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

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СКАЧАТЬ demands. A large chunk of its interior is taken up by a side chapel devoted to the monuments of the masters and mistresses of Greys Court, and principal among these is the exuberant and splendid alabaster and marble tomb of Sir Francis Knollys (d.1596) and Katherine, his wife. Their effigies lie side by side praying in formal splendour, while around the tomb seven sons and seven daughters parade in a pious line. Most touching is a tiny baby who died in infancy, whose effigy lies alongside that of his father. Sir Francis was a noted courtier of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. I like the thought that on his days away from court Sir Francis may have wandered in our wood for pleasure, or maybe hunted game there. On the floor of the nave a brass to Robert de Grey (d.1388) is altogether more modest, even though the manor and church both bear his name. Clad partly in chain mail, his sword by his side, and gauntlets still frozen in metallic prayer, he seems more a grand cipher than a real person.

      In the countryside, for many centuries manors and estates were paramount. Those who owned the estates neighbouring Greys provided its society. These nearby manors suffered the same pestilences and plagues, and shared good years and bad. The lords and gentry knew one another, and paid formal and informal visits. They eventually became what my mother would have termed ‘county’. From time to time the estates were home to remarkable historical figures; at others their occupants were quietly obscure. The status of peasantry and servants and artisans changed gradually, but all the estates had to absorb the changes, which continue today. The closest estate to our wood – and Greys manor – was Fawley Court and Henley Park to the north: a pigeon could fly from Grim’s Dyke Wood into the Park in a minute. To the east lay Badgemore. The fine house has now vanished, and what remains of it is a golf club. While further still to the north a small and perfectly set stately home remains in its own valley; the Stonor family that lives there boasts more than eight hundred years of occupancy, and one of the longest continuous lineages in Great Britain.

      Another map ties the wood more closely with Rotherfield Greys than with Henley-on-Thames. Civil parishes are the basic unit of local government, and frequently do not have the same boundaries as the ancient ecclesiastical parishes. They elect councillors, not priests, and their boundaries were sorted out at the end of the nineteenth century to make a more sensible system of local administration. Our wood lies in the civil parish of Rotherfield Greys, even though it is ecclesiastically Henley; this is appropriate to its other links with the big house. It seems that Lambridge Wood was always on the edge of some map or parish or village, which may be a good place to be to pass unnoticed. And like many other woodlands, our wood was also free from tithes: a 10 per cent levy on the income derived from the land once provided the principal source of income to support the local church. Following an Act of Parliament in 1836 a schedule of tithes was compiled across England, and in the Oxfordshire Record Office a map of 18409 portrays Lambridge Wood with considerable accuracy. The accompanying ledger prepared by a clerk in best copperplate script declares it ‘exempt’. I occasionally put a pound coin in the box at Rotherfield Greys as a token of expiation.

      In 1922 Lambridge Wood was sold off from the Greys estate after a history stretching back to Domesday. We have the map detailing ‘Lambridge Farm and 160 acres of woodland’ which was sold in Henley Town Hall on 26 July to George Shorland, a rich farmer and entrepreneur who had purchased land all around Henley. The modern era of Lambridge Wood had begun, and the unbroken thread leading back to medieval times had been severed. We will meet some of the subsequent owners later on, but now I am going to take a jump to 1969, when Lambridge Wood passed into the ownership of Sir Thomas Erasmus Barlow, Bt, whose heirs owned it until as recently as 2010. I admit that the name meant nothing to me. Sir Thomas was the third baronet to carry the title, and a distinguished naval commander. In a fairly perfunctory way, I started one of those online searches that have become routine for writers, as they have for almost everybody else. I moved backwards in time as far as I could. The First Baronet, another Thomas, had been Queen Victoria’s private physician, a man who died dripping with honours, and no doubt had an outstanding bedside manner. The Second Baronet, Sir Alan Barlow, father of Thomas Erasmus, was scarcely less distinguished as a civil servant in the grand tradition, serving as Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s Principal Private Secretary from 1933 to 1934. But then I discovered something that caused the mouse to freeze in my fist. Alan Barlow had married Nora Darwin. A magical name had somehow found its way into the genealogy of the wood. If one thread had been severed, another had been established. It did not take much more research to establish that Nora was the granddaughter of Charles Darwin. So our wood, the subject of my own modest natural history investigations, had recently belonged to a direct descendant of the greatest natural historian of all time.

      I happen to know another direct Darwin descendant who worked with me at the Natural History Museum, the botanist Sarah Darwin. The Darwins are an unusually distinguished clan, and the present generation respects the ramifications of the dynasty. Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus sired one of those lineages that seem to have done nothing but good in the world: the third Sir Thomas’s middle name must have been a nod in the direction of the grand old progenitor. Sarah knows the current baronet, Sir James Barlow; not least, they are both Ambassadors for the Galapagos Conservation Trust, which seeks to protect the world’s most famous natural evolutionary laboratory from further damage through foolish exploitation. In the autumn of 2014 Sarah introduced me to Sir James and his sister Monica. I met them both in our wood, and together we traced a path through Lambridge that they had not done for many years. James remembered his grandmother, who, he said, had been dandled on Darwin’s knee. So there I was, talking to somebody whose grandmother might have giggled and snuggled into the breast of the incomparable naturalist. I know that a number of generations back we are all related somehow – it is just a matter of statistics – but none of my friends or colleagues (apart from Sarah) has any direct link with Charles Darwin. It is difficult not to see this connection as a kind of blessing for the project – in the most secular meaning of that word, of course.

      As we ambled through Lambridge Wood James and Monica explained that their father had been very much the conservationist until his death in 2003. Some parts of the wood (not ours) had been clear felled in rectangular plots, and replanted with conifers, mostly larch and Corsican pine. These are not natural trees to find in the Chiltern Hills; on the aerial view they show up as intensely dark-green areas quite distinct from the undulating beech crowns. The intention was to harvest the mature larch for pit props, but that project was evidently ill-conceived, since the Barlow ownership of the wood coincided almost exactly with the terminal decline of coalmining in Great Britain. Now, some of our fellow small wood owners are simply removing the larch to allow the broadleaved forest to recover. There is a great pile of conifer offcuts near the entrance to our wood; I decided to leave these fragments of mistaken forestry in order to study the processes of decay.

      Elsewhere, the beech wood seems to have been left quietly to get on with being a beech wood, helped by periodic thinning. The manager of the wood was John Mooney, and the Barlows told me that they knew him as ‘Eeyore’ because of his pessimistic prognostications for making any money out of the wood. His annual accounts always finished with a thumping loss. It is as well that Barlow senior was primarily interested in good ecological stewardship, for all his correspondence from Mr Mooney is steeped in wry gloom.10 The wood was under threat from trespassers, he said, or horse riders who cut barbed-wire fences, and poachers who poached. Deer of all species curtailed almost all regeneration, and what little was left was damaged by squirrels. The whole business was hamstrung by interfering busybodies and/or charlatans from the Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England and official bodies like English Nature. In 2000 his annual summary finished magisterially: ‘It has been getting progressively worse for the past 25 years [before] hitting this nadir.’

      Then Harry Potter came to the rescue. From 2001 onwards J.K. Rowling’s novels about the young wizard were adapted for the screen, and the movies were watched by countless children. Many of them wanted their very own broomstick so they could play quidditch and generally fly about the place. The heads of the broomsticks were made from bound bundles of twigs, and the right kinds of twiggy shoots could easily be cut from birch trees and regenerating stumps in Lambridge СКАЧАТЬ