The Woods Of My Youth

By Sean Fagan

For many, the woods are a place of intrigue and wonder (Photo: Sean Fagan).

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CHANGING TIMES

It’s a damp wood and a small wood, on a south facing bank.

About twelve modest acres of hawthorn, elder and gorse, with a small number of blackthorns.

It’s not an elegant wood with large, stately trees but a wood teeming with dishevelled miniatures vying greedily for space and light.

A few large hawthorns exist - bequeathing generous clusters of dark, blood-red berries to the autumn mists.

Everywhere in the understorey, there are brambles with a few wild roses, their thorny limbs penetrating and sprawling without restraint.

This was the wood of my childhood. Unlike my other childhood haunts this is one of the few that has survived. Sadly, it is now much impoverished.

Now surrounded by a glut of factories, roads and a farm, it’s even been encroached upon by three gypsy horses, which have heavily grazed the adjoining marshy area, south of the woods, to a pitiable, muddy stubble.

I've camped in these woods as a child, enjoyed many a camp fire at night, have seen once - an almost black fox, knew where a short-eared owl roosted, and found an almost perfectly intact badger skull - weathered pale white.

I found the skull near an old sett - long evacuated.

Some of the badgers were dug out by men and killed. Over the badger sett is a massive elder tree, the largest elder I ever encountered – its heavy, sombre branches the silent witness to many generations of badger drama - now quiet.

Once, I found two tiny kittens nestled under the prickly sanctuary of a large gorse, while nearby their nervous mother - feral-eyed and taut, watched my every move from deep cover.

Evenings were special - as a large, female sparrow hawk seared along the darkening woodland edge, hungry for an unwary blackbird or song thrush.

As I got older I travelled to wilder places, but this place continues to occasionally haunt my memories.

A diminutive, humble wood of dampness and moss, of scurrying rabbits and timid thrushes, of brazen wrens and unruly magpies.

One experience in particular stands out. It was a cold, still night in January; the stars unusually clear through the frost-chilled air.

Night was a short time coming, and instead of going home I stayed a while, under an old hawthorn - its small, fey form cast an eerie silhouette in the waning light.

The alternative names for hawthorn hint at its seductive past - whitethorn, may-bush, the lone thorn, the fairy tree.

As dusk wrapped this world in darkness, I settled within myself - as still as the woods around me.

And out of the night and silent as the rising moon - an owl alighted on a low bough of the hawthorn, its simmering orange eyes instantly fixed on me.

It stayed, afraid but compelled by curiosity to investigate.

Then, as wistfully as it appeared, it slipped away into the quiet night.

It was a moment of perfection: the stars, the silence, the encroaching frost, the hawthorn tree and a curious owl.

A stark other-worldliness reaching out among the ordinary. All in a small wood, now tainted with the brash noises and lights of surrounding factories and passing cars.

Even the horses that dwell in the marsh beside the woods seemed somewhat removed from this world - as if tameness rendered them blind.

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