The dawn light astonishes but mostly it’s the smell: sharp, delicate, wild garlic, the last of the bluebells, dewy grass. Dappled light is spilled up the trees and on the ground, and swirls, as the leaves casting it sway, like reflections off water. Silver birch limbs, knotted with birch polypore fungus, lie pale on beds of fat-bladed grass. I find an ornate snail on one. Falling leaf litter. Birdsong. This place quietly seethes with life.
I’ve never needed a permit to go for a walk in England before. Easton Hornstocks is an old wood of lime and ash trees close to my home. It’s a national nature reserve, and I had to ask for access. It was easy. Free. I had to carry the permit. No bikes; fine, I don’t own one. No dogs; ditto. But I didn’t know how I felt about the idea. Rankled by the restriction? Or thankful for its sense of privilege?
Easton is a village, but Hornstocks is an unfamiliar word, certainly for a wood. There are other odd suffixes to woodland reserves in these parts: Everden Stubbs, Castor Hanglands, Bedford Purlieus. Archaic generics that had fallen obscure in the way that chase or heath hadn’t, maybe. One, purlieu, is a relic of the Forest Law, meaning an agricultural area on the edge of the trees.
Forest law was established by William the Conqueror a thousand years ago. In it there were two kinds of offences. Acts against the vert, and the venison. The green, and the game. The restrictions were different. No weapons. A fee to chase (that word). Mastiffs were allowed, but only if their front claws were removed.
Easton Hornstocks and the surrounding patches of old woodland – most now reserves – are parts of the old Rockingham Forest that once stretched from Stamford to Northampton. William used it. Then, like most ancient woodland, it was diminished.
Now these fragments of an older wild world are under law again, for a different kind of conservation. But, in their rarity, oddly more effective in the parts of the forest that linger. The crisp smell of this one lingers on me long after I leave it.
