For my father, Oscar Schneidau, with love

Cover illustration: © David Wyatt

First published 2020

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Lisa Schneidau, 2020

The right of Lisa Schneidau to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9577 1

Typesetting and origination by Typo•oglyphix, Burton-on-Trent

Printed and bound by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1   Wildwood

Niall and the Hag at the Well

Merlin

The Ancient Ones

The Rowan of Dubros

2   Royal Prerogative

Mad Sweeney

Robin Hood and the Beggar

A Test of Love

The Red King’s Deer

3   Hunter and Hunted

Herne the Hunter

The Vixen and the Oak

The Boar of Eskdale

The Man and the Nightingale

4   The Clearing in the Woods

Perceval

The Green Lady

The Giant with Seven Heads

5   The Other Ones

Tamlane

The Woodman and the Axe

The Swallowed Court

Pixy-Led

The Hound of the Hill

6   Escape to the Wild

Diarmuid and Grainne

Jack and the Green Man

The Flight of Birds

7   Tree Folk

Auld Cruivie

Three Wishes

The Gurt Vurm of Shervage Wood

Jeanie the Bogle

8   The Path Ahead

The Green Women of One Tree Hill

The Tree’s Revenge

The First Crop

The Woodland under the Sea

The White Hind of Hope

Story Sources and Further Reading

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lisa Schneidau trained as an ecologist. She has worked with wildlife charities all over Britain to restore nature in the landscape, in roles including farm advisor, river surveyor, political lobbyist and conservation director. She is also a professional storyteller, sharing stories that inspire, provoke curiosity and build stronger connections between people and nature. She lives on Dartmoor.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Where possible, I have drawn on multiple story sources for every traditional story retold here. I’m grateful to the folklorists, ecologists and authors whose work has heavily influenced this book, especially Katherine Briggs, Niall Mac Coitir, Oliver Rackham and Ruth Tongue. My thanks to the ever-generous and wondrous storytelling community; the audiences and school groups who have listened and shared the stories and given feedback; and all the storytellers who have collected and shared these tales in the telling down the generations. I hope that I have honoured their stories well here, and added something useful to the tradition.

Thanks to David Wyatt for his beautiful cover artwork, and to Nicola Guy at The History Press for all her support in bringing the book together.

Thanks in particular to Ronnie Conboy, Moira Houghton, Lisa Kenwright, Sam Lee, Karl Schneidau, Beccy Swaine, Ruth Testa and Nikki Walsh; and to Tony Whitehead, who has provided support, encouragement and inspiration throughout.

INTRODUCTION

It’s the end of February in south Devon, and hope is springing everywhere in the woods. The first of the tender green bluebell and ramsons leaves cover the ground, and hazel catkins are shaking out their pollen. The great-tit’s ‘tee-che tee-che’ call is heralding the new life to come, although the trees will be bare of leaves for a while yet. It’s been a cruel winter, and I am heartened to be here. The same woodland springtime has been happening in this place for centuries – perhaps even millennia. Wildlife is thriving here, yet this is not wildwood.

After the last great ice melted, ten thousand years ago, trees slowly started to spread across the islands of Britain and Ireland. Pollen records show that birch, aspen and willow came first, followed by pine, hazel, oak and alder, then lime and elm. Holly, ash, beech and hornbeam were more recent, but even they arrived many tree-lifetimes ago. Scientists describe the period around 4500 BC as our ‘climax wildwood’, before human activity started to change everything.

From oak-hazel woods to the Caledonian pinewoods, and from soggy alder and willow carr to graceful ash woodlands on limestone, our woodlands have always been a patchwork of different species, all determined by local soils and conditions. The land never had a continuous cover of trees: in our original ecosystems, gaps in the canopy would have been caused by tree death and grazing animals as well as water and altitude.

As human influence increased, so wider areas of Britain and Ireland were cleared for farming or used as wood pasture. Other areas gradually recolonised with trees, as different groups of people claimed land for agriculture and settlement. Woodlands were worked for timber, for tan-bark, for charcoal and coppice and fuel; they were used as hunting-grounds, to escape or to find food. No woodland was left untouched.

We are now among the least wooded countries in Europe. Only about 6 per cent of the UK and 2 per cent of Ireland is covered in native woodland. A similar area is planted with conifer forest, a relatively modern invention that has more in common with industrial crops, and limited wildlife value. Our woodlands are now mainly used for recreation and nature conservation, and we have lost many connections to woodland products and crafts. Most woodlands are privately owned and inaccessible to the public.

Yet still we are drawn to woodlands in our culture and our imaginations. One of the commonest practical responses to the dawning realisation of the climate and ecological emergency is to plant trees. Membership of organisations like the Woodland Trust and the Wildlife Trusts is growing, and politicians compete for the highest tree-planting target. Collectively, perhaps we are slowly starting to realise the importance of our woodlands, and their value to us, on many levels. We have a lot more to learn.

Our emotional relationship to woodlands is a complicated matter. Folk memories of woodlands may remind us of predators and danger, and of being ‘outside the village’ in wild places that may not be kind; but also of adventure and magical realms. What do our folk tales and our folklore tell us about this relationship, and do they hold any wisdom for us in our current predicament? These are the questions I have set out to answer in collecting the stories for this book.

Here are my own versions of thirty-two traditional tales about woodland from Britain and Ireland. I have chosen this geography because trees don’t respect political borders, and because of the ways in which the cultures of our countries share a common heritage. I am a great believer in re-wilding storytelling, and I have worked to honour the stories while bringing them alive in the context of nature and place.

I have hunted out stories from many different sources: folklore archives and collections, natural history literature, and of course listening to storytellers. Some tales are well known, others more obscure. Like all storytellers, I am grateful to those who have collected and told these stories all down the generations, known and unknown. I have tried wherever possible to pursue a story back to its oldest referenced source. A list of story sources and further reading is provided.

I have told many of these stories to different audiences, indoors and out in the field, sharing ideas and emotions that the stories provoke. Folk tales have their own personalities and idiosyncrasies. Some are darker than others, and the teller will need to decide which stories to share with very young ones.

Here, then, are fragments of woodland in folk-tale form. I hope this book will help to inspire and re-forge connections with our woodlands, past, present and future. Have fun reading these stories, try telling them, and let them work their magic on your emotions and your imagination, as they have worked on mine.

1

WILDWOOD

Bright the tops of the grove; constantly the trees

and the oak leaves are falling;

Happy is he who sees the one he loves.

attr. Taliesin, sixth century

Woodlands in Britain and Ireland that have been recorded continuously on maps since the sixteenth century are called ‘ancient’. These venerable fragments are the richest in flora and fauna of all our woodlands, although they have all been influenced by humans in some way. ‘Wildwood’ no longer exists in our islands.

But the idea of ‘wildwood’ is pervasive and persistent in our hearts, our culture and our folklore. Figures like the Green Man and the Woodwose haunt our art, literature and architecture, and the very act of going out to the woods takes us closer to the ‘wilderness’ that we both fear and crave.

Here are some of our traditional tales of wildwood and ancient beginnings.

NIALL AND THE HAG AT THE WELL

Niall is considered by many to be the first modern high king of Ireland. He was also called ‘Niall of the Nine Hostages’ after the captives held by him from people and lands he had conquered. Niall had many children and recent research has suggested that a high percentage of people in Ireland are directly related to him.

Tara, the seat of the kings of Ireland, is an ancient sacred site near Skryne in County Meath. Excavations nearby have unearthed giant oak pillars that probably came from the mixed broadleaved woodland that used to surround the Hill of Tara. Meath is now the least wooded county in Ireland, because the agricultural land is of high quality.

This story begins in a greenwood in the middle of the kingdom of Ireland. It was an ancient place, thick with oak trees and ash, wych elm and birch, honeysuckle, green moss and rich earth. It had been woodland since anyone could remember, and it covered the valley of a place called Tara.

Through the seasons of the year, and the circles of the years all through time, that great woodland held all of the hopes and dreams and wishes and fears of the kingdom of Ireland. In the very centre of the greenwood, in a glade they say was protected by the spirits, was a deep well of sacred, clear, cool water.

It was around the year 400, just before Christianity became widespread in Ireland, and the high king of Ireland, Eochaid Mugmedón, held his court at the Hill of Tara. He had three sons by his first wife, Mongfind. She was strong of thigh, strong of fist and strong of voice. Her sons were called Brian, Ailill and Fiachra, and all were fine young men.

But then the king took a second wife, Cairenn. She was beautiful, willowy, kind and eager to please other people for the sake of her king. Mongfind was jealous of her, and made no secret of the fact. She treated Cairenn as little more than a servant, and all the king did about it was to sit back and watch.

When Cairenn was expecting her first child, Mongfind ordered her to go to the woods and haul water from the sacred well in the centre of the greenwood, knowing what a heavy job it was. It was there in the centre of the greenwood, in the clearing by the sacred well, on soft green moss and brown earth, that Cairenn gave birth, before her time, to a tiny baby: a beautiful son.

Cairenn was scared for his safety at court, scared that Mongfind would find him and kill him. So she asked her friend Torna, the poet, to look after the little prince. Torna and his wife brought him up as their own. They called him Niall.

Time went by, and Niall grew up to be a strapping lad with a gleam of mischief in his eye. He was one of those young men who was sure he knew the right thread of every matter. Although many of Niall’s ideas didn’t match the harsh reality of the world, you couldn’t help but love his wild eyes and his sincerity and his curiosity for life, and hope he didn’t trip up too many times on his way to wisdom. And he had a way with words – what a way with words! For how could he be otherwise, brought up by the king’s poet, travelling around ancient Ireland with all its magic and mysteries?

In his eighteenth year, Niall vowed to return to the court at Tara, free his mother from the clutches of the king’s first wife, and claim his birthright as the son of the high king of Ireland. At midsummer, when the sun was high and the leaves were strong and hearty and the acorns were beginning to form, Niall took his horse and his ash staff and his travelling cloak, and he made his way back to Tara. It was there that his quick wit and turn for poetry, and his complete innocence and naivety, made Niall very popular among the king’s people.

Now Mongfind had two people to be jealous about. She was determined that one of her own sons should be the next king of Ireland, and she forced the issue. ‘Husband! Are you scared of the future? Now is the time when you should name your successor, the one who is to come after you as the true high king, the real man.’

The high king was ready for such a challenge, and he had his own thoughts: but he wanted to set a test for his four sons. He asked Sithchenn, the druid, his right-hand man, to devise a contest that would reveal the next true king – a test that would find the one who had the stoutest heart, the highest honour and the strongest compassion.

Sithchenn stroked his long beard and pondered, and sifted through all his wisdom. Then he went from the court and did the best thing he could think of. He invited the four brothers into his house at the edge of the greenwood. Then he went outside and went round to the back of the house with a bow drill. He fitted the stick to the stout leather and started to drill, tended the first sparks of fire with hay and dry leaves, and soon there was a merry fire that took to the house like a torch, with all the brothers still inside. Sithchenn sat on the branch of a nearby tree and watched.

Now this situation was not all that it seems. Sithchenn was a blacksmith, and the test he had devised was to set fire to his smithy and see what each of the lads chose to rescue. He watched as Brian came out with a sword, Ailill with a bundle of wood, and Fiachra – thoughtfully – with a pail of beer.

But Niall was nowhere to be seen. Sithchenn and the three brothers watched with horror as the cottage continued to burn, and there was still no Niall. They waited. And waited.

At last, a slightly charred Niall-shaped figure emerged from the cottage – hefting the anvil, the heart of the forge, from which it could be built new again. So it was Niall who was proclaimed the true leader.

Mongfind was not happy, and she would not accept the druid’s decision. ‘That’s ridiculous. As any fool would know,’ she said, ‘the sword is the most valuable!’

So Sithchenn the druid offered to set another task for the four brothers. This time he forged each of them a sword and sent them out hunting one by one into the great greenwood of Tara, to see what they could find.

They each went off in different directions, but soon the tangles of the brambles and bracken at their feet and the tiny criss-crossed paths through the wood meant that they all lost their way in the trees.

Now, whether it was the magic of the place, their thirst, or simply their terrible lack of direction, each one of the brothers was eventually drawn towards a clearing at the centre of the greenwood, and in the clearing there was a well.

The first brother, Brian, got to the clearing, and he could see that standing by the well, and blocking the way, was a woman. To his eyes, she was harsh and coarse: one of the commoners who didn’t know any better in life. Her clothes were ill fitting and patched and hadn’t been washed in a good while. Her feet were bare and calloused; and birds had been nesting in her raven-coloured hair.

She moved towards him, and he could see that under her dirt and filth her green eyes were sparkling. She hissed, ‘A kiss, sir! A kiss for some water!’ Her breath was so foul that he nearly lost his balance.

‘Eugh! No, madam, I can think of nothing worse,’ said Brian, and he went on his way, her laughter ringing in his ears as he went.

The same happened with the second brother, Ailill, and he beat a hasty retreat from the clearing as soon as he was challenged by the hag.

By the time the third brother, Fiachra, found the clearing and the well, he was thirsty. There barring his way was a woman; at least he thought it was a woman … or was it a very large crow? Her eyes were a little too piercing, her clothes were black, her gaze was hooked and hungry … A warrior should not get too close to such a spirit. But to turn away would be to show fear, and that he would never do.

‘A kiss, sir,’ she croaked.

‘Why of course, madam,’ he said, closing his eyes and giving her the slightest dainty peck on the cheek, and then waiting expectantly.

‘You think that’s enough?’ she spat. She stepped aside and Fiachra strode past … only to find himself at the other side of the clearing, behind where they had been standing. He walked towards the centre again … only to find himself, once again, in a different place. The crow-woman cackled and it echoed round the trees. Fiachra reflected that he had done his part, and maybe wasted enough of his royal time here … and he retreated into the trees, in search of a more generous welcome fit for a prince of the realm.

And finally here was Niall, striding through the forest, cutting the woodbine and the ivy with his sword, slashing this way and that, completely determined but without the foggiest clue of what he was looking for, let alone how to find it. And here was Niall, standing at the edge of the glade and taking in the whole scene, quick as a flash. Clearing. Sunlight. Well of water.

As Niall scanned the scene, he felt a strange flutter of recognition across his skin and his soul at this precious place. Somehow, he knew it. Had he been here before?

He was alone in the clearing. There was a well, and he was thirsty. He stepped forward, licking his lips; then from the shadows, seen and yet unseen, the figure of a woman appeared.

She had neither strength of thigh or fist, nor willowy beauty. She was like no woman he had ever met: he wondered if she was entirely human. Bones were plaited in her filthy hair and knotted around her waist, and she wore a badly skinned hare over her head in the manner of a hood. She was wild and dirty and elemental, made of the earth, completely at one with the greenwood.

‘A kiss! A kiss for some water!’

Niall was under the spell of this place, and anything seemed possible. He took a deep breath, took the stinking form into his arms, closed his eyes, and pressed his lips to hers.

She stepped back then, taking his hands, and he opened his eyes. Standing there was an ordinary young woman, dark curling hair and twinkling green eyes. And yet, and yet … she was not ordinary at all. She stood tall and straight and confident in this magical clearing, strong as oak, graceful as ash, deathless as the yew tree. Next to her, Niall noticed a small wooden harp propped against the well.

She talked straight, but her voice sang. ‘Niall, I give you all of myself, that is the sovereignty of all the land of Ireland. You will be high king of a royal and proud line. The water of this well, and the love of this place, will flow through you and all of your bloodline. And maybe … maybe … you might get me as well. If I feel like it.’

And so in that great greenwood of Tara, at midsummer, the kingship was secured and Niall (whom they later called Niall of the Nine Hostages) made his most important alliance of all: he married the land itself, and so found the heart of all that was to come.

MERLIN

Merlin is a shadowy and enigmatic figure in British folklore, and I think this suits him very well. He dances through the Matter of Britain as sage, prophet, shape-shifter, trickster and occasionally stern teacher to Arthur, the high king of Britain. There are several different versions of Merlin’s story, which have been woven together and lovingly reimagined by authors since Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century. According to the stories, Merlin was born of a mortal mother and a fairy father; he prophesied the coming of Arthur, and he helped Utha Pendragon win the queen of Cornwall and father the new high king. One story tells how Merlin’s lover Nimue tricked him to his death by trapping him by magic inside a hawthorn tree.

But here I would like to consider a different Merlin: Myrddin, a bard who lived in the sixth century, and who escaped to the woods and became a hermit, flirting with madness. The story is derived from a lesser-known work by Geoffrey of Monmouth, The Life of Merlin. It is likely that a large area of wildwood still existed in the Scottish borders at the time.

Could this be a manifestation of the Woodwose, our mythical wild man of the woods? Here is the magician who has lost control and given himself up completely to the elements and the land. He is wild man in the wildwood: he is truly outside of civilisation and much more content as a result, despite all the dangers. Perhaps as an elder of his craft, Merlin remembers something the rest of us have forgotten.

Peredur, prince of north Wales, and Gwenddolau, king of Scotland, were at war. They met in battle many times. The battle at Arthuret, near Carlisle, was the bloodiest – and in the thick of the fight, all three of Peredur’s younger brothers were slain.

For Merlin, this battle was different to the others. He let the stories of all the warriors and their families seep under his skin and into his sensibilities, and he re-lived their horrors every day. He could no longer draw a tune from a harp or a meaning from a bird. Half-crazed, he fled into the great wood of Caledon and he became a hermit there.

Merlin walked the woods, learning the ways of the animals and birds and their language, eating nothing but berries and roots. His stories from this time were little more than one long, bitter complaint at the unfairness of life, especially in the winter when food became scarce.

After a year, Merlin’s sister, Ganieda, who was queen at the nearby court of King Rodarch of Cumbria, was worried and sent men to search for her brother. Most couldn’t find him, because Merlin was better at woodcraft than they were. One man, however, after many false trails and weeks of searching, came to a hill where the whole canopy of the woods spread out before him, and crab-apple trees grew all around. A young wolf lay fast asleep in the grass. Next to the wolf was Merlin, wild of hair and beard, lying naked and emaciated and complaining to the sky and the apple trees and the birds around him.

‘Now, my friend the wolf, there is no food and no comfort; hard hunger has weakened both of us.’

The watching man quietly took his harp and started to play a tune. It was a lament from Ganieda at the plight of Merlin and how she was sick with worry; she had been right, he was in danger. Merlin had not heard music for a long time, and it tugged at his heart. He asked the singer to lead him to King Rodarch’s court.

Merlin was glad to see his sister; but the change in noise and pace of life at court was too much for him after a year in the woods, and his madness increased. The king offered him gifts if he would stay. Merlin was about to reply, when he was distracted: he pointed to his sister Ganieda and laughed.

‘What are you laughing at, madman?’ demanded the king.

‘I’m laughing at that leaf in my sister’s hair,’ replied Merlin. ‘I know how it got there. It was less than an hour ago that she was lying in the woods with her lover. Ha!’

The king was furious and looked to his wife for an explanation. ‘He has taken leave of his senses,’ said Ganieda hurriedly, blushing. ‘Let me show you just how mad my dear brother has become, and how little you should believe him.’

She called a young boy of the court to her. ‘Merlin,’ she demanded, ‘tell me how this boy will meet his death.’

‘That’s easy,’ said Merlin. ‘He will fall from a high place.’

Ganieda had the boy led away, his hair cut off and his clothes changed. Then she arranged for the same boy to be brought before Merlin. ‘Brother, tell me now how this boy will meet his death.’

Merlin laughed and said, ‘He will hang from a tall tree.’

Ganieda now had the same boy led away and put into girl’s clothing. She then called for the ‘girl’ and asked her brother: ‘Now foretell the manner of this girl’s death.’

‘Girl or boy,’ said Merlin, ‘she will die in a river.’

‘You see,’ said Ganieda, turning to her husband, ‘he has predicted three different deaths for the same child,’ and now it was the king’s turn to laugh.

Merlin made his preparations and left the court again for the great wood of Caledon. At the gates of the court, despite his knowledge of her secret affair, Ganieda fell down on her knees and begged him not to go. ‘Must I wait forever if you will not return? What is to become of your poor sister?’

‘The nut-rich woods are far richer a place than all the king’s court,’ said Merlin. ‘You will be fine.’

Weeks turned into months, months turned into years, and there was no news from Merlin. The young boy for whom Merlin had prophesied three different deaths grew into a strong young man who loved hunting. One day in the woods, he was chasing a stag when he found himself riding down a hill that was too steep. His horse stumbled and the lad fell down the hill, catching his foot in the branch of a tree, and dangling with his head submerged in the river that ran below. In this way, he did die a threefold death – by falling, hanging from a tree and drowning. So Merlin had been right all along.

Merlin continued to live in the woods that he loved better than any court or community. Very occasionally he was seen by travellers in the woods, lying among the trees and looking up to the sky, mumbling. On one occasion he was seen at the head of a great procession of stags, hinds, foxes, badgers and stoats, with Merlin himself riding a great antlered stag and leading them through the trees.

He only returned one more time to court, to attend a wedding. Queen Ganieda begged him not to return to the woods until winter was out, and he said, ‘The conditions may well be bad this winter. If you want me to be safe, build me a cabin in the woods, but let it have great windows so that I can see out to the stars and read their secrets. In this way I shall be able to foretell the future.’

Merlin set off again for the woods, and Ganieda sent men to build the cabin in a place of Merlin’s choosing. She visited her brother often then, on his own terms, and they had many discussions about what he had seen in the stars. Merlin even foretold the future of Britain:

What is this madness of the Britons, always greedy for something more? They won’t crave peace, but, goaded by fury, they begin civil wars and fight their own kind …

In time, Taliesin, the greatest of bards, also joined Merlin in that cabin in the great wood of Caledon, and they shared stories of the wondrous events that they had lived through and the times that were yet to come. Shortly after Taliesin arrived, a new spring of water burst out of the ground near to Merlin’s cabin, and as the hermit drank from the clear, cool water, his madness departed from him at last.

