From the Forest (47 page)

11
‘Beauty and the Beast’, which is a more grown-up version of this story, is not in fact in the Grimms’ collections – but it makes this point very clearly. Here, Beauty becomes entangled with the Beast, not because of a promise of her own, but because of one of her father’s. When she kisses the Beast she has no reason to know his true identity – she does not seek to liberate him from an enchantment or gain herself a handsome husband; she kisses him out of kindness alone, and for that she is rewarded.

6 Staverton Thicks

1
Rackham,
Trees and Woodland
, p. 12.

2
Rackham,
Trees and Woodland
, p. 547.

3
George Peterken has surveyed Staverton – see ‘Development of Vegetation in Staverton Park, Suffolk’,
Field Studies
, 3(1) (1969). Rackham comments that if Staverton were in Czechoslovakia, it might be categorised as ‘virgin forest’. Countries in Europe designate their own ‘virgin forests’, and there is no formal standardisation or regulation. Britain, Ireland, the Low Countries and Denmark claim no virgin forest – all the woodland in these countries has been worked, used, affected by human culture in one way or another; Sweden, second in the list, enters 38 woodlands in this category – whereas Czechoslovakia has named 123 sites. The general professional view is that Czechoslovakia uses a looser definition (which might include places similar to Staverton, although in the UK the evidence of pollarding would exclude it); the alternative possibility is that Czechoslovakia does in fact have a different forest history from the rest of Europe.

4
In some parts of the country pollards were also used as marker trees – for example, on a boundary, or as ‘signposts’. Oak trees in Scotland were more likely to be coppiced than pollarded, partly because the native sessile oak does not pollard as successfully as its southern relative. Most ancient oak pollards in Scotland are single examples in areas of coppice or timber trees, and are now believed to have been designed to give some sort of information, like boundaries or way-markers.

5
I say ‘almost’ because trees that develop through ‘cloning’ cannot really be dated the way other trees can. Cloning species put up new trunks from the underground root – so a ten-year-old tree trunk may be growing on centuries-old roots and be part of a centuries-old organism.

6
I have no idea why this is the case – and neither, apparently, does anyone else. Rackham speculates that newer trees tended to be planted closer together and this may affect their root formation (particularly because he records that trees on the edges of plantations do better in relation to windblow than those in the centre of large groups).

7
T. R. E. Southwood, ‘The Numbers of Species of Insect Associated with Various Trees’,
Journal of Animal Ecolog y
, 30 (1961), pp. 1 – 8. But it is important to understand that ‘no one individual tree of a particular species will harbour all the species of insects/mites/lichens known to be associated with that tree species. Indeed, no single woodland is likely to contain all of the species associated with its constituent tree species.’ Nonetheless, the numbers are actually even higher because Southwood was specifically counting tree-foliage eaters. However, trees obviously provide a range of resources for species other than those simply eating their foliage. Southwood further concentrated on species specifically linked to particular tree species and deliberately omitted those insects feeding more generally on a range of trees.

8
A ‘maiden’ tree is one that has never been coppiced or pollarded, but that has been grown for its tall, straight trunk. These are also called ‘timber’ trees.

9
Now perhaps 60, because in his (magical) book
The Butterfly Isles
(Granta, 2011), Patrick Barkham records seeing a pair of Queen of Spain fritillaries mating in West Sussex.

10
Christopher Marlowe,
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
, Act 1, scene i.

11
The magi or ‘wise men’ of the Greek original did not become kings for several centuries. The word ‘magic’ may be derived from these magi, although this is not certain.

12
There are two versions of this story in the Grimms’ collections – one puts the blame on the stepmother, and the other on the father.

13
It is well-nigh impossible to see how anybody could sew anything at all out of starwort (
Callitriche stagnalis
) – a tiny fleshy flower growing in water in wet mud. Its flowers are minute and its stalks are not fibrous. Perhaps her success is truly magical – and certainly skilful.

