From the Forest Read online

  Landscape historians have developed various methods for deciding where ancient woodland was and what trees were growing in it. Direct documentary references (in the Domesday Book, for instance) are reasonably conclusive, and place names provide strong clues. Unfortunately, in the case of beech this is not reliable because the word itself gets too easily confused with ‘beach’, ‘book’ and ‘buck’.

  A more favoured approach has been to look for what are known as ‘indicator species’ – these are not trees, but ground plants that, for one reason or another, are found only (or predominantly) in ancient woodland. They are often plants that either need shade to flourish or have inefficient methods of dispersing their seed, so they do not readily spread to new habitats. The more of these indicators (appropriate to soil and climate) that are present, the more firmly the dendrologists can assert that a particular wood is ancient. But this is not straightforward: the lists vary according to the region, and if you take all the lists together, a grass – Melica uniflora – turns out to be the only ‘universal’ indicator, although the sweet woodruff (Galium odorata), flowering so elegantly in Saltridge this April, appears on every list except the one for Cornwall. Nor is there full agreement about which species should be on any particular list.

  Modern scientific methods have demonstrated the presence of beech from before the cut-off date of around 7000 BCE. In particular, pollen analysis has enabled us to know what trees were around and when. Since beech pollen is not well dispersed by wind and is therefore unlikely to have blown in across the Channel, its presence in sites dated to 9,000 years old proves that beech is in fact a native tree.

  Nonetheless, the high status of beech in Britain is fairly recent. In Sylva, his 1664 book about woodlands, John Evelyn is dismissive of beech, claiming that it is ‘good only for shade and fire’. The main function of the beech woods of the Chilterns was to provide fuel for London, until in the later eighteenth century improved transport made coal a more attractive option. Even in strong beech areas, beech wood was never used for timber-framed houses – oak was always preferred. Beech had few traditional uses, except that the beech mast was used as pig fodder – and its botanical name, fagus, derives from the Greek verb fagein (= to eat) because of this. Later, it was sometimes roasted as a coffee substitute.

  Appreciation of the beech’s charms grew in the nineteenth century – partly because it was pleasing to painters, as they moved out of their studios and began to paint en plein air. Individual beech trees are distinctive, but the round groves of beech trees on the tops of hills proved even more attractive to the landscape artist; they make a useful focal point in wide views of grassy downs. Paul Nash (1889-1946), who painted the Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire repeatedly, said of them, ‘It was the look of them that told most. They were the Pyramids of my small world.’8 Now everything about beech trees is honoured: the pinkish-white colour and compact grain of the wood has become popular with contemporary joiners and wood turners.

  Today, the ascendency of beech trees and beech woods is firmly established. In Saltridge, in the sunshine, I could entirely understand this – there was a joyful magnificence in the huge trees and the clear ground beneath them. But I still find myself oddly resenting beech woods. I know some of the reasons why. Part of this comes from the deeply embedded irritation that most northerners, and Scots especially, feel about heavy cultural and national value being attached to any phenomenon which only occurs south of the Humber. But in the case of beech trees there is a socio-political edge to this annoyance. Although its natural range stops in East Anglia, beech will in fact flourish throughout most of Britain if it is planted. It will grow well as far north as most other trees. Perhaps because having beech trees required positive action and so demonstrated ownership and power, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century beech became the ornamental species of choice. The aristocracy and ‘gentry’ planted it in avenues and parks and inserted it into their home woods and plantations even as they enclosed the old commons and common woodland. Tommy Donnelly, the ancient tree specialist for the south-west area of Scottish Natural Heritage said to me that whenever I saw old beech trees in Galloway, I should ‘look for the mansion’. They would prove to be someone’s idea of poshing up their landscape, and they speak to me not only of southern dominance, but of Landlordism, of Enclosure and Clearance. (This political reading of the beech’s social standing is probably reinforced by an often-repeated little slogan of my father’s: ‘Tyranny is like a beech tree; it looks very fine but nothing grows under it.’ He certainly did not mean this to be taken as a comment on the tree rather than on his own strong democratic beliefs, but it has stuck in my mind.)

