Laura hollers excitedly from the far side of the patch, near a pile of twigs left behind from the felled cherry. She has found a perfectly round, woven nest the size of a tennis ball, with a circular entrance hole in one side of it. The nest has been constructed of long grass leaves—wood melick, I would guess—that have been perfectly wrapped in a number of layers like a hollow ball of wool. A few dark strands might have been cherry bark. It looks like a cosy place in which to snuggle up. Enlightenment comes in a few moments. It is a dormouse nest! This is the first evidence in our wood of one of Britain’s most delightful mammals, and one that can be described as “cute” without blushing. It is also a protected species under the Biodiversity Action Plan, so the discovery is important for the conservation of a rare species. It is hard to stop jumping up and down with excitement at the discovery that there are dormice in Grim’s Dyke Wood, but the nest seems so fragile and easy to damage, and bramble tripwires lurk everywhere. I might drop the evidence. Gingerly, the precious object is borne back to the vehicle, as if it were the golden hoard. We cannot be certain exactly where the nest originated: it could have been tucked among the brambles, or possibly it came from high in the felled cherry. It will be a special item for the collection.
One of the advantages of being cute and uncommon is that people take a special interest, something that does not often happen to rare woodlice. Jackie describes the big-eyed, orange-brown, fluffy-tailed dormouse as “wiffly-piffly,” which may not be a familiar word, but sums up their attraction concisely. The National Dormouse Monitoring Programme (NDMP) is partly run by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES), so acronyms are on our side. A photograph of our nest emailed to a helpful scientist was quickly confirmed as showing a dormouse hibernating structure, which is “not uncommonly” found in bramble patches. Our record will be added to the national database. Dormice are well-known from the Warburg Reserve2 a couple of miles to the north of the wood, where they are protected and encouraged to breed, so it is not so astonishing to find them in Lambridge Wood as well.
Dormice (Muscardinus avellanarius) are famous for sleepiness above all else, as they “spend up to half the year in hibernation and are torpid for much of the remaining time.”3 The behaviour of the Dormouse at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was not so much fantasy as scientific description. The ability to slow down their metabolism is an important survival strategy. When they are awake, flowers, fruits and nuts are important foodstuffs; the little mammals need to pack nourishment away to see them through their protracted sleepy periods when food is less available. Recent research shows that dormice live high in the canopy at some times, and close to the wood floor at others. Grim’s Dyke Wood offers bramble flowers, hazelnuts and beechnuts, but there is no honeysuckle, which is one of their sugary staples (though I have seen this plant elsewhere in Lambridge Wood). Like fairies, they dine on ephemeral delicacies. I have to wonder what they seek out in springtime in Grim’s Dyke Wood. We have no hawthorn flowers for them to sample. Perhaps they wake up early enough to enjoy the wild cherry blossoms that abound in the canopy in April, though this does not figure in research studies I have discovered. No matter: I just welcome these charming animals into our wood, even if they manage to suck nourishment from dew and dreams.
Man’s Estate
The story of Grim’s Dyke Wood has proved inseparable from the histories of the surrounding estates, and more particularly the manor of Greys Court, whose lords owned the ground for so many hundreds of years. Attitudes to rural property through the twentieth century changed in unprecedented ways—although, curiously, the large estates have come full circle. The greatest transformation concerned the humblest dwellings. Small cottages once occupied by blacksmiths, or coopers, or chair-makers, are now the proud possessions of businessmen or professionals or the comfortably retired. A solicitor will attend to his electronic mail in a room that was once foggy with carpenter’s sawdust. Just next to our wood, “the murder cottage” and the barn next to it were always part of the same estate as Lambridge Wood, and they were sold off together in 1922. They are part of our story. The cottage is now a charming country residence, tastefully extended in an appropriate fashion, surrounded by an ample and lovingly tended garden. Next door, the former barn has a huge picture window in its side, and has been converted into a comfortable family home.4 A newer house has been erected at the back of the older buildings on the site of the old orchard. When Cecil Roberts lived at the bottom of the hill in Lower Assendon in the 1930s, he regarded the houses at the top of the hill as out-of-the-way, and at the time of the Dungey killing in 1896 the Henley Standard emphasised the unusual remoteness of the spot. The modern internal combustion engine changed all that. Across the Chiltern Hills historic cottages have become valuable assets. Up at Crocker End, on the old route to Nettlebed, I visited a “cottage” that may originally have belonged to one of the brickmakers. Whole wings had been added, constructed of brick-and-flint, a landscaped garden surrounded everything, and two racing cars snuggled down on the drive. If it had not been done so accurately and “in keeping,” there might have been something offensive about this vernacular ennoblement. The hills are scattered with pretty villages, and many of them have no local people left in them at all. The village of Turville, lying three miles north of the wood, is known to millions from an aerial view at the beginning of the hugely successful television comedy series The Vicar of Dibley. It presents as remotely rural. In fact, it is almost entirely occupied by people who work in the media. The cottages looking so tickety-boo would once have had vegetable plots in their front gardens, and maybe even a pole-lathe in the shed.
