The Wood for the Trees

by Richard Fortey

  Grim’s Dyke can be alternatively spelled Grime’s or Grymes in old sources, and it predates any written record: it is ancient. It also gives its name to our piece of wood, though I suspect that this was mostly a sales pitch to attract the romantically minded (it worked rather well). A few miles away near Nuffield, close to the top of the Chiltern scarp, the same name is applied to a dramatically deep gash that descends straight down the hillside and continues all the way across the Aylesbury Plain beyond to the River Thames at Mongewell, cutting through the present agricultural patchwork as if to demand due acknowledgement of former times. Whoever constructed it, this was a serious piece of ditch-making. Several other comparable structures further north in the Chiltern Hills carry the same old name; in fact, Grim’s ditch appears in no fewer than ten English counties. Nuffield church records show that the dyke there was a familiar landmark in early medieval times. Between Nuffield and Greys Court other sections of the ditch present a more modest continuation of the same structure, and it is possible to join these pieces together and extend them further into our own wood, making some kind of line extending across country. In spring I have walked along the old footpaths that follow the dyke above Nuffield, lined with bluebells, as befits an ancient piece of country.

  In Norfolk, flint mines known as Grimes Graves were excavated five thousand years ago by Neolithic peoples in search of the perfect natural material with which to manufacture their stone tools. It is that same Grim again. The name dates from early Saxon times. Grim was a title for one of the many guises of the pagan god Woden—Odin of Norse mythology. Grimnir was a shape-shifter, “the hooded one,” a shrouded figure who led souls to the afterlife, a frequenter of dark places. I recall that dog-walker in the wood rushing past in the rain. What was his real business? Had I really seen him at all, or had some holly shrubs briefly created an illusion? Our Saxon forebears knew what the Romans had left behind, but they found many places bearing the scars of far older, mysterious carvings on the landscape: deep ditches cutting across country, odd terraces. To superstitious farmers, every nuance of their local countryside must have had hidden meanings. What could be more natural than to associate these strange workings with the gods?1 Grisly Grim might have been an obvious choice, whether for dykes or flint excavations. After all, in later times the Devil himself was tacked on to purely geological creations like the Devil’s Tor on Dartmoor or the Devil’s Punch Bowl in Surrey. There is an attraction to the diabolical when some inexplicable feature requires a label; it is as if the name alone is sufficient explanation.

  Grim’s Dyke was dug out and maintained by mere humans, though doubtless beings with their own gods and their own fears. Clearly, the dyke was already old by Saxon times. Richard Bradley has pointed out that not all the “Grim’s dykes” in Oxfordshire are necessarily part of a single system. However, he agrees with other scholars about their age, saying drily: “We can now accept that there is some body of evidence to favour a context for all these dykes in the later part of the pre-Roman Iron Age.”2 New evidence has been added recently to confirm his assessment: there is an archaeological feature more than two thousand years old forming one side of our small wood! Who needs spectral apparitions, with or without dogs?

  Hard evidence of Grim’s Dyke has been lost further down the hill sloping towards Henley. It is very likely that it continued there, because the Victoria County History finds reference to the old ditch in documents from the fourteenth century that are housed in the Oxfordshire Records Office. At that time it formed a natural boundary for the old Henley manor of Phyllis (quondam Fillets) Court to the north. Its course finally ran to the River Thames along what it is now New Street (actually a very old street), on the northern side of Henley. It may have been still in evidence much later, for it has been claimed that “Grimm’s Dyke, would at the beginning of the seventeenth century, have been plainly visible in the meadow stretching behind the brew-house in North Street, facing the entrance to New Street.”3 All this land is now built over. If the evidence is totted up, we finish with a ditch that runs from Henley to Mongewell for more than ten miles over the scarp of the Chiltern Hills, connecting across the great southerly loop in the course of the River Thames. Some pieces of the ditch are missing, but these are often in places where the land has probably long been under the plough. Farming slowly rubs out time’s messages.

