Forest thoughts

 This week I’ve been on a writing retreat deep in the forest with my good friends Chris Hammacott and Richard and Helen Salsbury.  We’re staying in a very comfortable cottage down a forest track a few miles out of Wareham in Dorset.  The house is reached by a narrow track winding between mature tree boles.

We’ve been doing a lot of walking around here, and that’s got me thinking about how living in the forest would dominate people’s thinking in the past.  That thought has also been triggered by reading Juliet E McKenna’s Green Man books.  They’re contemporary rural paranormal fantasy books, and the main character is a dryad’s son who works as a carpenter.

The great thing Juliet has done is make her main character Dan exist with a foot in both the normal contemporary world and with a foot in the timeless supernatural world of dryads, naiads, boggarts, and giants.  He owns a mobile phone and a laptop, yet uses ancient remedies to deal with a giant.

One thread which runs through all the stories is Dan’s struggles to keep the secret of his dryad heritage.  One minute he’s fixing roofing battens on a building site, the next he’s seeing the flash of emerald light in the eyes of an old carving of the Green Man.

I think I wouldn’t have understood how closely intertwined the paranormal and normal worlds could be if I hadn’t had this week’s stay in the forest.  We’ve walked to the nearest pub through the forest.  That’s a mile and a half walk each way, most of it on a forest track between mature trees. We’ve been walking in daylight, and at night there would be no light at all on that track.  It’s easy to see how the human mind would create supernatural beings at the slightest leaf rustle.

Walking back at dusk, we passed a field of grazing deer.  Encountering one of those unexpectedly on a forest track could easily give rise to tales of spectral creatures.

Being on foot, being surrounded by trees, and hearing no traffic noise, is a very unusual experience for me.  We passed a few people on the track to the pub, but most of the time we were the only ones there.  There is a deep stillness in the heart of the trees.  This time of year, with the leaves falling, there is little birdsong.  We’ve seen raptors hunting, but heard no birds in the trees.

So it’s easy to see how our rich folklore woven around forests arose.  I have a much better understanding of it now after this week away.