Something about the fencepost grabbed my attention, and instead of watching the path winding through dark trees against the orchestral sweep of a January sky, I picked out small visual notes: moss, water, tree rings on the post.
I’d passed this way 100 times; each time was different and each time I’d been looking elsewhere. What brought the fencepost into focus this time? Perhaps it was the dissimilitude of small birds in the trees: blue tits, great tits, chaffinches, robins, so different from each other yet similar in their size and movement, their little mutterings under breath made me notice smaller details.
This was a post the spotted flycatchers made joyous by flitting from in summer; one the wren made ominous by watching from in winter.
The fence caused local anger when it was erected 15 years ago; few remember why now. When the saw went through the trunk of larch or spruce, the post was turned from it, cut across about 20 years of growth according to the annual rings. So, tree and timber, this post was about 35 years old.
Maybe this one was not properly treated and began to decay earlier than others in the row, but the weather, fungi and micro-organisms had made a rot-hole filled with rainwater.
In this miniature pool had fallen the purply gunk of seeds and leaves, and around it lawns of glassy green algae spread. A cushion of moss the size of a computer mouse looked like a wood seen from above, perhaps how a passenger in that silver jet might see this land glancing idly from a window.
What is this tiny post-top place, with its own natural history, its own sense of “where”? Not a microcosm or a metaphor but a real place. It may represent enclosure, what the poet John Clare called “owners’ little bounds … In little parcels little minds to please” (The Mores).
But it raised a conundrum – the tiny return of lost commons, a place of freedom of which Clare wrote: “Its only bondage was the circling sky.”
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