The Wood for the Trees: The Long View of Nature from a Small Wood. Richard Fortey

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      The vigorous river that brought down the pebbles from eighty miles to the north-west was an ancestor of the same River Thames that now flows sedately two miles to the east of the wood.13 During the Pleistocene Ice Age (2,588,000 to 11,700 years ago) thick continental glaciers to the north waxed and waned by turn, diverting all Europe’s great rivers at some times, providing the source for vast spreads of gravel at others. The ancient Thames left behind a record of this complex history in its former river terraces, the remains of which are scattered around the Chilterns and the London Basin. The oldest of these terraces is close to our wood, at Nettlebed. The exotic pebbles that I found in the wood are well known from a younger terrace, a set of strata called the Stoke Row Gravels.

      The village that gives that formation its name is about four miles west of the wood, high on the Chiltern plateau. It is home to a most implausible structure, a little piece of India by a village green such as Cecil Roberts would have described as being quintessentially English. The Maharajah’s Well was dug by hand 368 feet down into the chalk, passing on the way down through the overlying gravels relevant to our wood, and all at the personal expense of the Maharajah of Benares, who also supplied the exotic, elegant and ornate canopy. His gift was reciprocation for a well dug in India at Azimghur by Edward Reade (‘squire’ of Stoke Row) in 1831. The Maharajah remembered that Reade had told him how his little home village on the top of the Chiltern Hills was most precariously supplied with water. His remarkable gift of the Maharajah’s Well was officially opened in 1864, and did its job efficiently for seven decades.

      Professor Phil Gibbard tells me that the Midland ‘connection’ was open for well over a million years, until about 450,000 years ago. Although the huge Pleistocene ice sheets never reached as far south as the wood, their influence could not have been more profound. An icy climate sculpted the Chiltern landscape. It scrubbed the landscape to a tabula rasa on which all its subsequent history was inscribed; this marks the baseline of my natural history. I have to imagine a landscape stripped of trees. The slopes of the hills are bare, with only the hardiest herbs able to cope with the frigidity to the south of the permanent ice. Now indeed Cecil Roberts’s description of the valley up to Stonor as a ‘ravine’ may be nearer the mark, for the Chiltern country is riven with steep-sided valleys. Cold summer streams that flow with rejuvenated force following the annual melt carve vigorously down into the soft chalk, which is still too deeply frozen to allow the tumbling waters simply to be absorbed. The streambed is choked up with flint pebbles. In Arctic latitudes I have watched just the same fitful progress of jostling stones during the brief summer – their percussion kept me awake. The legacy of the frozen era still marks the ground: not only the implausible sheerness of some Chiltern hillsides, but also valley bottoms floored even now by ancient stream gravels.

      Old names were bestowed by the Ice Age, like Rocky Lane, which runs up a valley on the south-western side of the Greys estate. Then, somewhat over eleven thousand years ago, the climate warmed for good, and now I must populate the hills with trees. Pioneers at first, small willows, hardy conifers; then birch, pine and aspen; and next, and not necessarily in this order, the broadleaved trees that came to make the original wildwood: oak, ash, lime, elm, hazel and beech. Oliver Rackham14 tells us that the lime species he calls pry (Tilia cordata) – the small-leaved lime – was dominant in many of those early woodlands. It still lurks, mostly unremarked, in a few places in the Chiltern Hills, but not in our wood. About six thousand years ago ‘Stone Age’ humans were already beginning to fell the virginal forests, where previously arboreal old age and accident had been the only foresters. The streams that had once carved the ‘ravines’ were now absorbed into the defrosted chalk, leaving a legacy of steep dry valleys, like the one that runs from the Fair Mile to Stonor Park; though it is not quite dry, for after unusually wet winters the water table rises until streams such as the Assendon Brook reappear, bounding alongside the tiny roads and causing cyclists to swerve and walkers to chide their wet Labradors.

      I hold a couple of the liver-coloured sandstone pebbles and a quartz keepsake up to the May sunshine. So much can be read from these fragments. I think of the lines from As You Like It:

      And this our life, exempt from public haunt,

      Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

      Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

      These remarkable, sermonising samples of rocks that might have passed unnoticed are next to be added to the collection.

      Maiden ladies and geraniums

      In 1787 Mary, Dowager Lady Stapleton, moved into Greys Court as her dower house, and women dominated that establishment for the next eighty years. After she died at the age of ninety-one in 1835, Mary’s daughters Maria and Catherine stayed on in the big house that owned Lambridge Wood until the younger sister Catherine’s death twenty-eight years later; both sisters also lived to a great age. The intellectual ferment in London that preoccupied their neighbour, George Grote – and the circle that included John Stuart Mill – passed them by. Rather, the Church engaged them fully, and led them to charities directed at the moral and religious education of the less fortunate in the parish of Rotherfield Greys. The rents from tenancies guaranteed their gentility, if not their spinsterhood. It must have been a quiet time at the ancient house.

      Mary’s son James was at Greys Court in the earlier days, and his friend from Christ Church, СКАЧАТЬ