From the Forest (9 page)

3

May

The New Forest

M
ay is the magic month in the greenwood. Gradually, through its bright four weeks, the roof of the forest thickens into summer density, the fan-vaulting of winter branches filling in and blurring with leaf dance. There is a mysterious brightness, a golden quality to the May green which will soon deepen into the heavier dark richness of full summer:

Nature’s first green is Gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Then leaf descends to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.
¹

In early May I went to the New Forest and discovered that, by glorious chance, it was the peak of the bluebell extravaganza. The drift of bluebells in the early summer, seen through and under trees just greening – blue water, blue mist, blue dreams – is always almost a fairy story itself; not rare, not unexpected, and occurring throughout Europe, from the north of Scotland
²
southwards through Belgium, France and the Netherlands to Spain and Portugal, and, through introductions, into Germany and Italy as well – domestic, but still fabulous. Botanically, bluebells are called
hyacynthoides non scripta
; ‘non scripta’ is the Latin for ‘not written on’, and the name distinguishes them from the classical (and mythical) hyacinth whose every petal was inscribed by Apollo with the letters AIAI – ‘alas’ – to express his mourning for his beautiful beloved. The bluebells in British woodlands are not mythic, are not touched by the gods. They are common, annual, ordinary, and their magic is small, unimportant and straightforward. They are the flowers of fairytales. A drift of bluebells in the late-spring sunshine, the warming air giddy with their sweet scent, is heart stopping.

In fact, bluebells are not confined to woodland; what they really need is damp, cool ground, and they are frequently found in ditches and along shadowed walls and hedgerows well outside the woodland margins; in Cornwall they grow on rocks right down to the shoreline where no trees have ever grown. But it is in the forest that they are most pronouncedly themselves. I think this is perhaps because in woodland you can never see exactly where the carpet ends; the sun dappling of the ground through the trees above and within the lakes of blue makes them seem to vanish rather than stop; there are always catches of colour receding further and deeper into the wood. Bluebells are particularly lovely under beech trees, because they flower just as those delicate, vivid leaves come out and the light within the wood is mediated between fragile bright green and the strange smoky shimmer of the flowers. The clear red-gold ground under beech trees adds a particular depth of tone in those patches the bluebells have left empty.

It is impossible to describe – and, oddly, nearly as difficult to paint or photograph. The whole effect is so over the top that most attempts to record it come out schmaltzy or chocolate-boxy, do what you will. Nor is it quite clear exactly how the bluebells pull off this annual stunt act: close up, it is not that spectacular a flower; the three or four small blossoms on their slightly floppy stems all look humbly downwards and face in a single direction. Taken one by one, the plants seem quite unimposing, the dark green strap-like leaves apparently outdoing the more modest flowers in volume and strength of colour. If you pick them,
³
their stalks are long and flaccid, dripping a limp dampness onto your hands from white silky stalk bases. They fade fast into nothing. And yet . . . in full bloom, in their wide pools of blueness, they create an ineffable atmosphere of everything that is loveliest about our ancient forests. Before there were so many cars, the railways ran Bluebell Excursion trips so that people could be nourished by seeing them, even through a window in passing.

Driving through the New Forest in May sunshine, I saw them as they spread away from the unfenced roads, back into the sunny distance of spring woodlands. I kept having to stop my car and look, convinced that this misty swathe, this sweet, grounded cloud, had to be the apotheosis of springtime and of woodland magic. The New Forest has a good mixture of trees, from modern plantation through to old heathy scrub, and includes both oak and beech stands. But the bluebells do not much discriminate. They tend to leave the thinnest, least fertile soils to bracken and they do not like the acid subsoil under plantation conifers, although they will return slowly once the trees have been cleared; beyond that, they are ubiquitous – they need only time, damp and space to perform their spring ritual.

Yet there is nothing particularly special about the bluebells of the New Forest; lots of woodland boasts ‘better’, or at least more famous, bluebells. I had not come in search of them deliberately. They were just an added bonus.