14
Zipes uses ‘spit’, but it is fairly clear from the narrative that something more vulgar was intended; the RKP complete edition of the Grimms’ stories uses ‘spews from back and front’.

15
There are also a few stories in which the Devil – or his grandmother, or an angel or saint, or, occasionally Jesus – appears and rescues the deserving. These are more ethical stories, but they are not ‘magical’ in any usual sense of the word.

16
This was Wilhelm Grimm’s belief by the end of his life: the stories were ‘fragments of belief dating back to most ancient times . . . the mythic element resembles small pieces of a shattered jewel which are lying strewn on the ground all overgrown with grass and flowers . . . Their signification has long been lost, but it is still felt.’

17
Rackham,
Trees and Woodland
, p. 547.

7 Forest of Dean

1
It is from this story that Cinderella’s ‘magical coach’ was drawn – the son’s third task is to find ‘the most beautiful woman in world’. The toad humorously comments that she doesn’t ‘happen to have her right to hand’, but then offers him a hollowed-out turnip, six little mice and one of the baby toads. Immediately the toad is transformed into a ‘remarkably beautiful maiden’, and the turnip and mice into a coach and horses.

2
Aeneas’ descent to Hades in Virgil’s epic is a well-known instance of such a visit.

3
There is archaeological evidence that coal was used on Bronze Age funeral pyres, but it would seem that this was ‘outcrop coal’ – coal lying on or very near the surface.

4
In 1848 a railway tunnel under the Severn was opened, and there was also a railway bridge between Sharpness and Lydney (which collapsed in 1960).

5
Fashions change – now the tall, straight oaks with tidy bushy heads are less admired than the more romantic, multi-trunked irregular old oaks with their infinite variations of leaf size and epicormics – the little tufty shoots of twigs found on their trunks. Now we like epiphyte ferns, mosses and lichens which all prefer irregular spreading trunks and branches. We prefer sessile to pedunculate oak trees.

6
The global danger of illegal logging is not that forests are being used, but that they are being exploited by non-local industries which have no local base and therefore no particular interest in managing the forest sustainably. This was simply not the case in Europe through the early modern period.

7
I have found no discussion on this, but given how soon this is after the serious social protest that led to the army being called out in force following the enclosure legislation, I cannot help wondering if the miners got these rights so clearly legalised because the government did not want to face another similarly difficult situation.

8
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/1-2/43/contents

9
Sea coal, which we would now simply call coal, was so named to distinguish it from char-coal (coal produced by charring or burning). It seems to have been called sea coal because it was first gathered not from mining but from pieces thrown up on beaches. The word ‘collier’ originally referred to both charcoal burners and miners.

10
Ochre is a clay used in dyeing – and it is often mixed with oak bark to make a preservative paint for buildings and ships’ sails.

11
This is a very complex and confusing (and unusually long) story, which appears to be an amalgamation of a remarkable range of themes and tropes. I have picked out only one of them.

12
The dignity and independence of spinning has left an odd, hidden mark on the English language. A spinster was a woman who could spin; it was as a compliment that the word was extended to all unmarried women, because it implied that they did not need a husband, but chose freely to love or live singly. ‘A spinster of this parish’ comes to have her banns called not from dire necessity, but from a position of equality and independence.

8 Ballochbuie and the Forest of Mar

1
In the nineteenth century the term ‘forester’ referred to someone who worked not in the woods but in the deer ‘forests’, where there were unlikely to be any trees at all. In the twentieth century these employees became known as ‘stalkers’ – a word whose meaning has changed in a rather sinister way – or as ‘game-keepers’.

2
As the fashionable enthusiasm for all things Scottish grew in the UK in the second half of the nineteenth century, a great many Scots pines were planted as ornamentals in other places – just as beech had been transported northwards earlier.