  What was Grim’s Dyke for? I return to the wood for some detective work. It is really not much of a trench here, perhaps twenty-five feet or so across, with a higher flinty bank on its western side. This must have been thrown up when the feature was dug out. The depression will have filled in over two millennia, but the stony ground seems to have retained its form. It is too small and the wrong shape for any kind of defensive dyke—such a structure normally would have a steep wall facing any potential enemies. The archaeologist Jill Eyers came with her team of volunteers to dig a trench across the dyke to root out any evidence that might remain there. It did not yield much to their mattocks and spades—no coin or pottery fragment that would have made the excavation an event. Our section of Grim’s Dyke is certainly no Maginot Line, and is much less of a barrier than the striking gulley that runs down the Chiltern scarp. I conclude, as have many others, that the dyke here must have been some sort of marker, perhaps a territorial boundary. Earlier historians would have made it the border between two tribal groups recognised by Roman chroniclers: probably Catuvellauni to the east, Atrebates to the west. Modern writers are more cautious, and recent interpretations have even mentioned the ditch as fencing in an extensive cleared area for raising livestock. All authorities agree that the dyke (or dykes) is connected with the Iron Age hill forts of the last millennium BC.

  Hill forts are distributed quite regularly along the high edge of the Chiltern scarp. On the ground they are marked by prominent concentric ramparts surrounding a central enclosure. There is usually one defensible entrance to the enclosure, within which the postholes for collections of round huts can usually be uncovered using trowels and patience. When they were built they were situated on extensive areas of cleared ground, with far views to the north, but nowadays the forested Chiltern hilltops have often reclaimed the old forts and sequester them inside deep woods. More of them are being discovered as this is written. Away from the scarp slope there is a similar structure guarding an ancient crossing over the Thames at Medmenham, about three miles downriver from Henley.

  The hill forts are in their turn related to trade. One of the most important routes in ancient Britain runs along the base of the Chiltern Hills where it joins the plain to the north: the Upper Icknield Way. I cannot better H. J. Massingham’s description of “the old road on its journey from Norfolk to Devon. It has crept along the ankles of the shaggy range, below the trees but above the springs, just where the upper Greensand borders the chalk.” Skins, wood, iron ore, exotica from the Roman Empire all traded along a route dictated by deep geological structure. Grim’s Dyke crosses it on its way to the Thames at Mongewell and the river. This whole area must have been abuzz with cowherds, farmers, shepherds, traders, soldiers and shamans. The population at that time was increasing. The hill forts commanded a view of all this activity, and doubtless extracted or traded their share of it. Grim’s Dyke is not simply an extension of the fortifications. Instead, it traces an independent course, as might be expected of a boundary. It may have demarcated the sphere of influence of one or more chieftains, masters of the forts; they must have been powerful figures to coordinate the ranks of ditch-diggers required for the job. Perhaps this was the first time the iron fist was brandished.

  By way of which history we arrive back at the wood. If Grim’s Dyke was once a boundary, I have to conclude that there was no wood! To bury a border of whatever kind deep inside a beech forest makes no sense. It should be out in the open. When the hill forts and their surrounding areas were cleared of trees there was a growth in farming of all kinds as the number of hungry mouths increased. Clearing was general. In the later Iron Age the c
limate was warming up after a long cold period, and this too supported greater agricultural production. The higher ground may well have been easier to clear than thickly forested and poorly drained plains, and no doubt sharp iron tools were helpful in that task. From our part of Grim’s Dyke Jill Eyers recovered pollen of arable crop plants. So the centuries before the Roman invasion provide a baseline for our wood—a time when it wasn’t there. Grim’s Dyke Wood was more likely Grim’s Dyke Down. I have a vision of men at work, digging the dyke, dressed in simple leather jerkins and trousers, the crack of iron on flint resounding in the air. Maybe some women dressed in simple flaxen shifts bring in a scattering of sheep from the surrounding fields. It is a scene full of light, not darkness. The language they speak is half-familiar from my days working in the Welsh mountains—some kind of guttural Celtic tongue, neither Breton nor Gaelic, but an ancestral version. I even feel a brief tug of affinity. When the DNA of my Y chromosome was analysed a few years ago in a laboratory in Oxford I was declared to belong to a Celtic population (on the male line).4 I was no Viking, Saxon or Roman. Those ditch-diggers were my people.

