The Wood for the Trees

by Richard Fortey

  My investigation takes me to an antique shop in Henley. The Tudor House is one of those emporia stuffed with bric-à-brac and china, and all manner of curiosities crammed in from floor to ceiling. It is a place in which I have to keep my arms under careful control lest I nudge something to self-destruction (“Breakages must be paid for”). Tucked around one corner is a shelf carrying old bottles, including one or two like mine. The proprietor of the Tudor House, David Potter, is able to confirm my hunch. He believes that stoppered bottles were used by Brakspear until the mid-1950s, and recalls that there was a deposit of a penny or two on the bottles to encourage people to return them. Now they might be worth £20. So they must have been abandoned at least sixty years ago. At that time Lambridge Wood was still in the hands of the Star Brush Company, and access was not as free as it is now. In the middle of Grim’s Dyke Wood it is more than probable that the thirsty people were employed by the company itself—they must have been woodsmen. The growth-ring counts I have made of my trees suggest that many beeches are about eighty years old. Sixty years ago they would have been young trees, of the right age to replace those that had just been felled for processing. David Rose would surely have approved the succession. This was the last serious harvest of mature trees in Grim’s Dyke Wood. I envisage two sinewy, red-faced men, resting after their labours. Maybe they were responsible for digging our well-preserved sawpit. The older man takes the more expensive brown ale in the engraved bottle, while his younger colleague has the “ordinary.” Perhaps he has already done his turn as the underdog, but he does not complain. They both realise that they will never come to work this wood again in their lifetimes. They carefully replace the stoppers and leave the bottles behind to mark the occasion.

  I am happy to discover a direct link between our wood and the Brakspear brewery. For well over two hundred years it was as much a part of Henley as St. Mary’s church, and located right next to it in the heart of town, where a brewery really ought to be. The smell on “brew” days was as distinctive a signature of the municipality as the famous Henley Bridge, and provided atmosphere in the most literal sense. Brakspear (rhymes with Shakespeare) pubs still dot the countryside around the home town, although there are far fewer than there were twenty years ago.

  The founder of the brewery in Georgian times was Robert Brakspear, born in 1750, who proved to be a man typical of the age, with a lively interest in rational experimentation to improve his product.5 He had thermometers and gravimeters to help standardise several varieties of ale, and he kept detailed and meticulous notes of all his “brews.” The Henley brewery was never very large compared with those in London. It produced about six thousand barrels a year at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The town had long been known for the production of malt, when barley is sprouted and then quickly dried to release natural sugars. Several of the old maltings survive to this day in different guises. There was good water in abundance, and a ready market. The brewery prospered. When I first moved to the town the old brewery yard was still operating, and I went on a tour of the brewhouse to watch their famous copper still in action and to attempt to understand the fermentation process. The rise in property values made this complex of lovely old red-brick buildings more valuable as “real estate” than factory. In 2002 they were sold off, and the still was moved to Witney, in the middle of the county, for Brakspear’s ale to be made under licence by the bigger firm of Marston’s. It felt as if some vital organ had been ripped out of the living town, and I have been unable to pass the old brass sign for the Brewery Office without a shudder ever since. The buildings are still largely untouched externally—they have been partly converted into a hotel and restaurant—but they have lost the purpose for which they were built. The same thing has happened to pubs in the hills that have been converted to private houses. One by one, the old inns have disappeared. I mean the kind of places where a few old boys sat chortling in a corner, and a real wood fire blazed when it was chilly. There is nothing more forlorn than a dead hostelry; nothing more final than when the cry of “Last orders” means exactly what it says.

  This view has changed little in two hundred years, but Brakspear’s beer is no longer brewed in the heart of Henley.

  Blow, Winds, and Crack Your Cheeks!

