Flo the horse is bouncier than usual – she is feeling the thrill of a blowy day. A raven, flying solo for once, feels it too and adds a jaunty upside-down jiggle to its usual sober flight. We are briskly crossing the valley pastures heading towards the plantation of Rowberrow Warren, the high shoulder of Black Down rises above us. This whole ridge was once open heathland and pasture but in the 1940s foresters came, planting beech, spruce and pine across the western end.
We reach the ash tree that stands at the end of the last field and seems to beckon us into the forest. In this sheltered corner only its upper branches are stirring; not enough movement to distract Flo – her big brown ears, registering her attention, are focused on the track ahead. Beyond, the forest trees paisley-pattern the hillside, but this one does not belong with them.
Clad in gypsy-velvet of green-golden moss with ruffles of polypody fern, this old tree is ageing well. Limbs bend low across the pasture’s edge towards us but at the back it “obeys” a vast coppiced hazel, spreading its branches only once they have over-topped the huge mound of the shrub. The tree has not been trimmed into this wonky arrangement; its natural growth has recorded the order of things.
First there was a hazel, in a patch of rough ground near a stream gully, where the tame pasture met the wild heath. Then there was an ash, growing a bit too near the hazel for comfort, grasping for space across the grazed turf, and at last succeeding in outgrowing its neighbour. Then, 70-some years ago, there came a woodland, marching across the heath and up to the stream, co-opting the ash to guard its entrance.
I admire this old tree, more picturesque than photogenic, telling its story in its own unique form, and I love its accidental importance in this small corner of the landscape. But right now Flo has no time for such slow beauty. Sometimes she will pause and crop the grass here, by my favourite tree, but today the wind is in her tail.