3
In Russia the startsy, hermits of the Russian Orthodox tradition, dwelt in the coniferous forests there, and there is Buddhist eremitical ‘forest tradition’ too – the Theravada forest tradition of north-east Thailand. The Theravada monks have a monastery in Sussex. The Irish tradition hermits seemed to have preferred islands, but there are numerous place names and chapels that inform us that the forests of the Middle Ages provided isolation for hermits throughout the UK. However, the hermits of the northern pine forests seem to generate a great deal of legend and lore.

4
Bible: 1 Peter, 5:9.

5
Shakespeare,
Macbeth
, IV. i, l.92.

6
I have not been able to confirm or source this, and in Ballochbuie and other woods the same feature occurs; however, I do hope that it is true.

7
Red deer stags collect does in the autumn and defend them energetically from other challengers (to the point of engaging in serious fighting). During this time they make the most extraordinary and indescribable noise somewhere between a cough and a roar, but with enormous carrying power and volume. It is always uncanny, and can be scary when you first hear it.

8
Kenneth Grahame,
The Wind in the Willows
(1908). Although Grahame is wonderfully precise about the feeling and the fear, he is rather more vague about the botany of his Wild Wood. It cannot, of course, truly be Caledonian forest, because the countryside around it is clearly the rich shire counties of Middle England. Nonetheless, it feels like it.

9
OED
, 1971(1933). ‘Uncanny’ is one of those fascinating and unusual words which is negative in form and either has no positive version or, as in this instance, did not develop one for several centuries.

10
Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution (1787), derived there from the English Bill of Rights (1689).

11
G. K. Chesterton,
Orthodoxy
(Bodley Head, 1908), p. 73.

12
These punishments are meted out, respectively, in ‘Snow White’, ‘Cinderella’, ‘The Little Goosegirl’, and ‘Hansel and Gretel’.

13
It is not clear exactly why the red deer population has been growing since the mid-nineteenth century – even the loss of territory to, for example, fenced plantation forestry, roads and expanding villages has not halted their increase.

14
Other reintroductions have been happier. There seem to be no problems with the return of the osprey or the sea eagles off the west coast of Scotland, and the wide forked tail of a red kite riding the evening thermals on easy wing cannot but cause the heart to lift with joy. The capercailzie in the Cairngorms, which are now causing concern, are themselves a nineteenth-century reintroduction. We do not yet know the outcome of bringing beaver back home to Glenknap in Argyle.

15
It is difficult, to put it mildly, to describe this weird life form, which is bright red or salmon pink and looks like one of those Chinese ivory filigree balls – like a cage – with a sort of fetid green slime lining (called gleba) that smells of rotten meat.

16
This is not just me: even experts need a microscope to be certain of what they are seeing.

17
This is an immensely complex field, as there is a range of classification systems presently in use. In the classical period the philosophers recognised two different sorts of ‘life’ – animals and plants. These came to be called ‘kingdoms’. Subsequently, and especially after the invention of microscopes, this simple binary system proved inadequate, and was gradually made more complex. Some classifications no longer use the idea of ‘kingdoms’ at all, and (to make our lives more difficult) the USA and Europe, including the UK, are presently using different systems as standard. In the UK the most commonly used organisation is into five kingdoms: prokaryota, protozoa, plantae, animalia and fungi.

18
There is a fungus called
Coprinus atramentarius
(the common inkcap) which makes excellent eating, unless you drink alcohol with it – in which case it becomes deadly. I cannot help but wonder how many unwanted husbands have been permanently dispensed with via a Coprinus casserole: the couple eat it together and then he goes off to the pub for a pint or two – and how would anyone ever know?

19
Richard Mabey, in
Flora Britannica
, records that Geoffrey Grigson (1905-1985) collected 70 local/idiomatic names for bird’s-foot-trefoil (the little bright yellow, scrambled-egg-shaped flower).

20
Liz Holden,
Recommended English Names for Fungi
(desk study for British Mycological Society, English Nature, Plantlife and Scottish Natural Heritage, 2003).