  These speculations are garnished with purest gold: a glittering hoard buried near Lambridge Wood. In 2003–04 a sleuth with a metal detector discovered a treasure of thirty-two gold coins in a field just to the west of Grim’s Dyke which was the best trove of its kind ever found in Oxfordshire. They were concealed inside a hollow flint—placed there for safety, or even as a gift to the gods. The coins were minted in the 50s BC, near the end of the late Iron Age. Both flint and coins are on display in the River and Rowing Museum in Henley. Gold never tarnishes, so these precious discs are as brilliant as the day they were made. Each coin is about the size of a U.S. quarter and has a beautiful, schematic “triple tailed” horse stamped upon it, standing over a perfectly suggested chariot wheel. The reverse side is unmarked. Coins of this type are attributed to the tribe of the Atrebates, and indeed the find was made on “their side” of the dyke. They may have been minted at Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum of the Romans), an important Iron Age city only fifteen miles or so to the south of the wood. Numismatists are able to match these “Celtic” coins all the way from the Danube to northern France, until they were created in ancient Britain itself in 120 BC. The design was copied and recopied from a pattern that originated in Macedonia before 300 BC, depicting the two-horse chariot in which Philip the Second of Macedon triumphed in the Olympic Games of 352 BC. Here on the edge of Lambridge Wood are golden tokens that marry the Chiltern Hills with one of the cradles of Western civilisation.

  I admit that I have been shaking appropriately shaped hollow flints ever since I heard about the hoard. I have failed to discover treasure (so far), but I have found some remarkably globular flints. Curious stones like these have attracted attention for a long time. In the Natural History of Oxfordshire (1677) Robert Plot writes: “Here also must be referred a Round Stone…containing within it a white sort of Earth and therefore called Geodes or the pregnant Stone…the outer Crust of these is sometimes on an indurated Chalk…and when found thus, by the inhabitants of the Chiltern (where they are most plentiful) they are called chalk Eggs.” Only one searcher has been lucky enough to discover a golden egg. The spherical stones have a down-to-earth-enough explanation. They are flints that formed around ball-shaped fossil sponges (Porosphaera globularis), and were originally derived from the chalk. Like other flints, they survived the erosion of the soft limestone that once enclosed them and nowadays may be brought up by the plough, or occasionally scattered on the surface, including the ones I pounced on in our wood. The white sort of earth in the “pregnant Stone” expounded by Plot is often all that remains of the fossil sponge inside the flint. With further weathering the flints hollow out completely, and then they make a suitable receptacle for a cache of gold coins. One particular Iron Age individual picked up a large example of such a near-immortal purse, and used it to tuck away treasure. To appease my covetous fantasies I shall have to be content with adding just three small “chalk Eggs” to the collection.

  There is no evidence in our wood for still earlier times—the days of the wildwood and after, more than eight thousand years ago. I will never know when the first footsteps crunched over the surface of our clay-with-flints. I have extracted fresh flints from the chalk beyond the Fair Mile, and they have wonderfully dark and uniform interiors; just the kind of flint that was used to manufacture sharp-edged stone tools. But I have never found any ancient implements of Mesolithic or Neolithic age in all my traverses across Lambridge Wood.5 In any case, there is enough known from the surrounding Chiltern Hills to show that human beings used the resources of our area long before the Iron Age. Mesolithic tools have been found as close as Stonor just up the Assendon Valley. A site at Chesham twenty miles to the north-east of us has yielded many tools of the same general age along with bones of red deer, boar and the extinct wild cow (ancestor of our domestic cattle) known as the aurochs (Bos primigenius). This is enough to conjure a vision of skin-clad hunters questing through thick forests (and our wood) stocked with edible but wary beasts. In turn, these people must have dreaded the attention of wolves and bears. Theirs was an opportunistic life, often on the move, settling around a rich seam of flint for a period before moving on once more. A dropped arrow, a damaged scraper for dressing skins—these were the only traces they left behind, their momentary lapses preserved for eternity thanks to the indestructibility of flint. Iron swords a fraction of their antiquity have become unrecognisable clots of rust.