  On a few occasions, worse destruction is wrought by nature. In the first days of February 1990 bewildered foresters were still totting up the casualties of the great wind of 25–26 January that has come to be known as the “Burns Day storm.” In the Chiltern Hills the hurricane was more ruinous than the famous storm of October 1987 that brought down many of the specimen trees in the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, and flattened large tracts of the forested Weald. The 1990 storm also accounted for more human fatalities, because it happened during daylight hours. Beech trees were particularly vulnerable to sudden gusts of wind that exceeded 100 mph. In the high Chilterns the woodlands were not only exposed, but the shallow chalk soils failed to provide secure anchorage for large stands of trees. Beech roots do not dig deep, but fan out around the base of the tree. The storm was so severe that many other kinds of trees could not escape damage. The Times described the devastation in Stonor Park that greeted a horrified Lord Camoys: “In front of him all 15 ash trees were laid out neatly like stalks of asparagus on a plate. At one end of the house a cypress had toppled and missed the fourteenth-century chapel by perhaps a foot. At the other end a cedar so big, so fat in its girth, that it was hard to believe it was a living thing had been flipped over as if by a wanton finger and had dumped itself on the wall of the shrubbery. Beeches the size of factory chimneys lay prone everywhere, dozens and dozens of them.” The flanks of the Assendon Valley fared particularly badly: whole beech woods were laid low. The toppling of one big tree set off an arboreal domino effect, with one tree after another wrenched out of the ground only to collapse on to further trees and spread devastation deeper into the forest; felling on a scale that exceeded any ever carried out by human hands. The aftermath was a no-man’s-land of tipped trunks and matted and broken branches.

  A quarter of a century later, the sites of woodlands that were destroyed in 1990 are still obvious as areas of scrub on the flanks of the hills. They have been replanted, but it will take another fifty years for new trees completely to erase the memory of the Burns Day storm. The tipped-up root plates of the fallen beech trees are easily spotted: lumps of white chalk dragged out of the ground by roots mark out the bases of the dead trees, and the holes they once occupied have not yet filled in.

  In another sense, the storm revived the wood. Long-buried seeds germinated; breezes and birds brought in other plant species. In the recovering woods near Stonor are masses of thistles and brambles, St. John’s wort, and chalk specialists like gromwell and ploughman’s spikenard. To a goldfinch or a whitethroat this is a much more congenial home than a high beech stand. Butterflies and moths might find more food plants. More insects would feed more insectivores. It could be argued that short-term devastation is long-term conservation. In the natural order of things there will be unusual storms from time to time, and their aftermath may refresh parts of the ecosystem that would otherwise disappear. “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good,” as the old saw says.

  Two miles south of our wood, Hunt’s Wood is a small piece of ancient woodland that was badly mauled during the 1990 storm. A few enormous beeches survived and now stand alone, their lofty trunks soaring strangely naked in the absence of their former fellows. Lucius Cary is replanting his wood, but with a mix of trees: more wild cherries, whitebeam and oaks as well as replacement beeches. In the end the richness of the woodland may well be enhanced, but it will be Lucius’s grandchildren who will notice the difference. Time has healed Stonor Park. A few beech trees still stand along the public footpath through the grounds, making small groves. They are among the oldest trees in the area. Because they were grown as ornamental landscape trees they have branches low down, and are altogether stouter than the woodland stands of straight-trunked, lofty
beeches. They have both more gravity and more gravitas. They resisted the hurricane. In 1803 the famous landscape architect Humphrey Repton remarked that most Chiltern beech woods “are evidently considered rather as objects of profit than of picturesque beauty.” He might have regarded their tumbling down like ninepins as aesthetic justice.

