My forest walks – walks anywhere in fact – are always overlaid with visions of what could, or might, replace, and in my opinion improve, what I see around me. I expect Lancelot Brown felt just the same. In town I imagine scruffy jumbles of nondescript buildings replaced with well-proportioned terraces or gleaming towers. From the train I envisage rivers and woods and rolling pastures full of calm cattle. From our favourite bench in deepest France, with a huge view of undulating bocage, I used to imagine a snow-capped mountain range on the horizon.
There is a little valley in our Welsh woods where two lively streams converge. Two more little streams glide down through culverts to make a meeting of four waters. All this hydro-activity was hidden under dark smothering spruces until a gale last summer felled a great tangle of trunks and branches, and toppled two in a line of tall Western hemlocks. The hemlock is not a tree foresters respect or sawmills want to buy, but in my view the most handsome of the potentially giant conifers we have from West Coast America.
Clearing up the resulting chaos revealed the potential beauty of this corner of the forest. The main stream comes crashing out of dense woodland higher on the hill and springs from a gap in a mossy old sheep-wall into the new clearing, to bounce and splash down the black rocks, below five majestic grass-green hemlocks aligned like a guard of honour. Fifty yards on it dives under the track to emerge again furiously into a much wider arena where we have felled an acre of dark conifers. The three other streams meet it here, converging to form acute angles of rushing water in the mossy forest floor.
At the moment it is a picture of stumps and snags and the debris of logging. In my mind’s eye it is something else: a mossy, ferny hollow under the beeches I will plant this year, where bluebells will rejoice in spring and in summer we will picnic in their dappled shade.