  Permanent settlement began with Neolithic farmsteads (3500–4000 BC). Caring for domesticated animals and the cultivation of early grains such as emmer wheat demanded clearance of patches of the wildwood. New livelihoods stimulated new skills. Pottery utensils for storage of foodstuffs for winter use and everyday cookery began to bequeath the scraps and sherds that provide the archaeologists’ bread and butter. Important persons were interred with grave goods in burial mounds—the barrows that are dotted over the English countryside. Centuries of ploughing have obliterated many, but in dry summers their outlines still emerge like repressed memories, often in the midst of cornfields. Areas underlain by chalk were favoured for clearance, but there is no Stonehenge or Avebury in the Chiltern Hills. Such large ceremonial centres lay on what are now the open chalk plains of Wiltshire to the south and west rather than the comparatively rugged Chiltern country. The only important sites yet discovered in our range lie in the northern section of the hills around Dunstable.

  Aurochs from Les Eyzies, France.

  The Upper Icknield Way was, however, already an important route, particularly as trade developed, so there must have been people passing through our patch of country. A greenstone adze has been found nearby which was traded all the way from Scotland. There is evidence of Neolithic settlement near Wallingford on the River Thames, just to the north of the point where Grim’s Dyke reaches the water. I am certain that there would have been forays into the hills to collect those beautiful, black-centred flints, so good for the manufacture of sharp blades. “Cutting-edge technology” was already an apt description this early in human history. I imagine hunting parties, armed with their new flint tools, setting out for the hills in search of game: the thrill of a deer brought down, the welcome the hunters received on their return to camp.

  When flint was succeeded by bronze (about 2500 BC), clearance of woodland probably proceeded further. John Evans has proved in the northern part of the Chilterns that the small species of snails recovered from excavations changed through time from specialists favouring life in woodland to those that thrived better in open grassland.6 Their shells remain behind to reveal such details. For these areas this change marked the first time cattle and sheep grazed the same hillsides that would support them for thousands of years to come.

  If the general history of landscape before the Iron Age is known, our piece of woodland has no precise place in that narrative. It is as well to recall the old aphorism “Absence of evidence is
not evidence of absence.” The lack of Neolithic flints from Lambridge Wood is no proof that hunters avoided it. A beautiful Bronze Age sword was recovered from the river near Henley-on-Thames and is now on display in the River and Rowing Museum, but if ancient braves ever wandered through our wood they left no trace. We do know that there were people in our area from Mesolithic times onward, and that later a major route lay near the foot of the scarp not far to the north; we also know that an important clearance was likely to have happened before the Roman invasion. It is probable that our woods were never left entirely to themselves. I cannot say exactly when the wildwood was erased, never to return. We do not even know exactly what the wildwood looked like. Oliver Rackham estimates that about 80 per cent of the British landscape was mostly tree-covered at 800 BC, which generally favours the idea of later clearance. The absence of any Bronze Age barrows near our wood would also indicate a later, Iron Age date—but again there is no proof. What I can say with certainty is that the subsequent regeneration and persistence of our wood helped to preserve the evidence of the Grim, Grimm, Grime’s ditch—choose whichever strange devil you like—by protecting it from erasure by plough and farrow; the churn and churn again of agriculture elsewhere sponsored slow amnesia in the landscape. Old woods are places with a much longer memory.

  Yew

  And even within the wood, some trees have longer memories than others. The most enduring tree of all is the yew (Taxus baccata). The oldest yews in the world are found in Turkey, and are estimated as over three thousand years old,7 which on a scale of our wood’s history takes us back well beyond the original excavation of Grim’s Dyke. The age of the oldest British yew is disputed, but one vast tree at St. Cynog’s church in Powys, Wales, has been claimed to rival the Turkish trees in antiquity. So the yew is a living bond with our era of mystery. Just above the Icknield Way, on Watlington Hill, veteran yews line one of the old tracks; their ribbed trunks are fantastically bent and twisted, sere branches droop to the ground and even take root, and dryads peep out from every inscrutable cranny.