The Wood for the Trees: The Long View of Nature from a Small Wood. Richard Fortey

of life or the geology of the world refracted through a personal lens. This book is the other way round: a tiny morsel of a historic land looked at all ways. The sum of all my observations will lead to an understanding of biodiversity – the variety of animals, plants and fungi that share this small wood. Biodiversity does not just belong to tropical rainforests or coral reefs. Almost every habitat has its own rich assemblage of organisms competing, collaborating and connected. What is found today is the result of climate, habitat, pollution or lack of it, history and husbandry. For me, the poetry of the wood derives from close examination as much as from synthesis and sensibility. But I am aware that description alone does not necessarily lead to understanding. This example from what may be Wordsworth’s worst poem (‘The Thorn’) comes to mind:

      And to the left, three yards beyond,

      You see a little muddy pond

      Of water – never dry

      I measured it from side to side:

      ’Twas four feet long, and three feet wide.

      The Darwin connection

      Despite this dire topographic warning, I must describe the anatomy of the countryside around the wood, since it is crucial to this history. Grim’s Dyke (and Lambridge) Wood lies at the top of a locally high ridge, and immediately to the north of it a steep slope runs away continuously downwards to a rather busy road; that part of the incline below the barn has been cleared of trees, and is now occupied by a well-fenced deer park. The main road is partly a dual carriageway running westwards up a typical Chiltern dry valley and serves to connect the nearby small and historic town of Henley-on-Thames, where I live, with the larger and even more historic town of Wallingford thirteen miles away. Wallingford also lies adjacent to the Thames, but between it and Henley the great river takes an enormous southerly bend by way of big, bustling Reading, as if reluctant to breach the barrier of the Chiltern Hills. This it finally does – and most picturesquely – near the village of Goring, about seven miles from Wallingford, where the Chalk cliffs are steep enough on the eastern side of the floodplain to suggest a gorge. Geographers have more prosaically called it ‘the Goring Gap’. Robert Gibbings is the most charming writer on this and other stretches of the Thames.7 I doubt I can live up to his blend of precise natural history with human observations of all kinds. The journey across country between Henley and Wallingford is very much shorter than the distance along the river, a fact that profoundly influenced the development of medieval Henley and its surroundings, including our small wood. Henley played an important part in the transport of goods and people between London and Oxford, and its story is inextricably bound up with that of the River Thames.

      There are other ways to locate our wood within the English countryside. Ancient England is a curiously tessellated collage of different patterns of ownership and responsibility. Parish, village and manor all make different claims. Grim’s Dyke Wood lies near the edge of the old ecclesiastical parish of Henley-on-Thames, so its original church, as it were, is the fine, thirteenth-century flint-and-stone edifice of St Mary’s in the centre of town two miles away.8 On the way out of Henley in the direction of Wallingford and Oxford the road is dead straight and splendidly bordered with wide grass verges and avenues of trees. This is the Fair Mile, appropriately named, and the ecclesiastical parish extends out in this direction. At the end of the Fair Mile, a minor road forks off to the right along another valley to Stonor, while the main road continues uphill towards Nettlebed and Wallingford. At this point our wood lies at the top of the slope on the skyline to the left (and south). The fork in the road marks the end of the village of Lower Assendon, and is very near to the wood as the red kite flies, which it frequently does around here. Smoke from Assendon chimneys can be smelled in the wood. Assendon also houses the Golden Ball, the closest pub, which seems nearly as ancient as the hills, and is reached by a steep downhill scramble along a path descending from Lambridge Wood. At the top of the hill, and further away from Lambridge, another ancient village with the briefest possible name – Bix – is arranged around a huge common, and is in a different parish.

      But more important to our story than either parish or village is the manor. For most of its recorded history Lambridge Wood, including our piece of it, has been part of the manor of Greys. The manor house, Greys Court, is a remarkable survivor, just a mile away from Grim’s Dyke Wood. Both the house and the estate are now managed by the National Trust, and thousands of visitors flock there. These benign crowds of pensioners and picnickers arriving by car make it difficult to imagine the house as a remote backwater, but there was a time when the Chiltern Hills were wild and inaccessible. Criminals could go to ground there; religious dissenters could hide there. Greys Court still commands the least urban aspect in the Home Counties. From the garden lawn the modern road is hardly visible, and the view is dominated by a broad, clear valley dotted with sheep and flanked on either side by dense beech woods. It could still be a landscape through which horses provided the only transport, at a time when London belonged to another world.

      Although substantial, Greys Court could hardly be described as a stately home. Part twelfth-century fortified castle, and part Tudor mansion, it remained in private hands from medieval times until 1969. In a brick outhouse an extraordinarily ancient donkey wheel resembling some cock-eyed wooden fairground attraction was used until the twentieth century to lift water from a well excavated deep down into the chalk. It is not difficult to imagine how a place like Greys Court might roll with the blows of history, battening down at times of hardship, fattening up in times of plenty. The extensive estate could provide what was needed: sufficient arable land for wheat and barley, pasture for cattle and sheep, from the beech stands fuel and wild game, and good water from the well. Lambridge Wood lay along the northern edge of the estate. Land nearer the big house was more likely to come under cultivation, so the marginal position of the wood doubtless contributed to its long-term survival. It was always useful just where it was.

      The parish church for Greys Court, where the grand names belonging to the big house are interred, is a tiny, flint construction with a low tower, close by the road in Rotherfield Greys, a hamlet that also has the second-nearest pub to our wood, the Maltsters Arms. Church and pub can be reached from the wood on public footpaths leading southwards and crossing open fields for a little more than a mile. I have never met anyone else on these old rights of way. The paths that run along the River Thames just a couple of miles away are crowded with walkers, but the open Chilterns are still the province of the skylark and the stroller. On a clear spring day, the low hills conceal endless possibilities, all of them joyous. The Maltsters Arms is one of those cosy pubs with exposed oak beams on low ceilings, real fires, no background music, and a landlord who actually seems to like his customers.

      The church is next to the pub, as tradition demands. A large chunk of its interior is taken up by a side chapel devoted to the monuments of the masters and mistresses of Greys Court, and principal among these is the exuberant and splendid alabaster and marble tomb of Sir Francis Knollys (d.1596) and Katherine, his wife. Their effigies lie side by side praying in formal splendour, while around the tomb seven sons and seven daughters parade in a pious line. Most touching is a tiny baby who died in infancy, whose effigy lies alongside that of his father. Sir Francis was a noted courtier of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. I like the thought that on his days away from court Sir Francis may have wandered in our wood for pleasure, or maybe hunted game there. On the floor of the nave a brass to Robert de Grey (d.1388) is altogether more modest, even though the manor and church both bear his name. Clad partly in chain mail, his sword by his side, and gauntlets still frozen in metallic prayer, he seems more a grand cipher than a real person.

      In the countryside, for many centuries manors and estates were paramount. Those who owned the estates neighbouring Greys provided its society. These nearby manors suffered the same pestilences and plagues, and shared good years and bad. The lords and gentry knew one another, and paid formal and informal visits. They eventually became what my mother would have termed ‘county’. From time to time the estates were home to remarkable historical figures; at others their occupants were quietly obscure. The status of peasantry and servants and artisans changed gradually, but all the estates had to absorb the changes, which continue today. The closest estate to our wood – and Greys manor – was Fawley Court and Henley Park to the north: a pigeon could fly from