saw and felt the world like nobody else. Notes from Walnut Tree Farm is as remarkable and as affecting as anything John Muir wrote; in fact, I think it is this century’s Walden. It might even be the best of his books; or perhaps there is no need to rank them like this. It completes the triptych, begun with Waterlog and Wildwood, in the most wonderful way.’

  Robert Macfarlane, author of The Wild Places and literary executor of the Roger Deakin Estate

  Praise for Waterlog

  ‘A simply wonderful book… A delightfully eccentric masterpiece’ Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

  ‘A delicious, cleansing, funny, wise and joyful book, so wonderfully full of energy and life. I love it’ Jane Gardam

  ‘A triumph of topographical and naturalist writing… to weave environmental and cultural concerns so deftly together in this enchanting and original travel book is a real achievement’ Independent

  Praise for Wildwood

  ‘A masterpiece’ Guardian

  ‘Extraordinary… some of the finest naturalist writing for many years’ Independent

  ‘Enchanting, very funny, every page carries a fascinating nugget. Should serve to make us appreciate more keenly all that we have here on earth… one of the greatest of all Nature writers’ Mail on Sunday

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Roger Deakin, who died in August 2006, shortly after completing the manuscript for Wildwood, was a writer, broadcaster and film-maker with a particular interest in nature and the environment. He lived for many years in Suffolk, where he swam regularly in his moat at Walnut Tree Farm, in the River Waveney and in the sea, in between travelling widely through the landscapes he writes about in his books, Waterlog and Wildwood, both of which have been acclaimed as classics of nature writing.

  Notes from

  Walnut Tree Farm

  ROGER DEAKIN

  Edited by Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  First published 2008

  1

  Text copyright ’ Estate of Roger Deakin, 2008

  Illustrations copyright ’ David Holmes, 2008

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

  no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced

  into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

  (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

  without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner

  and the above publisher of this book

  978-0-14-190025-4

  Contents

  Foreword

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  For the last six years of his life, Roger Deakin kept a record of his daily life, work, thoughts and memories. Forty-five lined exercise books were completed in his distinctive, bold handwriting. Each was numbered and paginated, with a table of contents carefully listed on the cover.

  The entries themselves were altogether freer. Spontaneous, playful, impassioned and sometimes experimental, they were Roger’s everyday observations, and releected the events of his inner and outer life as they happened.

  Some of the entries were research notes for Wildwood, the book he was writing at the time, or for one of his radio programmes, while others were written during his travels in Australia or Eastern Europe. Most of the contents, though, related to his life at Walnut Tree Farm, the extraordinary, much loved house in Suffolk where he lived for the last thirty years of his life. It is these entries which have provided the material for this book.

  We have selected extracts from the notebooks, including dates when they were mentioned, and have arranged them month by month to form one composite year. Abbreviations have been expanded, but otherwise Roger’s words have been allowed to speak for themselves.

  Alison Hastie

  Terence Blacker

  July 2008

  January

  1st January

  I am lying full length on my belly on frozen snow and frosty tussocks in the railway wood blowing like a dragon into the wigwam of a fire at the core of a tangled blackthorn bonfire. I am clearing the blackthorn suckers that march out from the hedge like the army in Macbeth, the marching wood, threatening to overwhelm the whole wood in their dense, spiny thicket.

  The technique is to get right down on the ground and go in with the triangular bow-saw at ground level, then grab the cut stems and drag the bushes away to the bonfire, which grows like a giant porcupine, bristling with spines that inleict a particular, unforgettable ache in the hands and thumbs of the woodman.

  The bonfire just keeps working itself up to a sudden burst of wildly crackling, spitting leame, and burning a chimney up its centre. Then it dies down, frosting the twigs with fire but failing to ignite with any conviction because the wood is too fresh, too green and sappy. It is exhausting work, crawling at rabbit level through a blackthorn thicket and sawing through the tough little trunks. You realize why blackthorn was used defensively as a dead hedge by the Saxons; it is the true precursor of barbed wire.

  I stumble back up the field for a tea-break to listen to myself on Home Planet on the radio and fall headlong in the snow by the shepherd’s hut. Tracks everywhere in the snow, mostly rabbit, and a single bee orchid standing up with dried seeds in the snowy field.

  A mauve, misty penumbra across the fields under a duck-egg sky and the glow of sunset. Everything very still and quiet.

  2nd January

  Another brilliant, intensely cold morning. Trees and everything enamelled and frosted, sparkling and frilly with frost.

  Hard to get the car started – cold diesel and frozen windscreens. Put more antifreeze in the tractor. Then a snow drive over icy roads to see Ronnie Blythe at Bottengoms.

