There's a name for the day that this was - Smokescreen Saturday, the Hunt Saboteurs call it. They sent a video of hunt people digging out a badger sett and hauling a fox from it. The fox ran away, but the terrier sent down after it was covered in blood - who knows whose blood?
Anyway, I had been for a run down a byway and on my return I saw a jeep which stopped when the two people inside saw me. They thought I was leaving and drove on down the track. I collected my camera and went after them. I didn't see them, but I could hear dogs barking and thought I heard the scream of a terrified mammal. But I saw nothing. The jeep had disappeared.
On the way back, I focused on the trees. I sat on the huge fallen branch of an oak and the tree said that they, along this track, were on the frontline. Fields on either side. The trees in thin hedgerows on either side of the byway. They were suffering. It seemed bucolic and I was surprised. But the tree was adamant. This is what it is to be on the verge of destruction. The fields and soil damage and chemicals and roots compacted and either water-logging or drought and the winds scouring the top of the hill.
The byway seemed to me one of those ideal 'corridors' - but it was a corridor from nowhere to nowhere. Just a thin strip of survival.
We all live, the tree told me, under chronic physical and, for those with psyches, psychological stress. We are fragile.
But, as I say, it had felt - the jeep aside - so peaceful. A buzzard perching in a mostly dead oak and flapping away when I rounded the corner. A wren darting under the fallen branch. Tits calling and the jackdaws above with their chatter. It was sunny and relatively warm. Butterflies. Something rustling through the grass and something else in the hedge. Blackberries, hips and haws. Quiet.
I was... happy... and yet that wasn't what I got from the tree. Another two oaks had an outlook less bleak, but they felt stoical, accepting. Perhaps they just didn't feel the fury of the first.
Before I left, that first tree asked if I was going to take photographs and I said yes. This seemed to be a good thing - as though this were proof of something. Indeed, the tree had greeted me by asking if I were the Oak-Lover and I had said yes. To witness, to document, that seemed to matter.
Some of these pictures are of ash trees - and they really appeared to be struggling.
There were a couple of belts of planted trees - pines and some broadleaves. Which reminds me, in the trillion trees book, Pearce says not, on the whole, to plant them, but instead to let them grow. And I think of that very first message from a tree, the ash, who said, 'Don't fence me in.' But we always do. This place is for you trees; this for our farmland; that is a meadow and this a wetland. Keep to your, place, trees. That's the only place where you are allowed to be.
Of course they are always on the frontline. There is no other place they can be.
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