I parked the car at Lover at the northern end of the forest, almost solely because I liked the name,
⁴
and walked in the woods there in clean May sunshine. It was a special walk, and not solely for the springtime and the bluebells, but because I saw a snake in the forest. Although still early in the year, the warmth must have called it from hibernation. It was a small adder lying out in the sun on a long ride, a grassy track between trees, so called because they were originally created to ride down, especially when hunting. Here, the grass had been walked flat in places, and it was on a patch of bare sandy earth that the snake was warming itself. I cannot see a snake without a sudden inhalation of fear. I am not alone in this; many people have a deep horror of snakes, which is hard to explain unless the Genesis story has sunk in deeper than we like to think; neither the Freudian tale of penises and paternal rape fantasies, nor the evolutionary one of ancient remembered dangers quite work – men are as terror-struck by snakes as women are and venomous serpents were never a primary threat in either jungles or savannahs. We do not experience quite this horror in the presence of the big cats and still less of hippopotami, although both are far more serious threats. But even though I know that the snake is most unlikely to bite me, that if it does it will not do me an enormous amount of harm, that in the worst possible case there are effective anti-venoms readily available, and that a bee sting is more dangerous and many plants are more toxic, still snakes are mysteriously scary.

Snakes do not appear often in the fairy stories, but they are always faintly sinister when they do. In ‘The Three Snake Leaves’, a little-known and dark tale, for example, a poor young man makes his fortune as a soldier and marries the King’s daughter, who is ‘very beautiful but very strange’. One of her peculiarities is that she binds any would-be husband to a vow that, should she die first, he will be buried with her. The young man is so infatuated, however, that he agrees; she dies; he is locked in the crypt with her. As he waits his slow fate a snake crawls into the tomb and, not wanting it to eat his wife’s corpse, he kills the creature and cuts it into three pieces. However, a second snake appears and, using three leaves it has brought with it, reunites the sections and resurrects the first snake. The young man copies the snake’s actions and restores his wife; he has the sense, however, to keep the leaves safe. Having said in the last chapter that there was very little adultery in the fairy stories, I immediately find myself recounting one of those few stories in which it does occur (might this explain the snake?): after a while, the princess falls in love with a ship’s captain, kills her husband, and throws his body into the sea. However, he is rescued by a faithful servant and revived in his turn by the carefully kept leaves. The princess’s father wreaks stern vengeance on her, and the young man inherits the kingdom. Interestingly, the snake shows no personal involvement or interest; it reanimates its own partner and then slithers away out of the story. The snake does not speak to or
give
the leaves to the hero, but just goes away, leaving them behind. Elsewhere, animals engage actively with the heroes and heroines; even wicked animals, like the wolf in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, show some interest in and involvement with the humans they encounter, and talk to them; but snakes just go coldly about their own dark business.

All three of the British snakes (the adder, the non-venomous grass snake and the much rarer but harmless smooth snake [
Coronella austriaca
]) live in the New Forest, but I knew this particular one was an adder by its extraordinary beauty – its elegant proportions, strong zigzag pattern and large, dark eyes. Adders are not uncommon in Britain, although, because of their timidity and habits of retreat, I have not seen many – it remains for me a nervy thrill. I’ve never seen a pair mating; they ‘flow’ sinuously along each other’s sides, licking backs and flicking tails. A male adder, interrupted by a peer during this ritual, engages at once with the second male. Together, they perform the ‘adder dance’, raising themselves up vertically and pushing at each other as though arm wrestling. They say that the male who has already flowed with the female always wins these encounters, strengthened by arousal, perhaps. I would so like to see this.

One specific feature of adders is that they need an unusually complex habitat to accommodate their diverse behaviours – sprawling in the sun to gain energy, hunting, hibernating and hiding. This is why they flourish in the New Forest. The New Forest is the largest area of unploughed, unsown lowland in Britain, and in consequence it has extensive areas of diverse habitats which have disappeared from elsewhere: 36,000 acres of old deciduous woodland; 29,000 acres of heath and grassland; and another precious 8,200 acres of wet heathland and bog. These are all broken into small patches like mosaic tessera. There are also over 20,000 acres of plantation trees, some from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but mainly planted since the 1920s. There is, in addition, a 26-mile coastal strip looking out over the Solent towards the Isle of Wight.

