Oak and Ash and Thorn by Peter Fiennes

Author:Peter Fiennes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Trees;Woods;Forests;Nature;Britain;Environment;Heritage;Art;Beauty;History;Folklore;Myths;Robin Hood;Romantics
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2017-08-15T17:02:49+00:00

He’s right. A fugitive from the law wouldn’t choose a modern British wood in which to hide, especially if she or he had a bunch of Merry Men to feed and clothe. The runaway in Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male (1939) did make for the woods, burrowing deep into an old rabbit hole that he’d enlarged with his teeth (or something – it’s a very odd book), until the Nazis run him to ground; and Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) dashes between the Scottish woods and moors, also pursued by evil Germans and their Fifth Column sympathizers. But these tales are fiction. Wild Britain has been lost, and whatever you may hear from Bear Grylls, there’s really no point in learning how to build a trap for voles or an oven for roasting earthworms, except for your own amusement. You are never more than a brisk walk from a hot cappuccino and a bacon sarnie.

In the 1940s John Stewart Collis worked in Cranborne Chase in Dorset, where Thomas Hardy once roamed and wrote, and describes in Down to Earth how he thinned the small wood singlehandedly, using only an axe and other hand tools. As he struggled with the rampant ash saplings, he decided that if he were ever on the run from the law, this would be the perfect place to hide out – until he learned that in the previous century ‘thieves, murderers and criminals of every grade’ had had the same idea – and so the entire area was disafforested. His little wood was the last, sad remnant of a great forest refuge.

It has been a wearily common theme throughout history. The authorities don’t like forests, because they don’t like places where people can hide. The Americans napalmed the jungles of Vietnam and showered them from on high with the defoliant Agent Orange. The Europeans razed the great forests of North America (but only after their predecessors had done what they could with more primitive tools). Edward I would have done the same in Wales, if he’d had the technology. Instead, in 1277 he ordered all woodland to be cleared that was less than the length of a bow shot from the main roads; and in the year 1287 more than three thousand English woodcutters, charcoal burners and diggers were ordered into Wales to slash and burn anywhere that might shelter an enemy or an outlaw. The same destruction was visited on the pine forests of the Scottish Highlands after the 1745 rebellion. It meant the rebels had nowhere to hide – and there was the handy side-benefit of a tasty load of timber and a big fat profit for the absentee landowners. Two hundred years later their descendants would be gunning down grouse in a denuded landscape. As Forster says, if you want to hide today, you need to head for the city. The rest of the land has been scoured clean.

Here’s John Keats’s ‘Robin Hood’:

And if Robin should be cast

Sudden from his turfed grave,

And

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.