Cecil Roberts lived in Lower Assendon at a time of transition. He admired the skilled, but ageing workers in the village, and mopped up their stories from his station in the Golden Ball; he even provided financial help to several local people in trouble. But he had Gone Rustic—to cite the title of the first of his Pilgrim Cottage books in 1934. His choice of title was significant. Some of his friends in the village were decidedly genteel, like Miss Whissitt, who conversed in idiosyncratic French. The “county” set was still more or less in place. But Cecil was committing to something of an experiment in a strange land—a rustic adventure (with added housekeeper and gardener). The flavour of his books is reminiscent of the popular 1989 work by Peter Mayle set in rural France, A Year in Provence, in which humorous episodes with “real” paysan people are combined with tempting glimpses of a more authentic life. It proved a heady mixture. Many Britons have headed for the south of France on the back of it. I am not saying that Cecil Roberts was in any way responsible for changing the demography of the Chiltern Hills, but he reflected a change in Weltanschauung that became ever more pervasive. By the time H. J. Massingham had published Chiltern Country in 1940, “gentrification” was well advanced, much to that opinionated author’s horror. Villages were changing, and the meaning of rural life was changing with it, with the woods as silent monitors.
Many ancient manors were under threat during the twentieth century. Estate duties on larger properties were introduced in 1914 by the Asquith government, and as these taxes gradually increased, they took their toll on stately piles when they passed from one generation to the next. Income from Empire declined as the great British trading nation was embroiled in two world wars, and several stately homes—like Fawley Court—were requisitioned for military purposes; some of them never recovered. “New money” took over. Lambridge Wood had been sold in 1922, and in the following decade Miles Stapleton disposed of Greys Court and its associated farmland, ending the long association of his family with the parish of Rotherfield Greys. Cecil Roberts volunteered to mediate on behalf of several of his friends interested in purchasing it, although the manor buildings had by then declined to a sorry state. In 1935 the remainder of the Greys Court estate was sold to Evelyn Fleming, who restored the house with more élan than wisdom. She already owned a large house at Nettlebed (“Joyce Grove”) on t
he back of banking wealth. Her sons were the travel writer Peter Fleming, and Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, which makes for a briefly glamorous association, but two years later she had sold on to the Brunner family.
Their money derived from Sir John Brunner, a brilliant industrial chemist and co-founder of Imperial Chemical Industries in 1926. His son Sir Felix (1897–1982) restored Greys Court much as it remains today, converting parts of the ancient fortifications into delightful walled gardens, including the finest and largest wisteria pergola I have ever seen. As a Liberal Member of Parliament he proved to be a politician enlightened enough to introduce statutory sick pay for ordinary workers, and he engaged with the local area in a way that Henley had not seen since the days of Sir Bulstrode Whitelocke. His wife, Elizabeth, was equally public-spirited, becoming chair of the Women’s Institute National Federation and vigorously promoting adult education for women. Lady Brunner lived on in Greys Court until her death in 2003, at just short of a hundred years of age. Hugo Brunner followed his parents’ tradition of public service as Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire. They were, to use the black-and-white classification of 1066 and All That, a Good Thing. Felix was also a great supporter of Octavia Hill, founder of the National Trust, and in 1969 Greys Court was given to the Trust to secure its future. The house has currently been “frozen in time” by the Trust exactly as it was when it was the Brunner family home, and I don’t doubt that they deserve their starring role, although we have seen that their tenure was a grace note on an extraordinarily long history, of which Lambridge Wood was a part. I cannot but wonder what the reclusive Stapleton sisters would have made of all the National Trust visitors gawping at their greenhouses.