This splendid variety has led to the survival of a rich diversity of life forms, too: plants, birds, insects, reptiles and mammals, some found nowhere else in southern England, hang on in the new Forest. For complicated historical reasons, it has been continuously used for common grazing – by cows and pigs, and particularly the ponies, which are now a notable tourist feature and more than earn their daily hay. As I have already suggested, woodland does best when it is properly used by humans – coppicing and pollarding extend the life of individual trees, and also expand biodiversity by breaking up the canopy and creating sunlit spaces within the trees. Well-managed stock-grazing has a similar positive effect – the open, diverse terrain of the New Forest has been enhanced and developed by the free ranging of domestic animals, as well as by the presence of its own native fauna.

The New Forest combines all these natural advantages with being easily accessible from other areas of the country, criss-crossed by roads and dotted with villages. Although one of the elements that preserved the New Forest was its low fertility, making its land less valuable, this has changed and Hampshire has high property prices, a rich population and therefore fewer pressures to develop high-density housing or industrial areas. The New Forest is highly protected – a large part of it is designated as a National Park, and there are various Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs) and conservation zones. The consequences, of course, are car parks, bicycle routes, well-constructed walkways and an inordinate number of ‘tourist attractions’ and their accompanying signage: the price of preserving the wild places can be managing the wild places so heavily that they cease to be wild at all.

Oddly enough, this has been part of the history of the New Forest. It has been a ‘made’ forest, an amenity forest, for nearly a thousand years. Indeed, the whole area is
more
wooded now than it was at the end of the first millennium.

Most places have several histories. For example, they have a ‘natural history’ in their geology, climate, flora and fauna and so on, and they also have a ‘political history’, which tells us about who owns them and to what end and how that came to be the case. These are never totally separate histories; they are usually closely related to each other. Like all histories, they are human histories, and they affect and entangle with each other and cannot be divided tidily.

Out of the relationship between these (and other) histories emerges a different sort of history: an imaginative history, a complex cultural narrative about how a place or particular type of landscape is perceived and pictured. The word ‘landscape’ itself shows how this history is both part of and different from the first two histories. Originally the word ‘landscape’ was an art history word – it meant a picture, a painting of a terrain, and thence a view of a terrain, and finally the terrain itself – as though we called human beings ‘portraits’ because a portrait is a picture of a human being. This history, too, weaves itself inextricably into the others and affects them; for example, there is now a planning concept called ‘landscape amenity’, which means that terrains socially (and politically) deemed to be beautiful are exempted from certain forms of further development. Some of the criteria for this are drawn more directly from ‘natural history’ (ancient woodland, high mountainous land, especially if it is rocky and fierce, and waterfalls are currently more likely to be ‘protected’, along with places occupied by a particular, culturally derived range of flora and fauna), and others are drawn from ‘political history’ (Bronze Age standing stones, medieval ecclesial buildings and eighteenth-century parkland, for example). This selection of landscapes affects the designated terrain directly and therefore inevitably affects other places, since if you do not put your factory, motorway or wind farm here, then you will put it
there
.

But even if it is impossible to draw clear lines between these histories, it is still worth trying to do so. If the northward retreat of the ice marked a crucially important moment in the natural history of northern European forests, the period around the turn of the first millennium – a thousand years ago – proved equally significant for their political history, and particularly in England. At that time a general European-wide cultural shift occurred which changed the understanding of leadership. The perception of what a king was shifted from a ‘first among equals’ status, reflected in various types of election or appointment, to someone with a unique form of empowerment, whereby royalty was embodied in the person of the monarch not by merit but by right, and the honours of the function became personal attributes, and later divine grace itself. In England, which did not make the move in the slow, steady way that seems to have happened elsewhere in northern Europe, this change was abrupt and difficult. In 1066, William of Normandy arrived from northern France with the new view of his own rights as King firmly in place, and after the battle of Hastings, he set about imposing these concepts on his newly conquered people. The change was sudden and imposed. There was a further complication: because of the country’s small size, and despite the still-flexible northern border – the clear limits of the country – all the land surface belonged to someone. This was not the case in much of the rest of northern Europe, where forest, stretching over much more huge expanses of land, was simply ‘free’; it often had no official owner.