All that was left was to enjoy the greenwood, the wonders of nature and the conversation of good friends. Ganieda eventually joined Merlin and Taliesin again, and their prophecies travelled up through the clear air, through the trees and out into the starry night above the islands of Britain.

For all we know, they are talking there still.

THE ANCIENT ONES

This story has many correspondences across Welsh and wider British and Irish mythology. I was sorry to discover that owls are not particularly intelligent birds in real life. However, this story is about respect for elders and ancestry, not necessarily wisdom!

The Owl of Cwm Cowlyd would have once hunted through unbroken woodland cover across Wales. Only fragments of this woodland now remain. What stories and memories these places and their plants and animals hold, and how much we have forgotten …

There was an old golden eagle in the woods of Gwernabwy, nesting on a rocky crag that rose out of the trees. He was so old that even he couldn’t remember how many generations of children he had brought into the world with his mate. But then his mate died, and the old eagle soared far over the land, carrying his grief for the loss of his best friend.

He waited for death to come to him, too, but no death appeared. Another year came around. The days lengthened and the sun shone, and the eagle was lonely. ‘Perhaps I should find another mate,’ he thought. ‘I should like to find someone who is advanced in years like me; someone whose family roots run deep through this land.’

The eagle had heard about an old owl nearby, the owl of Cwm Cowlyd, but he wanted to know more about her. So he went to an old friend of his, the stag of Rhedynfre, in a great oak woodland, and asked him how old the owl was.

The stag said, ‘See this ancient oak tree we stand beside? I remember when this tree was an acorn. They say that an oak tree takes three hundred years to grow, three hundred years to live and three hundred years to die – so I am very old. But the owl of Cwm Cowlyd has been old since I was a tiny calf. I do have a friend who is much older than I am, and he is called the salmon of Llyn Llifon. Why don’t you ask him what he knows about the history of the owl?’

The eagle flew to Llyn Llifon, to the water’s edge, and there he found the salmon. He asked him how old the owl was.

The salmon said, ‘I have lived a year for every scale on my skin and a year for every egg in my roe, so I am very old. But the owl of Cwm Cowlyd has been sitting in the trees overhanging this river since I was no more than a fry. I do have a friend who is much older than I am, and he is the blackbird of Cilgwri. Why don’t you ask him what he knows about the history of the owl?’

The eagle flew to Cilgwri, to the woodlands there, and there he found the blackbird standing on a stone. He asked him how old the owl was.

The blackbird said, ‘See this stone that I am standing on? I remember it when it was a huge rock that would have taken twenty oxen and chains to move it. All I have done every night is clean my beak on it before I go to sleep, and strike my wingtip against it when I rise in the morning. It is now much smaller, and so I am very old. But I have heard the call of the owl of Cwm Cowlyd in the woods in the valley since I was no more than a chick. I do have a friend who is much older than I am, the toad of Cors Fochno. Why don’t you ask him what he knows about the history of the owl?’

The eagle flew to Cors Fochno, to the bogs and pools, and there in the rushes and mosses he found the toad. He asked him how old the owl was.

‘Look at all the land around here,’ said the toad. ‘All I eat is earth and soil; and I have eaten a lot of it. I have carved out all of the hills of Wales from flat land, and so I am very old. Yet ever since I was a tadpole, I have never known the owl to be anything other than an old brown hag, haunting the night with her cries.’

The eagle knew then that he could marry the owl of Cwm Cowlyd, because of all the animals and birds, the oldest of them all was the owl.

THE ROWAN OF DUBROS

Rowan, or mountain ash, is a fairy tree. Although it won’t normally form the main part of a woodland canopy, it will grow in the understorey and on the woodland edges – in fact it will grow almost anywhere, and it thrives on poor soils and in the uplands. Rowan berries are a powerful healer, astringent and antibiotic. They were once used to heal scurvy, but they should be used with care as they can be poisonous to children.

This Irish tale gives a wonderful origin for the rowan tree. Manannan, the god of the sea, was one of the Tuatha de Danann, the supernatural fairy race of Ireland. He had a boat, a horse and chariot, a magical sword and a cloak of invisibility. Some say the Isle of Man is named after him.

The Fianna were a mortal Irish warband with otherworldly powers, led by Fionn mac Cumhaill, and we will encounter them again later in the book. There are many references to Fergus in the stories of the Fianna, including Fergus the bard and poet, and the name means simply ‘manhood’ or ‘potency’.

The Forest of Dubros was in modern-day County Sligo. Lughnasadh is the ancient festival of the god Lugh, himself one of the Tuatha de Danann; it is celebrated in early August, traditionally with sports and games.

Aine was the daughter of Manannan, the lord of the sea, and she was both beautiful and clever. The king of the Munster fairies, Curoi, decided he wanted Aine as his bride. But Aine had other ideas. She already had her heart set on a mortal man, Fergus of the Fianna, the magical warriors led by Fionn mac Cumhaill.

Manannan decided that the matter would be settled through a hurling match. ‘Let Curoi be captain of the Tuatha de Danann’s side, and Fergus be captain of the Fianna’s side,’ he cried. ‘If the fairies win, Curoi will marry Aine, and if the Fianna win then Fergus will be her husband.’

So they called a hurling match for Lughnasadh, played on the seashore where Manannan and Aine could watch. The match began at sunrise, and continued through the morning, but not a single goal had been scored by lunchtime.

Manannan stopped the game for refreshments. He had brought a basket of berries from his own world. They were from a tree called the rowan, which nobody had ever heard of. Eating just one of these bright red berries would satisfy any hunger and bring uncommon strength. ‘These are just for the players to eat,’ said Manannan. ‘They are from my world, and on no account must they be taken to either the world of mortals or the world of the fairy people.’

Fergus reached into the basket for a bunch of berries, curious, and started to eat them. At the same time another hand reached into the basket, a slender, pale hand. Fergus looked up, and straight into the eyes of beautiful Aine for the first time. He was smitten, and the berry that he had just put into his mouth remained there, on his lips with its stalk tangled in his beard. He completely forgot to eat it, and went back into the game.

Fergus started to play differently after that. They say he was like a great hawk harrying little songbirds, and his ash-wood hurl worked hard. Fergus scored the only goal of the afternoon, and at the end of the game the Fianna were declared the winners. Fergus had won his bride.

The Fianna called a great feast in celebration, and Manannan, Aine and all the Tuatha de Danann were invited. There was a grand procession through the woods to their hall; and on the way, Fergus wiped his hand across his face and beard, and the rowan berry that had remained there throughout the match fell to the woodland floor. He didn’t notice.

When the great feast was finished, Manannan gave his daughter’s hand to Fergus, and everyone cheered. ‘It is just as well,’ said Conan, the troublemaker of the Fianna, ‘that Fergus finally got rid of that rowan berry sticking out of his beard. Anyone would think he was a bird, sharing the seeds about as if to plant new trees.’

‘What do you mean?’ cried Manannan. Fergus had no idea; but when they retraced the steps of the procession, there on the route was a fine new tree growing, with smooth bark, umbels of creamy-white blossoms and fronds of deep green leaves, branched like the ash tree but smaller and more graceful.

‘This is a rowan tree, a quicken tree,’ said Manannan, and the whole company gasped in admiration. ‘It will bear the same magical berries, but no mortal shall take a single berry that grows. They are too magical for humans. One berry alone will restore a man back to youth a quarter of his age. Here is my punishment, Fergus: you shall guard this tree until you can find someone who will guard it better than you can. You may not see Aine again until you have done this, and you have made sure the berries are safe from mortal hands.’

Manannan wrapped the distraught Aine in his cloak and left the company in a huff of sea-mist. The Tuatha de Danann drifted away, and some of the Fianna also left the company to go back to Fionn, leaving Fergus sorrowful and wondering.

‘Who can I find,’ thought Fergus, ‘who can guard this tree better than I can? Who is more fierce, more skilful in battle, than one of the Fianna?’

Finally Fergus remembered a troll who lived on one of the little rocky islands just off the coast. This troll had sent word to Fionn several times, asking for his permission to have a little strip of land, even if it were only as wide as the hide of a bull. But Fionn had just laughed, and said ‘I don’t like the idea of even a tiny piece of Ireland falling into the hands of a troll!’ And that had been that.

Fergus sent one of the Fianna to ask Fionn if the troll could be guardian of the rowan tree, and to give him the little piece of land around it. ‘I don’t like this, in truth,’ said Fionn when he heard, ‘but we have to help Fergus.’

Several of the Fianna were sent to that little rocky island, where they found the troll, crooked and dark, one-eyed and ugly, tending a small flock of goats. The troll’s name was Crom Dubh, and when he heard that he was to be given a bit of land, he rolled around on the ground and kicked his legs in delight. The Fianna looked on, revolted, as he chuckled all the way back to the mainland in the boat.

They took Crom Dubh to the place of the rowan tree, and made him swear on the lives of his goats that he would guard the tree for all the time that it continued to bear berries.

Fergus then took his leave of the tree and the whole company and he went to find his love, Aine. They say that Fergus and Aine are still in love, still together, and still happy to this day, and that Aine is the queen of the fairies who rules over Munster.

As for Crom Dubh, he may have been a troll but he kept his word, and he guarded the tree day and night. As the tree got larger and the trunk sturdier, he made a little bed up in its branches, and from there he could look out for any approaching danger or theft. Nobody came, either from the mortal or the fairy world. Everyone had heard of a fierce troll guarding that part of the woods, and so they left it well alone. Dubros became a wilderness.

The animal world was a little different. The goats couldn’t help but pick up the odd rowan berry from under the tree, and they became strong and belligerent (even for goats). Crom Dubh looked out from the rowan tree one day, and he saw a young heifer nosing and grazing around the base of the tree. In the weeks and months that followed, stray cattle joined in ones and twos until Crom Dubh has a whole herd of cattle as well as goats. So the rowan tree had made Crom Dubh, and his goats and cattle, very happy indeed. The farmers around the edge of Dubros were less happy, and they often shook their fist in the direction of Crom Dubh when another cow went missing.

And so Crom Dubh was the guardian of the rowan tree and its magical berries in the woodland of Dubros, until the time when another of the Fianna stumbled across him. His name was Diarmuid, and he has another story.

2

ROYAL PREROGATIVE

There was a king and a knight

As was and will be, and as grows the pine tree

Some of them crooked, and some of them straight …

Scottish storytelling rhyme

Royalty and power, sovereignty and land, all of them walk together. Unfortunately, many of Britain’s monarchs have taken their power and privilege a step too far, to the detriment of their own people’s welfare.

When William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066, he set up his own system of land ownership and land rights that has had reverberations across Britain to the current day. A forest was originally a dedicated area for use only by the monarch or favoured courtiers, usually for hunting. By the thirteenth century, a full third of England’s woodland, heath and wetland was designated royal forest, and out of bounds for local people no matter how hungry they were. The draconian forest laws caused misery, hardship and death for many people over the years. Enforcement of forest law had died out by the mid-seventeenth century, and it’s only in recent times that the word ‘forest’ has come to generally mean a wooded landscape.

Wherever there are laws, there are outlaws, and folk heroes such as Robin Hood are there to stick two fingers up to the injustice of the ruling classes. These stories help us to explore the meaning of power and control, and the romance – or otherwise – of living outside the rules of society.

MAD SWEENEY

Here is a story of royal madness in the wildwoods of Ireland. King Sweeney (Gaelic Suibhne) transforms entirely during the story, from a proud and cherished pagan king to a bird-like broken man, drinking milk put out for him in the most demeaning of circumstances. The harshness of life in the woods drives Sweeney to beautiful poetry, lamenting his plight but also celebrating the holly and the birch, the deer and the wolf, the skylark and the turtle dove, and of course his beloved watercress.

This story comes from the area around County Antrim and County Down, and can be traced to the battle of Mag Rath at Moira in AD 637, the end of the rule of the Dal-Arie. A cantrev is an ancient division of territory, similar to the ‘county’ we have today.

In the new Ireland made pious by the worship of the new god, Sweeney, son of Colman Cuar and king of the Dal-Arie, was still a pagan. He came from a long and proud line of kings of the Cruthin people. They were a very ancient race who told the future through the flight and calls of birds.

Something wild inside of Sweeney refused to be calmed and controlled by the pious Christians. Everything they did seemed to be done just to taunt him.

One morning Sweeney was disturbed by the sound of a repetitive bell outside his hall. He fell into a fury and went to investigate. His wife Eorann tried to stop him by grabbing his crimson cloak, but the sliver clasp broke and Sweeney strode outside stark naked.

He found a Christian cleric, Ronan, marking out and purifying the boundary of a new church with his bell. Sweeney tried to drag Ronan away but was stopped in his tracks by other Christian men, so he grabbed the cleric’s precious book of psalms and threw it into the lake. More violence would have followed, but a messenger ran on to the scene at that point with the news that Congal Claon, son of Scannlan, was calling Sweeney to fight in a great battle at Moira, and his help was urgently needed. Sweeney glared at the cleric and strode away to prepare.

Ronan was outraged, and he shouted curses after Sweeney. ‘You will be fated to fly in the air like a bird, mad and outcast to the wilderness,’ he cried. ‘You will die by the point of a spear. May you carry my curse wherever you go.’

The following day, an otter came out of the lake carrying the book of psalms, and dropped it at Ronan’s feet. The book was undamaged, without a drop of water on it. Ronan took this as a sign of his righteousness, and threw more curses after Sweeney.

At Moira, battle lines were drawn between Congal’s men and those of Donal, son of Aodh. The cleric Ronan was brought in by Donal to guarantee the rules of battle, and it was agreed there would be no fighting between nightfall and sunrise. Sweeney ignored these rules, and made sure that he killed one man after the sun went down and one man just before dawn. Ronan’s face was red with anger.

The day of the proper battle dawned. Sweeney marched out with the rest, proud and resplendent in crimson tunic and gleaming weapons. Ronan and eight other psalmists worked their way along the battle lines, sprinkling warriors with holy water, and Sweeney was taken by surprise when the water hit his face. ‘Not my god, so you will die!’ he cried, and hurled his spear, hitting and killing one of the holy men. As they started back in horror Sweeney cast another spear. This one cut a hole in the bell around Ronan’s neck before the spear fell.

‘Praise be to God, I am protected,’ cried Ronan in front of the whole company. ‘You carry my curse, King Sweeney. You will wander through the air like a bird, as this spear shaft has done, and the sound of unbroken holy bells will haunt you as you seek solace. You will die by a spear, as you have killed our brother here.’

That moment the battle cry finally arrived as the warriors attacked. Sweeney charged with the rest, but as he ran in the noise and anger and fear of the oncoming fight, he was overtaken by wild convulsions and dark thoughts, and he felt himself slipping into another world altogether.

Sweeney’s fingers went numb and his weapons fell from his hands. Roaring and shouting, he looked up to the dark sky and started to move towards it through the air, floating as if he was enchanted. As Sweeney flew over the battleground, feathers sprouted from his back and his arms and his head. That day, instead of fighting, he flew to every blade of grass and every treetop in Ireland, and finally settled in a yew tree in Ros Bearaigh in Glen Arkin.

Donal won the battle that day, and Congal’s surviving soldiers fled the scene. Some of them made their way to Glen Arkin. They were wondering aloud about Sweeney when they heard a familiar voice from the yew tree: ‘Here I am! But forget the man you knew, I am changed. The easy life is over for me, the music is at an end.’

They tried to get him to come down but Sweeney refused. Instead, he shouted down to them:

My life is now very barren and narrow,

without music, without rest,

without womenfolk …

Sweeney flew on to Kilreagan church, perched on another old yew tree, and heard the voices of soldiers from the victorious side. They saw the strange creature and surrounded the tree, but Donal himself heard the tumult, looked up and recognised Sweeney. ‘Here was a good man,’ Donal said. ‘He fought for the wrong side, and now look at the state he is in.’ Sweeney left that old tree then, and flew on to Glen Bolcain, the place where madmen stayed, and here he roosted and foraged and survived the ravages of the woods for a whole year.

… Biting wind tearing at me,

already snow has wounded me …

… O briar, little crooked one,

you offer no fair terms.

You will not stop ripping at me

Until you’ve had your fill of blood …

Sweeney moved on after that, and for seven years he travelled the length and the breadth of Ireland, often returning to his new spiritual home, Glen Bolcain. He often roosted on trees near churches, and near streams and watercress beds, for it was watercress he craved as a food above all else. This was bittersweet for him, because wherever there was civilisation and watercress beds, there was the ringing of the Christian bell. Sweeney mourned and pronounced his misery to anyone who would listen. ‘I prefer the call of the cuckoo and the bellow of the stag in the glen, to the whining and whinging of the bell,’ he said.

… Birch, lithe and blessed,

Melodious, proud one,

delightful each entwining branch

in the top of your crown …

One day Sweeney landed on the lintel of his wife Eorann’s hut. She had mourned Sweeney’s loss, but was now living with and loving his kinsman Guaire. Sweeney called down to his lost wife, and she promised him that he was her first and true love, and bemoaned his sorry state. But he refused to stay. ‘It’s better for you to give your affection to him, than to me, the starving madman,’ he said, and flew on.

Sweeney’s foster-brother was called Lynchseachan and he became worried for Sweeney and sought him out to bring him to safety. The nobles of Dal-Arie were determined to find their king and bring him to sense. Lynchseachan failed in his first attempt to capture Sweeney, but on the second time he found the madman, and he tried a different approach.

‘Sweeney, I have difficult news to break to you, and I will do it as gently as I can,’ he called up to the trees. ‘Your family are dead. Your brother is dead, your father is dead, and your mother is dead. And what’s more, your beloved son is also dead. Everyone laments the loss: but how can you, who is their lifeblood, not be with us?’

Sweeney wailed loudly at this, and the horror of it shook him briefly to his senses. He came down from the tree, more broken even than he had been.

Lynchseachan took Sweeney’s hand. ‘Now you are here,’ he said, ‘I can tell you that there is still hope. All of your family are still alive. But they miss you. Come to rest, come back to where your heart’s affections lie, come back to your people.’

… You love it more among the deer in woods and forests

than sleeping in your fortress in the east

on a bed of feathers …

They shackled Sweeney and took him back to the assembled nobles of Dal-Arie, where he was imprisoned for six weeks. At the end of this time they decided that his sense had been restored to him, and Sweeney resumed some form of his old self at the court, albeit a very subdued Sweeney. He started to live a good Christian life.

Harvest time came around and everyone went out to the fields to reap, except Sweeney, who stayed behind.

The old mill-hag came to talk with him. ‘Tell me of your adventures,’ she said. ‘They sound so much more interesting than life here.’

‘Get yourself gone, old witch,’ said Sweeney, ‘I no longer think of those things.’

But the hag persisted. ‘I know it was Ronan and the Christian god, that’s what started it. I am only telling the truth.’

‘Do not fill my head with these things!’ cried Sweeney, clutching at the wall.

‘Show me how you flew,’ said the hag. ‘I am curious. Could you fly from, say, here to the edge of the bench?’

Sweeney did that easily, and the hag followed. He took another leap out of the window of the little hut, and the hag followed.

That day Sweeney flew over five cantrevs of Ireland and the hag matched him all the way. He roosted in an ivy-clad tree and the hag perched in the same tree. He couldn’t shake her off until he flew to Ulster and leapt from the top of Dunseverick fort, swooping and gliding before he hit the ground, but the hag was smashed to pieces on the cliffs and fell into the hungry sea.

Sweeney laughed out loud at her misfortune. He knew he could never now return to Dal-Arie because they would want revenge for the old woman’s life; for she was Lynchseachan’s mother-in-law.

… O holly, little protecting one,

door against the wind;

ash-tree, baleful tree,

hand-weapon of warriors …

Sweeney flew on to Roscommon, and there he alighted in a tree by a stream with a watercress bed, eyeing his favourite food. But a woman came out of a nearby cottage and gathered up the cress for herself. She was startled to hear a voice coming from the tree. ‘How could you deprive me of this? If you knew my sorry story and knew my hardships, you would think twice. It is not Christian to steal food from a poor madman.’ She replied by asking Sweeney not to be too harsh, and he cursed her as he flew away.

Sweeney flew further afield, to the Isle of Eigg off the coast of Scotland, to the Firth of Clyde, and finally to the land of the Britons, where he found a great woodland to his satisfaction. This was the same, and yet different to his beloved Ireland. He tracked the call of a strange creature through the trees, one that he recognised and yet could not place. After a week of puzzlement, he recognised the cries of anguish and lamentations of a fellow madman living in the wood. They became companions in madness and woodcraft for about a year, and then the mad Briton killed himself by falling into a waterfall.

Sweeney finally flew west, back to Ireland, and teetered between the call of the mad wild and returning to his own people. He was in the torment of indecision one night in the uplands when he saw five dismembered, ghostly heads bouncing along the road after him, their goat beards dragging on the ground and their eyes gleaming.

‘He’s mad!’ screamed one.

‘Get him!’ chuckled the second.

‘Follow him wherever he goes,’ said the third.

‘We are the curse of Ronan,’ chided the fourth.

‘We’ll chase him until he falls in the sea,’ shouted the fifth.

Sweeney ran and he stumbled and he flew, but wherever he went the five heads followed him, bouncing off tree trunks and leering into the air. He finally hid from them by flying into a low bank of mist, and when he came out the other side they had disappeared.

Sweeney’s black madness engulfed him after that, some say for weeks, some say for years. He finally roosted in a tree at a monastery at St Mullins, and started to debate with a cleric called Moling.

‘Why bother flying from place to place, Sweeney? There is sanctuary here,’ said Moling.

‘All I seek is peace away from men, and joy in the nature of the greenwood,’ said Sweeney.

‘I bind you to return to me every day, so that I can record your story,’ said Moling. ‘Your fate is to live and die here, for you belong to this place.’ Sweeney also knew this, for he had prophesied his ending several years before.

Moling ordered his cook, a woman called Muirghil, to leave milk out for Sweeney every evening. She made a heel-mark in a cowpat near the tree and filled it with milk, and Sweeney came to lap it up. A routine of sorts was created, and mad wild Sweeney grew closer to the world of people again.