  The coupling of oak and beech as king and queen of the forest, male and female, is another cause of irritation; it is an unusually silly anthropomorphism. At the same time, I also resent the fact that the beech has usurped the throne of the birch tree, which, in earlier times, was seen as the ‘queen’ of the forest – ‘the majestic sceptre of the wood’, according to the fourteenth-century Welsh poet Gruffydd ap Dafydd.9 And as late as the early nineteenth century, the poet Coleridge described the birch tree as ‘The Lady of the Woods’.10

  Birch trees have as delicate and graceful, as ‘feminine’, an appearance as beech, and are far less grandiose. They were the first trees to return to Britain after the last glaciers retreated, and they flourish higher up and further north than other trees dare; their natural range covers the whole of Britain. ‘Birch’, often in the form of ‘Birk’ or similar, is the commonest place-name prefix in the country. They are still pioneers, the first trees to move into clear-felled forestry land or to push their way into heathland or neglected fields. Beech is shade bearing, but birches love the sunshine and open spaces. Birch pollen is produced in abundance and carries widely on the wind, so birch can appear anywhere – and does. Despite their fragile appearance and relatively short life span (seldom more than 80 years), individual birch trees are immensely tough – Rackham reports specimens that have fallen over collapsing cliff edges, tumbled to the bottom and then simply re-rooted and carried on growing. They are highly resistant to frost, capable of flourishing on the poorest soils and serve to consolidate loose earth on bare slopes, preparing it for other species. Recently, birch has been earning the respect of commercial foresters for this reason: it will plant itself, saving time and energy; is just as profitable for pulp as the more laborious conifers; and improves the ground rather than acidifying it as spruce and even larch do. While the spread of beech may well be, at least in part, responsible for the reduction of other species, particularly the lovely lost limes which were once the most common tree of our ancient woodlands, birch creates new territories for trees. Birches begin their season with long catkins, and their looser crowns and more waving fingers mean that the sun-dappling effect, ‘more golden than under any other native tree’,11 lasts much deeper into the summer. In autumn their leaves turn a bright yellow. Their trunks, too, are smooth and peel into thin sheets, and are a radiant white colour (the adjective ‘silver’ in relation to birch seems to have been coined by Tennyson in the late nineteenth century). Though less imposing than beech trees, birches have their own particular charms.

  There are two further cultural reasons for restoring the birch to her ancient throne. Birch, unlike beech, good only for ‘shade and fuel’, is a remarkably useful tree. It has been utilised throughout the United Kingdom, and especially in the Highlands of Scotland. John Loudon (1783 – 1843), the botanist and landscape architect, extolled the usefulness of birch wood:[Highlanders] build their houses, make their beds and chairs, tables, dishes and spoons; construct their mills; make their carts, ploughs, harrows gates and fences, and even manufacture ropes of [birch]. The branches are employed as fuel . . . the spray is used for smoking hams and herrings. The bark is used for tanning leather and sometimes, when dried and twisted into a rope, instead of candles.12

  In addition, birch is used for wickerwork, for specialised articles like helms, whe
els and parts of barrels; for dyes and medicines. Birch oozes a natural oil called betulin, which gives birch bark its silver colour and is also the principal ingredient of ‘wintergreen’, the old-fashioned cream for aches and pains (the botanical name for ‘birch’ is betula); birch is also used in the making of gunpowder and, bizarrely, contemporary omelette whisks.13 Above all, its fermented sap was the original Gaelic uisge beatha, the ‘water of life’, a popular and potent drink before grain whisky stole the honour and the title.

  Curiously, beech trees are almost entirely absent from folklore. They have little place in legend, and virtually nothing in the way of associated customs or proverbs. Birches, on the other hand, are magical trees: Druids claimed them as the sister tree to the oak; witches’ broom sticks were traditionally made out of birch, and so, in some parts of the country, were maypoles. Birch trees, together with fish, are among the very few items from the natural world that cross over, with their positive magical attributes intact, between the fairy stories of the Celtic and the Teutonic traditions.

