If you go down to the woods and stay...
A young father dreamed of moving into a forest with his family – more than 20 years later, Tom Ough hears how he carved out a living
One night in 1991, Max Adams woke up in the small hours and resolved to live in a wood. There was little in his past that should have prompted this resolution; this was a sudden and apparently causeless epiphany.
In the morning, he told his partner, Linda. She liked the idea. So did a couple who were their friends. They all had different reasons, and were variously attracted to the idea of simplifying life, getting off-grid, working with their bodies and supporting themselves.
“We got quite drunk on the prospect of it,” Adams says. Between them, the quartet borrowed enough money to pay £25,000 for 40 acres of conifers in a plot near Beamish, a village in Co Durham. They bought two static caravans in which to sleep and moved in in February 1996.
Adams and Linda had a threemonth-old son, Jack. “We arrived in the middle of a blizzard,” says Adams, “the coldest winter I’ve ever had up here, and we found that the back end of the caravan had rotted.”
The hardship did not deter the young family and their two friends. Adams, an archaeologist at Durham University, fixed the caravan. As weeks in the wood turned into months, he learnt enough carpentry to build a couple of workshops. He and Linda didn’t have much money, but they had the company of the friends and supporters who frequently visited, and the satisfaction of using their hands. “It was brilliant,” he says. “We didn’t miss any civilisation. When it was windy, we could sometimes watch telly on our little portable black-and-white TV.”
Adams taught Jack, who had grown into a toddler, which plants were edible (wild garlic, wood sorrel) and which were not (foxgloves), and began showing him how to use fire safely. A picture from the time shows an infant Jack watching his father make a chair.
The idyll lasted three years, at which point Adams and Linda split up; “We drove each other mad,” he says. She and the other couple, who needed money from full-time jobs, left the wood. Adams carried on until some thugs came to the wood to mug him. He had no choice but to leave.
For Adams, by now a burgeoning arboriculturalist, to be uprooted was “emotionally traumatic”. The other three moved back into conventional housing, but Adams, who didn’t like academia and had left his job at Durham, had nowhere to live. He flitted from friend’s floor to friend’s floor, rented a place in the village of Grange Villa and then occupied two shacks, one on the banks of the Tyne, the other in a friend’s garden. Jack stayed with him every weekend. Father and son built things from wood, canoed and explored the local plant life. “As long as we had a roof,” says Adams, “which was sometimes nip and tuck, it was fine, because we had time, and time was the only gift I could give Jack.”
Eventually a neighbour reported the garden shack to the council. Adams was told he needed a fixed address to retain partial custody of Jack, now aged five. He took odd jobs, working as an admin assistant for £5 an hour in Newcastle. He was earning enough, just about, to rent a flat in Gateshead. “Then I had a couple of strokes of fortune.”
The first was some work on Tyne Tees Television’s documentary about the North East’s industrial revolution. The second was a winning entry for a Winston Churchill fellowship. Adams’ study of Admiral Collingwood, who was Nelson’s second-in-command, became a book, and the book became a writing career.
Much of Adams’ writing since 2014, appropriately for a landscape archeologist turned woodsman, has been on trees. It’s on the occasion of his latest, The Little Book of Planting Trees, that I’m meeting him.
Adams no longer lives in a wood, but he owns an eight-acre one a mile from the home he shares with his partner, Sarah, in Co Durham. Jack, who is now 24 and a PhD student in physics at the University of Leeds, is visiting. I join them at the house on a windy, haltingly sunny day in February, and Adams shows me the saplings in the garden and the tiny oak seedlings – bright green and delicate, protruding no more than an inch from the soil – that he keeps by a window downstairs. We sit by the wood-burning stove in the sitting room. Jack, who split the logs, occasionally tends the fire. He is glad of his woodworking skills and feels that his outdoorsy upbringing has made him resilient. Though he spends much of his time in a laboratory, he wants to eventually settle down somewhere wooded.
“When I hear wind blowing through the tops of trees,” he says, “I just feel at home instantly. It’s a very, very calming effect.” His friends, he says, envy the time he spends building things with his father, chopping trees down to make them into sheds and cabins.
Adams, a tall and bespectacled 58-year-old, tries to explain the satis
faction he derived from his first time living among trees. “Living in a wood taught me more about the past than being an archaeologist does, in a way,” he says. “Wood is the fundamental technology. If you don’t understand how wood behaves, you can’t understand the great human cultural adventure.”
Apart from all its ecological benefits, such as capturing carbon and providing a home for myriad flora, fauna and fungi, wood has a tactility to which the human hand is innately tuned. Working with wood, from what Adams says, is stimulating and satisfying. “It’s like stripping the carcass of an animal. You’ve got a tree with 30 products in it, and you’ve got to stack them and sort them and clean…”
Jack jumps in: “…clean up the branches and brushing things off one side to be burned as scrap, and stacking everything and getting it all sawed, sawing it up and splitting the logs.” We talk for about an hour about Adams’ story, how the legal obstacles to buying woodland have multiplied, about the ecological nullity of land kept clear for horses, and why so many books about trees, by Adams and other writers, have begun appearing on shelves. Adams credits Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin with revitalising British nature writing, and wonders whether the public’s interest might have something to do with climate change guilt.
And before it gets dark, Adams and Jack take me to “the ranch”: Thistle Wood. It’s a short drive to a gusty hillside of four-and-a-half thousand saplings, most seven years old, of hazel, ash and oak, and some surprises: a patch of wild garlic, marked by a cone, and some young fruit trees. Adams has mown curving paths among the trees, wide enough for three people to walk abreast. One day this will
When I hear the wind blowing through the tops of trees, I feel at home instantly
None of the great trees, wherever they are, were seen by the people who planted them
be a beautiful wood.
It will take a lot of work though. Having so many trees the same age, Adams says as we squelch through the mud, is “not a very good structure ecologically. So I will in a couple of years start a cycle of coppicing the trees. I’ll have an eight-year hazel cycle, 12 to 15-year ash cycle, 25-year oak cycle.” This routine, he says, is “basically copying the medieval woodland management system, which produces the most biodiverse habitat you can have in our climate”, as well as, eventually, the rich and fertile soil that can be produced nowhere but beneath old woods. This will take 100 to 200 years, so neither Adams nor Jack will see it. “But none of the great trees, wherever they are, were seen by the people who planted them. It’s not an excuse.” And particularly at this time of year, as winter turns to spring, there are incremental pleasures to watching the wood. “I’m just counting the weeks off,” says Adams, “I know what’s going to come first – the honeysuckle will come out in the hedgerows, then the cherries will come out, the tiny little perfect hazel flowers that nobody notices…” How fitting that the supremely generous act of creating woodland should come with such enchanting rewards.
The Little Book of Planting Trees, by Max Adams is published in paperback by Head of Zeus on Saturday (£8.99)