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The Blight of Ashwellthorpe

My first view of Ashwellthorpe is of a bright yellow rape field where poppies blush under a louring sky, June, 2013. The wood comes into view, ‘a darker green than usual’, like the Enchanted Wood of Enid Blyton’s books. It is dense with many species of tree. In rich full leaf, they nod and sway in the dull light, waiting for the rain. They beckon to me over the hedgerows and houses, but the road running straight through the village leads me past. I nearly hit the kerb as I try to glimpse the ashes I’ve come all this way to see. An elderly cyclist ahead of me pauses to let me pass, perhaps to save himself or to stare at me, a stranger in this sleepy village. I pass the hall and the church, the rows of plain houses and cottages that line the road: a barrier obstructing my view of the wood.

The village sweeps by and I pull up in the lane beside three ashes that all have the characteristic antlers of leafless upper branches, like oak trees widening their canopy as they mature. Crown dieback is a symptom of Chalara fraxinea’s presence and these trees remind me of photos I’ve seen of diseased trees in Poland. It could be part of a natural process … or signs of Ash Dieback. Naturally, I go for the latter theory since I know it has spread widely across the Norfolk Broads.

I climb out of my car and look back at the village and the wood. It is low-lying, cradled in the embrace of the fields and village that have depended on it for centuries. There is a gap between a larger and smaller patch of woodland, mown through as straight as a Roman road. The smaller wood is Upper Wood and the larger is Lower Wood. They are believed to have been separated during the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s, when a perfectly straight line of vision was required between London and the Norfolk coast for semaphore messages to be relayed as part of an early-warning system. Apparently it took only half an hour to relay the message of an approaching ship near Great Yarmouth all the way to London. Upper Wood is now privately owned and is a jealously guarded pheasant-shoot, but Lower Wood is managed by the Norfolk Wildlife Trust and is a site of designated specific interest. It is also the first place in Britain where symptoms of Ash Dieback were discovered in the wild.

The woods are beckoning to me. I fancy I can hear them whispering their secrets, like the trees in The Magic Faraway Tree. Blyton’s enchanted tree is huge and guarded by fairy folk, its branches reaching into different magical worlds. Its roots stretch far into the earth and it represents a complete entity, both admired and feared by the woodland folk who live nearby. Although the Faraway Tree is of an unspecified type, Blyton was perhaps aware of the ash’s magical properties and its powers of protection. It bears some resemblance to Yggdrasil, a huge tree that was at the centre of the Norse universe. Its roots were so abundant and so long that they reached into the underworld, and its trunk was so tall that its branches stretched to Heaven. Yggdrasil was the giver of life, at the beginning of all creation.

I drag myself back into my car and drive on to Norwich, knowing I will return in the late afternoon. Being among green things, in nature, is almost as essential to me as breathing: I cannot go too long without it. I need to feel the air, sun and rain on my face, to hear the wind blowing through the trees and grass. With a pang, I watch the woods receding from view and just refrain from stopping the car to go back.

It’s pouring with rain when I turn into the tiny Rosemary Meadow car park in the late afternoon. Steve Collin, head forester with the Norfolk Wildlife Trust, has to flag me down. No bigger than a garden, it backs onto the Wildlife Trust Meadow that skirts the south side of the wood. It is bright with Greater Spearwort, like large buttercups, and tightly clustered Red Clover, but today the grasses hang their heads, beaten down by the rain, which has been gathering force all afternoon. Steve seems not to notice it as he squelches towards the wood, with me slithering behind. He is at home here and strides with an air of propriety, accustomed to leading people round the wood that has received so much media attention in recent months.

The dripping trees enfold us in their shadows, sheltering us from the worst of the downpour. Fat raindrops splay on my glasses and blur my vision as I look up to the top of the canopy to see the tall ashes that have shot above the roof of the wood in their eagerness to reach the light. At my level, five feet four from the ground, it would be easy to walk past the trunks of the young ash without noticing what they are, since their bark is darkened with damp. They sway in the gloom of the wet wood, their leaves rustling, sweeping away the rain.

