Summer leaves await a glorious autumnal death
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Version 0 of 1. Summer’s end, and the forest is thick. Beneath the leaves, the sun creates puddles of bright and black, through a canopy still swollen enough to block most of its light. Roads are green tunnels. Paths are dark and have a warm smell, the dense flotilla-dust of bug, web and sap lit brilliantly in the air. Soon the forest leaves will burn, through every shade of russet, to glorious autumnal death. The Forest of Dean is an old world forest; organic, unwieldy, fecund, oaky. Forest as nature wanted, not the sterile, shadowed ranks of spruce that too often masquerade as such. In high summer a walk under the canopy seduces, in autumn one through its fresh decay beguiles. But now the more subtle charms of September’s change-month call for a higher lookout. Symonds Yat Rock is one. The New Forest, of comparable vintage, has no such vantage. Yat Rock’s eyrie-view of water and field and forest is scenically famous: the Wye’s gorgeous meander and the gorge it has routed, fields against the river, trees against the fields. Look along the rock’s aspect and, wigged with trees, pale limestone faces show the river’s slow slice. Peregrines nest in their creases. The view is also old. Walk its top and you walk the foundations of an iron age hillfort. The forest below was bigger then. Even in 1861’s Book of South Wales, the Wye, and the Coast, tourists to this “beautiful object” were promised views of “a mass of close trees … there can be no space between them for miles upon miles”. This old hunting forest is today less than it was, but still proudly stocky – a relic of the ancient, storybook wood that once stretched across Britain. The summer swell is over. So, now, watch for the turn. Summer leaves heavy with sun-loving chlorophyll and carotene make greens mask all else. As the nights lengthen the green diminishes, revealing yellows and browns, reds sometimes. But watch the canopy from this broad view-place in this brief, phantom change-season, and it’s not a draining you’re seeing. It’s a blush, shyly chasing across the leaves. Follow Country diary on Twitter:@gdncountrydiary |