Tom Bailey
Immerse yourself in the Forest of Dean on a journey to the heart of our most magnificent season, with CW photographer, and autumn aficionado, Tom Bailey
Country Walking’s photographer is an autumn aficionado. Join him on a journey to the heart of the season in the Forest of Dean.
I HAD ONE OF those days recently. It was perfect in every way. For once, weather, planning and luck aligned to produce a harvest so much bigger than I was expecting. For I have been to the Forest of Dean at its most regal and stirring time of year: autumn. Ale houses (and other establishments where walkers gather) across the land will hear of this day for ever more. Here is how it unfolded…
Pre-dawn, somewhere in the Forest of Dean. It doesn’t matter where; there is so much of it and all of it a similar shade of awesome. A pattering sound, soft and harmless, intrigues me. Infrared binoculars reveal the cause: leaves. Who would have thought it? Leaves fall at night as well as in the day. The hours of darkness have been cold. In the frost, the leaves seem to give up and let go. No gale takes them, these go of their own free will, down to be reunited with the others in the feasting hall of the forest floor. The afterlife for leaves, quite literally.
Walking through them is surprisingly quiet. Freshly fallen, they have yet to obtain that crisppacket quality. My pace is slow. It’s only now that light is filing apologetically into the back seats of the day. My confidence grows with every step. With every minute I see more, hear more.
A duel is happening. A tawny owl hoots, closely followed by the cawing of a crow. Not to be outdone, the owl calls again. The crow answers threefold, knowing the day is on its side. Robin song puts an end to the matter. The day has won.
A great meaty hunk of green on the map, the Forest of Dean is entwined with paths, tracks, rides, roads, cycleways and, best of all, large areas without paths which just need exploring. You can be Lord of the Forest for the day.
But there is an elephant in the room, or to be more precise, a boar in the wood. I walk into the early light and a clearing in the trees. All over the grassy glade, the soil has been turned over. I see cloven hoof tracks and droppings the likes of which I’ve never encountered (and believe me, I’ve seen a few).
Conker-brown bracken close by is infused with an unmistakably musky scent. Wild boar have been here, and recently.
Fifteen years ago, boar were released or escaped from farms close by. Since then they have thrived. There are around 1500 of them, and annual culling is failing to halt the increase (they have no natural predators in our country, apart from cars).
Boar have a reputation for being dangerous, but as yet no people have been harmed by them. Dogs are at more risk and there have been instances of sows protecting their young and attacking dogs. I did an image search on Google before I got here and there are pictures of people feeding and stroking some surprisingly large boar (or ‘peegs’ as one local I talked to calls them). It seems wild boar are here to stay in the Forest of Dean.
Rabbits and grey squirrels are active; a rustling above me confirms the latter. An acorn thuds into the leaf litter. A minute later one hits my shoulder. It’s clear one of those bushy-tailed critters has taken a distinct dislike to my presence. That awful screech of theirs is next. Whose idea was it to mix such a cute, fluffy creature with that sound? I retreat, away from the clearing.
Dog walkers abound at this early hour. I spy a man and hound approaching on another track. Something is flushed from the bracken near him. And there it is: a wild boar, racing straight across the track. Twenty metres distant and not impressively large, but nonetheless a wild boar.
It’s also my first. My heart pounds; it’s a heck of a thrill.
‘‘ THE FOREST OF DEAN IS ENTWINED WITH PATHS, TRACKS, RIDES… AND, BEST OF ALL, LARGE AREAS WITHOUT PATHS WHICH JUST NEED EXPLORING.
I follow it into the undergrowth hoping for a closer look, but alas it has vanished and I see neither hide nor hair of one the rest of the day.
Light draws me on. Through the branches of beech trees, a low beam of sunlight, thick and syrupy as only autumn light can be, hits the tree in front. Beech leaves have never glowed as these do. My resistance wavers and I step from the path, entering the forest for real, not in search of boar as I thought, but to feel that slice of rich sunlight on my face.