Twigs snap underfoot as branches of alder and ash brush our legs and reach out to touch our shoulders. A short way into the woods, we stop by what is probably the most photographed tree of 2012: the ash sapling on which Steve first noticed signs of disease in October that year. It has a diamond-shaped lesion close to a shoot some way up its thin trunk, which is seeping resin, like congealed blood from an open wound. Unlike human flesh, though, the tree bark cannot heal. Steve breaks off a dead shoot to show me how brittle it is. The effects of Chalara are easier to spot on a thin young tree because the diseased girdle that forms around the trunk is visible and everything above it dies. Leaves have blackened and twigs have wilted, ready to fall to the ground, no use to anyone. Most of the dead leaves and wood are removed once they’ve fallen, as instructed by the Forestry Commission.

On the day they first spotted the disease, Steve Collin and Dr Anne Edwards, the volunteer warden at Ashwellthorpe Woods, were looking at the coppicing that had been done. After twenty years, they had finally brought the cycle of coppicing into a regular rotation and the woods were responding to their care, with an annual increase in the numbers of bluebells and wild orchids that would not thrive as well without the light exposed by coppicing. Steve and Anne noticed that some of the trees appeared to be dead and reported it to the Forestry Commission, suspecting an invasion of Chalara fraxinea. Meanwhile Anne, a scientist, took samples back to the John Innes Centre where she works and alerted her colleagues to the potential danger lurking in their own backyard. Within weeks Chalara was confirmed but they knew they wouldn’t be able to gauge the real level of damage until the autumn leaves had fallen and the new buds had unfurled on the trees in spring. We discuss whether the fungus was blown in spores across the sea from Denmark, and Steve notes that the wind has been blowing easterly for a few years. In addition, the heavy rains in recent summers made perfect breeding ground for the fungus, although the ashes themselves can thrive in wet conditions.

An area of saplings holds yellowed shoots that have been drained of life. A bright yellow one is still sprouting from the base, though most of the tree above the infected girdle is dead. It hides behind a group of healthy green shoots. The saplings’ bark is slick with rain that trickles over a purplish gash, the mark of disease. Most of the signs of Ash Dieback in Ashwellthorpe are in the coppice growth, but the big ashes at the back of the coppice have Ash Dieback at the top and have probably had it for two or three years at least. The rooks perched on the uppermost branches are oblivious, croaking to one another in the dark heart of the wood.

Ash is the predominant species here but it is a mixed coppice of hazel, ash, hawthorn, alder and sallow. Ash, closely followed by alder, was possibly the commonest tree to make up the forests of the Neolithic wildwood that covered the Broadlands when the sheep of Neolithic peoples began to nibble at the tasty bark and seeds, turning the woods to scrub. Much of the woodland would have been felled to make way for farming and building. By the time the Anglo-Saxons, and later the Vikings, arrived, the woods were shrinking, with fields taking over. The Domesday Book of 1081 makes reference to a large tract of woodland here, and the present day Ashwellthorpe Woods are the last vestige of its former dimensions. The woods have retained their current size since about the 1830s. Seen from above on aerial photos, they form two darker blocks of green among the patches of yellow cereals, pale green wheat and brown ploughed land.

Behind Ashwellthorpe Hall, to the east of the wood, the remains of an Anglo-Saxon burial site were found, so it is safe to assume that there has been a settlement here since the early Anglo-Saxons arrived between AD 500 and 700. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who came to East Anglia in search of a better life, would in all probability have approached Ashwellthorpe (then unnamed) from one of the tributaries of the Waveney river, which then reached nearly to the sea in the south. The dark ash wood would have risen from the lush marshlands and mud banks, a welcome sight on the terraqueous landscape, providing shelter and respite from the sun. Anglo-Saxons tended to live in isolated farmsteads of one or two family groupings, eschewing the larger towns and fortresses founded by the Romans in favour of a simple rural life.

