I felt the sting of ice on my face just before I reached the shelter of the wood. The squall appeared as a sullen grey mist as it swept down the fell, engulfing grazing sheep before it roared through the tree canopy overhead. A blizzard of tiny hailstones hissed as they bounced across the layer of dead leaves around my feet.
Seeking refuge on the lee side of an oak, I leaned against its trunk. It pushed hard against my back as it bent beneath a swaying crown that clattered against neighbours’ branches. There can be few more exhilarating ways to experience a gale than to feel its elemental force transmitted down through an ancient tree’s trunk and into your own body.
The wind abated, the violence passed and the dusting of hail melted away almost as soon as sunlight reached the ground. The gales that have crashed into these exposed trees since Christmas have left casualties. The trunk of one oak had split from its topmost fork to its roots, one half leaning against another tree, both creaking and groaning as the lull in the gale gently rocked them together. A sweet smell of freshly splintered sapwood seeped from the wound.
Timber that the gales had harvested littered the ground: thick grey ash twigs; fallen white trunks of birches weakened by razor strop fungus; another limb broken from the only wild cherry here. All joining layers of gently rotting wood brought down by previous winters, all part of the natural cycle of death, decay and renewal that has sustained this fragment of ancient woodland over the centuries.
It was on the ground, on fallen trunks and limbs, that the first signs of new life were already forcing their way through the skeletons of last summer’s leaves. Feathery growth of tamarisk moss, (Thuidium tamariscinum), cloaked peeling bark of branches half buried in the soil. Springy tufts of shaggy moss (Rhytidiadelphus triquetrus) rose among fresh wood sorrel leaves from mouldering wood that crumbled to the touch, emitting humic aromas.
This is their season, a window of opportunity before tree leaves expand and deep shade returns to the woodland floor.
