I stepped over the body, and pushed on into the wood, passing stands of more elders, and ancient coppiced boles of sycamore and hazel. These had run riot, shooting up into groves of vertical poles thirty or forty feet high, which trembled at their summits when I pushed past their bases. The rough path petered out quickly, and the wood thickened around me. I batted away more webs with the back of my hand, and stepped over fallen trunks and outcast branches.
Within a few minutes, I was in wood so deep that it was hard to keep an orientation. Hazy light fell through the branches. The air was thick with the furry hootings of stock-doves. I walked as softly as I could, trying to avoid cracking dry twigs, but woodpigeons still crashed away through the treetops. From further away, I could hear the chatter of crows, probably picking over one of the turned fields that bordered The Wilderness. There were hundreds of burrows in the banks and between the roots of the trees, and in places the clayey soil had been worn to a polish by the passage of animal feet: badgers, rabbits, foxes. Bird corpses were everywhere; I counted a dozen and then gave up.
I came to a dip, a valley or ditch, curving away from me to left and right, perhaps fifteen feet deep and thirty across, with sloping sides. And there, unexpectedly, protruding from the bank, part-buried in the brown soil, I saw a bank of red bricks. I scrambled down one of the steep sides, and up the other, to the exposed masonry. A hundred or so flat thin bricks were visible only, but they were clearly part of some considerable structure. The bricks were now crumbling back into the soil out of which they had originally been fired. I slipped a flat rhomboid-shaped shard of one into my pocket.
There was a mystery to this place I could not quite figure out: the name, the bricks in the heart of the wild wood, the coppiced trees. I thought I would try to get an aerial view. I picked a stand of sturdy coppiced sycamores: six trunks which lacked lateral branches, but whose closeness made it possible to climb one of them while using the others for support. The trunks were leafless except at their tops, where they spread laterally into a quaking green canopy, so that as I climbed them it felt as if I were ascending a whale’s spout.
Over the course of two years, Roger and I had carried on an extended discussion of the relative climbing merits of different tree species. Roger had voted for the hornbeam ‘as the toughest, least likely to let me down with a rotten branch’, and for the oak, ‘except for their tendency to stagheadedness these days’. ‘Low on my list,’ he had said, ‘is the crack willow.’ I was, of course, an advocate for the beech and the birch, and an unfortunate incident involving a broken branch had turned me against the poplar. Both of us admired the appraisal given to the trees in Calvino’s
The Baron in the Trees
, for it was clear that Calvino himself had done some serious practical research on the subject. Cosimo, Calvino wrote, liked best of all to climb holm oaks, olives - ‘patient trees with rough, friendly bark on which he could pass or pause’ and figs, which ‘seemed to absorb him, permeate him with their gummy texture and the buzz of hornets, until he would begin to feel he was becoming a fig himself’, and the walnut: ‘the endless spread of its branches, like some palace of many floors and innumerable rooms . . . such strength and certainty this tree had in being a tree, its determination to be hard and heavy expressed even in its leaves.’ He did not, however, trust elms or poplars, whose ‘branches grew upwards, slender and thickly covered, leaving little foothold’, or pines, with their ‘close-knit branches, brittle and thick with cones, leaving no space or support’. Both Roger and I loved the description of how Cosimo spent nights in the canopy, ‘listening to the sap running through its cells, the circles marking the years inside the trunks, the birds sleeping and quivering in their nests, and the caterpillar waking and the chrysalis opening’.
We had several times discussed attempting an aerial traverse of a woodland. Roger had even gone so far as to research and write me a letter on the subject of brachiation. Brachiation, he explained, is the special evolutionary adaptation that enables orang, gibbon and chimpanzee arms to articulate in all directions and support a swinging, hanging body. It is what distinguishes apes from monkeys. By swinging, and moving fast to keep up rhythm and momentum, a heavy gibbon or orang-utan can swing from branches that would never support the ape standing on top of them. Using branches more like ropes than bars, it became possible to utilise the thinner, further reaches of them. The key evolutionary benefit of brachiation was therefore that it allowed the heavy ape to move about among the slender springier branches and reach the fruit at their tips. Brachiation also led naturally to a tendency to uprightness and all that this later entailed in terms of evolution. But it was also dangerous, Roger observed, so animals like the gibbon needed their big brains to remain safe, to make the sophisticated calculations required to stay aloft from branch to branch in the canopy instead of crashing to the ground and killing themselves.