Lower Ashwellthorpe Wood has an industrial history that dates back centuries, serving the local communities with faggots, hurdles and poles. We pass a group of ash that has grown in straight lines and would make strong, flexible poles, essential if you were going to build a structure of any kind. The Farming Journal of Randall Burroughs provides evidence of the various uses made of Ashwellthorpe Wood. Burroughs was a gentleman farmer from Wymondham who maintained a log of his daily business that is of little literary interest but of great historical value. We can connect the ash trees of Ashwellthorpe Woods with Burroughs’s regular acquisition of hurdles. On Monday, 21 February 1796 he states: ‘Fetched a load of hurdles from Ashwellthorpe Wood for Wm Gray.’ Gray was clearly a local veterinary surgeon, or someone who assumed the function of one, because on Sunday, 24 February 1799, Burroughs wrote:

On Wednesday Nelson went to Ashwellthorpe Wood for a load of hurdles namely 3 dozen & deposited them in the 12 Acre. On Thursday to Wicklewood & borrow’d 3 doz gate hurdles of Mr Bernard. On Friday the ewes and lambs viz 46 ewes, 49 lambs & 21 wethers were hurdled upon the 12 Acre. The lambs had been gelt on Tuesday by Wm Gray. The night was very rainy but they all recovered without ointment.

The hurdles he purchased were almost certainly made of ash and were used traditionally to hold livestock in place for routine operations, such as neutering or shearing. It is an example of how ash from these woods has served the needs of the farming community and advanced their interests.

Prior to the Norfolk Wildlife Trust’s acquisition of the wood in the 1980s, it had been owned and worked by the Co-operative Society, which coppiced ash poles for broom handles and hazel brush for their heads. For centuries until the 1970s a brush factory in Wymondham obtained all its ash poles from Ashwellthorpe Woods. It employed many local women, who were highly skilled and worked for half the wage that men received. The Victorian historian William Kiddier recorded an ongoing battle that began in 1829 when male journeymen complained that the women were undercutting them. Kiddier laid the blame at the feet of the employers for exploiting the women, who were often so poor that they were simply glad of the work to support their families and did not dare to quibble over their pay. There is now a museum of broom-making at the former factory in Wymondham, which describes the plight of the local women who worked there for generations.

Lower Wood still has the feel of a working wood, with one well-trodden path in a regular shape, as if it was marked out by lines of coppicing and collection; there are few of the smaller tracks that children make in woodlands used for leisure. The clumps of thick, taller ashes seem impenetrable: the trees seem to have closed ranks, as if to prevent human foraging. Perhaps it is their response to the over-exploitation of centuries of industry, or maybe they are hiding the signs of Ash Dieback that are evident in their bare crowns. Steve Collin knows of trees in Norfolk that started showing signs of incremental growth loss six years ago but at the time no one realized what it was. That particular plantation has completely succumbed to the disease.

At Lower Ashwellthorpe Wood, there will be one final harvest of the timber that can be sold for firewood, when the dead trees are coppiced and removed in the cycle of woodland management. Once the infected ash has been coppiced it won’t grow back, and infected timber can’t be used because the disease stains it. Steve was advised by European experts to fell any ash the instant he saw wilting leaves, so that he could sell the wood before Dieback took its full effect. He wonders whether that was what happened on the Continent, whether foresters felled the trees with Ash Dieback at the first sign of the disease so that they could still make use of the wood. Such radical action would be detrimental to the ecosystem of a wood such as Ashwellthorpe, where removal of the dead wood from a forest floor with easily compacted soils and wet conditions would also take away the fungi and flora attached to it.