Muirghil’s husband Mongan was a jealous man, and he heard petty gossip from his sister that his wife favoured Sweeney, she was giving him so much attention. He flew into a rage, grabbed a spear and went out to find Sweeney lapping up milk from a cowpat, his side exposed. The spear flew and went right through Sweeney’s flesh, breaking his back.

… There was a time when I found more melody

than the clang of a bell beside me

in the song of the blackbird to the mountain

and the bellow of the stag in a storm …

The curse of Ronan was complete. The dying Sweeney was brought to the church where he fell in his death-swoon at the door, and he was anointed and received by the new god.

But Sweeney’s poetry, his wildness and his passion have lived on through many centuries, and now his story has come to you.

ROBIN HOOD AND THE BEGGAR

Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire is inseparable from the name of Robin Hood, the crusader for poor rights and forest freedoms who dances through England’s woodland folklore. The ancient core of the forest is now a National Nature Reserve, managed by a group of public bodies and charities, and attracting around 350,000 visitors every year. It is one of our best remaining examples of oak-birch woodland, but it sits within a landscape that has suffered heavily from industry, development and intensive farming.

Sherwood is only one of the potential locations for Robin’s adventures, and scholars still argue over whether Robin’s origins are really in Yorkshire, and if his background was gentrified or more lowly. It is impossible not to like Robin and his merry band of thugs, and yet the laws they rebelled against were no laughing matter for the rural poor.

This story is derived from three of the later Robin Hood ballads, recorded from the seventeenth century and collected by Francis James Child in the late nineteenth century, and worked by other storytellers since those times.

There are twelve months in all the year

As I hear many men say

But the merriest month in all the year

Is the merry month of May.

One fine day in high spring, two figures set out on the road from the greenwood of Sherwood towards the city of Nottingham. One of them, tall and well built, wore a leather jerkin, doublet and hose, cloak and stout boots, and he was known as Little John. The other, a shorter, more wiry figure of a man, was all clothed in Lincoln green with a battered leather hat – and his name was Robin, or as he was better known, Bold Robin Hood.

The two men strode along that road with the crowns of the oaks arching over their heads and the roots holding the ground beneath their feet, and they laughed and shared jokes and stories as they went, as the birdsong rang out around them and the bright sunshine through the new leaves patterned the road ahead.

Little John said to Robin, ‘Let’s try for adventure today. Perhaps in disguise. Definitely with some trickery. Perhaps we shall even trick the sheriff himself!’

Presently, along the highway in front of them walked a lone figure, wearing rags at least twenty coats thick and three hats stuffed on inside the other, and leather bags of different sizes hung around his neck. He carried a large staff and walked with a jaunty gait, singing merrily as he went.

‘Here’s our chance for a disguise! I bet that man’s a rogue,’ said Robin. He hid his bow, arrows and hunting horn in a nearby hazel thicket and before Little John could say anything else Robin was running away down the road after the man, shouting ‘Stop! Stop!’

‘Why should I stop?’ cried the man, speeding up his pace. ‘It’s late. I’m in a hurry.’

‘There’s a toll for everyone who walks on this highway, you know,’ said Robin, running alongside him.

‘Not likely,’ said the man. ‘I’m only a poor beggar. I only have one penny piece to my name. But I’ll bet you have more than that: I will beat it out of you!’

So Robin Hood and the beggar set to with their quarterstaffs and fought in the middle of the highway.

The beggar fought well, but Robin eventually gained the advantage, and the beggar found himself knocked to the ground with Robin’s sharp hunting knife at his throat.

‘Spare me!’ cried the beggar. ‘What good will it do to kill a poor wretch like me? Look, good squire, I have a hundred pounds in gold, and more in silver in my bag, and it can all be yours if you let me go.’

‘So,’ said Robin, drawing back with his knife. ‘You have a pretty penny after all. Let’s see the gold.’

The beggar opened up his travelling bag and brought out a cloak, which he spread on the ground. He put his hand into the bag again, and Robin bent forward in anticipation of treasure. The beggar suddenly drew out a handful of finely ground oatmeal, and threw it straight into Robin’s face.

Robin coughed and spluttered and rubbed his eyes, but the beggar had plenty of time to fetch such a fourpenny-one to the back of Robin’s head that it laid him out cold. Then he stole Robin’s cloak, hood, purse and doublet of Lincoln green, that he changed with his own clothes, crammed everything into his bags and ran off down the highway, laughing out loud.

Little John came round the bend of the road just in time to see Robin sit up in his undergarments, rubbing his eyes of meal and looking dazed.

‘Ha, ha! You look like you’ve been at the mill. At least he left you your hose, and a cloak of sorts!’

‘Very funny,’ said Robin.

‘Now, you’ll be going back to the others,’ said Little John. ‘I reckon I’ll take this disguise as a beggar. I’m off after the fellow to teach him a proper lesson.’

‘Well, I’m not done with today yet either,’ said Robin, staggering to his feet. ‘I may still yet win the greater riches of the two of us!’

Little John put on the raggedy old clothes – which were quite a snug fit – and ran off after the beggar. Robin put on the cloak and a bag that the beggar had left on the ground. Then he returned to the hazel thicket where he had left his bow and arrows and his hunting horn.

Robin hid away the arrows under his cloak, set his horn to his belt, unstrung the bow so he could use it as a staff, and set off on the road towards Nottingham again. He was disguised in a way, because his hair and face were all smeared with mud and blood and caked meal, and he had a shiner of a black eye.

Soon Robin came to the edge of the wood-land, where open grazing land stretched down to the walls of Nottingham itself. There was a large crowd of people there, gathered around a scaffold, with a fire blazing nearby in a brazier. As Robin pushed through the crowd, he could see that tied to the gallows pole were three young men, all wide-eyed and damp-trousered with terror.

Robin turned to an old woman at the edge of the crowd. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘These three were caught bagging venison in the royal forest,’ she said. ‘Prince John left strict instructions for the forest laws to be held true by the sheriff, and so these three poor wretches are to be blinded with hot irons. ‘Tis a crying shame, what this country has come to.’

‘This is a wicked injustice!’ cried Robin.

‘Aye,’ said a yeoman nearby, ‘but the sheriff has said he will make an example of them.’

Robin looked the yeoman straight in the eyes and lowered his voice. ‘Are you not free Englishmen? Will you not raise a hand to help them?’

‘The sheriff’s men are armed and standing over there,’ said the yeoman, ‘and we are all known – if we get involved, then our families would suffer – you know what the sheriff is like.’

‘Besides,’ said a rather prim middle-aged lady behind Robin, listening in, ‘they have broken the king’s law.’

Fear ruled then, as fear rules now.

Robin rolled his eyes to the heavens, and pushed his way to the front of the crowd. Most of them were crying ‘shame!’ – on the sheriff, Prince John, the Normans and forest law. They were shouting encouragement to the prisoners too, although the options that those three lads had were really very few.

Robin started to shout at the prisoners as well: but his words were different. ‘You idiots!’ he shouted. ‘You’re getting all you deserve! Law-breakers! Thieves!’

A man in a leather apron drew a large metal prong from the heart of the fire, and started to walk towards the prisoners. But the crowd was surging closer, and he found it difficult to get through. As he walked past Robin, he tripped and fell heavily, and with a cry Robin fell on top of him, as if he had been pushed. The executioner cried out and doubled up in agony.

The sheriff’s guards shouted, and the captain of the guard hurried forward with his men and seized Robin by the scruff of the neck. ‘Your lordships!’ cried Robin. ‘The crowd pushed me! Oh, don’t hurt a poor beggar any more!’

‘Give him twenty lashes,’ said the captain to his guards, and then he turned back to Robin. ‘Or – better yet – you, beggar, you can go free if you become the executioner yourself, in place of the man you’ve hurt.’

‘I will do that proudly!’ gasped Robin, and he bowed low, while the crowd groaned and cursed him.

‘Well, get on with it then,’ said the captain.

‘Let me check they are bound well, first,’ said Robin. He picked up the bow that he had been using as a staff and limped towards the gallows, using it to steady himself. He examined each of the knots that tied the hands of the young men. Then he limped up to the brazier, picked up the iron, and made his way back to the lads, now whimpering and crying. The captain read out the charges of theft from the royal forest, and a murmur rippled across the crowd.

Robin came to the gallows, raised the iron – and then he suddenly straightened, turned and hurled the iron into the face of the captain of the guard.

The captain screamed in pain. Robin flung off his beggar’s cloak, blew his hunting horn, took up his bow, and readied an arrow on the string, shouting, ‘All free people of England – clear the way for Robin Hood and his three new men!’

The captain staggered towards Robin, but he fell with an arrow through his chest. Meanwhile the three prisoners untangled the ropes from their hands where the knots had been untied by Robin, and they grabbed any weapons and shields that they could as the guards started to charge with their spears.

More archers in Lincoln green appeared from the woods in response to the sound of Robin’s horn. There was the sound of bowstrings humming with more arrows towards the guards. Robin and the three lads were lost in the crowd, on their way towards the great forest, and the crowd surged forward to stop the guards giving chase.

Meanwhile, Little John, in his beggar disguise and hasty for revenge for his friend, was hurrying through Sherwood Forest in search of the beggar. He found him in the late afternoon, in a wooded glade just by the main road, sitting around a fire with three other beggars.

‘Good evening, brothers,’ said Little John. ‘I hope your day has been better than mine?’

‘Greetings to you,’ said one of the beggars, who was a poor old thing. ‘As well as we could hope, but yet we are beggars like you, with scarcely a penny piece to our names.’

‘Did you know that one among us is not a beggar, but a villain and a thief? This one!’ roared Little John, raising his quarterstaff and knocking his known enemy round the head. And with that, he looked round and the three other beggars were running for their lives.

‘Revenge for my friend!’ roared Little John, as he gave the first beggar a thorough thrashing with his quarterstaff until he was out cold. Then Little John reclaimed Robin’s doublet, cloak and hat, and he searched the pockets and the bags of the beggar, where he found over three hundred pounds in gold.

‘Here’s a fine harvest in May, from a rogue. This will do well for those who really go hungry,’ said Little John. He took Robin’s clothes and all the various bags from the beggar:

For now I have a bag for my bread,

So have I another for corn;

I have one for salt, and another for malt,

And one for my little horn.

Little John made his way back through the greenwood of Sherwood until he came to the great oak. All the merry company were there, including Robin and the three lads, and Robin was laughing about becoming the day’s hero in just his undergarments.

‘Good evening!’ said Little John. ‘How did you fare today?’ And he told the tale of how he had finally recovered three hundred pounds in gold and Robin’s clothes, dressed as a beggar.

‘That is a good story and a justice well dealt,’ said Robin. ‘But I gained more treasure still. For I saved three good strong lives, and they are now free to draw a bow and strike a blow for freedom in this green and pleasant place we call home.’

All the company were agreed that of all the winnings of the day, life and freedom in the forest was the greatest treasure of all.

A TEST OF LOVE

This little story is derived from the ballad ‘The Nut-Brown Maid’, first written down in 1502. It shows how difficult and outcast life in the forest was considered to be, no matter how romantic it might seem to us now. Talking of romance …

A baron’s daughter was loved by a merchant’s son, and she loved him in return.

One evening he came to see her in a state of some distress. He was on the run, he said; he had been falsely accused of a terrible crime, of poaching deer from the woods.

‘If they catch me, I will be condemned to die, my love. I have no other choice than to become an outcast, an outlaw in the greenwood for the rest of my days, and I have to go there by nightfall. I have come to bid you farewell, for this may be the last time I see you, and it breaks my heart.’

‘But I love you whatever happens, and I mean it,’ she said. ‘If you need to leave by nightfall as you say, then I shall prepare and come with you.’

‘You will lose your good name, and people will call you outlaw too,’ he said. ‘I cannot do that to you.’

‘You know that our love is above shame. Whoever accused us of that would be lying; they would be the ones in the wrong.’

He was agitated now. ‘No, no,’ he cried. ‘You would need to learn archery and hunting, you would need to kill to eat. You would live in constant fear of the law, and if they find you, they will hang you. I cannot do that to you.’

She smiled, a gentle smile that could not be argued with. ‘I am ready to risk that for you. I would rather die than lose your love.’

He told her of life in the woods in winter, of thorns and mud, of wolves and bears, of foul weather and cold and damp. He talked of hunger and thirst, of months of the year barren of food. ‘All these dangers I now face, but there is no reason why you should face them on my behalf,’ he said.

‘I have shared in your joys, and I am now ready to share your sorrows, whatever happens,’ she said. ‘The land will provide for us. We have our youth and our health, we are as strong as we could be.’

He looked down at her jewelled gown and plaited tresses. ‘Are you willing to cut your hair short and gird your kirtle to your knees, so you can see better and move more quickly to beat an enemy?’

‘Yes, and to leave my family too,’ she said.

He looked at her with doubt and fear in his eyes now. ‘You will change your mind when it all becomes real, I am sure. Ideas are different from harsh reality.’

‘Don’t doubt me, my love,’ she said. ‘Remember that I was difficult for you to win, because I am the daughter of a baron, and you are only a squire.’

‘Aye, the daughter of a baron! How could I betray you by doing this to you?’ He was beside himself with fretting now, his head in his hands.

She put her slender arm around his shoulders. ‘You would betray me by leaving me and going alone, and you know it full well. I’m coming with you to the greenwood.’

Did she go with him to become an outlaw in the woods? Or was he making it all up to test her? You tell me.

THE RED KING’S DEER

The word ‘deer’ in Old English originally meant ‘a beast’. Deer have had a huge role in our woodland and hunting culture over the centuries, as an important foodstuff, hunting prize, captive animal and inspiration. Britain’s indigenous deer, the red and the roe, have been joined more recently by fallow (probably a Norman introduction), sika (Victorian), muntjac and Chinese water deer (both introduced in the early twentieth century).

Deer have moved into a different place in the British consciousness as our connections with the countryside have changed over the last century. Walt Disney’s 1942 film Bambi put the cute, vulnerable fawn into global consciousness. Meanwhile, deer numbers in much of Britain have increased so much that few trees will now regenerate successfully; tree shoots are endlessly nibbled away. In spite of our increasingly industrialised landscape, deer have adapted and flourished. In the long term, without human intervention, deer numbers could spell death for our natural woodlands. Eating wild venison is a positive ecological act these days.

Here is a tale about a ghost deer, with evidence recorded from the New Forest in Hampshire by folklorist Ruth Tongue. It’s a great example of how places are said to be infused with the energy of events that have happened there – and woodlands are no exception. Although William II’s death is thought to have occurred near modern-day Brockenhurst, a stone known as the ‘Rufus Stone’ near Minstead is claimed to mark the spot where William fell. The stone was probably set up in the eighteenth century, after the allegedly offending oak tree was destroyed. ‘Slots’ are the footmarks of a deer.

William Rufus, the Red King, was a strange one. They say he was a wise ruler but a complicated man, fiery of temper and lusty of temperament, and he wasn’t liked by many of his subjects. He was short, blond, rude, ruddy-faced and big-bellied, and his eyes were different colours.

Like his father, William the Conqueror (or William the Bastard, as many called him), Rufus loved to hunt. His father had created many royal hunting forests, including in 1079 the New Forest, where local people said he evicted the people and pulled down the buildings of thirty-six entire parishes for the purpose of hunting deer.

On the second day of August 1100, the Red King went hunting in the New Forest, and he met his death: he was shot with an arrow through the lung.

Some said William Rufus died as a punishment for his father’s creation of the forest. John White, Bishop of Winchester in Tudor times, said:

From God and saint King Rufus did churches take

From citizens town-court, and mercate place

From farmer lands: New Forrest for to make

In Beaulieu tract, where whiles the King in chase

Pursues the hart, just vengeance comes apace

And King pursues. Tirrell him seing not

Unwares him flew with dint of arrow shot.

Some said that William died because an arrow was deflected against a great oak tree. That same oak tree is said to be haunted by the ghost of a red deer who witnessed the act. The deer is a giant, they say; you can tell by the great slots it leaves behind. If you see it, it means that the sovereign of England is going to die soon. If the deer is moving fast when you see it, the death will be in a few weeks, but if it is standing still, the death may not be for a year.

Only four or five keepers have ever seen this ghost deer, but each time it was just before the king or queen died: there are records of sightings before the deaths of George III, William IV, Victoria, Edward VII and George V. The last sighting of it was as a snorting red deer stag in late 1951. The family who saw it went home, turned the radio on and learned that George VI was seriously ill.

3

HUNTER AND HUNTED

The hunt unleashed its hounds

The forest overflowed with the bugle’s sound.

At first cry, the wild creatures trembled with fear …

Gawain and the Green Knight, fourteenth century

From the earliest human days, hunting in the woods was a matter of food and survival. Although many of our folk tales tell of the glory and thrill of the hunt, and of conquering a dangerous wild creature such as wolf or boar, much of the hunting in our woodlands would have been out of necessity. Creatures of all sizes, feathered or furred, were killed routinely, whether it was legal to do so or not.

How things have changed, and how they have stayed the same. Hunting is now a hugely divisive issue, loaded with class warfare and layers of invention, and many animals are still killed, but the ghost of privilege still looms large.

These folk tales talk about hunting in the woods from the viewpoint of the countryman, the animal, the thug and the amateur.

HERNE THE HUNTER

There is an old tale goes that Herne the Hunter

(sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest)

Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight

Walk round about an oak, with great ragg’d horns;

And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle,

And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain

In a most hideous and dreadful manner.

You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know

The superstitious idle-headed eld

Receiv’d, and did deliver to our age

This tale of Herne the Hunter for a truth.

William Shakespeare,
from The Merry Wives of Windsor, c.1597

This is the first written reference to Herne, and yet this character drinks from a much deeper well of folklore. Many people have connected Herne to the Green Man, the shadowy British vegetation god, and Cernunnos, the Celtic horned god of the woodland. Others have pointed out that he may be a manifestation of the Woodwose, the wild man of the woods. Jacob Grimm himself was the first to suggest that Herne was leader of the wild hunt, but again here he tapped into much older roots of local ghost legends all over Britain and beyond.

The story of Herne has been embroidered substantially since Shakespeare’s time, and it is almost impossible to trace an original story thread of any authenticity. Here is my version, with a modern addition recorded locally by the folklorist Ruth Tongue.

Windsor Forest and Great Park is now a Site of Special Scientific Interest for its many venerable ancient trees and associated invertebrates.

In times when England is in great need, or great danger, a shimmering figure can be seen riding through the great oak, beech and hornbeam trees of Windsor Forest at night. He wears great horns on his head and a chain at his neck. Two other hunters ride beside him, and ghostly hounds charge forward all around. He is the god of the Wild Hunt, Herne, the Horned One, and his business is to protect our land from harm.

Many centuries ago, Richard Herne was a hunter in the royal forest at Windsor, and a great favourite of the king himself. Nobody was more skilled a huntsman, more stealthy a woodsman, more sharp an archer, more effective a houndsman, more knowledgeable a countryman, or more swift on horseback, than Richard Herne. Those were still times when kings needed to be brave in combat and the hunt. Skilful and trustworthy men were essential if you were to reign for your full lifespan. But Herne brought something else to the king’s company: a love of nature, a curiosity for the wild, and a knowledge of animals, birds and plants that was second to none. As the king’s servant who looked after the forest and understood the ways of the wild, Herne was a man who loved his job.

The court of the king was a competitive place, as men and women vied for royal favour and power. Herne was having none of this gossip and falseness. He preferred to be straight talking, and quietly assess a man on his merits. He didn’t stay in court lodgings, but preferred to be out in the woods, saying that the forest was better company than the court. This may have been true, but there were those at court who talked against him. Where he saw truth and brevity, they saw arrogance; where he was skilful at the hunt, they were jealous.

One day out hunting, the king was following a great stag with massive, many-tined antlers. The stag was cornered by a great oak tree on one side and a thicket on the other, and the king started moving in for the kill; but the stag turned and charged at the king in defence. It was only the quick reaction of Herne, jumping in front of the king, that saved the royal person to hunt another day. Herne was badly gored in the leg, although not fatally, and it took him a long time to recover. To the king he was a hero, and he was given gifts in thanks for his dedication: a heavy gold chain for his neck, a silver hunting horn and a purse of gold coins. Herne also asked if he could be given the great antlers of the stag, to remind him how close he came to death, and this was granted by the king.

Herne the hunting hero became even more important at court, the king’s favourite, and those who were jealous of him became sickened. ‘We need to cut him down to size,’ they said. ‘We need to remind him that he is a servant of the king just like the rest of us.’ And so they put three deer skins in Herne’s quarters, and contrived that the king’s men would find them.

Herne was now accused of poaching, a terrible offence in the royal forest. The king called Herne to explain himself. ‘Tell me,’ he asked Herne, ‘how can I trust a man to lead my hunt, who does not even obey basic forest law? What am I to do with you?’ The king was embarrassed and angry, and no protest from Herne made any difference. The hunter was told to pack his things and leave the king’s service. He bowed and left the court, a shattered man.

Herne’s body was found the following morning, hanging from a great oak tree in the forest, at the place where the stag had gored him. Shame and love of life had battled inside the huntsman, and shame had won; he had taken his own life. He was buried at a crossroads in the forest with the antlers of the red deer by his side, and another man took his place as the king’s huntsman.

The jealous courtiers felt a little guilty for a while at Herne’s fate, but in truth they were glad to be rid of him. However, the two men in particular who had put the deer skins in Herne’s sleeping quarters started to notice odd things happening to them. All their skills seemed to have disappeared; their fingers forgot their craft and their brains forgot the patterns and customs of the court. They made more and more mistakes, until one said to the other, ‘There’s only one thing to do. We need to go and make peace with Herne, somehow.’

In the late afternoon of the next day, the two of them rode out to the forest and the place where Herne had been buried. As they approached the clearing by the great oak tree, a mist fell low on the land, and the curled, leathery leaves of the oak tree started to recede into shadow. Something made both the men look round, and a great pair of antlers loomed out of the mist towards them, but the antlers were too high even for the largest of deer.

