The parish church for Greys Court, where the grand names belonging to the big house are interred, is a tiny, flint construction with a low tower, close by the road in Rotherfield Greys, a hamlet that also has the second-nearest pub to our wood, the Maltsters Arms. Church and pub can be reached from the wood on public footpaths leading southwards and crossing open fields for a little more than a mile. I have never met anyone else on these old rights of way. The paths that run along the River Thames just a couple of miles away are crowded with walkers, but the open Chilterns are still the province of the skylark and the stroller. On a clear spring day, the low hills conceal endless possibilities, all of them joyous. The Maltsters Arms is one of those cosy pubs with exposed oak beams on low ceilings, real fires, no background music and a landlord who actually seems to like his customers.
The church is next to the pub, as tradition demands. A large chunk of its interior is taken up by a side chapel devoted to the monuments of the masters and mistresses of Greys Court, and principal among these is the exuberant and splendid alabaster and marble tomb of Sir Francis Knollys (d. 1596) and Katherine, his wife. Their effigies lie side by side praying in formal splendour, while around the tomb seven sons and seven daughters parade in a pious line. Most touching is a tiny baby who died in infancy, whose effigy lies alongside that of his father. Sir Francis was a noted courtier of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. I like the thought that on his days away from court Sir Francis may have wandered in our wood for pleasure, or maybe hunted game there. On the floor of the nave a brass to Robert de Grey (d. 1388) is altogether more modest, even though the manor and church both bear his name. Clad partly in chain mail, his sword by his side, and gauntlets still frozen in metallic prayer, he seems more a grand cipher than a real person.
In the countryside, for many centuries manors and estates were paramount. Those who owned the estates neighbouring Greys provided its society. These nearby manors suffered the same pestilences and plagues, and shared good years and bad. The lords and gentry knew one another, and paid formal and informal visits. They eventually became what my mother would have termed “county.” From time to time the estates were home to remarkable historical figures; at others their occupants were quietly obscure. The status of peasantry and servants and artisans changed gradually, but all the estates had to absorb the changes, which continue today. The closest estate to our wood—and Greys manor—was Fawley Court and Henley Park to the north: a pigeon could fly from Grim’s Dyke Wood into the Park in a minute. To the east lay Badgemore. The fine house has now vanished, and what remains of it is a golf club. While further still to the north a small and perfectly set stately home remains in its own valley; the Stonor family that lives there boasts more than eight hundred years of occupancy, and one of the longest continuous lineages in Great Britain.
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 1842 portrays Lambridge Wood with considerable accuracy.9 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 coal mining 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 manage
r 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 will grow happily in the shade of their towering neighbours. The most obvious is plentiful dark-green holly—probably too much holly. Still, I welcome it where its prickly evergreen foliage makes an almost impenetrable screen twice as high as a man around my favourite part of the wood: the Dingley Dell. Not quite in the middle of our patch, the Dell surrounds two of our most impressive old beech trees, which have been christened the King and the Queen. Unlike many of our beeches, they don’t soar away upwards immediately; there is a little spread of branches. Beneath these giants the ground is clear except for a covering of old leaves. Sitting on a log there in the April sunshine, I feel as content as a dog before a fire. It is a place to write up my notes, and eat bacon sandwiches. Around the Dingley Dell a few old coppices of hazel—a traditional Chiltern undercrop—produce clusters of long, unbranched trunks almost straight from near the ground; these are of several ages and hence variable thickness. Some of the branches are dead—they need attention. A couple of young birch trees are growing on the edge of the large clearing. All these tree species have become old friends, and like all my friends they have quirks and history and several failings. We shall get to know them all.
Cherry Blossom
During April the wild cherry blooms at the same time as the bluebells, but the cherry flowers are displaying high in the canopy. In hand I examine a flower head that has fallen down from above: coppery young leaves, half a dozen at the tip of the shoot all pointy and enthusiastic as if they should cry, “Forward, forward!” But then behind this tip is a natural flower arrangement—ten little bundles of white cherry blossom coming off a grey-brown stick. They are arranged in clusters of four or five blooms, each one held on a green “matchstick” an inch long. Every flower carries five notched, almost perfectly white petals surrounding yellow stamens, which are tiny threads with spherical heads like miniature pins (and in the centre of the flower, hardly grander, the style and stigma). Five red-brown sepals bend backwards from the flower as if to feign deference to the performance going on in front, which might be described as a cluster of tutus; and each bunch of flowers emerges from another five-fold arrangement of bracts next to the stem. So the twig is a series of bouquets topped by a flourish of leaves, a brief, exuberant festival of white blossom fifty feet above the common view. An early feast for insects, I suppose. Why do we need those double garden varieties of flowering cherry—“flore pleno” and the rest? Admittedly they do augment the resemblance of the flowers to tutus, but there is already enough in the solitary blossoms. A Japanese artist might lose himself in a flower or ten: so short-lived, so fragile, like rice paper crimped into snowflakes. Even now a gentle snowfall of petals tumbling from high above is settling on last year’s old beech leaves; in an hour or two the sun will have frizzled them into obscurity.
