When modern life seems too much, I dream of living in the woods. I’ll be a mad, feral woman eating hazelnuts and tending a fire obsessively. It’s this specific wood where I would go, with its deciduous mix of ash, oak and chestnut, its sandy badger sett, wild garlic, bluebells in spring, and the clear, fast-flowing water of the gravel-bottomed stream. Known as Fox’s Grove, it’s just a few miles from the centre of Norwich.
Today, I am not a hermit. I have a troop of children for company, who are enthusiastically den-building and stick swinging. They’ve collected plenty of dead wood and a wigwam shape is emerging from their collective imagination. I am happily redundant, sitting under a large beech tree, on a comfortably curved root. My fingers are drawn to the mulchy earth, into leaves and soil, as I inhale that musty, fungus scent.
Out of childhood habit, I turn the log next to me to find it thick with woodlice and can’t resist peeling off a large chunk of bark, sending them scurrying. A fallen branch is decaying over a gnarly, raised root beside me. Nestled in the gap below, I can just see the greyish legs and tail of the common newt (Triturus lissotriton vulgaris). Smooth and still, it is beginning its hibernation. I quickly replace the log, leaving it be.
Then, on a nearby oak, there is a brisk mouse-like movement. It’s a treecreeper, Certhia familiaris, scuttling upwards with tail held low. Those heavy eyebrows and down-turned beak give the tiny bird a bad-tempered look, as if it is searching for something inconveniently lost.
The treecreeper reaches the cleft of two thick branches, where an incongruous bracken plant has found a place to grow, and then it rapidly flies down to the base of another oak. From here, it begins another climb upwards, long claws gripping. The only way is up for treecreepers; unlike agile nuthatches they can’t go down the trunk head first.
Dusk comes early in the woods, and the den must be abandoned, half-finished but structurally sound. We crouch in it first, feeling safe and satisfied, before leaving for electricity and carpets.
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