Weald walking

16 Oct Weald walking

Yesterday we walked in a borderland. Full of trees, green, honey-coloured stone, natural riches and private opulence, this land straddles Surrey and Kent. The Weald. 

We try, especially these days of disarray, to leave the terraced suburbs, escape the approaching tide of a new lockdown and seek the reward of friends and the company of open spaces. It’s like a transfusion of fresh blood, a life support, a reminder of simple joys. For a while, sitting in a stationary line of vehicles four lanes deep on the M25, watching the cars, vans and lorries rush past along the clockwise carriageway, it’s almost impossible to imagine there’s an open space, a place of quiet where we can retreat from the heavy hum of traffic, the thud of tyres on tarmac, the noise of humankind, our present anxiety and our future doubt. But just a few miles south of this massive metal orbital with its relentless daily surge of people and goods and their destructive footprints, we arrive in the borderland and park in a muddy pull-off under trees.

The Weald. I love the word. The ‘w’ hardly makes a sound, just a whisper of air across the lips, the ‘d’ landing softly, enclosing it as if announcing a secret place. And here, in the deep, ancient forests that lie gracefully across the Weald’s easy slopes and hollows, you are in a world that feels secret. The trees are hushed as if in prayer, reaching their branches up to heaven. I look up and have to bend far back on my heels to let my eye reach the top where they stroke the sky. They are letting go of their leaves, those diligent engineers of life. Their summer work is done, so that now they can lie down, rest, decay, reform, regenerate. But first they get to play. To decorate the world, light up the hillsides with yellow and gold, orange and red as if each tiny leaf has grasped threads from the sun, spun them through its veins and woven them into its burnished blade.

The forest floor is soft underfoot, gentle on our soles and calves. Our conversation is easy and warm, tender on our souls and selves. We catch glimpses of nature at its unselfconscious best: the way the meadow slips away to merge with the wood; how the sheep rub their woollen coats against the hedgerow; how the geese graze beneath a tree gabbling to one another; how the nettles exude a velvety innocence as they crouch under blackberry bushes whose fruit is shrivelled or spent. I try to find a word to describe the green of the grass in between the forests. ‘Green’ is not enough to convey the brilliance of grass when it has sated itself on sun and rain. 

We walk through forest after forest. They overlap and intersect. It’s often difficult to know where one ends and another begins. Perhaps they are all one though I feel sure they have individual names, given to them hundreds of years ago, a story of a bygone age captured in a single word. The forests are deep but not dense; trees are spaced so that the sun filters through in teasing shafts of pure light.

We pass oast houses restored so intensely that we wonder if they are modern reproductions. So neat that they’ve lost their character. Vast houses take cover among the trees; we catch the edge of a chimney or the white of a window frame and only then can we unravel their disguise. A grand estate house with countless bedrooms, wrought iron gates held shut with a padlock, wisteria curling like rope along a wall, a glorious view untroubled by any sign of human life. Private places these. For the super rich or England’s inheritors. We briefly wonder who lives in them – and realise that, mostly, they are empty. We pause to speculate, to rue the waste or the injustice, to ventilate our ready prejudices. But we let them lie. We are happy enough to be here, to tread on the soil, to feel again the size of the world and gaze on its loveliness.