The great man’s figure seemed indistinct, not quite physical, with the antlers sprouting from his forehead and a heavy gold chain around his neck. He rode a black stallion and commanded dozens of hounds, each one of them made of the same ghostly stuff. The hounds bayed and the horse whinnied and stamped, but the ghostly man was a figure of calm, and he fixed both courtiers with his red eyes. Not breaking the gaze, he lifted his silver hunting horn to his lips and blew a single, wild note; and the two men turned their horses and rode for their lives.

Their horses were never found, but the two courtiers were found hanging from the same oak tree the next morning, their faces contorted with terror and pain.

Herne the Hunter disappeared for a while after that, and didn’t bother that particular king again. But from that day to this, he has appeared in Windsor Forest whenever he deems he is needed. He makes his own forest laws.

Some time in the 1950s three lads, Teddy boys, were messing around in the woods in Windsor and breaking trees and saplings. One of them saw something unusual in the leaf-mould on the ground: he picked up an old, dented silver hunting horn, and grinned. After wiping away the worst of the soil and leaves, he put the horn to his lips and blew it.

Instantly, hounds bayed behind him and a man shouted loud. The lad stumbled and tripped through the woods in terror, as invisible creatures chased him through the trees. The other two lads managed to run ahead and hide in the church.

Just as the lad who blew the horn reached the church porch, a bowstring twanged. He fell quite dead on the step with an invisible arrow right through him.

THE VIXEN AND THE OAK

This is a strange little story. I like it because it scarcely contains any human characters. It was collected from a soldier in the Lake District in 1948 by the folklorist Ruth Tongue. Her text refers to ‘oakmen’, oak fairy spirits in the style of Beatrix Potter, but in this version I have chosen not to complicate the spirits of individual trees.

Holly is a dioecious tree species, which means that female and male flowers grow on different plants. A ‘barren holly’ is a holly tree growing on its own that cannot reproduce, since another holly tree of the opposite sex is missing nearby. In my experience it’s very rare to find a single holly tree on its own – next time you are out in the woods, have a look to see if there are any single holly trees about, but beware the prickles!

It was early December and the vixen had been running from the hounds all day. After running full pelt for hours and hours, she was nearly spent, and she couldn’t shake them off. Her mouth was dry and her limbs were shaking. She staggered into a little copse of trees by a wall, trembling and exhausted.

The old hawthorn tree was sleepy and it knew never to trust a fox, but it wanted to help all the same. ‘Jump up and climb up my trunk to run along the high stone wall,’ it said to her.

‘Thank you,’ said the vixen, ‘but I can’t jump right now.’

‘There’s a gap in the wall further along the way,’ said the hawthorn, ‘and on the other side is the greenwood. Squeeze through there. That’s what the hedgehog does.’

The vixen heard the hounds baying not far behind, and she squeezed herself through the gap in the wall. She left a lot of her red-brown fur on the rough stones, but she got through just as the hunt came by. ‘Thank you,’ she said to the hawthorn, before making her way through the wood.

Only one great hound heard her and came snuffling around the gap in the wall where the vixen had left fur behind. He lifted his head to call out to the others, but the hawthorn dropped a bunch of old haw-berries down his throat and made him cough. ‘You bully, give her another chance,’ the tree told him. ‘Go round the wall if you want to get to her. She may be a vixen but she doesn’t drool and splutter everywhere like you do. Move on!’ The hound went away.

The vixen, craving some rest and peace and quiet, heard men’s voices again, and she limped to hide in a group of ferns. These men didn’t see her: they carried axes and were deep in conversation.

‘Reckon it’s time to take out that big oak,’ said one.

‘We’ll get a good price if we can get it out to the road,’ said the other. ‘That’s mistletoe on it too, rare and special on an oak tree; lucky for us!’

The vixen heard every word, and waited until she could hear them no longer; but just as she thought the coast was clear, the sound of the hounds and the hunting horn drifted towards her again. She limped on, desperate for rest. The woodland was becoming darker around her, and the going more difficult underfoot: she was heading towards a large holly tree.

‘Holly! Please can you block the way behind me with your prickles?’ she asked.

The holly tree, although fully awake, was a barren holly. ‘I will if you come closer,’ he said, but the vixen could see he had a wicked heart.

‘But my paws are too sore to walk on your leaves,’ she whined. ‘You might spike me to death, or hang me on your branches.’ She kept well away from the shadow of the barren holly.

Onwards, onwards through the wood the vixen went, painfully slowly, with the hunting noise ever louder behind. Then she saw the great old oak tree, the king of the woods, and she crawled towards it. The air became lighter and gentler around her.

‘Please open up and let me inside,’ she whimpered.

The oak tree was sleepy and it knew never to trust a fox, but oak trees protect all forest beasts so the vixen was pulled safe inside the hollow at the base of the old tree.

In between gasps she managed to tell the oak tree the story of what the men with axes had said. ‘We are both in grave danger, both of us with little energy,’ she said. ‘When will they ever stop?’

‘Is your story true?’ said the oak tree sternly.

‘I swear on what’s left of my life that it is,’ said the vixen.

‘Then I can help you. The hunt has gone past and away without finding you. Walk your sore paws in the pool of water in my roots over there.’ Once the vixen had bathed her paws in the water, she found that they soothed and healed, and the fur grew back on her coat where it had been scraped away.

‘Now, I must wake up the good trees around us, and we shall see what we shall see about all this trouble,’ said the oak. ‘Avoid the barren holly, whatever you do, and don’t come back here again.’

The vixen murmured her thanks, and then she was away from the woods, quick again, silent, to her den below the rocky crags. She was safe and sound and warm and curled up fast asleep in minutes.

When she woke up, Mr Fox had just arrived with a fat duck in his jaws. ‘This is one of Farmer Gregg’s birds,’ he said. ‘He won’t need it. He’s hanging high from the branches of a big holly tree in the woods, him and another ne’er-do-well. Eat this and stay strong, my love, and I’ll just go back and get another one for our supper.’

THE BOAR OF ESKDALE

This story is a perfect illustration of the ‘pecking order’ of forest law in the Middle Ages, with church and king holding ultimate power. Eskdale in North Yorkshire has suffered invasion from Vikings, Saxons, Danes and Normans, and intensive agriculture in turn; it now only has fragments of woodland left, but it is likely that the forest was a mixture of land uses for many centuries. The abbey at Whitby was originally founded in AD 657 and then replaced by the Normans. At its height, the church owned a third of the local land. Whitby also holds the last record of wild wolves in England: Harting (1880) records that the monks of Whitby paid 10s 9d ‘for tawing fourteen wolf-skins’ in 1394–6.

Wild boar are plentiful on the European mainland, but they were hunted to extinction very early in Ireland, and in Britain during the Middle Ages – despite a decree from William the Conqueror in 1087 that anyone caught unlawfully killing a wild boar would be blinded. Baby pigs are cute (did you know that a baby wild boar is called a ‘squeaker’?) but an adult male wild boar can weigh up to twenty stone, travel at thirty miles per hour, and barge through most types of fence. It’s no surprise that boar hunting is a dangerous sport, and it is considered a mark of bravery across the globe. Imagine being a medieval huntsman faced with a bristling, cornered boar that’s about to charge, armed only with your hunting dagger … It’s worth noting that since the 1990s wild boar have again become re-naturalised in a number of areas of Britain, notably Kent / East Sussex, the Forest of Dean, Dumfries and Galloway, Dartmoor and various parts of Ireland.

This story could have originated as a cautionary tale to local people who had to maintain their hedges dividing the land tenancy, or else forfeit it to the abbey. The annual creation of ‘Penny Hedges’ is called the Horngarth and is still practiced in Whitby at nine o’clock in the morning on Ascension Eve every year. The choice of Ascension, which changes every year in line with Easter and the lunar calendar, has helpfully ensured a low tide every year at that time, except in 1981.

There was a great forest at Eskdale, and it was owned by the monks at the abbey in Whitby. The abbot was a proud man. He was a friend of the king and he acted a little bit like a king himself, but everyone was used to it.

Abbot or not, the hunting in Eskdale Forest was good, and local knights would follow their sport in the forest very often. Not many people went in there, apart from a few peasants keeping their sheep and pigs around the woodland edges, and the odd illicit hunting party, and so nobody was any the wiser.

There were many local tales of the biggest hunting prize of all in Eskdale – the old black boar. Nobody had ever managed to get close enough to kill it, but it had gored many men who had tried. The boar was monstrous, clever, wily and ferocious, with sharp tusks and sharp teeth. Surely it would be a brave and noble man who would bring that beast home!

One day a monk at Whitby Abbey asked to meet the abbot. He explained that he had had a vision: to be closer to God, he wanted to live more closely with nature and away from people. He asked for the abbot’s permission to become a hermit in the woods, and build a little shelter where he could live simply among the trees and among God’s creation.

The abbot smiled at this and gave the monk the materials to build a simple little hut. It had an altar at one end, for the monk to make his daily prayers, and a stout door to keep out any wild animals at night.

The monk was delighted. He set about his routine of prayer for much of the day, simple living, observation of nature, and being as inconspicuous as possible. He would have largely succeeded in his aims, if it hadn’t been for a fateful day the following October.

That day dawned sunny and calm, and the trees had not yet fully given up their autumn cloaks of red-gold and amber. The warmth of the sun released the scent of decaying leaves in autumn, the soft surety of the waning year offset by the clear blue sky. A day like that in the woods is a great day to be alive, and three knights decided that it would be the perfect day to go hunting the old black boar of Eskdale Forest.

Luck was with them. Not long after riding into the woods with their hounds ahead, sniffing out the chances, they picked up the scent of the boar itself. It wasn’t long before they roused the great animal from its slumbers. It charged at them, they circled around, the hounds harried the beast, and the game began. The clear call of the hunting horns rang out among the trees as the hooves of their horses pounded the soft ground, the leaves and the rotting undergrowth of the old year, and the knights gave chase to the black boar, surprisingly fast for its size.

Several times they nearly cornered the poor animal, until at last one of them threw a spear and opened up a gash in the boar’s side. The boar squealed in pain and launched into the undergrowth, this time difficult to follow.

The noise of the hunt reached the ears of the hermit, who was deep in prayer and communion with God. He got up from his knees, opened the door of his little hut wide and who should rush in but the boar, all blood and stink and hair and terror. The animal was absolutely huge. It filled the space and trailed leaves and blood along the floor as it charged at him, head down and tusks sharp.

The terrified monk had no chance. He backed towards the altar as much as he could, but as the boar reached him it stopped. Its bloodstained eyes looked up at him, more blood streaming from its nostrils, panting. It seemed to be pleading with him, but then it sank down at his feet in resignation, only its rasping breaths telling him it was still alive.

Now there was the sound of the hunt, the hounds and the horns getting louder as they followed the trail of the boar. The monk leapt over the still body of the boar and closed the door of his hut, just as the huntsmen approached. Outside, the dogs hurled themselves against the closed door of the hut in a frenzy; they could smell their quarry inside.

One of the knights cursed loudly. ‘Come out of there!’ they cried. ‘Have you seen the great boar?’

‘Yes, he is here,’ answered the monk quietly, ‘and he has claimed sanctuary in a holy place.’

‘Get out of our way,’ cried another, ‘we need to finish him off!’

‘There will be no killing in God’s house,’ answered the monk.

‘For God’s sake,’ shouted the third knight. ‘It’s only an animal, and this is only a little hut in the woods. Open the door and let us finish the task we started. How dare you try to stop us!’

But the monk refused, again quietly, as he found himself stroking the roughly bristled flank of the unconscious, wounded animal inside the hut.

The door flew open and three furious knights stood at the door. ‘Out of the way, you old fool!’

‘Cast you out, sinners, you shall not harm this creature,’ said the monk, standing and stretching his arms out to stop them getting to the boar.

The knights lost their tempers then, and all notion of knightly honour left them. They drew their swords and attacked the monk, and soon his blood was mixed with that of the boar on the floor. They left him in a bloody heap, and then turned to the animal; but they discovered then that the boar had already died, and they had been cheated of their hunting conquest.

More curses followed from the three knights. But as their anger cooled, they realised the reality of the situation: they were in a small hut in a forest that wasn’t theirs, with a dead monk and a dead boar, neither of which they had any right to kill. The abbot would be furious, and he would show no mercy. They turned to each other in horror.

‘Now it’s our turn to seek sanctuary. To Scarborough!’ Then they thundered through the forest, their hounds racing to catch up, until they reached the sanctuary of Scarborough church. They knew that in a church, they could not be touched for forty days before justice could be called on them; and in that time, they could hatch their plans and gather support.

Meanwhile, the noise of the chase hadn’t gone unnoticed, and it didn’t take long for the news to reach the monastery at Whitby. Monks were sent to investigate, and they found the sad, crumpled body of their brother inside the little hut in the woods, and the dead boar beside him. Tears of sorrow turned to tears of hope as they discovered that the monk was still alive! They carefully carried him back to the monastery, where he related the whole sorry tale.

The abbot was furious that his land had been violated and one of his monks mortally wounded, and the very sanctuary of the church had been held in contempt. He planned to wait outside that church at Scarborough at the end of the forty days, to bring a swift and just end to the self-imposed wilderness of those knights. He went to the king and pleaded for the highest penalty of all: murder should be met with a killing in retaliation. His friend the king agreed that the death penalty would be appropriate for all three knights.

When the abbot hurried to the injured monk in the monastery to tell him the good news, he didn’t get the reception he expected. It was clear that the poor man was dying from his injuries, despite all the herbs and healing craft the monks could administer. But he managed to muster enough strength to sit up and speak.

‘We must offer the knights the Lord’s mercy,’ he said. ‘We must forgive them.’

‘That’s impossible,’ spluttered the abbot.

‘Nothing is impossible,’ said the monk. ‘They must be forgiven, but they should be given a penance to carry out every year for the rest of their lives. That way, they will not forget.’ He found just enough life in him to tell the abbot the details of the penance, and to hear his agreement, before his last rattling breath left his body and he went to meet his Lord.

The following Ascension Eve, in late May, the three Yorkshire knights woke at sunrise and went to the forest armed with nothing but a penny-knife each. They cut nine stakes, nine stout poles and nine leafy branches each, and they carried them down to the foreshore of the river Esk at Whitby on their own backs. Then they set about building a low wattle fence, digging the stakes deep in the mud a yard apart from the next, and weaving the branches to a neat finish between them. Stakes were placed so that the fence (or ‘hedge’) lasted for at least three tides before they were washed away. Any failure in the task would mean that all the land belonging to the knights would immediately be forfeit to the abbot of Whitby – and so they took great care to do good work.

When all was finished and neat, each of the knights took their hunting horns from their belts and blew loud notes to the sea, calling then: ‘Out on you! Out on you! Out on you!’

This happened every single year without fail (except if there was a high tide), by the decree of the hermit monk. It has been happening every year since, carried out by the ancestors of the same knights; and it still continues today, over eight hundred years later.

THE MAN AND THE NIGHTINGALE

The nightingale, a migratory bird that spends its summers in the south and east of Britain, has one of the strongest and sweetest songs of all our birds. Sadly it is also in alarming decline, with numbers reduced by 91 per cent between 1967 and 2007 (data from British Trust for Ornithology). Nightingales favour woodlands and scrubby habitats, and it is thought that cessation of coppicing in our woodlands, overgrazing by increasing deer numbers, climate pressure and the state of the nightingale’s wintering grounds in Africa may all be causes of its problems.

A live broadcast of nightingale song was a feature for many years on BBC radio in its early years. On 19 May 1942 a live broadcast was quickly stopped as 197 RAF bombers flew overhead on their way to Germany – something the BBC did not want advertised on the airwaves. The recording of that day, telling its own story of birdsong and machines, wildlife and warfare, can easily be found online.

This is an English version of a Greek fable, taken from the early Tudor fables by Alfonce and Poge, and printed by William Caxton in 1484. Woodlands in Tudor times would have been full of nightingale song in the early summer, and through the centuries songbirds were often caught to put into cages. In light of our twenty-first-century ecological emergency, this story takes on a new poignance.

A man had a garden at the edge of the woods, and one warm evening in May he heard the song of a nightingale close by. He was transfixed. Lilting and trilling, high notes and low, the nightingale was a delight for the ears, a rapid melody of the unexpected, an entire avian orchestra rolled into one. It was a sweet offering from such a small, dull brown bird.

He returned to listen the next night, and the next. He found that he worked his day only to get home and hear the song of the nightingale. As days turned into weeks, the man thought about how he could hear this song whenever he wanted, all the year through.

He found out a way. He bought some sticky birdlime and painted it on the branches of the nightingale’s favourite tree. The next day, the little brown bird was stuck fast to the branch, and then it was being held tightly in the man’s fist.

The nightingale fixed the man with its black beady eye, opened its beak and spoke. ‘Why did you take me? There’s nothing for you to gain that you couldn’t get if I were free.’

‘I want to hear you all the time, so you can be with me,’ said the man, a little startled.

‘Ah,’ said the nightingale. ‘But I won’t sing if I am captured or caged.’

‘If you don’t sing for me,’ said the man, ‘then I will kill you and eat you.’

‘There’s not much meat on my bones. If I were boiled, I would make a sorry meal; if I were roasted, I would give even less meat. But if you let me go, there may be a great profit for you – for I will teach you three great secrets, that only we nightingales know. I would be worth far more to you if I were free.’

The man considered, and let the nightingale go free. It flew up into a branch above his head, just out of reach of both birdlime and man.

‘Here are the three great secrets I promised you,’ said the nightingale.

‘First: never believe anything that’s clearly impossible.

‘Second: be sure to keep what you have.

‘Third: don’t be sad if you lose something and you can’t recover it. There is no point being sad.’

The man considered the nightingale’s advice. It didn’t seem to make sense.

Then the nightingale began to sing again, and this time the man could understand the words and the notes. The nightingale sang a story:

‘I praise the springtime, and the sunshine, and I give thanks for my life. If this man had known that inside my belly, there is a great diamond that is heavier than me, then he would have acted differently. But he didn’t know, and now I am glad to be free.’

The man’s brow furrowed. ‘That’s not fair! Let me get that diamond!’ He tried to chase the nightingale through the thicket, and only ended up tripping and covering himself in scratches and cuts. He went back to where the nightingale had returned to sing, and shook his fist. ‘You’ve tricked me!’

‘Now I know that you are a fool,’ said the nightingale. ‘You let go what you had. You believed something that is clearly impossible. And now you are sad about something you will never get back.’

The nightingale flew away, and it never returned to that part of the woods again.

Of course, the man didn’t learn. They say you should never try to teach a fool who won’t listen.

4

THE CLEARING IN THE WOODS

Into the forest I go,

To lose my mind and find my soul.

John Muir

If you listen to a story that ventures into the woods, and the hero or heroine reaches a clearing, you can be sure that something interesting is about to happen. In traditional stories the world over, woodlands are a place of adventure, where wagers are made, agreements are struck, and magic is created. We step outside of the community and out of our normal routine, and we are lost … and sometimes found. Woodlands are Joseph Campbell’s place of initiation in his ‘Hero’s Journey’, where the main character undergoes a transformation – depending, of course, on how they meet the challenge in question. Here is our classic territory of fairy tale, quest and redemption.

PERCEVAL

Perceval, or the high medieval Parzival or Welsh Peredur, appears in many medieval versions of the Arthurian romances. Scholars have debated the meaning of Perceval and the Fisher King for centuries. Even the origin of the name is debated: some say it comes from the old French per ce val (‘through this valley’), some insist it comes from the Arabic fal parsi (‘pure fool’). Wagner wrote an opera about Parsifal, and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was one of the most important poems of the twentieth century.

There are many ways to approach this story and meet Perceval. I started with some simple questions. What would it be like to grow up in the woods, far away from civilisation and all of its trappings? What if, despite your upbringing, you were fated to discover a great truth, without any experience to help achieve the quest ahead?

This is a major Arthurian story, and so parts of it have been shortened in this version.

You might say the hero of this story was a fool. But for quite a lot of our journey alongside him, he didn’t even have a name.

He was brought up in the wild tangle of the woods, by a mother who was herself a queen, once upon a time. She had fallen on difficult times and had vowed to take her son away from the court and bring him up in the woods, in a real place away from violence and killing and all the knightly dangers of the court.

A woodland has its own wonders and dangers for a young child, and our hero was fascinated with nature, in particular birds. He spent many hours watching them, listening, and imagining what it might be like to sing like the nightingale, soar like the raven, or see in the dark like the owl. The songbirds provided his orchestra: he woke when the robin and the blackbird started up before dawn, and he prepared to sleep when he heard the insolent calls of the song thrush and the last of the wren’s trill giving way to the liquid melody of the nightingale. The laugh of the green woodpecker met him whenever he walked the edge of the wildwood.

His mother was jealous, and she worried that her son was too infatuated with these strange, otherworldly creatures. So she arranged for a large net to be set in the woods, and her son watched in horror as his feathered friends were caught and slaughtered.

It took many years for the heart-lifting song of the woods to return, but eventually the birds did come back and they learned to trust again. The lad, in his turn, learned to hide his interest in nature from his mother, and the woods claimed a little more of his heart as a result.

When the young man was fifteen years old, he was working on a new wooden outhouse in the centre of a clearing in the woods, when he heard sounds new to his ears: loud shouts and whinnies and jesting. There in front of his eyes, three men in the prime of life rode into the clearing, wearing bright colours and armour, their steeds decorated and jangling with bells. They stopped and looked at the young lad with broad smiles.

‘Good day to you! That’s fine work,’ called one of the men.

‘Good– good day,’ stammered the lad. ‘Who are you?’

‘Why, we are knights of the Round Table, from Camelot,’ they laughed.

The lad’s eyes were as wide as soup-plates. ‘What is a knight, and what is Camelot?’

