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

Rowena met Cecil Roberts she was a young schoolgirl, and she found him more than a little alarming. She later realised that his manner was just very camp. A modern reading of Gone Rambling would leave little doubt about the author’s sexual orientation, with its panegyrics to bare-chested Italian sawyers whose ‘skin, tanned a warm mahogany by the Venetian sun, gleamed and caught a hundred tones and facets of light as the muscles glided with cryptic strength beneath their satin sheaths’; to say nothing of some very ambiguous poems.

      I cannot help wondering how Cecil Roberts might have been regarded by the locals in the Golden Ball in those less tolerant times. Maybe they just thought he was from London. He seems to have been genuinely helpful with his time and money in the village, and nearly always described its inhabitants sympathetically. He appreciated the efforts of his gardeners, including Charles Crewe, who lived in a damp dwelling with none of the usual services on the very edge of Lambridge Wood. Roberts was determinedly anti-fascist. I was surprised to learn that his origins in Nottingham were far from aristocratic. He was a self-made man, living mostly from his prolific pen, whose name-dropping was probably an exuberant validation of his reinvention. ‘Mon dieu!’ his special and amusing spinster friend Miss Whissitt might have exclaimed. ‘Tu es une arriviste!’

      H.J. Massingham is altogether more astringent. His 1940 book Chiltern Country deals with the whole range of hills in luminous language. His feel for natural observation is superb. Much of his work is driven by fury about the spread – no, the rash – of homely villas outwards from London. He mourns the ‘real England, the England in which the hills, the vales, the waters, the crops, the roads, the buildings, the natives and the rock that bore them up all on its back were intricately bound together in an organic system not unlike the human body’.5 The country cottages that have withstood the centuries – and the worthy souls who have earned their living around them for as long – are becoming overwhelmed by red-brick mediocrities planted about with shrubs that don’t belong. Beech woods become desirable scenic accessories rather than essential resources. For Massingham the country beyond Rickmansworth was irretrievable, and the country around High Wycombe was doomed. The spread of the Metropolitan Line from London into the hills was a sinister fungus that sprouted despicable edifices – suburbia: ‘the touch of it annihilates identity in place’. His ruralism stands at the other extreme to the poet John Betjeman’s sympathetic regard for what he termed ‘Metroland’, a land of healthy young women and clean semi-detached gentility.

      Massingham’s combativeness is quite appealing. I think he would fain have jumped back in time way past the Enlightenment to fetch up somewhere in the late medieval period. He reserves his most eloquent writing for our piece of country, and most particularly Stonor Park, ‘the heart of the Chilterns’, where the wild spirit of the place has not yet been ousted, the views not hopelessly corrupted with eyesores. I have no proof that he ever visited our woods, but I hope he would have found the genius loci satisfactory there, too. I am certain he would have disapproved of the practice of ‘splitting’ to sell off ancient woodlands, thereby dividing the integrity of manors that had been in existence for nearly a thousand years. There is no defence, except to say that I could never have afforded to buy a whole stretch. There are plenty of very wealthy people in the hills who don’t appreciate the unique treasures they have on their land, and my small patch is much loved.

      Just over a century before Cecil Roberts was pottering around his garden in Lower Assendon, John Stuart Mill was exploring our Chiltern countryside with a far more scientific enthusiasm. The philosopher and political theorist was equally a dedicated and scholarly botanist. Very few people can instantly recognise rare plants like wintergreens (Pyrola), but J.S. Mill was one of them. From his early days he was a close friend of George Bentham (nephew of Jeremy), who would become one of the greatest botanists of the Victorian age. Mill made an expedition in France in search of poorly known flora. His house in Kensington Square in London was virtually a herbarium. Some people who are not naturalists find it odd that famous thinkers, poets or mathematicians might derive as much pleasure from the minutiae of natural history as from the fields of endeavour that made them famous. Vladimir Nabokov was as serious about blue butterflies as he was about writing novels, but certain critics relay this fact as a kind of eccentric footnote to the life of the artist. Doubtless they perceive that less time frittered away with the butterflies might have resulted in one or two more novels. Can they not see that the taxonomic eye applied to recognising the subtlest nuances of difference in butterflies is the same eye that spots the deceptions and evasions in human motivation? The capacity to make accurate observations is a special genius, and it is not limited to focusing on one particular bipedal subject species.

      In 1828 J.S. Mill undertook his own bipedal tour that passed through our part of Oxfordshire.6 Open fields yielded abundant white-flowered wild candytuft, ‘one of the commonest of all weeds’ (Iberis amara), which is now a rare plant – I eventually ran it down myself on clear ground on Swyncombe Down, nine miles from our wood. His record of thorow wax (Bupleurum rotundifolium) might be one of the last for the county: this species is close to extinction in Great Britain, and Mill noted its rarity even then. On 5 July he approached Henley from Nettlebed: our patch. You may imagine the pleasure his subsequent writing gave me.

      The woods are the great beauty of this country. They are real woods, not copse, that is, they are not cut down for fire-wood, but allowed to grow into timber, though not to any great age, nor are there, as far as we could perceive, many very large or fine trees among them … We stopped at the White Hart, Nettlebed for the night, and in the evening walked down the hill by the Oxford Road towards Henley. It passes through a fine forest-like beech wood, and on the whole the ascent to Nettlebed from Henley is far more beautiful than any thing else which we have seen in its vicinity.

      I cannot prove that John Stuart Mill walked exactly along the footpath past our wood, although it is hard to see how a woodland ascent towards Nettlebed from Henley could have taken any other route. His praise for its beauty is not the least of it. The woods he described are very like those that still flourish today in this corner of the Chiltern Hills; the same stately ‘forest’ of mature timber trees, but yet lacking any truly ancient giants such as survive in old parkland or as parish boundary markers. My wife and I discovered a massive ancient beech pollard along a path in Nettlebed that must have been four hundred years old at least, all gnarled and knobbly and hollowed out. There are a few in the area. But no, Lambridge Wood was a working wood two hundred years ago, a beechen grove permitted to grow on to timber, but not to senility. We shall see, however, that nothing is forever, and our wood would have had different employment in earlier and later times.

      Nor can I prove that John Stuart Mill walked through the wood in the company of George Grote, but I like to think that circumstances favoured it. They were friends already in the early 1820s. Mill was both an admirer and a reviewer of Grote’s writing, and particularly his monumental history of Greece (1846–56) in twelve volumes:7 a work not perhaps as beloved as Gibbon on Rome, but with a similarly vast reach and ambition. The two prolific writers shared what might broadly be called liberal and reformist views, and were Utilitarians. The seat of the banking Grote family was Badgemore House, which has been mentioned as the estate adjoining Greys Court directly to the east. Part of the Henley end of Lambridge Wood was within that estate; tracks ran onwards into our part of the greater wood. George’s father was fond of country pursuits, and went hacking on horseback through our woods and onwards to Bix. Young George (then still a banker) and his wife would make the forty-mile journey from London to spend ten days with his parents, and on one occasion Mrs Grote drove all the way in her own one-horse vehicle while her husband rode for four hours separately on horseback.8 Although George Grote was much attached to Badgemore, in the days before the railway it was hardly a practical commute. By 1831 it was clear that the country house should be given up, and George left for the metropolis to devote more time to reformist politics. We shall see that all the manor houses surrounding our wood had political connections with the capital at one time or another.

      As for contemporary writers, Richard Mabey’s memoir of Chiltern countryside9