There are many schemes around the country, funded by the Forestry Commission, to burn wood as an alternative to fossil fuels but they were based on the reliability of ash, which stores well, grows fast and burns better than any other wood. The ash coppiced from Lower Ashwellthorpe Wood would have enabled the woodlands to pay for themselves. Now Norfolk Wildlife Trust will have to find other sources of fuel, which may mean buying in from abroad. This would not only be expensive but potentially fraught with hazards, such as the fear that the lethal Emerald Ash Borer from America, where it has laid waste to millions of ash trees, could somehow find its way across the Atlantic.

We pause for a moment to watch a furniture beetle and a Minotaur beetle, distinguished by its horns, crawling towards a hole in an ash, as if in a race against one another to get inside it first. The hole is almost as big as the backside of a cow and the bark has peeled back to form a thick fringe framing the exposed wood, which is gradually rotting, aided by the beetles and other insects that feed off the bark. Steve picks off the furniture beetle to show me but it walks off the end of his thumb and falls into the grass: we have inadvertently helped the Minotaur beetle to win the race. Certain epiphytes, like lichen, prefer the ash bark because oak is too acidic and there is a danger that many such rare species will be lost unless they find alternative habitats.

Under the tree a mat of ground cover sends its leafy runners in all directions – it stretches right across the path. This is Ground Ivy, or ‘ale hoof’, as the early Saxon and Norse settlers called it. The leaves are very different from those of ivy, larger and rougher, with teeth all the way round. I rub one between my thumb and forefinger and smell it: it has a tart citrus flavour, a little like the lemon sage I grow in my garden. Apparently it was used as an alternative to hops for making beer, and the Scandinavian Vikings, who lived near the wood, would almost certainly have used it to make a fresh light ale. It likes damp places and semi-shade, so the foot of an ash is the ideal place for it; its purple flowers cling to the ivy, each with two lips to drink the rainwater. It is likely that when the Vikings dug it up they would have used spades with ash handles.

Before leaving the wood, I stand still to look up at the canopy of a few mature ashes growing so close together they probably share the same stool under the ground. Some of their branches interlock but their crowns fan out into finely etched sprays, each leaf like a black flower, hundreds of them dancing under the raindrops that tickle my skin. Speckled light filtering through the leaves almost makes me dizzy: the overlapping sections of the canopy seem to revolve, like a kaleidoscope turning. A nearby broadleaf tree, probably a sallow, forms a solid clump of closely knit leaves in its canopy; a morris dancer next to a ballerina, it is lacking in elegance and lets no light through.

The morning after the rain, the clouds gradually clear, giving way to blue sky and warm sun: a perfect English summer’s day. My friend Lizzie and I walk away from the village towards Underhill, slightly uphill but not so that you’d notice. The farmer has cut a path that takes us straight across a corn field. Wheat ears brush against our legs then spring gracefully back into place. The earth is soft and sap rises through the grasses as the moisture of the night’s drenching evaporates on the warm air. Miles of cereal fields are spread all around us, relieved only by hedgerows and distant houses. A skylark is singing above, and I turn to see the wood behind the village. The plain houses of Ashwellthorpe have receded from view and it is easier now to imagine the wood as it once was, surrounded by the fields and marshes of the Anglo-Saxon settlement.

On our approach to the solid cluster of houses that forms the hamlet of Fundenhall, the fields that scroll away from the woods, with the marks of previous inhabitants imprinted on the soil, are used to human feet. The early Anglo-Saxons, when they arrived from their cold wastelands, must have been seduced by the warm climate and fertile, waterlogged land. We are walking in an anti-clockwise direction: south-east to Fundenhall, north-east towards Toprow, north-west to Wreningham, then south towards Lower Wood. From every angle I can see the wood. It is the dominant landmark in the area, the nucleus around which everything else has grown – fields, hedges, paths, roads, farms and houses, people and animals. In a landscape where hills are absent, birds of prey perch on the highest trees (probably ash) to survey the surrounding countryside for voles and mice.