One hour and much conversation later, the three knights turned their horses about. ‘Farewell! Perhaps we will see you in Camelot one day, young sapling!’ More laughter echoed through the woods as they rode away; but the young lad stared after them, open-mouthed. Such glamour, such ambition! This was what being a man was all about! He had to join them!

His mother, naturally, didn’t receive this news well. When she could see her son was determined to become a knight, she gave him absolutely no help at all. The lad was forced to train himself in the little he knew about, with information gleaned from servants about the nature of battles, the correct way for a knight to behave, and a few stories about King Arthur. They really knew very little themselves, but for a few years he persevered, always dreaming, always aspiring to the highest notions of knightly behavior and courtliness.

When he turned eighteen years old, the lad decided to go and seek his dream: to find Camelot and become a knight of the Round Table. His mother was distraught that he might leave her, but when she realised he was determined to go, she offered him some advice.

‘My son,’ she said, ‘there are three rules that you should always keep, if you are to make your way in the world. They are:

‘Rule One. Always dress in bright colours, that way you will be noticed.’

(The lad thought: ‘Must make sure I look great at all times.’)

‘Rule Two. Never ask questions. A knight keeps his own counsel.’

(He thought: ‘Real men are strong and silent.’)

‘Rule Three. Women are important, women are to be valued and cherished, and women are to be kissed. But when you do kiss a woman, and you mean it, then you must also take her ring and her dowry purse, for anything else is less than honourable.’

(He thought: ‘Remember: kiss women, take their ring and their money.’)

The fateful day of parting came. And the lad couldn’t wait to get started. ‘Goodbye, Mother! Wish me well!’ He rode off into the woods towards his knightly destiny with so much excitement that the fluff on his chin was near quivering, and he didn’t look back once. The birds were singing to him, the sun was shining down on him, and he was going to become the most honourable and skilled knight that the world had ever known.

If he had looked back, he would have seen his mother drop dead with grief behind him.

There were plenty of adventures before our hero reached Camelot. There was the day he found a lady sleeping alone in a pennanted tent, and the way he got curious about her as she was sleeping, and the way he had no understanding of boundaries beyond those his teenage hormones would grudgingly acknowledge. He kissed her many more times than was reasonable, and insisted on taking her ring and her money, as he had heard his mother advise. This caused trouble between the lady and her lord, that led to many sad consequences.

Then, there was the day when he finally arrived at Camelot, and met a red knight who challenged him in the courtyard outside. With nothing but an ash-wood spear, a deal of over-enthusiasm and a hefty dose of beginner’s luck, our hero killed the knight outright before he had a chance to parry, to the horror of the onlookers. Was it really his uncle, as he learned later? No matter, he kept the red armour (how colourful!) and started training as a knight himself, meeting a mixture of derision, amusement and confusion among all the other knights. And there was an argument with Kay, King Arthur’s adopted brother and seneschal, and a feud with many others.

At Camelot they gave him a name: Perceval, meaning ‘a pure fool’, and Arthur meant it jokingly as a compliment. What knight could fail to be inspired by the pure intention and lack of experience of this young lad? He shone like the sun, a blank canvas on which to project such purity of intention. But as we all know, there are good and bad aspects to being a fool … or, as one of Perceval’s companions told him, ‘Fortune is bald behind and hairy in front’. He was, in short, a walking controversy.

Perceval worked hard and trained hard, and he loved every aspect of being a knight. For a start, there were the clothes. It was a knightly pursuit, being strong enough to wear the armour, the chain mail, the tanned leather and the wool, all over the linen undergarments. It took a noble man to be able to do that. Then the chivalry, the swordsmanship, the bawdy jokes … in truth, Perceval became one of the lads.

The day he was knighted made Perceval feel as if he had truly come home: he had found his tribe, and his humble upbringing made him feel all the more proud of it.

And yet, still underneath, Sir Perceval was the same wide-eyed, joy-filled, innocent boy that he had been when he was little, just with a little more tin plating, a little more glamour. He wouldn’t thank anyone to remind him of it.

Time passed in pleasant way, and Perceval was itching for his first quest, an adventure where he could prove his mettle as a knight. But still Arthur smiled and insisted, ‘Not yet, not yet … Your time will come.’ How frustrating. The time was slow and yet it started to offer up an idea, often discussed among the knights, of something called the Grail.

Nobody knew exactly what the Grail was, apart from a sign of religious perfection, the ideal knight, the closest you could get to God … a chalice holding pure light, the possibility of immortality and the unknowable. Whatever it was, Perceval wanted it, and he wanted to be the knight who found it, as well.

It was this longing that led to Perceval taking a vow on the holy book itself, in front of Arthur and Guinevere, that he would quest for the Grail, and he would not return to Camelot until he had found it.

But the route he had planned, at least at the outset, took him to find his mother in the woods where he had grown up … it was time he paid a family visit. He had no idea that she had died years ago.

And so the armour was polished, the supplies packed, the sword and lance and knife were prepared, and Perceval set out one morning in high springtime on his quest.

In our hearts, we all know those wonderful woodlands that the knights of the Round Table travelled through. The bright spring sun was always shining, dappling the new green leaves of the hazel and oak and ash, the wrens and chiffchaffs belting out their song, the bluebells carpeting the floor of the woods, with stitchwort and wild garlic and campion. The horse’s harness was jangling and the brachet racing alongside. All was hope and promise, any challenge could be well met, and some may say that surely here was the ultimate blessing, the best state of being, perhaps even the Grail itself. But we, and Perceval, press on.

Pathways he knew gave way to paths that had not been travelled for some time, even tracks that might be for badgers, not men. On the third day of his quest, the sunny morning soon gave way to a dull, overcast and hazy place, descending steeply to a wooded valley below, the fog obscuring the water beyond and muffling any noise. His horse picked its way through clumps of ferns and thickets of trees, and as he travelled he noticed that all was not well with this place. With every minute they journeyed, the new hazel leaves were becoming withered and malformed, the oak crispy brown, the ash mouldy shoots, the elm just dead branches. The lichens had given way to mould and green slime on the tree trunks, and the mist smelt stale, like the promise of a good year interrupted, already darkened and dead. Few birds sang in this place, other than the clattering of magpies and the occasional harsh cronk of a raven. As Perceval rode onto cleared land, the grass was patchy and yellowed beneath the hooves of the horse, the soil pale and sterile.

In front of Perceval, a stern castle took shape in the mist, grey and lifeless; and in front of it, a great lake or moat – he couldn’t tell which – clouded in mosquitoes and midges that crawled into his hair and under his armour and into his well-laundered linen shirt.

On the water was a small boat, and in the boat sat an old man, his fishing line stretched out into the water, yet not looking out to the potential catch but hunched over as a man resigned to misery. Hearing Perceval approach, he looked up and managed a smile. ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘Nice morning for fishing. There might even be a catch for dinner.’

There followed the kind of particularly British small-talk that never makes it into stories, because it really doesn’t say much of interest. But when Perceval told him eagerly of his quest, as a knight of the Round Table, for the Grail, then a glimmer of something like life came into the old man’s eyes.

‘I was like you … once,’ he said, and smiled again. ‘Perhaps, yes, you are the one. Did you know that I am a king, albeit a hobbled one?’ (He winced as he gestured towards his upper thigh, and Perceval could see a clumsy dressing wrapped around his leg.) ‘And this castle is my castle. As a knight of Arthur’s court, we would be honoured by your presence at feast tonight, if you would care to join us.’

Perceval graciously agreed, and that evening he found himself handing his horse to stable boys and being led into his own rooms in the castle, where he was helped to wash and dress.

Even Perceval noticed that all was not well with this place. He hadn’t even thought to ask the king about his story, but he did notice that the fine hangings on the windows were patched and darned, the tapestries worn, and the people in the castle carried some unseen burden of sadness and lack of hope. This was such a different place to Camelot. Perceval thought of himself as a benevolent, knightly beacon of light shining in the gloom, and he smiled to himself. Perhaps he could do some good here.

As he walked through the castle into the banqueting hall, nobody was there. He followed the sound of sweet singing through passageways to the throne room, and found everyone there, assembled solemn and processional, as if they had been waiting for him, to begin.

There in the centre of the procession was the king he had met earlier, barely recognisable in fine robes of velvet and fur, but still stooped and wincing at the pain from his wound. Perceval could see clearly that the blood was seeping through the dressing. The king looked up and welcomed Perceval to the feast, and Perceval knelt before him and received his blessing, as was the custom.

There was a pause, and Perceval, still kneeling before the king, felt that somebody had forgotten their lines. They were waiting for someone to say something. How odd. Still, he’d better get up, it doesn’t do for a knight to grovel on the floor for long, does it? He got up and took his place behind the king, and there was a low murmuring from the assembled company, but he couldn’t make out what they said.

The procession began, to a slow chanting song. Four objects were brought into the room and presented to the king, and the procession started to move as the bearers of these precious objects wove their way through the assembled guests.

One maiden carried a great round golden plate, a platter filled with the most delicate of foods, which the king kept trying and kept finding bitter and against his taste.

One carried a great sword, which the maiden plunged into the groin of the king on occasion as she went past, causing him to cry out in pain, opening the wound anew so that a great stench filled the chamber. But no words were spoken, just the same sad chant, sung over and over.

The sacred lance, carried by another maiden, was bleeding with drops of blood falling to the floor as they walked, on dresses and britches and walls.

And then, most precious of all, the Grail itself was brought in, by three solemn maidens: one carrying it and the other two flanking her. What was the Grail? A carved ancient stone with decoration all of the natural world, lichen and lapis and gold filigree, all changing in front of his eyes, with all manner of sweetness and savour.

The Grail was here! Perceval lit up. It was finally here, and it was a sweet sight! But what a strange ritual. No doubt he would understand more in time. It wasn’t right to ask. Be strong and silent, he thought, and smiled that he was still remembering his mother’s advice.

Perceval followed the king in the procession, and many of the people there glanced at him or offered a shy smile, and he was led to join the king at the high table, where the maidens helped the king to sit to table as comfortably as he could. The king proposed toasts to their guest, and now people down the table were looking at Perceval expectantly, and he beamed back at them. ‘I suppose I should say something here,’ he thought. ‘I should tell them something of myself, but they need to understand I am an ordinary person too, of course, and not lording it above them.’ He told them a couple of jolly anecdotes from Camelot, thanked them for inviting him, waxed lyrical about the Grail, and then sat down and the king signalled that all could eat.

‘They seem a little dissatisfied,’ thought Perceval, and he soon understood why, or so he thought: the fare was meagre and winter rations even in the height of spring, with no fresh food and the preserves past their best. ‘I must be gracious, and make the best of it,’ thought Perceval. He asked the king about the Grail, which was processed in front of them during the feast, but the king didn’t seem to want to talk about it; he chatted and made light small-talk to those either side of him, as all those present continued to glance sideways at him from time to time, almost as if they were waiting for him to say something.

The jesters and bards came forward after the eating had finished, and their entertainment was acceptable, though ‘nowhere near as jolly as Camelot,’ thought Perceval. He began to look around and shift from side to side – the wine wasn’t good, he was getting a headache, and the woman next to him was frankly a bit boring. The harpist finished with a flourish and compliment to their guest, and looked expectantly to Perceval, and paused. The whole room was silent, but Perceval just smiled and murmured, ‘No, you are too kind, too kind.’ There was an almost audible sigh of disappointment from around the table. ‘Everyone’s getting quite tired,’ thought Perceval. And it wasn’t long after that that he made his excuses and went to his chamber to rest for the night.

After a dreamless, sound slumber, Perceval slept late and woke heavy of limbs with the same headache. ‘What a strange night. Still, I did see the Grail, and I may yet see it again today, and learn more!’ He called for servants but none came, and so he dressed himself and went out to find company.

But there wasn’t a soul to be found in the whole castle, not even in the courtyard. Perceval, rather disgruntled now, went to get his belongings and find his horse on his own, and he rode out of the castle courtyard and over the drawbridge into the mist of the withered, dark countryside beyond. As he did, a lone voice from a window high up behind him called out:

‘You fool! You fool!’

It happened so quickly. The echoes rang in the courtyard and were gone. Then he was riding away. Had he imagined it?

‘I’d best get out of this Godforsaken place,’ thought Perceval. ‘But the Grail was there. What does it all mean?’

As Perceval rode through the withered trees and dying ferns, his horse climbed uphill through the fog, picking its way under trees and through thickets. After what seemed like a wretched age, the air became lighter, and sunlight and green life slowly returned to his surroundings. Here, again, were the woods that Perceval knew and loved, the place that held him, the place he had grown up in … as he rode into a sunlit clearing, the green woodpecker laughed at Perceval and he stopped to consider his options.

He would not go back to Camelot without the Grail. He was too proud for that.

Should he storm the castle and steal the Grail for a happier place? That didn’t feel honourable. Had he been the victim of a terrible enchantment, led astray by malevolent spirits?

And yet even Perceval knew that here was a problem to be fixed. He wanted to be the man who had not only found the Grail, but liberated it and put it to more sacred and positive use. Still the real situation would not reveal itself to him.

It took three meetings on the way to help Perceval see what his true quest would be. All of those meetings were with women. He told each one what had happened.

The first one said, ‘Why didn’t you ask the king what was going on?’

The second one said, ‘Look, love, I hate to tell you this, but it’s not all about you.’

The third one, his own sister, said, quite simply, ‘You should have asked a question.’

‘Really?’ said Perceval. ‘But … what question should I ask?’ And she could not answer him.

After that, Perceval started to dream dark and foreboding dreams, and the riddles addled his mind. After that, the dark times and the troubles began for him. And all through his quest, forever seeking the Grail castle, no matter how much he searched, he could not find the question that he had to ask. He could not make up for what he had missed, even though he had no idea what it was. He could not find it anywhere.

He did find a lot of challenges and adventures, and slowly, slowly, Perceval’s bad times started to change him. He loved, and he lost. He injured, and was injured in return. He acted, and he often regretted it. No matter how much he sought the Grail, and joy, and purity … he found hardship, disappointment and boredom. He exchanged just a little of that shining, beloved innocence for hard-won experience. He travelled through bitterness, jealousy, despair and rage, many times, and often to his own cost. He was being tempered like steel; he was being forced to question himself. And above all, he was being forced, slowly, painfully, to listen.

It was a whole five years of questioning and journeying later when Perceval found himself travelling down a slope in the woods to a place where everything was dead and decaying, despite it being high spring again. Wherever Perceval looked, something wild was mortally wounded, sick to near death … just like the king. At the bottom of the slope, next to a lake in a haze of stale mist, there was the Grail castle and all its surroundings, and he descended on his horse through that wretched wasteland of Britain, the place where the land and all joy was fetid and hopeless.

Inside the castle that evening, there was the same scene: the procession, in shabby grandeur; the king, in pain; and Perceval, kneeling down in front of him, being blessed as the honoured guest.

The assembly held its breath.

‘My liege,’ began Perceval.

There are many versions of the question he then asked. The one most often used in the medieval texts is ‘Whom does the Grail serve?’ But my favourite version is, ‘How can I help?’

And as Perceval spoke those words the colour flooded back into the Fisher King’s face and he stood tall and leapt in the air for joy, his wound healed. The air became sweet with hope and fragrance of the springtime. All the land around was healed, the lake became clear, and the woods became green and vibrant and buzzing with life. The green woodpecker’s laugh rang through that valley as the days lengthened and the sun lit up the place with new life. And the Fisher King embraced Perceval, and told him that he was Perceval’s uncle; and he bestowed upon Perceval the role of Keeper of the Grail.

Perceval’s adventures didn’t end there, but we will leave the story for now, with more questions.

Was the Grail still a magical cup borne by maidens?

Or was it the experience and wisdom that Perceval had won?

THE GREEN LADY

I’m glad to say that it isn’t just boys who have adventures in the woods in our folk tales. This dark little Hertfordshire story has more than a hint of both the Russian Baba Yaga and the German Hansel and Gretel about it. I’m glad that the first girl doesn’t do absolutely everything she is told to do.

British folk tales often tell of wisdom and help from the creatures you might find in a well; and it’s generally sensible not to eat fairy food, in case you were considering it.

A man had two daughters, and they all lived together in a small house at the edge of the woods. The elder daughter was sensible, honest and hard working. The younger daughter was slapdash and conceited, and she thought more about what she looked like than what she was doing. But the man treated his younger daughter more kindly than the older one, because the younger one was prettier. Ever since they were both little, it had been the same, and while the older daughter had made the best of it, she dreamed of the day when she could leave home and make a life for herself.

One warm spring day, when the sun was shining and the birds were singing, the elder daughter plucked up the courage to ask. ‘Father,’ she said, ‘give me a cake and a bottle of beer and your blessing, for I’m away to seek my fortune.’

The man was a little surprised, for it hadn’t occurred to him that she might go; but he gave her his blessing, and cake wrapped in a cloth and a bottle of good beer. She waved him goodbye and walked down the path into the woods.

It seemed that nothing much was happening in the woods that morning. The girl saw a deer as it bounded away, and a couple of squirrels running along the branches overhead. The sun shone and the insects danced under the trees; the woundwort reeked and the St John’s wort nodded along the wayside. She felt excited. She didn’t bother to mark her route, because she was on an adventure.

After a couple of hours of walking, after the path had narrowed to animal tracks and she had clambered over fallen trees and around boulders, she came to a small grassy glade, and she sat on an old fallen cherry tree to eat her lunch.

She got the cake and beer out of her bag and when she looked up again, there was a little old man standing in front of her, watching with beady eyes.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘What are you doing under my tree?’

‘I’m walking out to seek my fortune today,’ she replied, ‘but first – lunch.’

‘Care to share your lunch with me?’ he asked. ‘I’m very hungry.’

‘Yes, of course, there is plenty of cake and plenty of beer.’ She gave him some beer and a lump of cake, ate some herself and kept some wrapped up in her pocket for later, just in case she needed it.

The old man ate his lunch enthusiastically. ‘Where are you going next?’ he asked, spitting crumbs everywhere.

‘I’m not sure yet,’ said the girl.

The old man finished his cake and wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. ‘I’ll tell you where you can find your fortune. If you go along there’ – he gesticulated over to the dark part of the woods she hadn’t ever visited – ‘go further and further into the dark woods, you will eventually find a house. Knock on the door, and the green lady of the woods will answer. Tell her you’re looking for work, and she’ll help you out. Mind, you should do everything exactly as you are told to do, and then you won’t have any trouble.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, and they parted company. She walked in the direction he has shown her, and the path got narrower and more tangled and more difficult the further into the woods she went.

Eventually the girl got to another clearing and there was a little wooden house, with its walls made of carved yew-wood, its windows encrusted with lichen, and its roof tiled with oak-bark. She knocked on the door and it was opened by a woman unlike any the girl had ever seen.

This lady was tall and slender, with skin as pale as the sap of the birch tree and long, waving brown hair. She wore a dress made of all the leaves of the greenwood: fresh spring hornbeam and summer-rough elm, fiery first hawthorn shoots and broad, toothed hazel. The dress moved around her as she walked and made a sighing noise.

The lady fixed the girl with piercing yellow eyes. ‘Yes?’ she asked.

‘I – I’m looking for work,’ stammered the girl.

‘What work can you do?’ asked the green lady.

‘I can bake, I can brew – most things about the house I can do,’ said the girl.

‘Well come in then, don’t just stand there! I need you to sweep the kitchen. Make sure that you cause the dust to fly, and whatever you do, don’t look through the keyhole.’

The green lady handed the girl a birch-twig broom, then she swished into the front parlour and closed a heavy wooden door behind her. The door had a large keyhole under the latch, but no key.

The girl started to sweep. It wasn’t long before clouds of dust were rising into the kitchen, and so after getting rid of the worst of the dirt from the floor she had to wash everything, from the top shelf to the bottom of the dresser, before sweeping more carefully a second time.

She was just putting the broom down when the green lady came back into the kitchen and looked around. ‘Good, good,’ she said. ‘This has been well done. Now, the next job I have for you is to fetch water from the well to cook our supper in. Fill this bucket. If the water isn’t clear, keep changing it until it is.’

The girl took the metal bucket and walked out to find the well. There it was, all cased around with rocks, with a winch to haul the water up by a little wooden pail.

She hauled up the first pail of water and it was muddy, as if it had come from the bottom of a pond. She cast this away and tried again.

The second pail of water from the well was clearer, but as the girl peered into it, there was a flash of silver. A bright-scaled fish came to the surface of the water.

‘Wash me and comb me, and lay me down softly,’ said the silver fish. So the girl did, and gently put the silver fish into water in the metal bucket.

The next pail of water from the well was clearer still, and it contained a fish with scales all of gold.

‘Wash me and comb me, and lay me down softly,’ said the golden fish. So the girl did, and gently put the golden fish into water in the metal bucket.

The next bucket of water from the well was crystal clear, and it contained a white fish whose scales glistened like pearl.

‘Wash me and comb me, and lay me down softly,’ said the pearl-white fish. So the girl did, and she gently put the pearl-white fish into water in the metal bucket.

The next pail of water was so clear that the girl knew it was good. She put her hands to the water and drank, for she was thirsty.

Then the three fish lifted their heads from the water in the metal bucket and sang:

Under the soil you will soon dwell

If you eat the fairy food.

Drink the water of this well

And all things for you shall be good.

If you’re honest, bold and true

Good fortune it will come to you.

The girl thanked the fish for their advice and put them carefully back into the well. Then she hauled up enough clear water to fill the metal bucket, without any fish this time, and set off back to the green lady’s house.

It had taken her a while to fetch the water, and she was worried, but the green lady smiled. ‘Good, good,’ she said. ‘Here’s our supper for cooking. When it’s done, bring some in to me in the parlour and you can eat here in the kitchen.’

Supper was a strange root vegetable the girl had never seen before, and it smelt delicious as it boiled in the pot. She remembered what the fish had said and decided to finish off the cake in her pocket instead, along with some more of the cool, clear water from the well. Once she had done that, all she had to do was wait for the green lady’s supper to cook.

