Tree Cover

The sound of rain on our coats is enveloped by the sound of rain in the trees, which is itself soon enveloped by the great noise of the river in the valley bottom.

Just as we pass under the line of trees I ask my wife if she is having fun yet. Peering out from under her cagoule hood she answers “It’s beautiful.”

The valley of the East Lyn in North Devon is a sharp, deep ‘V’, almost straight from the pages of an old geography textbook and quite different from the softer curves of the Valley of Rocks on the other side of Lynton. One of the Lyn rivers is thought to have flowed there before the last Ice Age changed its course. Now both rattle down deep combes cluttered by rocks and cloaked with trees.

Such amazing trees. In Richard Mabey’s Beechcombings he describes how as a younger man he never saw trees for themselves, only for what lived in, under and above them. Here, too, it’s easy to focus on the sheerness of the valley sides, the force of the water below, the heaviness of the rain. But the trees are why this place is a European-level Special Area of Conservation, and why these paths were cut into the earth, bands of access striping the hills with footprints every year.

At first it’s appealing to think of Victorian gentlemen striding down this route in similar weather, arguing knowledgeably about mosses, or on the arms of ladies whose physical achievement in getting up here in corsets and petticoats would far outdo those of the men. But though I share their (supposed) delight in this environment, my thoughts can’t help but go back a step further. Those naturalists and gallants were not the first on these paths – the ground under me was cut from the hillside by labourers, presumably local men. They chopped away trees, chopped away earth, and almost certainly some men fell. It’s a long way down to the rocks in the river, punctuated by unforgiving wood.

The doggedness to achieve that seems so characteristic of the Victorian mindset, at least as viewed from this distance, is summed up by the story of the “Captain”. In 1899 Captain Jack Crocombe led his lifeboat crew – and the lifeboat – over these exhausting hills. A ship was in distress off Porlock Weir and drifting ashore, but the weather prevented the crew using the harbour. So they carried the Louisa the 11 miles to Porlock, overnight, in a storm, demolishing walls, taking out trees. On arrival they immediately put out for the stricken vessel to rescue the survivors. It would be interesting to know if they were able to use the path that I and my wife wander down. But I suspect they went by another route.

Just as I’m thinking about the men who cut these paths, I look out across the valley and see that we are exactly level with the A39 on the other side. Through the complicated colours of thousands of leaves I watch a bus’s lights advance into a confrontation with those of a small car. A brief pause, then the car retreats.

At this level, we are too high up to get a good view of the river - just glimpses of white and black. Its sound always seems to be in crescendo. I wonder if the noise would have been far different on the night of the great Lynmouth flood in 1952, when its storm waters overcame blockage after blockage to smash the village into the sea. In the same week that Hurricane Sandy hit New York, even the faintest echo of that monochrome night is unsettling, especially for someone whose home is on a floodplain.
But up here we would have been safe. Up here we can hear the river, feel the rain, but see and smell only trees.

Beechcombings also discusses more general social attitudes towards trees, how very often our response to them is to wonder who planted them, and why, as though trees were unable to seed or establish themselves without our parental guidance. To me this is a disturbing idea, particularly because with my unpractised eye it’s hard to tell the difference between a planted wood and one that’s come about of its own volition.

But there is a clear difference between the woodland on Hollerday Hill, between the Valley of Rocks and Lynton, and this, hard on the slopes overlooking the Lyn. On Hollerday Hill mixed species were sown on the instructions of Sir George Newnes, a local magnate. There, the bark is generally clear, and light penetrates quite easily, even where the trees have descended on the ruins of the Newnes’ Hollerday House – burnt to the ground after only 20 years of existence.

In this valley, where the two of us seem endlessly dropping toward an unreachable zero – perhaps a Nirvana of some kind – each tree seems to have faced down time. Looking up, they replace the sky, their roots visible a short length before they grip the undersoil below the spread of autumn leaf litter. Looking down, they replace the earth, replicating geology’s layering with their own intricate curvatures. I’m irresistibly reminded of one of the most potent scenes from my childhood reading – when the woods of Fangorn envelop the hillside by Helm’s Deep and consume the remnants of the orc army. For all the failings I now see in Lord of the Rings, I’m still sure Tolkien understood the potency of old woods.

Further and further back in my mind’s archive, I reach fantasies of dinosaurs roaming just such a moist and dense environment, never mind that oak trees post-date the last great pre-human extinction by many millions of years.

Oaks are dominant here, sessile oaks, whose leaves seem to me to be heavier, more rigid than those of the famous “English”, pendunculate oak. Those well-known trees stand separate and alone in my consciousness. Not just symbolically, but also because in isolation in a field they are founders of their own ecosystems. Fungi in the roots, beetles in the bark, birds in the branches. Of course they also stand in forests, but my perceptions are partial, and these sessile oaks seem well set in woodland.

These trees too are all visibly hosts of other lives. Between branches move brown dunnocks, robins, wrens. Great thicknesses of moss cover the slopes of their trunks and major branches. The density of the word “sphagnum” seems perfect for this enveloping fabric. (I know little of mosses, and no doubt I’m applying the word completely inaccurately.) Rising from this deep green are the necks of ferns and the webs of lichens. These last come in sickly colours, almost those of the grave, but they are the strongest signs of unpolluted life now that November is recolouring the leaves.

The leaves that have already dropped layer the mud under our feet. They have a rich smell. I once would have called it death, having been fed the idea that the end of summer is a source of grief. But just as midwinter sunset was a pivot of the year for prehistoric people, whose stones dot the shoulders of Exmoor just over the hill, so I’ve started to understand autumn as the preamble to birth, the necessary breath between words.

And yes, it is beautiful. When we reach the lowest path, alongside the river’s edge, there are far more people, making their way to or from the teashop at Watersmeet. Even on a day when the rains make rivers of roads this path is well trodden, well loved.

My wife is a few steps ahead. As she moves on I see that the tip of the stick she carries is adorned. A single oak leaf is speared there, turning as it brushes the ground. She carries an unexpected gift for our daughter back among the houses and the cars.