  In fairy stories, individual trees are always strongly positive forces, but there are no beech trees; there are birches, oaks, limes (linden), ash, willows, pines, larches, junipers and above all hazels, but no beeches. Given that the beech is so well established in Germany, this cannot simply be a translation issue.14

  So although I walked happily that day in the dancing spring sunshine along the limestone ridge in Gloucestershire and enjoyed myself and admired the beech woods, I recognised an underlying resentment. The beech trees were imperious and very beautiful . . . but so were wicked stepmothers. Being ‘the most lovely of all’15 may not make you good, may not make you the heroine or the natural princess. Perhaps that is more precisely the difference I am struggling to express: the beech may be the queen, the symbol of English woodland, but the birch is the princess, the heroine of our woodland fairy stories.

  Much of this, of course, is of necessity imaginative speculation, because the dissemination of fairy stories is at least as complicated as the dissemination of tree species. Oliver Rackham says that we cannot even imagine how the wildwood (the wood before any human interventions) may have looked, and we cannot reproduce or recreate it. I believe the same is true of the fairy stories. By the very nature of an oral ‘text’ you can only know how it was this time, the time you heard it. Field anthropologists have become sensitive to the fact that asking someone in an oral culture to tell you a traditional story will distort the story; the teller will mould the story to the listener’s expectations – at least as far as such expectations are understood. This is not deliberate deceit or secrecy; it is the job of a story teller to do so.

  A written text is fixed from the moment of its inscription. Because it is a physical object, we can usually date it with some accuracy, both by the language and often, too, by its physical manifestations – its graphology and the actual materials it is made of (for example, is it carved in stone, pressed into clay, written on parchment or paper?). Because it was written into an immediately fixed form, we can also often know who wrote it and, in some cases, learn about the text through what we know about the author, and vice versa. None of these ways of de-coding the history of a written text works for an oral story, which is just a murmur of air, invisible and flexible. And since the art of oral story telling has, to a very large degree, been lost, we cannot even reconstruct such stories out of our own collective experience of telling and hearing them. Many historians believe that memory itself has changed with the shift to literacy – that we learn and remember things in a different way today from how we did in the past.

  This is made more difficult still by a deep disagreement about the origins of fairy stories. As I discussed in the previous chapter, broadly similar themes and tropes emerge in stories from a number of highly disparate cultures, but the stories themselves are, so to speak, site specific. There are, basically, two schools of thought to account for the similarities: the first suggests that the stories deal with such fundamental human dilemmas, issues and problems that they arise spontaneously and independently in any given human culture. The other theory is that each of the stories is disseminated through telling, handed on from traveller to traveller, and that each new audience becomes a teller – a sort of anthropological ‘six degrees of separation’. To be honest, I don’t think either version really quite adds up, though I have no better theory to offer.

  In fact, there is a good deal of disagreement about the emergence of any of the forms of expressing the imagination. Currently, anthropologists and social geographers suggest that all art began with ritual and arises initially out of a religious rather than an aesthetic response: the cave paintings of southern France or Central Eastern Africa (or anywhere else) were more fundamentally about hunting rituals than about interior decor. The idea, put too simply, is that first there was ritual, repeated ceremonies to placate, please or manipulate the gods. The life-and-death importance of these ceremonies made it crucial that they were practised correctly each time, and to make this simpler, rhythm developed – eventually supported by percussion instruments (usually some sort of drum) which punctuated the rituals and assisted their correct repetition. Rhythm developed into music. Both visual and narrative images came later – first, solid objects (sculpture), then representation (two-dimensional metaphors for three-dimensional realities); first, songs, then poetry, then stories.

  As far as we can tell, oral tradition stories fell into three categories: myths, which dealt with religious matters; legends – heroic tales with some claim to historical truth; and fiction – stories that were not meant to be believed, at least at a surface or literal level, whether or not they revealed profound metaphorical truths of one kind or another. However, it is surprisingly hard to distinguish between the three.

