It was raining leaves in Waresley Wood, on a day so still it felt that every fall might be recorded in sound. They came from on high, striking branch after branch on their descent as if they were playing pinball, making light scuffs and scrapes with each deflection.
Often they dropped out of sight, but others fell close by. One landed at my feet, bedding down on the woodland floor with the slightest of noises, a mouse’s sigh.
There must have been thousands of leaves falling throughout the wood at a time when nothing else stirred, and millions more would drop in the weeks ahead. But there were still enough leaves overhead to provide a roof of bewildering complexity.
In this dense wood there were so many trees, so many boughs, and so much overlapping and crossover. It was almost impossible to lean back, gaze upwards and work out which tree was providing what in the green, gold and brown heaven. If the thick trunks were the pillars of this forest cathedral, then the overarching canopy was fan vaulting of the most intricate kind.
A little off the path, a three-pronged ash tree was blurring distinctions between life and death. The tree had last been coppiced, or cut back to its base, perhaps 100 years before, and the stool was now rather like a hollowed-out cauldron. It was lined with moss and three trunks had grown out of its sides.
Splayed out in different directions, the trunks had met varying fortunes. One forked outwards at a dangerously jaunty angle; another had toppled over decades previously and was in a crumbly state of advanced decomposition. The third appeared dead too, all but detached from the parent stool, specked with white fungus at its broken end and punctured with six finger-sized rot-holes in a line.
I gazed at the rotting beam. Side branches, about four and six metres along, had grown at right angles to the dying log and thickened to become fresh new trunks with their own branches and twigs full of leaves. The tree had effectively walked.
