Words

This is a favourite photo of mine.  It is a church in Essex at Bartlow.  One path leads towards Christianity but the other leads to the fabulous Roman pagan burials in large barrows that sit in the field behind the church.

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"Hardly a rood of land but can show its fresh wound or indelible scar, in proof that earlier or later man has been there."

Perhaps those words should accompany the folly that is called HS2, a railway track that makes it's strong footstep across the country, now talk of it being postponed.  Rest in peace those woods that were uprooted.

But though mention of trees is part of what I am thinking, there is the books we so avidly read, or in my case now, listen to, that is on my mind.

Beeches of Avebury growing on a barrow

On the radio at the moment is 'Peter and the Wolf', story telling in music.  But it was the book I picked out of my Audible library to listen to yesterday which took me on a ramble.  Robert Macfarlane's 'Landmarks', glossaries of old words, words lost in time - fragments of the past.  But I scooted through the words and went to the storytelling bits of this book which is a cry against the 'Lost Words'.

He mentioned 'Reliquiae' an annual book of words and thoughts captured by Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson, who in the daring of youth, live in a little rented cottage somewhere in Cumbria maybe or it could be Lancashire (will do my homework later!) high on the moors, cultivating a nettle bed for soup and vegetables - a story in itself.  Music or language they both explore and experiment, the old need for adventure in the young still strong.

So copied from the book, Gerald Manley Hopkinson quote, a rather sad one for it captures the feeling when a tree is felled.

"The ash tree growing in the corner of the garden was felled.  It was lopped first:  I heard the sound and looking and seeing it maimed there came at the moment a great pang and I wished to die and not to see the inscapes of the world anymore."

Life in its many forms, when killed suddenly becomes stilled you can see it the moment between life and death and it stabs the heart with the emotion of loss.

Gilbert White has also written about the felling of an old oak tree in 'Raven Tree'.  The ravens who built their nest year after year in the branches above the large bulge which stopped the village boys getting to it.  But in the end the tree was brought down with the female raven still sitting on her nest of eggs and she was entangled in the branches and killed.  The first verse of 'Memory of a Sister' by Thomas Hardy.  As suggested by Tasker.  Logs on the Hearth..

The fire advances along the log
Of the tree we felled,
Which bloomed and bore striped apples by the peck
Till its last hour of bearing knelled.

And whilst I am about words, I find the word 'blog' both ugly and clumsy, no finesse whatsoever!

Years ago!  Narrating the Landscape blog