The girl wondered what the green woman was doing in the parlour, and her eyes crept to the keyhole of the door.

Why not look – what harm would there be? So she did – and this is what she saw.

That graceful green lady was dancing merry steps around the parlour of the little house to music from a little orchestra of songbirds perched on the tops of the picture frames. There were blackbirds and chaffinches and blue tits, song thrushes and robins and wrens, with a nightingale providing the melody, a nuthatch the rhythm section, and a woodpecker on percussion.

The green lady was not alone. Dancing with her was a grey-green troll, all crusted with moss and earth. He left scorch marks in the floor where his feet had been, and every so often he laughed: a great phlegmy laugh, with such foul breath that the girl could smell it, even through the keyhole.

‘Eugh!’ said the girl. The music instantly stopped, and the green lady was standing by her shaking her shoulders.

‘What did you see?’

‘Nothing,’ said the girl.

‘Hmm,’ said the green lady, and looked at her through narrowed eyes. She went into the kitchen and fetched her meal, then swished back into the parlour and closed the great wooden door firmly behind her.

The girl had no further work to do, and she looked at the keyhole of the closed door. She just had to look once more … very quickly, so that the green lady wouldn’t notice. Wouldn’t you have done the same?

As soon as she put her eye to the keyhole, the green lady was next to her. ‘How dare you disobey me!’ she cried, and lifted her hand. There was a flash of light, and instantly everything went dark for the girl. The green lady had taken away her sight.

‘Because you have been a good girl,’ said the green lady’s voice, ‘and you have made the dust fly and done all your tasks, I will give you your wages and you can go home.’

A bag of money and a bundle of clothes was pressed into the girl’s hands, and she was turned out into the dark of the woods with no sight to find her way.

The girl stood for a while and heard the owls calling to one another from the trees. She shuffled forward carefully, sensing the colder air of a clearing ahead, and trying to keep to the path by feeling ahead with her feet and reaching out with her hands. It wasn’t long before she stumbled against the rocks of the little well.

‘Here, let me get some water for you,’ said a man’s voice that she didn’t know. ‘I’ll make sure it’s clear. Before you drink again, put some water to your eyes. I’m putting it in your hands now … there.’

As soon as she had bathed her eyes in the water from the well, the girl found her sight restored. She looked up and there was a young man looking anxiously at her. ‘The fish of the well sent me to look after you,’ he said. ‘I can help you find the way back home.’

The girl looked at the young man again. ‘Thank you,’ she said. He had a kind smile, and sparkling eyes. By the time the two of them got back to her father’s cottage, cracking jokes and sharing stories, it was time for breakfast.

They tipped the bag of money on to the breakfast table, and it was full of gold and silver and jewels; the bundle of clothes contained fine gowns and velvets. Both the girl and the young man laughed at the sight, and it wasn’t long before they were married and happy in their own little cottage at the edge of the woods.

What about the girl’s younger sister? She was jealous of the fine gowns and velvets, jealous of the jewels, and above all jealous of the young man her sister had married. ‘Why shouldn’t I have that?’ she thought. ‘I deserve far more than my sister.’

One morning soon after, the younger sister put on her best clothes and finest bonnet, and went to see her father. ‘Father,’ she said, ‘give me a cake and a bottle of beer and your blessing, for I will go to seek my fortune.’

‘Very well, daughter, and I hope it turns out even better for you,’ said her father. She flounced off down the woodland path in her neat little shoes, carrying a basket of provisions and two good bottles of beer.

What did she find in the woods?

She found an old man who was rude enough to beg for food (of course, she refused to give him any).

She found a lot of scratches and cuts and ripped clothes from the twigs and brambles, as she tried to find the green lady’s house.

She was given a scolding from the green lady, because she didn’t sweep the kitchen properly.

She found three slimy, horrible fish in the well that made her dress all wet and dirty – she screamed and threw them back in the well.

She was given a disgusting vegetable that the green lady was rude enough to feed her. ‘Now,’ said the green lady with a wry smile, ‘you can never leave the woods.’

There was the younger daughter now, in the green lady’s house, looking through the keyhole of the parlour door. The green lady caught her, and took away her sight, and she was given no wages because her work had been so poor.

The younger daughter was put out into the woods, in darkness and with nobody to help her find the way home.

For all I know, she may still be wandering there now.

THE GIANT WITH SEVEN HEADS

Here we meet Jack, noble youth, fool, accidental hero and everyman.

Sometimes, a hero’s journey isn’t quite so deep and meaningful. Sometimes he just has to get the quest out of the way so that he can get on with his day.

This is my version of a Scottish story, told to the remarkable Hamish Henderson.

Jack went out from his house one morning and walked into the woods. There, in front of him on the brown earthen path, was a little brown bird.

‘Don’t go into the woods, Jack,’ said the little brown bird. ‘If you do, you’ll find the giant with seven heads.’

‘I’m looking for rabbits,’ said Jack, ‘I don’t need a giant with seven heads.’

Jack walked a little further into the woods. There, by the path, curled up on top of a purple heather plant, was an adder.

‘Don’t go into the woods, Jack,’ said the adder. ‘If you do, you’ll find the giant with seven heads.’

‘I’m looking for rabbits,’ said Jack, ‘I don’t need a giant with seven heads.’

Jack walked even further into the woods. There, perched on a branch, looking very sleepy, was an old brown owl.

‘Jack, will you do something for me?’ said the owl.

‘What’s that then?’ said Jack.

‘Take my old sword,’ said the owl, ‘and go and kill the giant with seven heads.’ There was the owl’s old sword, propped up against the tree trunk.

‘I’m looking for rabbits,’ said Jack. ‘I don’t want to kill a giant with seven heads, but now you’ve asked me, I’ll do it if you want.’

Jack picked up the sword, and it was light as a feather. He carried on walking, up the slope of the woods and over the hill. There, in front of him on the woodland path, a huge horse was galloping towards him at speed. It passed him by, and rode off into the distance; but no sooner had the sound of hooves died away than they were coming back again. Here now was the horse with a rider, and the rider was a huge warty giant with seven ugly heads all waving angrily at Jack.

There was the little brown bird again. ‘Jack! Touch your nose to my beak.’ Jack got down on to the path and touched his nose to the little brown bird’s beak. ‘Now draw your sword,’ said the bird. Jack got up from the ground and drew the sword, and he instantly changed into a little brown bird as well.

Jack-the-little-brown-bird took the sword in his beak and cut off one of the giant’s heads, and then flew away behind a tree as quick as he could. ‘Hoi!’ shouted the other six heads of the giant.

But Jack-the-little-brown-bird flew back towards the giant again with his sword, and he cut off another of the giant’s heads, and then another, and another, and another, until the giant had no heads left.

As the giant’s last head rolled on the ground, Jack changed back to his original form, and there where the giant had been standing was Jack’s long-lost brother.

‘Thank you very much!’ said Jack’s long-lost brother.

‘Go off and tell them at home, then,’ said Jack. ‘I’m going to catch rabbits now.’

5

THE OTHER ONES

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight …

William Shakespeare,
from A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Act 2 Scene 1, 1595/96

Call them the fairies, pixies, the Other Ones, or simply Them, you will find strange otherworldly creatures in the woods of Britain and Ireland. Fairy lore is alive and well in our folktales of the woods, and it’s often very local to the spirits of place of a particular woodland. Some recurring motifs can be found; but there are few rules, so expect the unexpected.

TAMLANE

This famous story is also a popular ballad from the Scottish borders. It has been traced back to at least 1549. The motif of fairy transformation, and persistence to save a mortal soul in the face of danger, is common throughout European folk tales.

Young Tamlane was son of the Earl of Murray, and young Janet was the daughter of Dunbar, Earl of March. They met when they were both tiny, and they grew up together, meeting when their parents did. As they grew up, the jokes turned to shyness and their childish curiosity to teenage dreams, and now when their parents visited one another they would steal away to be alone together and tell each other their wishes and hopes for life ahead.

It wasn’t long before Tamlane and Janet were engaged to be married, and it was a fine match. The future stretched out ahead of them, full of promise, and love, and family. But on Midsummer morning, two weeks before their wedding day, Tamlane went wandering in the woods, and he never came back. Nobody could find him anywhere: the heir of Murray was gone.

Young Janet was inconsolable. It was no surprise that nothing could cheer her. She took to wandering in the woods all alone, much to the worry of her parents; but for Janet, it was the closest she could get to her true love, as it was the last place he had been. Summer changed to autumn, and then to harsh winter, but Janet went out to the woods in all weather. Even worse, there had been rumours of a ghost seen in the woods, a ghost that preyed on young women. Janet’s family feared the worst, and they were worried sick about her, but nothing could stop her going to the woods to look for Tamlane.

One day the following springtime, Janet was wandering in Carterhaugh Wood, the wood that had been given to her long ago as a gift by her father. As she wandered along, she absent-mindedly plucked the flowers from the bushes. She came to a broom bush and plucked three blossom-heads from it; then Tamlane appeared by her side.

‘My love,’ he said.

‘I knew you’d be here! Why have you been away so long?’ cried Janet.

‘I’ve come from the land of the fairy,’ said Tamlane. ‘The fairy queen has made me her knight.’

‘But how did you get there, Tamlane?’ cried Janet.

‘I was hunting on Midsummer’s Day in the woods, and I rode widdershins three times around the hill without thinking of it. Then I fell fast asleep lying against a tree, and when I woke up, I was in the land of the fairy. It is a fair and wonderful place, Janet! The fairy queen keeps me there in her service – but I would rather be with you.’

Janet and Tamlane embraced, and it was a sweet feeling after missing each other for such a long time. They spent the night in the woods together. The following morning, Janet woke alone under an old hawthorn tree, surrounded by carpets of bluebells and wood anemones, and serenaded by song thrushes. There was no sign of Tamlane, but a bunch of broom flowers had been placed in her hand.

Janet returned home, to the delight of her parents, who had been sick with worry, but she just told them that she had been lost: she didn’t say anything about Tamlane for fear of worrying them even more. She dreamed of going back to the woods to find Tamlane again, but her parents now barricaded Janet in her room and forbade her to go out.

Over the following weeks, however, Janet realised that she was carrying Tamlane’s child. This was a pretty fix! What was she to do now? She decided to go back to the woods and try to find her love again, and this time to get him back for good.

Early one morning Janet used her bedsheets to make a rope out of her bedroom window and climb down to the ground below. She went to the same place in the woods he had been before, plucked three bright yellow broom blossoms, and there was Tamlane again by her side.

‘My love, I am so glad to see you. I need your help,’ Tamlane said.

‘I would take you away from the fairy queen, Tamlane, you belong with me. Are you in danger?’

‘The queen is making too much fuss of me. I have found out that every seven years the fairies pay their tithe to the Underworld, and I am scared that as her favourite knight I could well be the tithe, and have to live in the Underworld for evermore.’

‘How can I save you and bring you back, Tamlane? There must be a way!’ cried Janet.

‘Tonight is Midsummer’s Night, and I will have been in Fairyland for a year of human time, although it seems much shorter in fairy time. Tonight, the fairy court will ride through the woods of both England and Scotland, and walk over the borders to stake their claim on both our countries. You will need to stand at Miles Cross, the crossroads at the top of the woods, between midnight and one of the morning, and cast a circle of holy water all around you. Make sure to wear rowan blossoms in your hair.’

Janet realised that she was not going home that day, as she had some preparations to make.

Tamlane continued, ‘The first court of fairy folk that ride past, let them pass. The next court of fairy folk, bow low but say nothing to them. The third court that comes past will be the fairy queen’s court, and I will be riding at the head of the procession beside the fairy queen. I will be riding a milk-white horse and I will have a star in my crown. You will know me because my right hand will be gloved and my left hand will be bare. Be sure to be standing alongside my left side if you can.’

‘Then what should I do?’ asked Janet.

‘Reach out to my bare hand and pull me from my horse to the ground,’ said Tamlane. ‘Then grab hold of me quickly, and don’t let go. The fairy queen will cast all the magic on me that she can, and make me as unpleasant as she can – but remember it is just an enchantment, and don’t let me go, whatever you do! The final thing she will turn me into is a red-hot piece of iron. At that, cast me into the nearby stream, and I will change back into a man. Then throw your green mantle over me, and I will be yours. All the power that the fairy queen has had over me will be gone.’

So Janet promised to do all these things to save Tamlane. She collected rowan flowers for her hair for protection, and crept into the nearby church to steal some holy water in her flask. At midnight that night, she stood ready at the crossroads and sprinkled holy water about her, making prayers for the safety of her love, herself and their unborn child. The ash trees at the crossroads arched over the road and the moon cast shadows of their leaves on the ground.

Here was the first host of the fairy court, riding by all resplendent in blue silk with chestnut horses, lamps twinkling and bells tinkling at the reins. Janet ignored them and they did not appear to see her.

Then the next company rode by, this time all dressed in green silk with black horses and silver bells. This time Janet curtsied to the head of the procession and he gave her a nod as they went past.

Now here was the fairy queen, at the head of the next procession. Janet’s eyes, accustomed to the dark, could hardly look at her for the bright light. She was dressed in shimmering white and sparkling diamonds, as fireflies danced around her and her laughter chimed like tiny bells. Next to the queen was a gleaming, handsome knight, with a star on his crown, riding a milk-white steed as they all were in this procession. Through the sparkling haze, Janet could just about see that he was wearing one white glove, carrying the reins of his horse, while his left hand was dangling by his side, gloveless. Tamlane! Now, he was riding towards her, now he was next to her, and she was grabbing the bridle and grabbing his hand and pulling him off the horse …

The laughter and the bells immediately stopped and Janet grabbed hold of the man’s form on the ground, holding him as tight as she could.

‘He’s won! He’s won!’ shouted a voice, and the fairy people surrounded them and began their magic.

The figure of Tamlane became ice cold, so cold that his skin was freezing itself to Janet. She held on grimly. Then they turned Tamlane into a ball of flame, and still she held on. The flame vanished and the man became a huge snake, an adder writhing and hissing in her grip, trying to sink its fangs into her flesh; somehow, Janet held on. The snake became a swan, struggling with its powerful wings and legs to fly up and away: she grabbed on to its legs and managed to keep her grip.

Then Tamlane was turned into a rod of red-hot iron. Janet ran with him to the nearby stream and threw him in the water. As the hiss of steam rose into the night, there was a figure of a naked man in the river, exhausted and confused, and she threw her green mantle over him. Although Janet had felt the pain of fire and ice and fear and struggle, she was unharmed, and so was her child.

The fairy queen cried out: ‘Ah, Tamlane, Tamlane! Had I known that a lady would take you, I would have put out your eyes and replaced them with wood; I would have put out your heart and replaced it with stone. I’ll have to pay the Lord of the Underworld seven times over in place of you.’

The fairy court shimmered in the night air and drifted away like smoke in front of Janet and Tamlane’s eyes.

All that was left were the woods on Midsummer’s Night, and two young lovers, ready to make their way home, finally to be married.

THE WOODMAN AND THE AXE

This little story is from Sheffield. It reminds me of the woodland nature reserve where I studied for my Master’s degree in Aberdeenshire, with a swirling river Ythan below, stark conifer plantation up to one edge of the river, and ancient woodland to the other. I hope this woodman was cutting down the conifers.

Once a woodman was ordered to cut down some trees that grew very close to the bank of a deep, fast-flowing river. The woodman had lost his axe, and so he went to borrow one from a neighbour to get the job done.

He walked carefully along the riverside until he came to the doomed trees. It was difficult to get enough access or enough purchase to strike the proper blows and make a clean cut, but he did the best he could. But after only a few strikes, he raised the axe into the air and the head of the axe flew straight off its shaft and into the waiting river.

Well, this was annoying – and it wasn’t even his own axe! As the woodman stood scratching his head and wondering what to do, a little fairy man appeared on top of the water, his beard floating in the current. He clambered out and stood on the bank.

‘What’re you fretting about, there?’ he asked the woodman.

‘That’s the head of my neighbour’s axe in the water there, and I can’t reach it for fear of drowning,’ said the woodman.

‘Where did it fall in?’ asked the fairy man, and the woodman pointed.

‘Give me the handle,’ said the little man. The woodman handed it over, and the fairy threw it into the river where the axe-head had fallen. The woodman was furious – now the whole things was gone!

‘Nay, nay,’ said the fairy man with a smile. ‘Just watch the river where it went in, and you’ll see.’

They sat there crouched by the river bank, woodman and fairy man, watching the river. A full hour went by, and the woodman was beginning to fidget, when he heard a rumbling noise in the water, and the hatchet slowly rose out of the water for all as if it were King Arthur’s sword itself.

The woodman took the hatchet, and he turned round to thank the little fairy man; but the fairy man had gone.

THE SWALLOWED COURT

The wildwood that once covered the islands of Britain and Ireland would have varied, depending on the soils, the aspect, the grazing animals around, and crucially the water in the soil. Willows and alder prefer wetter land and the water’s edge, while trees such as holly and oak don’t like waterlogged soil at all.

This is a dark, but rather pleasing Welsh story. The woods can be dangerous, but perhaps they are also the place where we find more than we bargained for. The lake at the end of this story is Llynclys Pool, in the village of Llynclys near Oswestry. Shropshire Wildlife Trust now manages some of the remaining species-rich common and woodland in the village. Wylan, the villainous clerk of the story, is apparently commemorated at nearby Croes Wylan (Wylan’s Cross).

Benlli was prince of Powys, and although he wasn’t well liked, he was powerful. Like many older men of power, he thought himself the most attractive man in the world. The story doesn’t tell us what Benlli really looked like, so that has to be left to your imagination.

Benlli had been married for many years, and the marriage had been a happy one. But now his wife had wrinkles and grey hair and a saggy body, he didn’t find her attractive any more. So he started to daydream about young women, to flirt with maidservants, and to think about what it would be like to have a young, firm, tiny-waisted woman in his life.

One day the prince was hunting in the greenwood around his castle, pursuing a great stag, and he became separated from the rest of the company. As he was searching the trees for his quarry, there was a jangle of harness and a young woman rode past him. He saw long dark curls, blushing cheeks and sparkling green eyes; he caught the lilt of a merry laugh and the scent of roses in summer, and she was gone.

Benlli was entranced. He returned to the same place in the woods the next day, and she rode past again, laughing and twinkling at him. But on the third day, as she rode past he caught her arm, and both horse and rider stopped.

She was breathtakingly beautiful. Her skin was plump and perfect and her body was lithe.

‘Please,’ said Benlli. ‘You have enchanted me with your beauty. I am the prince of this place. Will you come back to my castle and share your life with me?’

She laughed again: it was a tinkling, pretty laugh in the trees, a sound that played harmonies with the birdsong. ‘Prince. You must put your wife away, and then I will wed you on one condition. One day in every seven, you must allow me to leave the court unseen and alone, and nobody must follow me. I will be away for the night and return the next day. You must swear never to ask me where I am going or what I am doing. If you do this, and if you keep your solemn vow, then I will never grow old and my youthful beauty will never fade, until the tall yellow flag and the long green rushes grow in your hall.’

The prince agreed, and took the radiant Maid of the Greenwood back to his castle.

But what of his wife? She must have heard the news, and hidden in shame, or fled in sorrow, for nobody could find her. She completely disappeared; and Benlli wasn’t sorry about it. Her disappearance made life easier for everyone.

The wedding day of Benlli and the Maid of the Greenwood was a merry affair. He presented her with a blue sparkling sapphire ring, worth a hefty part of his kingdom. As the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, they settled into a happy married life. The prince showered her with favours and jewels, and he was besotted. It seemed that her beauty was more radiant with every day. Every seventh day the maid disappeared before nightfall, and returned the next day seemingly unharmed. Nobody followed her, and nobody asked questions.

Time went on and the months passed by in rapid happiness. But Benlli began to wonder. Where did his wife go on that seventh day? Why couldn’t she be with him? The curiosity and the sense of rejection ate into him and he became unhappy, quiet and sulky, particularly the day before she went away, and the day after she came back from wherever she had been.

Nine months after they were married, Benlli held a great feast for Candlemas day, and among the guests was a Christian clerk called Wylan. This man was secretly skilled in magic, and he could see that in spite of the costly feast and the luxurious life the prince lived, there was some dark sorrow hanging over him.

A few days later Wylan had the chance to ask. ‘My lord, something is troubling you, I can see it,’ he said. ‘I am a man of God. Can you not trust me enough to share your troubles? It may help to ease them.’

The prince told him everything. ‘When the owls start to call at the end of every seventh day she leaves me, and I lie awake and alone in my bed all night, waiting until the day-star appears in the sky. Then I fall into a deep slumber, and when I wake late she is back by my side, as if nothing had happened. The weight of this mystery is heavy on me, and I can find no peace.’

‘I can help you to find your peace,’ said Wylan. ‘This is not a Christian way for a man and wife to be living. Let me help you, for I am learned in these matters. All I will need is for you to give the Maid of the Greenwood up to me, and promise that the monks of the White Minster will receive an annual tithe of all the animals on your land and all the money in your vaults.’

Benlli agreed, and the clerk went out that night to the dark of the wildwood close to the castle, wrapped up in a dark cloak against the cold frost. He crept through the trees, navigating only by their shadows. The bright stars and the first crescent of the new moon peeped through the bare branches. At the highest point of the wood were the rocks by the giant’s grave, and he hid himself close to the mouth of a cave that led down to Fairyland.

Sure enough, just before midnight a lady hurried past him into the cave, cloaked in fur and velvet and with jewels glittering in her braided golden hair – it was the Maid of the Greenwood.

When she was safely in the cave, the clerk opened his book with cold fingers. This was not a Bible, but a Book of Shadows, and he began his spellcraft by starlight and lantern-light. It wasn’t long before the clearing in the front of the cave was full of the local ancestors of the place, summoned to do his bidding.