Roger had seemed inexplicably keen that I try the traverse first, with him watching me from the forest floor, on the grounds that I was the climber and he the swimmer. We had never got round to the experiment, but I still aspired one day to fulfil the beautiful description Roger had sent me of the gibbon: ‘Gibbons really fly from branch to branch! They fling themselves with great force and glide with a fluency that was surely learned from the birds, the ancient aristocracy of arboreal life. Perhaps they also utilise the energy stored in branches when they are bent, like longbows.’
I had not climbed a coppice-group before, however, and it was with a distinctly ungibbonish inelegance that I reached twenty-five feet up in my sycamores. But from there I was able to look down on to the Wilderness and to get some sense of the land’s lie. The ditch was a moat; this much was clear. It ran in a squashed circle around the central area, which looked to be about an acre in size. I could see evidence of earthworks and more exposed ridges of brickwork, suggesting walls and palisades. And beyond the moat in every direction were bands of thistles and waist-high nettles. These were the new fortifications of this area, keeping people out, preserving the land for the creatures that lived in it.
My guess was that the name on the map was a late-eighteenth-century relic: that a big house, perhaps Elizabethan, had once stood here, and had then been taken over by an early Romantic landowner who, following the picturesque taste of the time, had created for his estate a ‘Wilderness’: an area of rough country, regulated for its irregularity - often with artificial waterfalls and faux rock outcrops - which could be excitingly strayed into by visitors.
But the name had proved a prophecy: two or more centuries later, The Wilderness had become a wild place, properly reclaimed, only a few hundred yards from a road. The building that had once stood here had dilapidated, and had then been steadily and thoroughly reoccupied by nature: by nettle, thistle, elder, hazel, fox, badger and bird.
Swaying up there in the sycamore canopy, I remembered a comment Baker had made to his journal on a late-January day in 1954. ‘The view from the gate, beside the wood and past the house seemed wonderful,’ he had written. ‘The grass was a deep green, whole fields waterlogged and green, . . . grass, which will master us all yet, and cover our shameful rubble in its equality.’
There was something in this long sight, this sense of the human presence as being something temporary, which I recognised. During my journeys, I had seen so many human structures from so many epochs sinking back into the land: the roofless houses of the west of Ireland, the rubble of the Clearance townships mossed over in Scottish glens, and the slate spoil-heaps of Blaenau, where I had spent a day inside a mountain, moving through the abandoned mine-tunnels. I had heard about others: the drowned village of Dunwich on the Suffolk coast, reclaimed by the rising sea, over which Roger had once swum. The thousands of deserted medieval villages of England, painstakingly found and mapped by the historian and archaeologist Maurice Beresford in the 1940s and 1950s, many of them abandoned in the years after the Great Plague. The little Isle of Soay, off Skye, where Gavin Maxwell had established a basking-shark fishery in the 1940s, and where the grass now grew through the eyeholes of shark vertebrae that were scattered in the bone yard, and where rust and damp were slowly breaking down the flensing equipment and the hauling pulleys. South of me here in Essex, I knew, were the so-called ‘plotland’ woods of Laindon and Thundersley: young woods that had sprung up on land that had been built on in the late nineteenth century, and then again during the great slump in land prices of the inter-war years. Street after street of bungalows, many of them self-built, had rotted back into the ground, and the trees had returned - native oak, ash and hornbeam - and with them had come the creatures.