  We have lunch in the Six Bells in Bures – cod and chips, and halves of Guinness – and set off to Ager Fen, where we walk through the ancient mixed woods of cherry, oak, fir, hazel, willow, poplar, ash. Ronnie says all country children were conceived in woods, because you couldn’t make love in the house: there were too many people in there – children, p
arents, etc., no privacy at all. So you went to the woods.

  Ronnie lends me John Masefield’s thumb stick, carved by him and later, in Oxford, given to Dr ‘Bird’ Partridge – who in turn gave it to Ronnie.

  Ronnie walks with a bird’s claw stick of blackthorn that belonged to John Nash. A bird’s foot clutches an egg of wood. Lovely.

  There are warrens and dips where clay was quarried and then carted off for building – and there is a big wood bank running along the parish boundary.

  Big ancient cherries with fungal bracelets.

  Then on to Tiger Wood – so called because the tooth of a sabre-toothed tiger was once found there somewhere.

  Ronnie says how much he loves the ruinousness of woods – of the dead trees fallen over each other. John Nash loved dead trees lying about, scattered. He didn’t like woods to be tidied up too much.

  There’s a brick-maker’s cottage in Tiger Wood, one of only two houses in the wood, surrounded by old brick-clay burrowings and pits. Every spring they have a bluebell party in the cottage and toast the bluebells and listen to the nightingales. There are about six pairs of nightingales in this wood, resting in Ager Fen.

  Driving back through the rolling country to Wormingford, Ronnie points out that this was once all the deer park of the Waldegrave family, who are buried in the chapel on the hill top.

  The bonfire is still burning under the crack willow by the common, smouldering and gently glowing, melting the snow that tries to settle on it, smoking just faintly.

  Immense numbers of tits, mainly blue, a few great, the occasional coal or marsh, on the three peanut cylinders. They are all over the damson tree, waiting their turn or digesting peanuts. All sorts of power groupings and petty struggles over who is king of the castle. Now here comes the spotted woodpecker, approaching cautiously through the damson branches. Sees a sudden movement of mine at the window, flees far across the meadow.

  I cut a hazel-coppice pole out of my wood and used it as a curtain pole in my bedroom. It works well.

  4th January

  Walking up Stonebridge Lane with Jayne [Ivimey], I notice the width of the old stone bridge – twenty feet at least – I must dig it out and measure properly. As you walk the lane, you see how the farmers have all encroached and how the new middle-class squatters are claiming stakes on the lane, using it for horse jumps, etc. We walk on to the old ash pollard on Burgate Little Green, then on into Burgate Wood, passing a leaning chestnut pollard – a long, pendulous bough. Jayne remarks that trees are like people: you don’t have to talk to them, but you get to recognize them all.

  As the light changes, we depend more on our feet, on feeling our way through the wood. Shapes of things loom up. A paleness in a covert seems at first to be water, a woodland pond, but turns out to be a fallen silver birch, a bold streak of white in the wood.

  On the way out, on the lane to Burgate Hall, a metal paling has grown into the trunk of an ash. The iron bars of the fence pass straight through the middle of the trunk, like whirling dervishes in Kurdistan with knives through their bodies.

  An old house may be built of the humblest, simplest materials, and, like a bird’s nest, be a thing of great beauty.

  Or: like a bird’s nest, a house may be beautiful because of the way it combines the simple, ordinary natural materials of which it is built.

  An early swim with Janine [Edge] and Helen Napper at Leiston Pool, then a big breakfast with porridge, sultanas and linseed soaked overnight in water (recipe by Helen Napper). Talk of a future walk in the woods with Madeleine [Wynn] and greyhounds and young chess-master Hugo. Then out to the sea to buy fish from a fisherman at a hut, a black-tarred pine hut with a radio inside wishing fishermen good fishing and giving the weather forecast. I bought a skate, a half pound of sprats and some cooked cod’s roe. Newspaper cuttings on the door about Alzheimer’s and fish-eating as a way to avoid it.

  A walk along the beach to see Maggi Hambling’s new oyster-shell sculpture: ‘Hear those voices that will not be drowned.’ These were the fishermen I filmed at Aldeburgh in 1997.

  Then up the road to the ruined slate-roofed cottage on the marsh, and the apple tree in the shingle beach. All-round circumference of 100 ft, 23 ft in diameter, 3–4 ft high, very squat and dense. Already almost in bud in its bunker.

  Thence to Thorpeness, like a film set – phony half-timbers, and a concrete church, like a toy-town. The artificial mere, the country club, the huge village hall, sports and social club.