The wood is about a mile to the west as we walk by a high hedge at the side of another neat field of corn. By the end of this walk we will have seen it from south, east and north. Between us and the wood, hidden under layers of earth and crops, the Anglo-Saxon burial ground lies behind Ashwellthorpe Hall, invisible now among the tranquil expanse of fields. Another skylark is singing above us, and the scents of flowers are delicate and sweet. Yellow Field Pepperwort, red Sheep’s Sorrel and Elderflower waft across the golden waves of wheat. My excitement grows at the prospect of walking in the wood again. It is hot now, well past midday, as we cross the corn fields towards Lower Wood. Although I was in it less than twenty-four hours ago, I am eager to see it in sunlight.

A row of ash and alder guard the north side. They have been here longer than any other species. We are entering by a path where tall grasses have been trodden down and the sides of an earth mound have been sculpted by the weight of many feet. Lizzie is slightly ahead and pauses to look around. In black T-shirt and shorts, she is framed by an ivy-smothered trunk and a mature ash, almost hidden under the burgeoning mass of vegetation rising above her. She looks slighter than usual and, fleetingly, as she slips into the waiting wood, she seems like a tree wraith or a wood nymph.

An ancient bank, with a ditch, surrounds the wood on all but the west side, where Lower Wood was separated from Upper. The ditch, now rank with stagnant water, would have been deepened by farmers over the centuries to deter livestock from entering the woods, but the original bank is believed to have been created in the Anglo-Saxon period. The ditch would have been dug with ash-handled spades, labour-intensive work. The farmers and peasants who toiled over it are most likely under the soil in the burial ground I mentioned.

When the ash trees have all gone, the mound will be exposed. Nothing is ever planted in this wood. The ‘Ash’ in Ashwellthorpe will be a historic reference. The ‘well’, originally ‘weall’, meaning ‘bank or mound’ in Anglo-Saxon, will remain: a lip of mud sculpted over fifteen hundred years. It will continue to accommodate the rain and silt and keep the boundary of field and tree. If the bank could talk, it could tell us who made it and why, tales of the many people and animals who have passed over it and left. When the ash trees have gone, the bank will be the sole keeper of the woods.

The earthworks will do the job they were originally intended for: to delineate the woods from the farms and maybe as a form of defence. Perhaps they were decorated with spikes or sharp implements to impale robbers and marauders crossing the woods to raid farmsteads at dead of night. Protection was much needed in the long and turbulent period of the many Viking invasions of the eighth and ninth centuries before the Danelaw was established. It seems likely that the Anglo-Saxons conceived the earthworks as part of a defence system, as they were in other parts of the country. It was common practice for earth mounds to be built around settlements as defence boundaries.

The copse is cool and welcoming after the heat of the open fields, the air heavily scented with the humus of rotting vegetation and moisture-locked soil. A little light filters though the fine canopy of ash and sallow, but not enough to dry out the wood after the drenching of the last few days. Rays of sunlight sparkle on the woodland floor. Last night the branches were dripping and bent under the weight of rain; today the boughs of the ash are still heavy and there is a sombre air among the trees. Our mood changes as we walk through them, looking for lesions on the bark of young ash. At first it is a game to try to spot the signs and I’m keen to show off my new knowledge. But Lizzie is walking fast ahead of me, and doesn’t want to stay too long to examine the diseased trees. We become silent, and I feel as I do when visiting a sick relative or friend in hospital: I want to stay and cheer them up but feel helpless.

We leave the wood to the plaintive whistle of a chiffchaff, the two notes, one higher than the other, seeming to call us back. As we stroll past the meadow towards the car, I’m aware of the trees whispering behind me. I turn back, but the sound fades. Yet as I drive away from the village, with the windows wound down, I hear it again, many voices muttering, not words or syllables, but musical notes. It reminds me of the description of the spirit chorus that the soul seers claimed to hear in Montaillou, France, in the fourteenth century. Many occupants of this wood are passing into spirit form and, clamour as they may, nothing can save them.