‘The prince has promised to continue our craft and the knowledge at the White Minster by giving us a fat tithe – and so he has paid his price,’ said Wylan. ‘Now he has resigned the Maid of the Greenwood to me, so may this be: may she forever be as she now appears, and may she never leave my side, for she is mine. I swear to marry her tomorrow. Take her to the White Minster before daybreak and I will wed her there in the morning.’

The invocations were made, the spell secured and the spirits thanked. Wylan travelled back through the woods to the White Minster, smiling from ear to ear, to await his beautiful bride.

But outside the White Minster, a heap of an old hag was waiting for him. Her eyes were clouded and bloodshot, her face was warty and her hair wispy and clumped as if old lichen had rooted on her scalp. She reached out a bony finger from her shawl and beckoned him over to her. The ring flashed blue sapphire: it was the ring that Benlli had given to the Maid of the Greenwood on their wedding day.

‘Take me to be your bride,’ she cackled through rotten teeth. ‘I am the woman that you swore to marry.’

‘No,’ stammered Wylan, disgusted.

‘Thirty years ago,’ she said, ‘I was Benlli’s blushing bride. Time wore heavy on both of us over the years, and beauty was all he cared about in a wife. As I lost my beauty I had to seek out magic, to make sure I could stay in the life I loved. The fairy people gave me eternal beauty as the Maid of the Green Forest, on the condition that I returned to the cave once every seven days to be the foul hag you see now. In this way I charmed the prince all over again. I promised him that my beauty wouldn’t change until the tall yellow flag and the long green rushes grew in his hall.’

Wylan’s mind was racing. ‘But …’

‘I have kept my promise to Benlli,’ she said. ‘Now your new magic overrides the first, it means that I will remain as the hag forever. And you have also kept your promise, for Benlli has found his peace, although not the kind he wanted; it is the peace of the dead. The water has already risen way beyond the ceilings of his royal hall. The yellow flag, the green rushes and the reedmace are growing tall, and willow and alder are sprouting at the new boundaries of this woodland, next to the lake.’

‘There has to be some way out!’ pleaded Wylan.

Again the hag cackled. ‘No. You will now take me as your bride, and do as you have promised the spirits. Your tithe shall be a share of the pike and the perch swimming in the great lake that has swallowed Benlli’s hall, and a share of the water in its vaults.’

Wylan had been caught in his own dark plot.

PIXY-LED

There are many tales from around the British Isles of being led away by pixies in the woods. Some involve actual journeys, some are definitely time travel, and some are, well, all in the mind.

I was delighted to find a pixy story from my own stomping ground of north Devon, where there are now only fragments of broadleaved woodland left. Torrington Common is a happy exception: these 365 acres of Devon were gifted to the people of Great Torrington as ‘an area of waste’ in 1194. It has now largely reverted to woodland, enjoyed by local people, wildlife and visitors alike, and managed by a dedicated group of commoners.

I wonder how this story originated. Those who are more cynical about pixies could find a number of explanations. I’ll leave you to your own conclusions.

It was a fine June day in 1890, and a party of local men were stripping oak-bark in a woodland near Torrington. They worked pretty hard and finished their work in the early evening. When they were packing up to leave, one of the men stopped. ‘I’ve left my billhook in the woods,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and get it, and catch you up.’

The man walked back into the woods where the oak and elm and ash trees were casting long shadows, and the bluebells and dog’s mercury were all gone to seed. The nightingale was starting up its song at the edge of the wood, and the blackbirds were giving their warning call, but here in the middle of the trees it was quiet … too quiet.

There was the glint of metal on the ground, and he stooped to pick up his faithful old Devon billhook. As he straightened up again, he felt all dizzy and odd, and he couldn’t stand up straight. It felt a bit like some weight was bearing down on him that he couldn’t see. He tried to raise his head to look around.

There was a little chuckle, then another from the other side; then a third laugh that jarred with the first, and yet another snigger that bounced off the trees and clashed with all the other sounds.

Pixies! The man knew they were laughing at him, and he’d heard of people being pixy-led, but he couldn’t move, even to take his jacket off and turn it inside out, which is what he’d heard you had to do if there were pixies around. His brain was all cloudy and he couldn’t think straight, and so he just stood there all hunched over in the woods as the pixies laughed at him.

Back at home, his wife was waiting. When the clock chimed eight o’clock and he hadn’t arrived, she marched down to the village pub, exasperated. ‘Where is he?’ she demanded of them all, sitting with their mugs of ale and looking faintly guilty. ‘No sign of him here,’ said the men who had been working the tan-bark. ‘He said he’d catch us up, but he didn’t.’

By ten o’clock his wife was really worried, and she walked up to the woods in the fading light. When she got to close by the woods where the men had been working, she found the scrunched, sodden figure of her husband shuffling towards her, as dishevelled as she’d ever seen him.

‘I’ve been pixy-led,’ was all he could say.

‘That’s no excuse,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you just turn your pockets inside out, like everyone else does?’

And that was that.

THE HOUND OF THE HILL

This old Cheshire story is a good example of a ‘fairy hound’ tale. Such stories occur all over these islands. The dog is typically a ghost or ghoul, sometimes a representative of the devil – especially if black – and usually a bringer of bad luck. I was pleased to find this one is helpful! Do remember never to thank the fairy folk, because they don’t like it.

A farm lad was walking home through the woods at dusk one evening, when he heard a whimpering from the hazel thicket. He walked over to find out what was in trouble, and saw a red and white hound curled up in the leaves.

He called out to the hound. ‘Come on then, let me help you out. You’re worn out with all your running! See, I can get some dock leaves and water, and bathe your feet a bit, and we’ll get you back to the village.’

He went to find some big dock leaves from the path, wetted them in a little stream nearby, and then went back to find the dog.

‘Come on, then.’ And the dog got on to four paws with some difficulty, and limped over towards him. It wasn’t the size of a normal dog, it was the size of a small cow.

The lad turned white as a sheet. This must be one of the fairy hounds! It was bad luck, if not certain death, to see one. Still, any animal in trouble should be helped …

Without thinking too much, he reached for each of the four paws of the giant dog, wrapped them in the wet leaves, and then stood back. ‘Now then. You can make your own way home much better now – wherever your home is – and I’ll be off to the safety of mine. Good night.’

The hound’s tail was wagging.

The farm lad pressed on. He walked the rest of the woodland path and then came out to the heath and the common, and it was only there that the trouble began. There was more shadow than light now, and to begin with he could only see two bright green eyes heading towards him. But as they got closer he could make out the shape of a massive black witch-goat, all horns and hooves, and it was gathering pace as it ran at him. The lad was frozen to the spot, quite paralysed.

Just as he was closing his eyes for what he thought would be the final time and calling to his gods, something flew out of the darkness and attacked the goat. A tumbling mass of ferocious red and white hound and angry goat snarled its way across the heath. But the goat was no match for the fairy hound. It gave up the fight for lost, and changed into a ghostly white barn owl that flew silently away into the night.

The red and white fairy hound was panting for breath, and he looked at the lad and wagged his tail again.

The lad knew he shouldn’t say ‘thank you,’ but he touched his cap and said ‘Good night,’ and then he went home.

6

ESCAPE TO THE WILD

But when ye have killed, and your bowl is spilled,

And your shoes are clean outworn,

Back ye must speed for all that ye need

To oak, and ash, and thorn!

‘A Tree Song’, Puck of Pook’s Hill, Rudyard Kipling

In our culture, and in a practical sense, the woods are a place outside of normal community. The days of dangerous predators are long gone, but still we humans prefer to live together in the convenience of the collective. Our imaginations, too, reach out to woodlands as ‘other’ – a place where things could happen that might normally be unacceptable; a place to escape to, if you want to conveniently disappear. This leaves us at the mercies of the elements, whether we would choose them or not.

Here are stories about escaping to the woods, and about what happened next, after the first flush of adventure.

DIARMUID AND GRAINNE

The mythology of Britain is peppered with romances where couples elope into the wild woods. From Tristan and Iseult in the Arthurian tradition, to this Irish tale from the Fenian cycle, the tales often end in tragedy and heartbreak. Before that happens, though, there is an escape to a purer, wilder and more fundamental way of being: a time of respite and even flourishing love in the woods before the inevitable justice is served.

Diarmuid appears in many adventures of Fionn mac Cumhaill and the magical warband of the Fianna, set in the second to fourth centuries. Diarmuid’s ‘love spot’ on his face was said to make him irresistible to women, and this got him into many challenging situations. A ‘geis’ was a spell, vow or taboo placed on someone that they could not break – it was a way of setting a person’s fate and invoking ancient and magical forces to come to bear on that person.

Fidchell is an ancient Celtic board game, perhaps an ancestor of chess. The Forest of Dubros and Ben Bulben are both in modern-day County Sligo. This story follows on from ‘The Rowan of Dubros’ in an earlier chapter.

Diarmuid O’Duibhne, son of Donn, was born with a magical spot on his forehead, which made him irresistible to women. Throughout his time with the Fianna, in the service of the great Fionn mac Cumhaill, Diarmuid took some care to conceal the point of love on his head and he wore his hair long; but that only served to make him even better looking. Diarmuid got into many adventures with women, and the love spot would prove to be his downfall, as this story will tell. It was the worst kept secret of the Fianna.

But this wasn’t Diarmuid’s only secret. When Diarmuid was growing up, he witnessed his father accidentally killing his half-brother in a game. The little boy’s father, Roc, grieved loudly when he saw his son’s broken body, and he cast a magic that changed his son into a wild boar, a huge animal that ran away into the woods. Roc then cast two geis. The first, on his son the boar, was that one day he would kill Donn’s own son Diarmuid. The second was that Diarmuid would never be able to pierce the skin of a wild boar, or defend himself against such an animal.

Diarmuid became one of Fionn mac Cumhaill’s best warriors, and had many adventures with the Fianna. He once rescued a lady under enchantment from death by killing three thousand four hundred men single-handedly. He freed the Fianna from the enchanted House of the Quicken-Trees, a trap set by Fionn’s enemies. His foster father and protector was Angus Og, the god of love. His overlord and best friend was Fionn mac Cumhaill, and Diarmuid was one of the most loyal of the Fianna.

But as the adventures and the years rolled by, time caught up with Fionn mac Cumhaill, as it does with all of us. He found himself wiser, but a little slower than his younger warriors like Diarmuid. He lost his wife to sickness, and he carried on alone. Every year on his birthday, Fionn started to set himself great physical feats that he always achieved, as a reminder that he was still strong and that age was not causing him to fail. Not yet.

After some years alone, Fionn decided that it was time to take a new wife. He called the Fianna together and asked their advice: was there a suitable woman who would be able to match the strength and wit and wisdom of the great Fionn mac Cumhaill? All the Fianna agreed that there was only one woman in Ireland who fitted the bill: Grainne, daughter of the high king, Cormac Mac Airt. She was young and beautiful, but already her reputation as a strong and fiery woman was known throughout the land.

Fionn sent two of the Fianna to seek Cormac’s permission for his daughter’s hand in marriage. When Grainne heard the news, she set to thinking.

As a young girl, Grainne had seen a boy playing hurling one day, and as he had stood up and brushed the hair back from his handsome face she had fallen in love with him. She had not been able to move the image of him from her mind, and because of this Grainne had refused any offer of marriage.

But the years had passed and the lad had not appeared again. Grainne heard of the offer of marriage from the great Fionn mac Cumhaill and she found it flattering. She concluded that she could do much worse than this great hero, and so she graciously accepted his offer.

Arrangements were made, and a great feast was held at Cormac’s hall to celebrate the forthcoming nuptials. Grainne dressed in her finest and, just before she walked into the assembled company, she could not resist a peep through the heavy drapes at the doorway of the hall to see what her new husband looked like.

Grainne saw an old man standing next to a younger man near the high table, both of them with the same features. She realised with horror that the older man was Fionn himself, and the younger one, much closer to her own age, was Fionn’s son Oisin. Grainne began to regret her decision. Oisin was much more suitable! Why had she agreed to marry an old man?

Then Fionn turned to Oisin in conversation and Grainne saw the man on the other side of him. He too was a younger man, handsome of face and shining of countenance, and she saw the young lad she had fallen in love with on the hurling field, all that time ago. It was Diarmuid O’Duibhne.

That was the moment when Grainne decided she would not marry Fionn. She strode into that hall and found herself seated at the high table: the bride-to-be with Fionn on one side of her and Diarmuid on the other.

Of course it was Diarmuid that Grainne kept turning to for conversation. Fionn didn’t really notice; after satisfying himself that his new bride was beautiful and well respected, he was busy renewing old bonds of comradeship and making deals with the elders in Cormac’s court. As the evening progressed, Diarmuid found Grainne very pleasing company – he had always been one for the ladies, and the other Fianna started to tease him. But when Diarmuid found himself dancing with Grainne for the fourth dance in a row, although he was enjoying it, he started to feel a little embarrassed for his lord.

‘Go to your betrothed now, for your attentions should be with him,’ he hissed to Grainne.

‘Can you not sense the feelings between us, Diarmuid?’ she twinkled back. ‘I would marry you, not Fionn, I swear. There is a true bond between us.’

Diarmuid was now in a fix. He could not betray Fionn, and yet Grainne was casting spells of love on him, as he might have done by accident with her on account of his love spot. Diarmuid made himself scarce for a while.

Grainne called for her women to bring wine. She added herbs to the wine, and offered the cup to the assembled company one by one as a toast: for a good wedding, she said, and to bring good cheer. But those herbs were not the heartening hawthorn, the blessed rowan or the sunny St John’s wort. Those herbs were vervain, wormwood and tiny dried mushrooms, and as she was serving wine to the last of the Fianna the first were already falling into a deep, trance-like sleep.

At the end of the line of Fianna were Oisin and Diarmuid. Grainne stood close to Diarmuid, a little too close, and giggled. ‘Diarmuid,’ she said, ‘will you not run away with me, and marry me? There is high energy between us, and great love.’

Oisin turned with anger to Diarmuid, but he was already refusing Grainne’s advances again. ‘I am one of the Fianna,’ said Diarmuid. ‘I cannot betray my lord, and I will not go with you, however much you might want it.’

At this, Grainne sighed. ‘Then there is nothing else for it,’ said Grainne. ‘You must meet your fate with me, Diarmuid. I cast a geis on you to run away with me to the woods tonight, to be with me, and to be my love.’

Now both men were horrified. A geis was a sacred bond, and to try to break a geis was to incur the wrath of the gods and the Old Ones. ‘My lady,’ protested Oisin, ‘this is not fair.’

Diarmuid looked Grainne straight in the eyes: she was determined to get what she wanted. ‘I will come with you, I cannot break a geis,’ he said, ‘but I will not lie with you. I will not betray my lord Fionn even under this duress. He may seek me out, but I will still be loyal to him no matter what he judges to be the truth.’

Diarmuid had no choice but to leave that night with Grainne, and they travelled in silence: she was determined, he was resigned to his fate.

The next morning, as the Fianna awoke from their wild, strange dreams and Oisin told them what had happened, Fionn cursed Diarmuid. It wasn’t the love of Grainne that he missed, it was the broken loyalty of one of the best of the Fianna that had hurt him. Fionn swore to hunt down the couple and take his revenge on Diarmuid.

It can be tough going, walking through the woods, especially if there isn’t a clear track to walk by, and particularly if you didn’t really want to be there in the first place. The first days of Diarmuid and Grainne’s journey were punctuated with sharp words and sore companionship between the two of them. She asked him to hunt for food, and she asked for him to find horses to help their travel; and when he refused, she resorted to more geis, much more readily, to impose her will on him. It was an uncomfortable journey.

But the woods in high spring hold surprises in every clearing, behind green hazel shoots and under yew trees laden with pollen-flowers. During the day, they tracked inquisitive deer and chased chattering red squirrels along the branches; they dozed in sunlit clearings peppered with primroses. By night, Diarmuid kept his distance from Grainne on the other side of the fire, and they took turns to keep guard as the owls called overhead. The gods of curiosity and humour started to make themselves known.

One night, there was a silence at the fireside that was slightly less tense than usual. Grainne looked over the fire to Diarmuid, and grinned at him through the smoke and wood-sparks. She told him about the time she had seen him playing hurling; she told him of life in her father Cormac’s court; she told Diarmuid of her hopes and wishes. He couldn’t help but ask questions of her, and the answers she gave intrigued him. She started to ask him questions back. Their conversations became a little richer, the silences more connected.

They travelled on, and now the jokes were more frequent. But still Diarmuid kept his distance from Grainne, and remained faithful to his lord. He watched her, though, and saw how deft and skilled she was in the ways of the land and the knowledge of herbs and bird-lore. He began to enjoy the company of the days ahead with Grainne, and told himself he had found a fine companion and friend; he tried to ignore any other more unhelpful feelings.

One sunny morning they were crossing a shallow river, their horses picking their way through the pebbles. The water splashed up and soaked Grainne all the way up to her thigh. ‘Ha,’ she said, and twinkled at him. ‘Diarmuid O’Duibhne, whatever courage you might show as a warrior in battle, this splash of water on my leg has plenty more courage than you.’

That was the moment when Diarmuid broke his promise to his lord Fionn, and he kissed Grainne. That day they became lovers, in the greenwood of old Ireland, surrounded by the court of songbirds and the company of trees.

They travelled on, the journey now one of togetherness and pleasure, and one day they met Angus Og, the god of love and Diarmuid’s foster father. Angus grinned. ‘I completely approve of this match,’ he said. ‘But you must beware, for Fionn mac Cumhaill is on your tails. As long as you are together, you can never sleep in a cave with one entrance, or a house with one door, or a tree with one branch; you won’t be able to eat where you have cooked, or sleep where you have eaten. You will need to keep moving, if you are not to be killed by Fionn and the Fianna.’

One night Diarmuid and Grainne came to a deserted wooden hall in the woods, all wattle and thatch, with seven different doors around the edges. It was a rainy night and the shelter was welcome, so they settled down in the dark together. Later on, they woke to the sound of fists pounding at the doors. ‘Diarmuid O’Duibhne! Traitor! I have you surrounded,’ shouted Fionn. ‘You cannot escape; one of the Fianna stands at each door of this place. Give yourself up to the fight, and be ready to meet certain death.’

Another voice spoke in the dark: Angus Og had come to help. ‘Let me spirit you both away,’ he said quietly. ‘I can remove you from this danger.’ But Diarmuid hesitated. He hadn’t heard Fionn’s voice for many months, and now he was torn, between protecting his love and fighting for his honour as one of the Fianna. ‘Take Grainne to safety,’ said Diarmuid. ‘I will meet my fate here, and then I’ll come to find you.’

Angus and Grainne disappeared, and Diarmuid walked to the first door. ‘Who is behind this door?’

‘Oisin,’ said a voice quietly, ‘and I will help you escape.’

‘No, I want to fight,’ said Diarmuid. He found friends from the Fianna behind the second, third and fourth doors, the fifth and sixth, all of them offering to help him escape unharmed. ‘No!’ muttered Diarmuid. ‘This is not right, it is not honourable.’

He came to the seventh door. ‘Who is behind this door?’

‘Fionn mac Cumhaill,’ roared a familiar voice. Diarmuid opened the door and the battle began.

Diarmuid knew Fionn’s fighting technique well, but he had not expected the rage behind the blows, or the violent anger that fuelled Fionn’s fight. As the light was rising in the east, the two of them still fought, surrounded by the other Fianna, sad to see two of their brothers fighting each other with bloody intent. Diarmuid was tiring, and Fionn knew it. Fionn whirled about and brought his sword down, intending it to be the death blow for Diarmuid; but now Diarmuid was leaping with the agility of a salmon, up and out of the circle, and away into the woods to seek his love. He had been able to escape all the time, yet chose to fight; but he was not ready to die just yet.

Following that night, Diarmuid and Grainne lived a nomadic life in the woods, hunting, tracking, never stopping, never settling, always chased by Fionn and the Fianna. The chase ran across the woods of Ireland, as spring turned into high summer and the green of the leaves grew darker, as the sun reached its height and the year ripened to the festival of Lugh.

One day Diarmuid and Grainne found a patch of woodland that was wilder and more remote than any they had seen. This was the Forest of Dubros. It was under stewardship of a local troll, and Diarmuid agreed permission from the troll to hunt in these woods, on the condition that they did not eat any of the berries from the ancient, magical rowan tree that grew there.

But Grainne, who was pregnant, craved the rowan berries as soon as she had heard about them, and would not settle until she had some. There was only one solution: another battle. Diarmuid met the troll again, and after a long and bloody fight his sword met the troll’s throat and he was killed. Grainne was already reaching for the beloved red berries on the tree nearby, and both Grainne and Diarmuid climbed the ancient rowan to find the sweeter berries higher up. They found the troll’s nest in the branches, and settled there for a while, safe and sated with magical berries, refreshed and re-inspired, and strangely younger and even more beautiful than they had been before.

Fionn’s life was more complicated, with other business to attend to; he couldn’t spend all his time hunting for Diarmuid. When the chief of the Mac Morna clan, sworn enemies of the Fianna, sent a message asking for peace, Fionn saw an opportunity. ‘I will agree to a truce,’ he said, ‘if you do one of two things. Either bring me the head of Diarmuid O’Duibhne, or bring me the magical berries of the ancient rowan tree.’

Diarmuid had quite a reputation in battle, and the chief of the Mac Morna clan decided that it would be easier to find the rowan berries. But when they tracked down the location of the magical tree, they arrived to find the troll’s bloody body at the foot of the tree, and many of the red berries missing – far more than any birds would ever have taken. Fionn and the Fianna were called to the scene.

Fionn stood under the rowan tree and pondered. The Fianna were the only ones capable of killing the troll, and it hadn’t been one of his men … so it must have been Diarmuid. Was he still up there? Fionn called his son Oisin to him. ‘I say that we play a game of fidchell, right here,’ he said. Puzzled, Oisin set up the game and they started to play. It wasn’t long before Fionn had set a trap for Oisin in the game, and he was heading for checkmate; but then a red rowan berry dropped from the tree onto a square that Oisin hadn’t thought of, and he could now see the move to get out of trouble! The game went on, and each time Oisin was in a fix and Fionn looked like winning, another rowan berry would fall from the tree onto the board and guide the way out for him.