Our other manors followed utterly different trajectories. Nobody can see them. Badgemore House, which owned some of the lower stretches of Lambridge Wood, passed into the hands of another prominent local family, the Oveys, in the later nineteenth century. Richard Ovey still farms the Hernes estate, by the road from Henley to Greys, and he showed me photographs of an elegant, finely proportioned house, with well-dressed members of his family posing in front of the pedimented entrance designed by Christopher Wren’s master carpenter Richard Jennings. By the 1930s the Oveys had the now familiar problem of maintaining such a large house, which was not in a good state after the First World War, and they sold it on to a man called Vlasto, who built a new and more convenient house immediately to the north. The stable blocks were hived off as riding stables for a Miss McAlpine. Both houses were requisitioned in the Second World War, and the older house was demolished in 1946—after a fire, according to Richard Ovey—and vanishes from our story. The newer house and the stables became the nucleus of the Badgemore Golf Club, which still operates today.
More big houses around Henley survived Hitler, and might well have been destined to follow Badgemore House into perdition. Instead, new employment as educational institutions rescued them from destruction. Friar Park, Fawley Court and Park Place all became schools after the Second World War; for youngsters, evacuees from Poland and children with problems, respectively. At this point the history of the big houses takes a bizarre turn: the estates have gone back into private hands. Friar Park was bought first, by George Harrison, and thus passed into the domain of a special kind of royalty. Very wealthy people bought the other houses. Fawley Court is currently being refurbished for a reclusive private owner, with “no expense spared,” after the Polish school closed and the Marian Fathers finally departed. Park Place was the most expensive private house sale in English history at £140 million, sold in 2011 to a Russian oligarch called Andrey Borodin. I know nothing about him, and it is not wise to enquire too closely. All I will say is that he has refused to allow a bat survey of a special site on his grounds which has been catalogued every year for the preceding twenty; I do not suppose we would have much in common.
Almost every remaining estate around Henley has been purchased by a Swiss banker, Urs Schwarzenbach, including the parkland on the other side of the Fair Mile from our wood. He has acquired much of the Hambleden estate to the north that was once the property of W. H. Smith, of stationery fame. He added Culham Court—a splendid small stately home three miles from Henley—as his private residence, and topped it off with Henley Park, in Fawley parish, combining his estate holdings under the inelegant, if accurate, label Culden Faw Estate. He converted much of his land to service his polo team, the Black Bears. Polo is a sport that can suck up infinite quantities of money, so it is a convenient indulgence for the very wealthiest. Most of the fields around Henley are now fenced with double post-and-rail, and are as neat and as lacking in biodiversity as a croquet lawn.
So far as I know, none of these hugely rich people ever emerge from their secure gates to come into town. I did hear that the wife of Mr. Borodin visits a neighbour by helicopter, but that is just gossip. They might as well be on private islands, which I presume is exactly the idea. This new aristocracy does not have deep roots in the location, though I imagine (I am obliged to imagine) they appreciate the woods as they might an expensive painting on a far wall. On the other hand, I must recognise that this is history recycled, in a perverse way. Colonel Mackenzie, Strickland Freeman and Bulstrode Whitelocke all added to their holdings of land, and the right kind of marriage brought the Knollys and the Stapletons additional estates. Today’s new aristocracy is an international caste, and their takeover could be viewed as the final stage of engagement of this corner of England with the rest of the world that started with a young Knollys buccaneering in Elizabethan times. What is different now is the exclusiveness of the landowners: they really do exclude.5 Just about everybody, unless they arrive in a helicopter.