Abandoned places such as these provide us not only with images of the past but also with visions of the future. As the climate warms, and as human populations begin to fall, increasing numbers of settlements will be abandoned. Inland drought and rising sea-levels on the coasts will force exoduses. And wildness will return to these forsaken places. Vegetable and faunal life will reclaim them: the opportunist pioneer species first - dog-rose, elder, fireweed, crows . . . Just such a reclamation has occurred in the so-called ‘zone of alienation’: the region of north Ukraine that was placed off-limits after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. In Pripiat, the town in which the Chernobyl workers were accommodated, silver birch now throng the empty streets and court-yards. Flower meadows of exceptional botanical diversity have grown up through the paving stones. Forests of pine and willow have populated the city’s outskirts, through which run wolf packs of up to 200 animals. Moose, deer, lynx and boar pad through the city’s suburbs. Black storks nest in its chimneys, bats in the empty houses, and kestrels in the unused window boxes. The cooling ponds of the Chernobyl plant itself are now filled with catfish up to six feet long.
I had spoken once to a climate-change scientist about the subject of abandonment. The study of her science had changed her perception of time, she said, and of the relevance of human beings within history. Though we are now among the dominant species, she said, our age will pass, and our material legacy - unthinkable though it now is to imagine it vanished - will be absorbed by the land, becoming all but imperceptible.
Eventually, very much later than this, she said, the sun will swell to become a red giant, swallowing up all the vast empty space as far as the earth. Imagine that, she said, an ancient red sun, swollen and massive, charring the earth.
The band of woods of which The Wilderness was a part extended north towards the River Chelmer. Baker had spent a lot of time haunting the overgrown banks of the Chelmer: he would often follow it down to where it issued into the saltmarsh near Maldon. So after an hour or so in The Wilderness, I followed the line of the woodland northwards, keeping to the edge of the tree-line, out of sight. I passed through regions of ivy-throttled oaks and groves of sweet chestnuts. The vast field to my west was divided by a row of poplars, whose leaves crackled in the wind like overhead power-lines. A gang of rooks chakked over the corn stubble. I wondered how many people ever came to this wood, so close to the road, but such a strange place. Hawker dragonflies buzzed around over the grass like quick biplanes. A single green woodpecker passed me, its flight following the line of a stitched thread. Baker had written of watching woodpeckers feed in a nameless wood near his home. ‘This quiet ritual took place on the very edge of the world I see,’ he had written, ‘very near to the world beyond the looking glass, the lost place, the beginning of things.’
I walked for another half a mile. And in the middle of a deep section of oak wood, where it seemed at its deepest, and where a rough little stream cut through it, I came into a glade to find a tyre on a rope, tied to the bough of an oak tree. It was a swing! Suddenly my sense of the wood changed. This was where the children of the village came: to swing on the tyre, to play hide-and-seek, to have adventures. It was a wild place for the kids, and must have been for decades, perhaps centuries. I could see a path worn into the soil by the passage of feet, leading back west through the wood to where the trees thinned, and from there back between two fields towards the church of Woodham Walter.
I left the glade, and walked north-east for two miles to the Chelmer, keeping to the hedgerows and field edges. Just short of the river, passing along the boundary of a newly turned field, I stopped, and picked a curiously shaped flint from a curve of sillion. It was a hand-axe, unmistakably a hand-axe. I couldn’t believe my luck. Its interior was blue, a blue which had a depth to it like cloudy water, and its outer side was the colour of old brown bone. It looked to have been abandoned before its flaking had been properly finished. I tested its edge with my thumb, weighed it in my hand, and then set out for the Essex coast and the saltmarshes of the Dengie Peninsula.
The Dengie is a blunt-nosed peninsula in eastern Essex, just under a hundred square miles in area, and bordered on three sides by water - the Blackwater estuary to its north, the North Sea to its east, and the Crouch estuary to its south. Most of it is reclaimed land, below sea-level, saved from the tides by a network of sea walls: grassed-over linear earthworks, fifteen feet high or more. It is provisional land, borrowed land. Stepping onto it, you are stepping into a ghost of water.
At unpredictable moments, the sea reasserts itself in great diluvial acts. The disastrous tide of Martinmas 1099, recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: ‘This year also, on the festival of St Martin, the sea-flood sprung up to such a height, and did so much harm, as no man remembered that it ever did before. And this was the first day of the new moon.’ Or the storm-surging spring tide of 31 January 1953, that killed hundreds, and submerged the Dengie as far inland as Tillingham.