In touch with The Wild Wood

As I familiarise myself with the landscape around the place I live, I've realised that there is wildness in the most benign landscape. No English landscape is virgin forest or a desert untouched by human feet – it is molded by generations of lives lived on the land, but that doesn't mean that the untamed doesn't exist.

I've set myself a project to get to know one small area of land, our tiny plot that we acquired last Easter. Whenever I can, I plan to eat my lunch sitting on the seat in The Wild Wood, and while I eat I'll read and think . . .

A meditation in The Wild Wood, 17 February 2010

A brook and a small tributary stream run along two sides and meet at one corner. There are Yew trees and an Ash. The soil and Ivy hide broken lumps of what was probably a furnace, maybe from the Old Forge which once stood on the opposite side of the brook. We have made beetle banks and a log pile half submerged in the ground. Cliff constructed a seat from Yew branches, which is bathed in warm sunshine at midday. Spring is starting to wake up The Wild Wood.

Today I read the introduction and first chapter of Wildwood – a journey through trees by the late Roger Deakin, who loved and was inspired by the Suffolk countryside.

"To enter a wood is to pass into a different world
in which we ourselves are transformed."