  Lambridge Wood (and Grim’s Dyke Wood) escaped lightly from the great winds, as Mr. Mooney reported to Sir Thomas Barlow. How this happened is difficult to deduce, though I surmise that the narrow Assendon Valley might have funnelled the winds into lethal gusts that particularly affected tree-covered chalky slopes. Our woods are on nearly level ground, and the clay-with-flints soil might have been more stable. Two beeches in our small patch have blown over: their root plates still stand vertically, showing how the roots once extended more or less horizontally over the woodland floor. I suppose they remain in place because it would have been too much trouble to remove them after the trunk timber had been cut up and processed. I cannot say whether these trees were tipped over in 1987 or 1990. I can say that they did not set up a chain reaction of falling neighbours. One of them created a small clearing when it fell, and now several small beeches and a wych elm compete for light in the open space. The end of one tree provides opportunities for the next generation. A wood in which no tree ever tumbled would stifle its own future.

  —

  I MAKE A QUICK VISIT to the wood to ponder and wander, which has become a form of occupational therapy. It is still cold, and a wan mist that Turner would have appreciated filters the distant sun. The new year’s bluebells are already spreading pert rosettes of splayed dark-green leaves, and the wintry light has awoken other plants. Tongues of cuckoo-pint leaves (Arum maculatum) emerge from the deepest litter, unfurling into triangles, some blotched with black. They are in a hurry to grab energy while they can, to produce starch that they will then store in white tubers deep underground. By high summer there will be no sign of the leaves; only green sticks will remain, rising straight from the ground carrying poisonous berries that ripen red in the autumn, when they seem to have nothing at all to do with the luscious leaves in front of me now. As I scuffle through the old beech litter, a robin redbreast pops out from a holly tree and pounces on something edible that I have disturbed, just inches away from me. He too is curious. He is adapted to investigate the ground stirred up by any passing animal; he might think of me as a rather inadequate wild boar. Was it the same robin who had followed the Chiltern Society? I clearly pose no threat; he darts back into the holly cover to see if I will uncover any further treats.

  Bird names can be confusing: I remember being shown a “robin” in the eastern United States, and realising it was a completely different bird from the European “robin.” An American visiting Europe experiences the converse. The two birds are even placed in different avian families, though they were formerly both lumped together with the thrushes. Nowadays, ornithologists have popped our cheery little redbreast into another evolutionary packet altogether (an old-world flycatcher, no less), while the U.S. version is still related to thrushes. Maybe using Latin names would help, but Erithacus rubecula somehow fails to convey the quality of “robin-ness.” I shall stick with the common tag.

  Charcoal

  An elderly correspondent writing in the Henley Standard in April 1922 recalled charcoal burners at work in Lambridge Wood in the latter years of the nineteenth century. Clearly this is something to try. Weight for weight, charcoal is a much more efficient source of energy than firewood, and commands a premium. It was exported to London from the wharves at Henley for centuries; in the Forest of Dean and the Weald it provided the high heat necessary for smelting iron long before coal took its place. The principle of charcoal manufacture is simple enough: to drive off the sap and other volatiles from hardwood to leave behind pure, black carbon. A fire creates heat that is then sealed beneath the wood to be combusted, expelling all the fluids and impurities. Manufacture of charcoal in large quantities required a very skilled hand to ensure proper stacking of the wood, and to build a covering of soil or turfs to seal in the combustion. The pile had to be continuously guarded for several days to prevent “burn-outs”—an exhausting business. Fortunately for me, charcoal can be made in small quantities using nothing more than an old oil drum. Andrew Hawkins is my guide to charcoal manufacture at the level of a cottage industry.

