For those who obeyed the rule to stay local through the pandemic, the rebound to places beyond walking distance can be a long time coming. “Three and a half years!” I exclaim as we emerge from the hedge-lined stretch of Wood Lane on to the stubble fields. A great sweep up the slope takes our eyes to the living monument on top, a woodland that goes back to Domesday, capping the brow of the hill. My memory had been of a continuous dark green strip, the crowns of hundreds of trees giving it a cumulus-effect bobbly roof.
Though I had heard about the change, it is still a wrench to see the breaks. The intact wood has become like a gappy hedge. When ash dieback began to strike the wood before the pandemic, the estate did everything by the book. It worked with authorities and informed the council that it would be realising the commercial value of timber before disease rendered the trunks unsaleable.
We should all weep for the ash and the loss of its light-giving generosity. Its leaves are last to open and first to drop. Even when it is in full leaf, sunlight slips through its fingers and dapples the floor. Of all the trees in the wood, this is the one that should not have fallen. But fallen it has, and when we rise on the farm track to the short end of a long oblong, I am full of foreboding. An ash-oak woodland? Not any more.
Two or three years after the churn and gouges left by felling, here are settling woodland glades. Straggly, tall oaks, freed from crowding neighbours, might yet take on middle-age spread, or in their exposed position be toppled by gales from the north or west. Coppiced hazel bushes, no longer overshadowed, boss it over the herbage. And all through the clearings are plastic tubes, leaves half-curled inside, infant trees ready to fill the vacated airspace over decades to come.
I am too young to remember the great elms. What will the ash mean to children born today?
• Country diary is on Twitter at @gdncountrydiary
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