Hollow Places. Christopher Hadley
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small-scale maps accurate? They were surveyed in two parts. First the large-scale trigonometry was completed, and then a second survey filled in the resulting triangles with fields and roads, rivers and hills: this was the interior or topographical survey. Map historians write that the very first OS sheets of Kent had been plotted at the end of the eighteenth century to the exacting standards of the pioneering military map-maker William Roy, who insisted that ‘The boundaries of forests, woods, heaths, commons or morasses, are to be distinctly surveyed, and in the enclosed part of the country at the hedge, and other boundaries of fields are to be carefully laid down.’ It was a slow and expensive process, so when they came to do Essex, the chief surveyors were told to make it faster and cheaper, but in the end they only sacrificed the exact shape of fields. So while the 1804 sheets might not be as detailed as the later large-scale maps, it was a proper military survey, and the towns, villages, rivers and hills were plotted accurately. As were the woods, because they could provide cover for ambushes – a French invasion was still feared when the surveyors were at work.
Assured of the map’s accuracy, I laid a copy over later maps, and found that where a finger of the wood points to its northernmost edge, it precisely matches the shape of the boundary between Great and Little Pepsells. (I use italics in an effort to convey the excitement I felt at this discovery. It was as if I had unearthed a fragment of an ancient cuneiform clay tablet and found it joined up perfectly with another found years before to reveal the location of Noah’s ark.) Was it an echo of the northernmost tree-line of Great Hormead Park Wood? Did an ancient yew tree once mark this boundary? Yews, as well as other trees, had been used as meres or boundary markers since Anglo-Saxon times. And there was that telltale path that the yew had straddled, hence the stile in its split trunk, a path terminating at a tree that is no longer there.
There is a later map, one of the last private county maps made before the OS swept all before it: Mr Bryant’s 1822 map reveals that sometime between then and the start of the century, the section of Hormead Park projecting into Furneux Pelham was grubbed up, or, in the terms of the Lord of the Manor’s tenancy agreement for the land, the timber was felled, cut down, stocked up, peeled, hewn, sawn, worked out, made up and carried away. Why was the Yew left untouched?
The same military zeal that saw the birth of the Ordnance Survey saw the felling of thousands of trees not for timber for ships or for the war effort as is sometimes said, but simply because corn prices went through the roof. The militaristic language used to describe the campaigns against Napoleon were used to describe the agricultural revolution against the inefficient use of land. ‘Let us not be satisfied with the liberation of Egypt or the subjugation of Malta,’ wrote the first President of the Board of Agriculture, in 1803. ‘Let us subdue Finchley Common; let us conquer Hounslow Heath, let us compel Epping Forest to submit to the yoke of improvement.’
The transformation of the ancient clay or heavy-lands of Eastern England from medieval bullock fattening into intensive arable is now recognised as one of the key stages of the agricultural revolution. Arable land in the Pelhams increased by 130 acres in the half-century after 1784, but pasture fell by only three. It was woodland and hedgerow that gave way to the plough. Hertfordshire was one of the counties with the least waste – or uncultivated land – as so much of it had already been enclosed and cultivated in the Middle Ages; little wonder then that farmers were grubbing up trees and not just scrub when corn prices were so high. ‘What immense quantities of timber have fallen before the axe and mattock to make way for corn,’ wrote one observer in 1801.
If you are felling and grubbing up fifteen acres of trees, felling them by hand and digging up the roots, when you get to an ancient yew, perhaps some thirty foot or more in circumference, magnificent and stately and – more importantly – notoriously hard to chop down, you might well leave it standing, along with its stile that allowed people on the track from the north to clamber into the woodland.
It was not only a mere but also a shelter. The presence of these evergreens in churchyards and elsewhere is often said to be because of the shelter they offer. Deer have been spotted sheltering under a yew at Ashridge Park, in Hertfordshire, and there are yews on the banks of John of Gaunt’s deer park at King’s Somborne, probably dating from when the deer park was set out in the thirteenth century. Of course, they can shelter more than game. An ancient yew at Leeds Castle in Kent was lived in by gypsies in 1833, and the hollow Boarhunt yew in Hampshire reputedly housed a family for a whole winter.
‘I know of no part of England more beautiful in its stile than Hertfordshire,’ wrote Sir John Parnell in 1769. Here the ancient fields were bordered by ancient hedgerows that were practically small strips of woodland. In an 1837 article lamenting the fall of an ancient yew in a hurricane, one eulogist wrote: ‘There are few objects of nature presenting more real interest to the mind, or richer points of beauty to the eye, than a noble aged tree; and at times these glories of the forest become associated, either from intrinsic character or local situation, with our best and purest feelings.’ We know that folk, and not just poets, loved trees. In Matilda Betham-Edwards’ novel about rural Suffolk in the 1840s, The Lord of the Harvest, Kara Sage the wife of the farm headman finds companionship in a magnificent elm. She ‘never tired of gazing at that ancient tree’. But we are told that in her love of nature she was ‘unlike her neighbours’. Still, she was not alone in literature: Thomas Hardy’s eponymous Woodlanders Marty South and Giles Winterborne were also said to be rare in their ‘level of intelligent intercourse with Nature’, when they knew by a glance at a trunk if a tree’s ‘heart were sound, or tainted with incipient decay; and by the state of its upper twigs the stratum that had been reached by its roots’.
Even if we doubt that in such a practical age someone left the tree standing simply for its grandeur, we cannot doubt the effect such a tree might have had on the superstitious – that fear may have stopped their axes. At Old Oswestry Hillfort in Shropshire, the countryside has been stripped of trees except for a single old yew. ‘It was probably spared because of a superstition about felling yews or because yews are very hard and so difficult to fell,’ suggests one Shropshire natural historian. In his 1896 article ‘Folk-Lore in Essex and Herts’, U. B. Chisenhale-Marsh wrote that ‘All about our own neighbourhood it is very customary, in clipping hedges, to leave small bushes or twigs standing at intervals, originally, no doubt, to keep away the evil spirits, or as propitiation to those that were cut away.’ What better way to appease the spirits of the vanished woodland than to leave them the sanctuary of an ancient yew, to watch, and wait, and guard the secret at its roots for a few years more?
Many writers at different times have engaged passionately by proxy in the fairy world. Most of the accounts of encounters in fairyland report incidents and adventures that occurred to someone else. This is the terrain of anecdote, ghost sightings, and old wives’ tales, of oral tradition, hearsay, superstition, and shaggy dog stories: once upon a time and far away among another people …
—Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time, 2014
‘Except for their gravestones and their children, they left nothing identifiable behind them,’ wrote historians George Rudé and Eric Hobsbawm of the nineteenth-century agricultural labourer, ‘for the marvellous surface of the British landscape, the work of their ploughs, spades and shears and the beasts they looked after bears no signature or mark such as the masons left on cathedrals.’ They are right that the traces are few, but the fields themselves carried names and sometimes they were the names of men who had worked them and, if the land bore names, so I expect did the men’s tools, their initials cut plainly into hafts alongside the initials of their fathers who swung them at other trees on other mornings. Did the yew tree itself also bear their names? One historian has noted that