There is a byway open to all traffic, or BOAT, near Alton called Water Lane. It is, for much of its length, a sunken lane or holloway – that is, a route lower than the surrounding land surface. Holloways can be created by the passage…
Continue reading High and Dry (Corner Ash)
Exposed tree roots fascinate me. They are secrets revealed, intricately interwoven, the manifold anchors for massive entities – and the forest’s unexpected means of communication. These beech roots cascade down the steepest of slopes while the trees that they belong to do their best to…
Continue reading Chorus Line – SOLD
I went out for a walk to visit a mermaid and came across a field full of mediterranean miniature donkeys. The mermaid was a carving on the door-surround of the tiny Norman church of St. Swithun’s in Nately Scures, near Hook in Hampshire. She’d lost…
Continue reading Donkey Throng – SOLD
I tried something a little bit different with this one. It seemed to have an awful lot of stuff going on on the ground. In the foreground, this was kind of okay; the leaf litter included large sweet chestnut leaves that made it all quite…
Continue reading Recurve
When I read that Sidley Wood, an SSSI north of Andover and not very far from me, has “many stands of ancient hornbeam coppice”, I immediately added it to my list of places to visit. There is a footpath running through the length of the…
Continue reading Understories – SOLD
This is a celebration of the less obvious. Hedges around fields are a commonplace feature of the English landscape and, while I think most of us are aware of their importance in terms of diversity and wildlife, we probably don’t think too hard about the…
Continue reading Hedgerow
The hamlet of Woodcott seems to consist of a farm and a church, next to one another on a one track road in an obscure corner of north Hampshire. The tiny church of St. James has a rather splendid ancient yew in the churchyard, hollowed…
Continue reading Woodcott
A woodbank is a linear boundary around or within a wood, marked by a low earthen bank. It’s a feature often associated with ancient woodland, and it’s not uncommon to find trees growing on it. These two trees, an ash and a silver birch, are…
Continue reading Woodbank
This is a drawing, on paper, of half of an ancient churchyard yew which has split into two parts. We’re looking at the hollowed-out inside of the tree, with what looks like several well established aerial roots. The tree is fascinating, with an array fascinating…
Continue reading Interior 1 (Woodcott)
This is the third in the “mini-series” of close-ups (Beyond, depicting an ancient oak tree, was the first, followed by Coalesce, which showed an ancient sweet chestnut). This tree isn’t ancient (but it probably got to a decent age for its species, which I think…
Continue reading Echo Chamber