Butterflies appear suddenly in some numbers, and not just the umber-brown speckled wood butterflies, flitting erratically like camouflaged and subtle ghosts in and out of the shade, but also brimstone butterflies as bright and freshly coloured as primrose flowers. These last arrivals almost make up for the absence of real primroses in the wood, for the iconic springtime flower does not deign to live in the sparse, poor soil of Lambridge (this saddens me, as Darwin worked on primroses). A solitary peacock butterfly, a battered survivor of the winter frosts, with eyed wings shredded at their margins, is sunning itself on a bramble in the clearing, the better to gather the energy for a final burst of egg-laying. A green-veined white lingers for a second, then flits past and away.
I have evidently become attuned to the Class Insecta. In the midst of the bluebell sea, open flowers are pollinated by large bumblebees that delicately hang off pendent blossoms which look too frail to carry them. I fancy they are like oversized clappers hanging off the bells. I believe I can recognise the white-tailed (Bombus lucorum) and red-tailed (Bombus lapidarius) species, not least because they have a convenient dab of the appropriate colour at the end of their fuzzy abdomens. A huge red-tailed bumblebee must be a queen on the search for an old mousehole in which to establish a new colony. She buzzes about the cherry roots, and she won’t have long to wait to find a suitable site. While I am crouching among the bulbs, a “pretend” bumblebee whizzes past me that I know to be the bee fly (Bombilius major), one of nature’s cruel deceivers. Although fuzzy and generally bee-like, it is no bee at all (it is closer to a bluebottle). It carries a long proboscis at its head end, and I watch it dart forward into and back out of a flower to feed on nectar, so it really is an entomological humming bird as much as anything. But it reproduces by laying its eggs near a true bees’ colony, and its larvae crawl into the “nest,” where they consume the bees’ grubs. In fact, it is an entomological Iago. I recall that Darwin described how deception was commonplace in nature; the man himself apparently so free of duplicity.
This is the day when all the male birds sing out passionately for a mate. Their plumage is buffed and preened, spring-ready. I am an amateur at birdsong, but I cannot mistake the sweet and penetrating phrase of the song thrush,
repeated thrice or so, as if to emphasise its originality, for the next phrase is always different, and always repeated in its turn. I can pick out the implausibly loud song of the tiny jenny wren with a little rattle at the end of its performance. The songs of the robin redbreast and the blackbird I know well from my own garden. But I would not have recognised the nuthatch’s broadcast had I not seen the handsome blue-backed bird sing from a bare twig: a kind of “pwee-pwee-pwee”—simple and penetrating. Can it be that there is an inverse relationship between the showiness of the plumage and the beauty of the song? The nightingale and the most musical of the warblers are pretty ordinary of feather, while the extravagant peacock’s raucous cry appeals only to other peacocks and the English aristocracy. Somewhere in the middle of this aesthetic spectrum, black-yellow-green great tits are everywhere in the wood uttering their repeated high regular notes—“tee-too,” possibly—which is hardly spectacular. The more sibilant, guttural, chatty conversation of the blue tit is more appropriate for such a small and bouncy cheeky chappie. Just now many blue tits hop rapidly about the denser branches whistling to one another, “Here we are!” What I cannot do (pace the nuthatch) is reliably locate the source of all the birdsong; it seems to emanate in a general and celebratory way from almost everywhere. I begin to understand those descriptions of whole woods “bursting into song.” The distant drumming of a woodpecker, a sporadic, hollow-sounding percussion, provides all that is needed for a backbeat to the avian orchestra. But then I briefly catch a glimpse of a timid tree creeper dodging behind a beech trunk, almost furtively working its way rapidly up the tree in search of insects tucked into tiny crannies in the bark that it can pick out with its curved bill. It moves in silence.
The Wood for the Trees Page 3