Carved into a boulder beside the footpath was a dedication. Lady Riverdale, wife of a Sheffield steel baron, wanted it known that she had gifted the 16 acres of Froggatt Wood I was standing in to the National Trust in memory of her parents. She handed it a jewel of inestimable value, although the landscape has changed a lot since 1931, the date of her endowment. Trees have sprung up liberally, many thin and weakly, pale imitations of the grand old specimens that she would have known, riding like galleons on this green ocean of change.
Near two mossy gritstone gateposts was a gnarled oak with fissured bark; a little further away was a spreading beech whose lower boughs had curved elegantly, dipping close to the ground. Its canopy was vast, a billowing cloud of foliage. Both trees bore the marks of their long lives: the oak with its kind’s strange angularity in its limbs, the beech with its sinuous flow. Neither had faced much interruption to their normal expression.
It was another story near Lady Riverdale’s inscription, one of trauma and redemption. The beech here had sprung up beside a small stream, sinking its roots into the thin soil of the rocky bank. A strong wind had long ago tipped it over on to one of its branches. New roots had grown from this to compensate for the lost originals, clamping the distressed tree to the ground. This prone branch offered me a comfortable daybed from which to admire its determined recovery.
From where I lay, I saw how the branch had grown upwards in a smooth arc for some 60ft. Another branch at right angles was almost as long. Linking them was an odd root-like structure that looped like a hairpin. A sucker had grown though the gap this made, like threading a needle. This brave tree was all limbs and no trunk, tripping over its legs.
Beeches are well known for their extraordinary plasticity. Wordsworth, during his stay at Alfoxden in Somerset, saw a beech bough that had rooted itself twice, “which gave to each the appearance of a serpent moving along by gathering itself up into folds”. But I can’t remember having seen anything like this before.