  I keep puzzling about that apple tree, buried up to its neck in the shingle like a daddy at the seaside. It can’t quite see the sea. If it were to grow another ten feet, it could peep over the top of the long ridge of shingle that stretches from Aldeburgh to Thorpeness. It grows in the shelter of a bunker, a hollow in the dunes of shingle and sand that helps protect it from the wind. I suppose the sheer withering intensity of the wind must prune the budding twigs relentlessly so that the tree takes the only course of survival left open to it: to creep ever outwards, crouching low and close to the shingle, creating a pincushion of densely branched fruiting spurs.

  I have seen people gathering apples from it in summer. Outside the seasons of flowers and fruit, most people would pass it by, mistaking it for a scrubby sallow bush. No doubt the salt spray of winter gales must provide the tree with an antifungal dusting that may well be helping to keep it healthy. It must be a relic of an ancient orchard, perhaps connected with the derelict cottage a hundred yards inland that looks across the marshes. Somewhere down there the roots are finding fresh water. But this still must count as one of the hardiest apple trees in Britain.

  At Ubbeston I walked a green lane that has long beckoned to be explored. The coastal sunshine had given way to a uniform bleak grey, a cold wind and occasional bouts of rain. I trudged uphill on a wide grassy track between old hedges with the occasional oak pollard, tousle-mopped, no longer regularly cut. In contrast to the oaks nearer the coast, these trees were in healthy enough condition. All along the edge of the sandlings, where the heavier Suffolk claylands begin as you head inland, the parkland oaks in the fields were all dead or dying. Many had had the ground beneath their canopies ploughed up, with fatal results for the trees’ root systems and the complex ecology of fungi that feed and support them.

  I reached the top of the hill and a gate into a meadow, and recognized an ancient place straight away. It was an odd shape, like a miniature green with funnels of hedged grassland leading off it in several directions, and with a maze of hedges and moats. The grass itself was grazed by cattle, and very uneven, with banks and hummocks and the line of an old earthwork running along one perimeter, close to a moated wood that was really still part of this same intriguing corner.

  I had passed within two or three hundred yards of this place for years and never realized it was there.

  Towards the middle was a moat-like pond around what may have once been an island but was now an inundated patch of reeds. The spinney was moated, and a variety of old pollard oaks and ashes presided over the hedges and two additional ponds at other corners of the meadow.

  The lane issued from the far side of the little meadow and plunged steeply downhill in a grassy drift overhung by more old oaks. This, I have since discovered, has always been the favoured local tobogganing hill, drawing people from miles around, as good hills are hard to find in most of Suffolk.

  Later, over an impromptu lunch with a local farmer friend, Dave Pratt, I discovered that this was indeed an interesting spot. It was a medieval farm and yard, and had been excavated a few years back by a local archaeologist, Ruth Downing. Dave said all the ponds around Ubbeston are on the tops of hills. The moated wood must have supplied coppice wood for the farm, and its moat would have helped keep out cattle and deer from grazing the young shoots.

  As we sat in his kitchen, Dave spoke of the nature reserves near the coast where he rented the grazing for his cattle. He questioned some of the management of these wetlands. Why didn’t the RSPB control predators – the f
oxes and crows that stole the eggs and chicks of the plovers and other waders that nested out there?

  A good many of the local farmers round Laxfield, Heveningham, Ubbeston and Dennington were keen on conservation and retained their hedges and smaller fields. I found large numbers of hedgerow pollard oaks around there, all doing well.

  I stand in the little pightle, admiring one particular perfectly spherical, ideally shaped tree, a pollard oak in the hedge, and another, a pollard ash on the edge of the wood, its roots sunk to its knees in the moat water. The tree against a dark grey sky with charcoal lines of rain cloud approaching.

  9th January

  A wild, windy night and a bright, clear windy day. I walk out along Cowpasture Lane and up the hill to the pollard hornbeam, definitely a trasmocho tree with its unusually wide bolling. On the way I stand leaning on the little wooden bridge over the stream at the ford, watching the running water. Then a long trudge into the wind to reach the badger sett, still very active and well trodden, with claw marks in the mud everywhere. The wood is creaking, and a sound like a squeaky hinge sings out where two birches are rubbing against each other. From the mud hill-fort of the badger sett, beaten paths radiate into the wood and out across a plank bridge into the weedy set-aside field beyond the wood. In the long shadows of the late white sun it is easy to make them out and to follow one over the field to a ditch crossing and all the way to a gap in the wire fence of the railway embankment, where the badgers scratch themselves against the wire and leave little clumps of their shaving-brush hair on the grass. I walk to the lane in the shadow and shelter of the tall embankment and scuttle home, glad of the shelter of the lane’s hedges.