Once in its tractor beam I move through the trees up a bank, blinded whenever I raise my head to check my course. The life and warmth of it make me deliriously happy. Grounded in reality normally, I let myself have a moment. The power of the season is there to be smelled, seen and – as I reach my hand into sieved rays of sun – touched.
Once off-path, the drug of exploration takes over. Never far from a track or path I cut from one to the other, treading where few people go but where many of the forest creatures regularly pass.
The freedom of walking that you might usually associate with wide open spaces is everywhere here too. No fences or crops to hinder progress, off-path walking requires a bit of effort, but it brings rich rewards. Six fallow deer are mooching close by me, their barcoded backsides flashing as they nervously trot a few metres further away. Half a dozen heads are focused on my still presence. Raising the binoculars to my face proves too much, and the buck leads them off deeper under the larch trees.
Those very same trees are raining down an inaudible deluge of needles. The larch is deciduous, rare amongst the pines. If I look towards the light, I can see the needles falling. In fact I half expect to be able to hear them, too. One is caught in a single thread of spider silk. It’s straining, as if it feels the need to complete its journey to the forest floor.
Half an hour later I’m cursing those very same needles. They’re all down my neck.
Beech, sweet chestnut, oak, birch and larch make up the bulk of the deciduous trees in the forest. The primary mammals here are rabbits, squirrels, badgers, foxes, muntjac and fallow deer, boar, mice, voles, shrews, bats and moles. Birds are too numerous to name, but jays are everywhere, collecting acorns and burying them with the same desperation as the squirrels.
My wandering brings me to Crabtree Hill and onto Woorgreens Nature Reserve, a largely open area of wet and dry heath. Suddenly having the sky as my canopy instead of the trees is both refreshing and unsettling: there is way too much empty space for my brain to handle after being in such a confined, detail-heavy environment.
There are many birders up here. They’re all looking for a great grey shrike, a scarce winter migrant that was seen at the weekend. Just about everyone I meet tells me I’m too late for the fallow deer rut, which has come and gone. They conjure up images and sounds that would have filled the forest. I’m here a few days after All Hallows’ Eve, and I’m having such a great time I don’t even regret missing the rut. The forest is restless after the lull of high summer. Action is everywhere.
‘‘ NOW MY EYE IS IN, THE SIGNS ARE EVERYWHERE …WILD BOAR HAVE BEEN HERE, AND RECENTLY. ’’
Off I go again, this time following a compass bearing through the wood (I’m the kind of person who regards that as fun). There are large areas without any serious vegetation to hinder progress, so I challenge myself with a bit of leap-frogging, a navigational term for moving from your current position to a further point on the bearing along which you are travelling. I leap from one clump of trees to the next; it requires a certain amount of nerve and concentration, especially when distractions are everywhere. Cue a large, ghosting form, gliding through the canopy. All I see is a shape, a form, a shadow. A goshawk? I’ll never know, typical of this most secretive of birds.
I emerge from my bearing on a track, check the map, identify features, plot my position, then decide on a new destination, and I’m away again into the trees. Every time I do this I feel like adventure awaits me. Walking on the forest paths is great, but it’s known. I want the unknown. In the Forest of Dean there is plenty of unknown, never very far from the comfort of the known.
The light, which is never many shades away from golden, is starting to intensify the autumn colours. The shadows stretch back into the trees, merging to form an hour-early twilight. I’m tired, more mentally than physically; there has just been so much to see.
Back at the car I boil my Kelly kettle, make a cup of tea, and relax with the last of the sun on my face. Insects fizz above the open ground in front of me.
There is a mellowness to the day, and come to think of it, to the year. Before I change my boots and go, a faint but identifiable scent wafts my way on the insect-fanned air movements. Boar. Never very far away, but seemingly nearly always out of view, they are part of the uniqueness that is the Forest of Dean.
Driving away I feel a pang of longing. I was already in love with autumn. After a day amongst the trees, the passion is raging like a fever.