Beetles
Beetles are the most diverse group of animals on earth. Their front wings are modified into tough covers (elytra) that conceal a pair of flying wings that can be deployed when needed, so this group of insects can get down into crevices and under the ground—or indeed almost anywhere. Their larvae can make a meal of almost anything. So beetles occupy an astonishing range of ecological niches.
Ground-living beetles are different from those that live in standing dead wood, or on flowers or dung, and many species are nocturnal. During the course of the Grim’s Dyke project I attempted to sample some of their different habitats. This took much of the year, so the beetles appear here in the last chapter, although I have already mentioned one or two discoveries that were made in the canopy with the help of a cherry-picker in June. A trap for flying beetles was a special piece of “kit” that was suspended from a branch well above the ground; it was equipped with a lure and a series of cones that helped any beetles to tumble into a sample jar. A different trap for ground-dwelling species was easily made. I half-filled a jam jar with diluted Dettol (rather like Pernod, it goes cloudy when water is added), to which I added a couple of drops of washing-up liquid, which breaks the surface tension so that anything that falls in is submerged quickly rather than struggling for hours. I buried the jar so that its lip was level with, or very slightly below, the surrounding ground. After a few days the contents were tipped into a preserving jar primed with alcohol, for later examination.
I was astonished at just how many beetles must have been marching around the wood after dark—during summer, the jar was fairly crammed with them. The disadvantage of this collecting method is that slugs also fall into the trap, and when they do, a mass of unsavoury slime befouls the mixture. I fished out the slugs with a spoon before proceeding further. Common finds in the jar were big, dark ground beetles, which are terrestrial hunters, and often flightless. The jar was also stuffed with predatory rove beetles (Staphylinidae) that are mostly long and wiggly and look rather like earwigs to the uninitiated. In fact they have very small wing cases, which allows the back end of the abdomen to be seen much more readily. The largest species is commonly known as the devil’s coach horse. When I left a sample jar a little too long in the ground, something began to decay, and the smell probably attracted a distinctive orang
e-and-black burying beetle (Nicrophorus vespilloides). This beetle is an arthropod undertaker. It buries the corpse of some small animal and then lays its eggs upon it; the eggs develop into carnivorous larvae that consume the body. This particular species shows a surprising degree of parental care, culling its larvae until there are just enough to prosper on their grisly repast. I am fairly confident that I can identify a shiny, chunky, black woodland dor beetle (Anoplotrupes stercorosus) with spiky legs, one of the dung-eaters—there is plenty of deer dung in the wood on which its larvae can feed.
That is about as far as I can go. Many more beetles lurk in the jars to be identified. Some of them are tiny, just a few millimetres long. I need the help of a specialist coleopterist or two. In Britain there are over a thousand species of rove beetles alone, more than four hundred weevils, and who knows how many wood-borers, fungus-eaters, pollen-lovers and so on; it began to seem an impossible task to name my samples. Colleagues from the Natural History Museum came to the rescue. Max Barclay totted up fifty species or so from the collecting jars, and from earlier collections made by entomologists swishing their nets. A small brown beetle, Ernoporicus fagi, got him excited—it is another species from the wood classified as “nationally scarce,” with just a handful of previous records. In company with a young enthusiast called Jordan Rainey, the Museum’s beetle curator Michael Geiser came to the wood in June and snuffled about, spotting beetles just about everywhere. Michael is short-sighted, so when he caught some tiny beetle, he simply lifted his glasses and squinted at it to get a magnified view. Then he shuffled instantly through a vast mental encyclopedia of Latin names before pronouncing. I followed behind him with my mouth hanging open. Not all of the beetles could be identified in the field. Some had to be mounted back in the laboratory for careful examination under a microscope. However, it was clear by the end of the day that more than a hundred different kinds of beetles lived together in the wood. Michael thought the real total might be double that.6
The Wood for the Trees Page 29