Almost seven centuries ago, a great calamity 50 miles out to the east sent men with axes and saws into priory-owned Chicksands Wood. The Norman central tower of Ely Cathedral had collapsed, and the architect of its replacement chose to bridge the gap not with stone, but with wood. To this day, the Octagon Tower has Bedfordshire oak timbers holding up its roof to heaven.
Not so long ago, another forester came into Chicksands Wood to take out the tallest, straightest trees. He cut them down on either side of the ride, the aisle of this cathedral. Buttressed stumps a metre wide were as fluted pillars brought low in the ruins of a church building.
On the flat top of an orangey-brown stump, I ran my finger down the timeline towards another catastrophe. Sixty-three annual growth rings took me to the centre of the tree and the period when owners of this wood and thousands of others like it lost patience with the old ways. In postwar Britain, two-thirds of Chicksands was cleared and replanted with conifers, including the trees like this one, which had just met its end.
Further down the ride, a shaft of sunlight enticed me to a place where the wood’s medieval heart beat still. Scrambling through sedges, I came to what was evidently the remnant of a coppiced ash, a moss-covered eye socket betraying where a stem of the same tree had been cut long ago and the base had rotted into a hollow.
A little way behind it was another ash of gigantic proportions – 10 trunks as thick as my waist rose from a stool about three metres in diameter. This tree, maybe 500 years old, had sprouted from the humped bank over a sinuous ditch. And since the bank had to pre-date anything growing on it, I guessed this trench had been dug in days when a woodland boundary would be marked from tree to tree, a twisting line that had outgrown its logic. The ditch was surely there on that day in the 1320s when woodsmen came here in search of oaks to fell.
