Again the landscape is etched with snow. The footpath to Barford Wood and Meadows from Rushton village crosses first under the Midland mainline, emerging on to a wide and exposed field where the chilled wind bites, before passing over the Corby branch line and on to the nature reserve; a tapering wedge of land, bound on the west by the railway and by the thundering A43 on the east.
The northern fields are winter sheep-grazed hay meadows of high botanical interest, while the southern third has been planted with native broadleaved trees in the fairly recent past, certainly since its 1994 acquisition by the Wildlife Trust. The reserve path dives south into a hazel coppice, each stool a foot wide and sprouting a spreading bundle of 25-foot tall straight and bare poles.
With a snow floor and wooden vaulting, the coppice has an architectural quality that is amplified by the lines of closely spaced and uniformly sized stools. This regularity is a jarring contrast with the haphazard and organic nature of pre-Victorian coppices, although the straight lines do hint of labyrinths and Narnia.
The path progresses into a stand of young ashes, in the same regimented lines, and some still with a twist of protective plastic wrapped around their thigh-girth bases. Another area contains a mix of oaks, field maple and ash, with only a slight relaxation in regimentation.
I am conflicted by the blatant artificiality of the planting. It is out of kilter with the current rewilding aesthetic. While young woodland can’t escape its uniform age structure, and a coppice is by nature a human-worked landscape, a randomness to the planting pattern and density would be more aesthetically pleasing to my eye.
On the other hand, the trees have established beautifully and the wood will develop its own character over coming centuries. After all, it is a gift from humans to wildlife, so perhaps our aesthetics are a lower priority than the quality of habitat provided, and we should accept that the gift naturally has the hallmarks of its maker’s efficiency, organised mind and occasional thoughtlessness.
