Enchanted wood
Jeremy Clarke y sister was round at our house at the weekend, trying to give up cannabis after 35 years. It's her idea but she was absolutely furious about it and her mouth was twisted with vexation, even when she lay asleep on the sofa. On Saturday afternoon me and my boy thought it best to be well out of the way should the volcano erupt again. So we drove up to Dartmoor and sat in the shade of a small primeval oak wood for the afternoon.
Wistman's Wood is a rare and unusual remnant of the kind of oak woodland that used to cloak the moor. It has survived because it grows out of a 'drifter' (boulderstrewn) slope, which has saved the oaks from the axe and protected young saplings from creatures that nibble. The trees are weirdly stunted and festooned with mosses and lichens. Many believe that the wood was once a Druids' sacred grove. This is most likely an extravagant absurdity put about by Victorian clergyman antiquarians. And yet wisht is an old Devon word meaning 'haunted', and Wistman's Wood's local reputation for harbouring a supernatural presence is unsurpassed.
I knew a woman once who went there at dusk with her sister and some friends and they were so overwhelmed by a palpable sense of evil that they ran all the way back to the car park screaming. Later the sister went mad, and her madness was directly attributable, or so my friend claimed, to whatever it was they'd encountered in the wood that day. I related this anecdote to my boy as we strode across open moorland towards the low compact wood on the hillside about a mile away. He scoffed, saying that any woman who elects to go out with me probably has a history of mental illness in the family anyway.
The sun felt unbelievably hot last Saturday, and along the way I shed all my clothes except shorts and flip-flops. Once we had to step aside to let a long file of walkers led by a uniformed ranger pass by. These walkers were all fully rigged out with poles, boots, sun hats, rucksacks, map cases, compasses. And as they trooped by, my nakedness, encountered in a barren wilderness, compared with their layers of specialist outdoor clothing, drew titters, as if I was some kind of lunatic John the Baptist figure.
In spite of my boy's scoffing at any mention of the supernatural, I noticed that as we approached the edge of Wistman's Wood, he allowed me to go in first. I don't believe in ghosts either, but that doesn't mean they don't exist, and the stillness under the fantastically gnarled boughs was at first slightly unnerving. Ten yards in, we stood as still as statues and listened. To my slightly fervid imagination it was the concentrated silence of an unseen presence watching and listening as intently as we were. I was suddenly cold and put my shirt back on. The silence was punctuated by the single flutelike note of a bird, as exotic as anything you'd hear in an African rainforest.
Stepping and jumping from boulder to boulder we made for the densest part of the wood, so as not to be able to accuse ourselves later of cravenness. But this had been fenced off in 1965, said a notice on the wire, to prevent public access, and in any case behind the wire the wood looked impenetrable. So here we sat down on our respective moss-covered boulders and for the next couple of hours enjoyed the cool silence and the mellifluous hooting of the bird and the train of our own thoughts.
'Haunted!' said my boy with contempt. He was right. On the contrary, such coolness and silence 40 miles as the crow flies from my sister and her rage at having to forgo the daily spliff made Wistman's Wood feel an accepting sort of place once we'd settled in a bit.
Another legend concerning the wood is that acorns found there cure arthritis if carried around in a pocket. I don't believe this for a minute, either. But you never know, and I spent some time rooting through the leaf litter with a stick for acorns to give away to arthritic friends. Last year's acorns were all rotted away to nothing but I kept raking away on the offchance. And while I had my head down doing this, I was momentarily assailed by a strong conviction that I wasn't meant to be there. But I feel this way at some point almost everywhere I go and I dismissed it from my mind.
When I returned to our spot, my boy said, 'Shall we go?' I narrowed my eyes interrogatively at him But he was bored, that was all. So we made our way out of the wood and returned home, where my sister's rage was far more terrifying than anything Wistman's Wood had to offer.
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