Paradise by way of Slough Trading Estate

The air was soft and still, the light was low and the only sound was the gentle patter of beech mast falling on a carpet of dry, dead leaves. Heaven must be a woodland on a fine autumn morning, and it is a peculiarly English miracle that you can find paradise a couple of miles from the Slough Trading Estate.

The woes of a sleepless night in Slough Travelodge – if John Betjeman had stayed in a Slough hotel where the card key to the room didn’t work and the bathroom door wouldn’t close if the toilet seat was down, he might have been even harder on the place – evaporated within seconds of my stepping into Burnham Beeches.

I arrived at 7.10am to dewy spiders’ webs, blackberries, the distant cackle of a green woodpecker and shafts of sunlight arrowing through the oaks, birches and rowans, dripping with red-orange berries. Even the planes stacking for Heathrow only moaned quietly.

As its name suggests, this dry, wooded common is famous for its ancient beeches. The usually short-lived beech was for centuries regularly pollarded for firewood, at about the height a local person could reach. This kept the beeches at a stout, sturdy height, and bequeathed them near-immortality and tremendous character.

The Oldie

The Victorians were the first to picnic under the trees and give them names – the Elephant Tree; His Majesty – and today there is Druid’s Oak, an 800-yearold which boasts the biggest girth in the forest, as well as the spindly Ballerina beech and the Cage Pollard.

Ancient trees suit our individualistic age. They are relatable celebrities of the natural world, brimming with charisma and meaning, and I was eager to encounter them.

Meeting your heroes is supposed to be dangerous, but Burnham’s beeches did not disappoint. The first marvel had a tremendous, stout trunk that revealed itself to be completely hollow. Beech trunks are usually smooth, as if designed for our graffiti, but this one’s bark was as gnarled as an old oak, and no wonder – this slender skin alone was holding up the tree without the help of any heartwood. Further on were trees grown into fantastical curves: writhing eels, human-like limbs, face of green men.

Two hundred years ago, the spread of a coal-based affluence meant the pollarding paused and the stout beeches’ new limbs grew too tall, and these immortals tore apart. When cattle-grazing stopped too, the forest grew in around the pollards, further imperilling them.

Since the 1980s, we have sought to save our celebrities, clearing ‘halos’ of forest around them to give them light, and fencing them off to protect them from our understandable desire to pay homage to, touch and be blessed by the ancients.

Burnham Beeches is a landscape under plenty of people pressure, but there is another scourge of the celebrity trees. I’d never seen so many in my life.

Rustle. Scutter. Scratch. On this quietest of autumn days, the dominant noise of Burnham Beeches was the scratch of grey-squirrel claws. The Corporation of London, which manages this National Nature Reserve, apparently ‘controls’ them to lessen their barkstripping, branch-chewing hooliganism but it seems futile. They chased each other in helter-skelters down trunks. They rattled and squeaked like broken toys. They had the temerity to build dreys in the ancient trees.

Squirrel fuss loomed large, but I didn’t let it spoil what was becoming a deeply spiritual experience.

I found an ancient pollard without security fencing and sat beside it, enjoying an hour of bliss. An oval-shaped hole in its trunk was like a benign, green eye. After a period of blissful silence in this glade, the fallen beech carpet rustled and a wood mouse ran straight towards me. Encountering my rucksack, it somersaulted and sped back to the safety of the ancient beech.

When I returned to suburban civilisation, a red kite circled over Pets At Home on the Slough Trading Estate. It seemed a sign. Whatever ugliness we build, we have also created and protected great beauty. Often, thankfully, it can be found in the same neighbourhood.

Burnham Beeches National Nature Reserve car park (8am to 4.30pm in winter), Lord Mayor’s Drive, Slough SL2 3LB. Or X74 bus (15 mins) from Slough bus station, beside the railway station