A Walk in the Woods

After work and jobs this afternoon we took the dog along the old toll road. For the first eighty yards it is well-maintained, as it leads to Michael's fields and what was the old Oat House, still there in the 1950s, and now half surviving as field stores. The Oat House was possibly a village mill for grinding oatmeal, but wind or water or donkey-powered, I don't know. Beyond the turning into the fields the road was inaccessible until the water board hacked their way through a few weeks ago. In the month or so since they have finished, some of the thinner branches have whipped back across the path, and some of the bigger ones - hacked, broken, lying horizontally - have started blossoming. (Much of southern England must have looked like this after the storm in 1987, and recently I have read how much of the devastation rejuvenated itself with no human aid; and often where people did clear and plant, nothing grew.) The track slides through the mud along the side of the hill and joins a heavily overgrown trail that once led to the Oat House, a track now full of saplings and even small (post-1950s presumably) trees. The trail is only distinguishable from the wood floor by the overgrown mossy wall that once defined road from field. These old tracks join a relatively well-used modern track that leads to a farm, a chapel and a house. The woods are starting to come alive again, or rather the life is starting to reveal itself. Primroses, wild daffodils, wood anemones - whole banks of these near Byton. The thorn bushes are starting to put out leaves in 'our' woods and we have seen blackthorn blossom on other lanes near here. As the trees start to put out leaves, I realise how few native British trees I can safely identify. There are birch on the toll road, and hazels, as the squirrels from the hill leave the shells neatly pillaged.