Badger's wood
Peter Quince
Although the winter has been exceptionally mild (we have seen scarcely a particle of snow) it has also been unusually windy. At one time, at the beginning of the year, one powerful gale had barely exhausted itself before another swept across the landscape. We seemed to be living in a perpetual fury of turbulent air. The result is that now calmer days have come, I go about the district with an eye out for the marks left upon the scene by a succession of storms. News of major upsets, such as the fall of a towering horse-chestnut across the river, gets passed around .without delay; but it takes time to notice lesser. damage.
On one of those perfectly sunny days of late February I went to a large wood at the other side of the parish, a place I had not visited this year. It is in fact an ancient coppice of beech and hornbeam, long abandoned as a source of timber; the trees which used regularly to be cut down to ground level have been left for many years to grow as they pleased. Most of them have reached a considerable height, often assuming somewhat fantastic outlines in the process. It is as if, having been denied their natural upright growth when young, they have been uncertain how to proceed when finally left to their own devices.
What I chiefly noticed this time was the quantity of fallen branches which the storms had torn off and tossed to the ground. A few whole trees had come down, and lay piled against their neighbours, but the general effect was as if a destructive giant had trampled through the coppice slashing off branches in all directions. They lay where they had fallen, undisturbed. I suppose the ancient greenwood of England must have looked a little like this after a rough winter.
Time will doubtless remove these picturesque scars eventually. I expect that much of the dead wood will gradually be carried off for fuel by the more industrious people of the village. Woodgathering has become a distinctly more popular activity of late, ever since the precious nature of fuel of every kind was drummed into us all. There may, conceivably, be legal objections to our carrying off quantities of firewood from someone else's coppice, even a coppice that has been left in peace for many years: but these, sensibly enough, are generally ignored. After all, useful faggots will not simply stay put if we do not carry them away. They will go to waste. In any case it was extremely pleasant to be there on such a day at the mild end of February. The wood resounded to the calls of what are known locally as "teacher-birds," in other words the great tits, so called from their habit of bellowing "Teacher, teacher, teacher" in stentorian tones at this time of year. Dog's mercury provided expanses of fresh green vegetation beneath the trees; the bluebells were well advanced; the elders which has planted themselves here and there within the coppice were already in leaf. The sky was blue above the trees and the sunlight reached the earth in innumerable shafts through the branches.
There have always been badgers in this wood and I came across the lair of one of them. The main earthworks have existed for some time. I was glad to see evidence of spring refurbishing. Badgers are appealing animals and there is something almost comically snug and domestic about their "sets." A neat and well-trodden path led up to the main entrance, which consisted of a large hole under the roots of an elder-tree. A bunch of bluebells had placed itself nicely amid the soft moss spread out before the opening. It is a pity one seldom sees badgers, except after much patient waiting and watching, but they hardly ever go abroad in daylight. Still, I was glad this one had survived the winter safely, sleeping placidly through all the storms in his den ten feet below ground.
The Good Life
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