  It is, for example, impossible to know exactly how and in what way people understood the truth of some very ancient stories. Did the Hebrew people believe in Adam and Eve and the snake in the way that contemporary fundamentalists seem to? It seems unlikely: after the second chapter of Genesis, the name Adam occurs only twice in the whole Hebrew Scriptures, on both occasions in poetry, and both times meaning ‘humanity’, without any explicit moral message and no reference to the story itself. Eve is never mentioned at all, even in the laws and instructions enjoining obedience and submission on women.16 Similarly, it is clear that many sophisticated Greeks and Romans did not believe in the myths or in the deities described by the myths, but still believed the stories were worth retelling, enjoying and referring to in a broader cultural way – as Ovid does in the Metamorphosis.

  Because hagiography emerges in a similar cultural context and contains some surprisingly similar tropes to fairy stories, it is worth wondering exactly how medieval Christians understood these stories about saints. Some of the saints were clearly historical figures, and a good deal was known about them biographically. But others distinctly lacked plausibility. Margaret of Antioch was one of the most popular saints in northern Europe (judging by the number of Church dedications to her); did her devotees really believe that she was swallowed by a dragon, but that her purity disgusted the monster so much that he opened his mouth and let her walk out through his throat – thus making her an appropriate patron of women in childbirth? Did the women who certainly did seek the prayers of St Uncumber believe, in our contemporary sense, that this Spanish princess of no known historical period got out of her marriage by growing a miraculous beard overnight – and that she would, in exchange for a handful of oats, get rid of other women’s unsatisfactory husbands too? Certainly European hagiography shares an extraordinary number of themes and scenes with fairy stories. Are these legends, or fictions, or something in between that we lost a sense of with the rationalism of the Enlightenment?

  A great deal of work has been put in over the last two centuries trying to work out exactly what we have got with the body of fairy stories; but the results are surprisingly meagre and unsatisfactory. Folklorists and anthropologists ha
ve come up with various ways of taxonomising fairy stories and their parallels in other cultures. The two most popular analyses at present are the Aarne-Thompson system, which tries to organise fairy stories according to specific motifs in their plots, and Vladimir Propp’s morphological approach, which analyses the stories by the function that various character types and actions perform. Both systems are extremely complex (the Aarne-Thompson system ends up with 2,399 different types of fairy story, which hardly seems terribly useful, although, to be fair, this does include a range of stories that might not immediately meet some criteria of a ‘fairy story’) and, more problematically for me, they inevitably look for what is common to the diverse, worldwide stories, as opposed to what is specific to any particular story. In fact, neither system has even come up with a working definition of a fairy story.

  One problem, which brings our fairy stories at least back within the shades of the woods, is that we have no ‘virgin stories’, or true fairy wildwood. Once a story has been recorded in any form at all, it moves out of the oral space in which it originally evolved. Throughout the historical era fairy stories have always existed in two forms – the oral stories, and the literary versions of them. What is unclear is how much the literary versions affected the oral versions, as well as, more obviously, the reverse. Just as beech trees and, for totally different reasons, Norwegian spruce were inserted into already existing woods, so literary retellings of fairy stories may well have fed back into the existing tales, altering them in ways we do not fully understand. In her wonderful book The Forest of Mediaeval Romance,17 Corinne Saunders examines the magical forests of high literary culture that shares so many elements with the fairy story, but is completely different. And not just different in tone and style – in the romances there are virtually no children (never mind children as protagonists); in the fairy stories, there are virtually no sword fights or battles. The heroes of romance have names and ‘back story’; in fairy stories, even the principal characters seldom have names, and when they do, they are often simply descriptive (Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood) or generic (John, Gretel, etc.). In the Grimms’ stories, practically no one goes mad; in the romances from Merlin to Orlando Furioso, madness is a regular occurrence. In fairy stories there is, ultimately, no such thing as unrequited love and remarkably little infidelity; in the romances, both of these are almost a necessity. Nonetheless, it is obvious that the two forms have affected each other. By the time the demotic fairy stories were being collected they had incorporated elements drawn from literary romance – sometimes satirically.18