Five years after the palaeontologist Richard Fortey bought Grim’s Dyke Wood, a small Chiltern beech wood, he shows no diminution in enthusiasm for his “nature reserve”. He gives me a tour, though in truth we delight in each other’s discoveries. I find him a ring of bright feathers on a pile of rotting pine logs, a raptor’s kill, the buffs and browns speaking of a song thrush forever silenced. He finds bracket fungi that have insinuated themselves into the thin, horizontal lesions on a cherry tree’s trunk.
I prise a white pebble from the ground as if drawing a chocolate from its box. North Wales, he says, a jewel of quartz carried to that very spot by a prehistoric river. A cappuccino-coloured stone he ascribes to the Midlands, with the easy assurance of a geologist who pinpoints tiny details within (for the rest of us) unimaginably big pictures.
I jump into one of his best finds, a deep, rectangular bramble-strewn hole that looks tailor-dug for a large coffin. He is fairly certain it is the remains of a sawpit, a relic from the days when labourers left the farms after harvest-time and spent their winters working in the wood, felling trees for more skilled woodworkers to make Windsor chairs and scrubbing brushes. For a hilarious minute, we mimic woodsman forebears using a giant cross saw, Richard standing above as “top dog”, me as “underdog” in the pit below, with pretend sawdust falling into my eyes.
There is more to this than redundant words and foolery. Richard spent two years tempting former colleagues and specialists from the Natural History Museum to carry out a bioblitz, a natural inventory of the wood, and even wrote a book about it. But he also followed its human story and is trying to see how far a living museum can become a working wood again. He takes me to a cherry tree that he had felled and cut into planks. The stack of bark-edged slices is a raw reminder of the timber’s natural origin. Here is a quantity of fine-grained, quality wood, yet he has still to find a buyer.
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