  One end of the oil drum is cut out to improvise a lid; the other has a smaller-diameter hole cut into it to act as a chimney. Any old dry twigs and small boughs lying on the woodland floor can be used to start a lively fire. Then the oil drum is placed over it to provide a shelter for the blaze. Now the hard work begins. A stock of slender fallen beech branches (some squirrel-damaged) has been gathered together, and the job is to saw them on a sawhorse into lengths of about eighteen inches, and throw them through the chimney end into the drum on top of the fire. Boughs of a width about the same as my wrist are ideal. Sawing is hard work—it does not take long to build up a sweat. I can imagine the hard labour that must have gone into stacking a full load. The edge of the base of the drum is very slightly levered up on one side to provide just enough air to the fire. Once the drum is half-full, prolific white smoke emerges from the “cooking pot”—to avoid choking, it is as well to check the wind direction before setting up the sawhorse. White smoke is the sign that the wood is in process of transformation, but unlike the election of a new Pope, this white smoke is the beginning rather than the end of the process. At this stage the lid is loosely propped atop the chimney exit to keep the heat sealed in. Now all we have to do is wait for an hour or two, until the colour of the emerging smoke takes on a bluish cast. This is the signal that the wood is becoming “cooked.” At this point, all air is excluded. Loose soil is piled around the base of the drum to seal it, while the lid is weighed down over the chimney hole with a heavy stone. The edges of the lid are sealed tight using a sand fillet around the perimeter (sand falls back into any vacant space as it dries). Now we can go away and leave the sealed hot drum to its own devices.

  The following day we return to unpack the booty. There is a decent return of nice blocky charcoal—less than a third of the volume of the wood that went in. A coarse sieve is used to take out ash resulting from the odd piece of wood that has gone just too far. Andrew tells me that before he got the method right he once had the experience of finding nothing but ash for his pains. Now we have two large bags of excellent natural charcoal to fuel our barbecues. As commercial charcoal is often made from mangrove wood, damaging a major tropical habitat and a valuable shield against coastal erosion (to say nothing of tsunamis), we can also take home a sense of having done the right, sustainable thing.

  12

  March

  An Unexpected Discovery

  The vernal equinox approaches. A clear dawn among the trees induces a sense of anticipation that infuses the very air. Lambridge Wood has woken from its winter sleep already, but the beech leaves are wrapped within their buds awaiting some arcane signal to instruct them to unfurl; the sun can still reach everything under the trees. Light briefly catches on the wings of insects on the move, and twinkles on dancing gnats. Scuffling noises like scrunching paper from under the leaf litter prove that small mammals are secretively scurrying about their business. Large, grey-spotted leopard slugs have emerged from hiding. As for the birds, mating has become imperative. The whole wood resounds to the drumming on hollow trees of red-and-pied greater spotted woodpeckers. They are advertising themselves with a rapidfire tat-a-tat; a snare drum rather than a kettledrum, but a cleaner noise than either, and designed to carry. There are two—maybe three—in different parts of the woods. The repetitive percussion is only possible because they have built-in shock absorbers in their muscles, and a hinge between skull and beak. Human headbangers sustain more damage, and probably attract fewer mates. So there is an orchestra in the wood today: a wind band of birdsong—chaffinches with their descending cadences, rich flutes of blackbirds, chimes of great tits—with
the woodpeckers adding their percussion section allegro con brio. Then, quite suddenly, a discord intrudes on the symphony: the cackle, the mad hilarity of a green woodpecker, the cry my father called a “yaffle.” For a few seconds a penetrating series of repetitive, rather harsh notes dominates the woodland. It is like a whoopee cushion interrupting a concert. I spot the culprit escaping heavily through the trees, a large green bird flying, I should say lolloping, in almost dolphin-like fashion towards the open fields beyond the wood. The symphony soon resumes with undiminished vigour.

  Around the clearing a few offcuts from the felled cherry remain to be carried home for splitting into logs, so there is work to be done. Laura Henderson, a friend who works for the Forestry Commission, is being introduced to the wood. Brambles grow too vigorously in the open. They originate from gnarled woody bases that are very tough. I had always assumed that briar pipes must have been manufactured from this wood, but I discovered that the raw material is actually derived from a Mediterranean tree heath (Erica arborea) for which the local name is bruyere,1 so tobacco pipes will not, after all, be one of my country products. Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Long, arching branches splay out from the old bases, and root in their turn, soon making an impenetrable mesh of prickly vines, ideally designed for tripping up people carrying logs. Just now, shoots for new branches crouch like rockets, ready to go when the starting pistol fires.