Oisin ended up beating his father at fidchell for the first time, and Fionn was not happy. He leapt up and gazed into the tree. ‘There’s only one man who could ever beat me at chess, and that’s Diarmuid O’Duibhne,’ he cried. There was Diarmuid’s face grinning at him from among the fronds of rowan leaves; and he leapt to safety, as Angus Og again spirited Grainne away from danger.

Diarmuid and Grainne stayed on the run for years, and they made their life in the woods, living from the animals, fish, nuts and berries they could find, and never able to stop and rest. In all that time, they raised four sons and a daughter: true children of the woods who grew up wily, alert and wise in nature-lore. But after many years, despite the rowan berries, the lovers started to slow. Their bodies were creaking and life in the trees was becoming more difficult. They decided to try and make peace with Fionn mac Cumhaill, and sent word to him of their intentions.

Time changes people. By this time Fionn was a grand old man indeed, remarried, settled and happy in his prime. He was relieved to put his anger aside and show his generosity, and he welcomed them back to his hall with a great feast. Diarmuid and Grainne found themselves walking into the same hall where they had met all those years ago, and sitting at the high table as guests of honour, the same people, yet now very different, with half a lifetime of stories carved in the lines around their eyes. They settled with their family a short distance away, and Diarmuid and Fionn built their bonds of friendship anew.

A few years later, on a fine early autumn morning, Fionn asked Diarmuid to go hunting with him. They rode out to the woods, to the foot of a hill called Ben Bulben. In that place, they heard the grunting and snorting of a huge boar, and they tracked it through the woods for most of the day until they cornered the beast. It was the greatest and angriest boar that either of them had ever seen: none other than the son of Roc transformed. It was there to fulfil the geis to kill Donn’s son, Diarmuid.

Fionn saw the nature of this beast and reminded Diarmuid of the other geis: that he could not pierce the skin of a boar. But it was too late. The boar charged and gored Diarmuid high up on his thigh, opening up a great wound that flooded with blood. Diarmuid managed to bring down the hilt of his sword hard on the boar’s head, stunning it, maybe killing it. Then he lay back, his life blood leaching into the soil, and Fionn could see that Diarmuid had received his death wound.

Fionn mac Cumhaill had many powers, and one of them was to restore life to the wounded, simply by offering them water from his hands. Diarmuid knew this, and called out to him feebly. ‘Fionn! Help me!’ So Fionn went to the nearby stream and carried water back in his hands, and yet he could not bring himself to take the water to Diarmuid’s lips. He remembered their stories, remembered his bitterness at the stealing of Grainne, and he let the water drain through his fingers and back to the soil.

‘Fionn! Please!’

Fionn’s heart stirred for his friend, and he went to collect water from the stream a second time. But again, when he had brought it back he looked at Diarmuid and imagined him together with Grainne, while Fionn was the cuckold; and he let the water go again.

This time Diarmuid turned his head with some difficulty and looked at Fionn with pleading eyes. Again Fionn went to collect water from the stream, and carried it back in his hands, and he brought it to Diarmuid’s lips. ‘Drink!’ he said.

It was too late. Diarmuid O’Duibhne had already given up his last breath to the clear woodland air.

JACK AND THE GREEN MAN

The Green Man is a familiar figure in British folklore – his leafy face leers out of church bosses and pew-ends all over the country. Yet I have been unable to find many folk stories about the most obvious and compelling of the vegetation gods.

This Aberdeenshire fairy tale has a number of versions across Britain and beyond (some of which I have also referenced here). They all feature the ubiquitous Jack, our very own folk anti-hero. I like the way that the Green Man’s real purpose is never really shared. Do watch out for low-flying knitting the next time you go for a walk in the woods.

Jack lived with his mother in a cottage at the edge of the woods. He was a lazy boy. He did nothing more all day than to play chess with his dog, and his dog couldn’t play chess.

The day came when Jack turned twenty-one years old, and he announced to the world and nobody in particular that now was the time to go and seek his fortune. His mother protested, his little dog barked, but Jack set off into the wild woods at once without even looking behind him.

After a while, Jack came to a crossroads where every track looked the same. There were the same hoofmarks in the mud, the same oak trees, the same clumps of bramble alongside, the same bluebells, the same twisting honeysuckle. An old wooden signpost leaned against a crooked stone horse trough where the roads crossed. Wood ants were busy winding their little ways around the rotten post, and there was only one sign, pointing to the left-hand track. In worn old carved letters in the wood, Jack could just about read the words ‘LAND OF ENCHANTMENT’.

‘That sounds like an adventure,’ said Jack.

‘Yes, it could be, Jack,’ said a rich little voice.

Jack looked all around, but the only other living thing he could see was a robin redbreast sitting on the lip of the horse trough.

‘How do you know my name?’ he asked the robin.

‘I’ve been waiting for you for twenty-one years,’ replied the robin, and fluttered forward to land on the track a little way ahead, observing Jack with a beady eye.

Jack followed the robin and the track to the Land of Enchantment, into the depths of the woods until the track became a path, and the path became nothing more than a dent in the purple bluebells. Eventually he came to a tiny cottage in a clearing. Inside the cottage was the oldest woman Jack had ever seen, her face as leathery as one of last year’s acorns, sitting in her chair rocking back and forth, back and forth.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You’ll be needing some food.’

Jack had been wondering about his next meal, as he always did, and she fed him porridge and honey, milk and cream, butter and bread. He went to bed on a huge feather mattress, excited about the adventures ahead the next day.

In the middle of the night Jack woke up cold. He tried to pull the covers over his head but there were no covers. He felt around for his hat but it wasn’t there, and the floor was covered in nothing but peats; he wasn’t lying on a feather mattress any more but an old sheepskin. ‘Strange,’ thought Jack, but then sleep claimed him again.

At breakfast the next morning, the old woman offered Jack some advice. ‘Today, it’s important to wait until someone talks to you. Let them ask a question before saying anything.’

Jack walked to the nearest village, and on the way he sat on an old tree and ate the lunch the old woman had given him. Tucked inside the cloth around the bread was a gold coin, and Jack put it in his pocket.

In the village there was a pub, and Jack ate his dinner there. He noticed a group of men playing cards in the corner and watched their game. One of them was a curious fellow, all clothed in green, with green hair and a distinct greenish tinge about his face – or was it just the light?

One of the men noticed him and called him over. ‘Come and join us – only if you can play, mind. Can you play?’

‘I play a bit,’ said Jack.

‘Do you have money?’

‘I have a bit,’ said Jack.

After a few games it became clear that Jack and the man in green were very well matched at cards. Both were skilful players, whatever hand they were dealt. One by one, the other men fell out of the game and went home, until it was just Jack and the man in green, playing strategy and skill with small pieces of cardboard and symbols.

In the wee small hours, after yet another nail-biting game, the man in green put his cards down. ‘I’m done, Jack,’ he said. ‘Your playing is too good. I don’t like to be beaten. Let’s call it a draw.’

‘Who are you?’ asked Jack.

The man smiled. ‘I’m the Green Man of Knowledge.’

‘Where do you come from?’

‘East of the sun and west of the moon. Good night.’

The Green Man strode out without a further word, leaving Jack a little startled and the innkeeper polishing glasses behind the bar.

‘I want to know more about him,’ Jack said. ‘How can I find where he lives? I’ll pay you if you tell me.’ Jack jangled a full purse of his winnings in front of the barman.

‘I really wouldn’t do that if I were you,’ said the innkeeper, taking the money. ‘He’s nothing but trouble, I can tell you that.’ He would say nothing more on the matter.

The following morning, after difficult dreams and an unsatisfactory breakfast, Jack continued on his journey through the woods, wandering along tracks and paths, hacking through brambles and clambering over fallen trees.

It wasn’t long before he came to another little cottage, and there inside it was a woman even older than the one before, her skin like a wrinkled crab-apple at the end of winter, sitting in her chair rocking back and forth, back and forth. The smell of broth drifted through the air from the kitchen, and Jack stayed.

The next morning, the old woman offered Jack some advice. ‘Go and sit cross-legged and cross-armed on that piece of knitting over there.’

Jack saw an ordinary-looking square of undyed knitting on the stone floor, and sat down on it as she had said.

‘Now, whatever you do, don’t look behind you,’ said the old woman. ‘Say, “Away with us!”, and when you get to where you’re going, whirl the knitting three times around your head and say, “Away with you!”’

‘Away with us!’ said Jack.

Jack’s flying journey on the knitting led him through the trees, dodging and weaving through branches and tree trunks of unimaginable age, dripping with lichens and ferns, skimming the green surface of bogs and getting his feet tickled by the tops of reeds. Once he flew a little closer than comfortable to two ravens on the branch of an oak tree, who croaked with amusement at the sight.

He landed abruptly in a mossy clearing, and through the trees he could hear the rush of the river close by, and the repeated clank of hammer against metal. As soon as the knitting had flown away home, Jack set to exploring the woods.

Up above the clearing, there was another cottage, and inside it was a woman even older than the first two, the skin on her face stretched fine and sheer like a skeletonised leaf, sitting in her chair rocking back and forth, back and forth.

‘How do I find the Green Man?’ Jack asked her.

‘Go and ask my husband the smith,’ she said.

Jack clambered through the trees, around coppice stools and great ferns, to the smithy further down. The smith put down his hammer and peered at Jack through sooty eyes.

‘The Green Man’s house is very close by,’ he said, ‘but he doesn’t like visitors, and he sets traps to make sure they don’t bother him. The worst is this. You will need to cross the river, and there is only one bridge, but if any human being puts so much as one foot on that bridge, all the planks and joists turn into threads of gossamer, fine as the web of a spider. You will fall in, and the raging river will carry you away. Not a good way to go, I’d say.’

‘Is there any other way I can get across?’

‘Only one, and I have never dared to try it. The Green Man has three daughters, and early every morning they come to the other side of the river. They take their clothes off to bathe, but when they touch the water they change into swans – the two oldest are black, and the youngest is white. I reckon that if you take the clothes of the youngest daughter – take everything, mind, don’t even leave a hairpin – then she will have to help you, or she won’t be able to take back her original form. Ask her to carry you across the river, and only then will you give her clothes back.’

Jack went down to the river early the next morning, and he couldn’t resist trying out the bridge. He touched the edge of the timbers with his foot, and – blink! – the bridge changed into intricately woven cobweb, dew-blessed and sparkling in the early morning sun. A surprised-looking spider dangled from the end of the handrail. ‘A bridge that’s fine for the little folk,’ thought Jack, ‘but it won’t carry my weight, that’s for sure.’

He watched until, over on the other bank of the river, three young women approached, undressed and clambered into the water. The first two instantly turned into black swans, and the third into a gleaming white swan. With their clothes in heaps on the bank, the birds bobbed and paddled downstream, still and serene above the water, playing with the strong currents of the river.

Jack waited until they were out of sight, and then realised he had a problem. Their clothes were on the other riverbank! So Jack cut a long rod of hazel wood from the nearby coppice, and fashioned a crude hook for the end out of a twine of woodbine wound around the hazel. With this, he carefully lifted the youngest girl’s clothes, bit by bit, over the river and on to his side. He stowed them away in his bag, and waited some more.

Eventually the three birds returned, and the two older sisters put their clothes back on and left in a hurry, seeing the stranger on the opposite bank. The white swan frantically swam up and down the bank, searching for her clothes; and when she could find none, she approached Jack.

‘Can you tell the truth?’ called the white swan.

‘Certainly,’ said Jack.

‘Then tell me. Are you a gentleman, Jack?’

‘Oh, no. I’m definitely not that.’

The white swan sighed. ‘Please will you give me my clothes back, Jack? I might be of help, where you’re going.’

It wasn’t long before Jack found himself being carried across the river on the back of the swan, and stepping lightly on to the other bank. He walked straight up into the woods, only reminded of his promise by a sharp nip to the ankles from the swan; and when she got her clothes back and transformed back into the Green Man’s daughter, she left him to his journey, but not before she gave Jack a sideways glance, and a grin, and a twinkle of the eye.

The Green Man’s house wasn’t made of brick or stone or cut timber. It was formed by growing trees, perfectly fitted together to be watertight, and still growing, bulging slightly at the joints. The mortar was fungus and liverwort. The roof was formed by thick branches and leaves woven through the growing, with beards of moss and lichen stuffed into the gaps.

Jack knocked on the stout door, ash wood with sturdy black bosses of King Alfred’s cakes. The Green Man was more than surprised to see him. ‘Come in, come in, now you’re here.’

Jack walked into a leafy drawing room, walked forward and walked straight on to a hidden trapdoor in the floor, falling down and down into a dark prison cell among the roots of trees, thick with the smell of mould and damp.

‘That’s what you get for seeking me when you weren’t invited!’ shouted the Green Man through the door. ‘I have three little tasks for you to complete. If you manage them I’ll let you live, but I’ll bet you won’t.’

Next morning Jack was hauled out of the dungeon and led to the stables at the back of the house, which were piled high with horse manure. ‘I’ll admit, they need a bit of a clean,’ said the Green Man. ‘It’s been a few hundred years, what with one thing and another. I want you to get rid of all this muck and by the time I return at sunset, I want that stable floor so sparkling clean that I could eat my dinner from it. Otherwise, you’ll become manure yourself.’

Jack wasn’t the best at working hard, but he gave it a try. He shovelled and shovelled and shovelled, but no matter where he put the horse manure there was still too much. After a morning’s smelly, back-breaking work he put down the shovel and quietly despaired.

‘Don’t worry,’ said the voice of the Green Man’s daughter. ‘I can help.’

The voice was coming from beside his foot. Jack looked down and there was a little black dung beetle. ‘It’s me,’ she said, waving her stumpy little antennae. ‘Just watch this.’

Jack looked out into the yard, and saw a thin black line on the ground snaking towards him. As it got closer he could see it was made of dung beetles, all steadily marching from the woods to the stables. The sound of thousands of tiny, determined insect mouths followed, and the pile of dung grew less, and less, and less, as Jack leant on his shovel and watched. Within about two hours, it had completely disappeared; and a line of considerably fatter dung beetles marched back out of the stable and off into the woods.

‘You’ll have to do the final clean yourself,’ said the Green-Man’s-daughter-disguised-as-dung-beetle. ‘We don’t do that kind of work.’ Jack could have sworn he heard a little belch.

He swilled the stable floor with soap-suds, and mopped the water away, until the whole building was sparkling. When the Green Man returned at dusk, he was furious. ‘Who helped you?’

‘I’ve cleaned all this with my own fair hands, no word of a lie,’ said Jack. He was marched back to his tree-root prison and given bread and water for the night.

Next morning, the Green Man led Jack to the middle of the woods. ‘I’m not a big fan of ants,’ he said. ‘I want you to clear this whole woodland of ants in the next half an hour. Otherwise, I will bury you alive in that great ant nest over there, and they will strip your bones clean in no time at all.’ Jack looked over to where hundreds and thousands of big red wood ants were teeming through a hummock on the forest floor, and whimpered slightly.

After the Green Man had left, Jack took his hat and started trying to fill it with ants. But wildlife will never do what you want it to do. The ants started crawling up his arms and inside his shirt, tickling and biting and angry. Jack wailed and leapt around the woods trying to shake them off.

He was making such a commotion that he didn’t see the little queen ant at first. She was standing on top of the next ant nest along, waving at him frantically. ‘Stop! It’s me! The Green Man’s daughter! I can help,’ she cried. ‘Sit there and leave it to me.’

Jack sat uneasily on the forest floor as ants started to march past him in a steady stream, that turned to a red river, that turned to a clicking, rustling torrent of ants. The Green-Man’s-daughter-disguised-as-an-ant led them out of the woods, down the track and into the sparkling stables cleaned the day before.

‘Stay very still,’ she told the ants. ‘You can go back later on.’

The Green Man wasn’t happy when he returned half an hour later. He couldn’t find a single ant anywhere in the woods. ‘Who is helping you?’ he shouted.

‘The ants did it themselves, no word of a lie,’ said Jack.

‘Well, you are a lucky one, and no mistake,’ grumbled the Green Man. ‘But not tomorrow …’ Jack was unceremoniously returned to the tree-dungeon.

Next morning, he was hauled out again. ‘Here’s your final task, Jack,’ said the Green Man with a dark smile. ‘I have lost a gold ring down a deep ravine in the woods, about twenty minutes north of here. I’m sure that with your amazing powers you can fetch it out for me in no time, but just to be sure, I’ll want it back here in two hours. Otherwise you can go and join my gold ring in the ravine, Jack.’

Jack walked through the woods, travelling north by the sun as much as he was able. ‘It must have been more than twenty minutes,’ he thought. The urgent chiding of a blackbird stopped him in his tracks. ‘Hey!’ cried the blackbird. ‘No further, or you’ll go over the edge. Crawl on your belly and look down to the ravine that way.’

Jack found himself lying among the old leaves and stitchwort and twigs at the edge of a dark chasm in the rock, and he could see no end to it. ‘The ring’s down there?’

‘Yes, but only a little way … look, you can see it glinting on that ledge down there,’ said the blackbird-that-was-the-Green-Man’s-daughter. ‘I can help you, but there is only one way. I will make a ladder out of my own bones, and you will need to tread carefully, because I will need my bones back unbroken afterwards.’

Jack could see the ring, but he was not good at heights. So he turned to climb over the edge as she called out words of encouragement. Jack’s eyes were screwed up tight, and his foot was dangling in mid air until it settled on what felt like … someone’s shoulder?

‘Keep climbing down, Jack,’ she called out. His eyes stayed closed.

The next footholds were … A nose? A hand? An arm? A finger? Slowly and haltingly he climbed down into the ravine, until she called out, ‘The last foothold’s coming up, Jack,’ and he realised he was standing on her foot. ‘Now reach out to your left for the ring. That’s it.’

He clasped the ring for a while, then carefully held it between his teeth for the climb back up. Slowly, slowly, without daring to look down into the ravine, Jack used the body of the Green Man’s daughter as a ladder to climb up the rock … but the last foothold was the worst. He could feel the top of the land, the edge of the woods, a small tree root to hold, but he needed to put his weight on the ladder to haul himself up … and he felt a sickening crunch beneath his foot as he did so, and a cry. Was that her neck he’d broken? As he crawled away to safety on the woodland floor, there was no sign of the Green Man’s daughter or the blackbird.

‘Who helped you?’ cried the Green Man, as Jack stood wretchedly before him with the golden ring in his palm.

‘I climbed it myself, I swear,’ said Jack, who just wanted to leave his strange adventure.

The Green Man searched his face. ‘Well done,’ he said slowly. ‘I will reward you well with gold and good food.’

Sure enough, Jack was led into a hall with a banqueting table piled high with foods of all kinds, and plied with bags of gold. There was the Green Man’s daughter, seated at dinner and dressed to the nines! She looked at him and grinned.

After the feast, when the Green Man had left the room for a moment, she leaned over and whispered in Jack’s ear. ‘It was my finger you broke,’ she said, ‘but I’m wearing gloves to hide it. If he finds out, we will both be killed. But after dinner, he will offer you a horse. Make sure you choose the old mule.’

The Green Man took Jack to the stables and offered him his choice of horses to ride. At the end of the stables, there was an old grey mule, chewing hay and looking thoroughly bored. ‘That one,’ said Jack.

‘Are you sure? Well, there’s no accounting for you,’ laughed the Green Man.

Jack took the mule for a test ride around the yard. ‘It’s me,’ whispered the mule, ‘the Green Man’s daughter. We have to get out of here, or he will kill you.’

The mule carried Jack away from that place faster than any mule should be able to run. On and on into the night they rode, but presently she said, ‘He is chasing us, and gaining on us. Reach into my left ear and pull out the drop of water you will find there.’

‘Ewww,’ thought Jack, but he did as he was told. ‘Now throw the drop of water behind us and ask for great lakes and rivers behind us, and a clear path ahead,’ said the Green-Man’s-daughter-disguised-as-a-mule. As soon as Jack did, the air grew cool and he could see the moonlight reflecting on a great expanse of water. He heard the Green Man cry out and a splash behind them, and they rode on.

Presently the mule said, ‘He is gaining on us. Reach into my left ear and take out the splinter of stone you’ll find there. Throw it behind us and ask for mountains and hills behind us, and a clear road in front.’

This time there were great mountains behind them in an instant, the snowy tops glistening in the moonlight. Jack heard the Green Man cry out, and his call echoed round the hills that now stood between them. They rode on.

Later, after they had ridden through another dark woodland and out the other side, she said, ‘He is catching up, and he will reach us soon. Reach into my left ear and take out the spark of fire you’ll find there. Throw it behind us, and ask for fire behind us, a clear road in front.’

The little spark flew through the air and transformed the woodland behind them into a crackling wall of heat and flame. Jack could hear screams of agony from the Green Man dwindling into the night, and the mule rode on in silence.

‘That was her father,’ thought Jack, and thought it best not to say anything more for a while.

By the time the light of dawn was growing stronger in the eastern sky, they reached a crossroads, and the little mule stopped and transformed back into the shape of the Green Man’s daughter. Her face was streaked with tears and her eyes were downcast. ‘Here I must leave you, for now,’ she said. ‘I have done great harm this night, and I must suffer punishment for it. Goodbye for now, Jack.’

‘Where do I go?’ cried Jack.

‘Go home, go back to your roots and your family,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget me, for we are destined to be together, you and I. When I am free again, I will seek you out. But in the meantime, be sure never to accept a kiss from another, for you will instantly forget me if you do.’

They parted with the promise of being together again one day, and after he had watched her walk away, Jack started down the path towards his home. When he got there, his mother was almost pleased to see him, but she never usually showed any emotion anyway, so there was no danger of a kiss from her. But his little dog was over the moon, and before Jack could stop her, she had jumped up and licked his face by way of a dog-kiss.

Instantly Jack forgot all about the Green Man’s daughter and his adventures in the greenwood, the Land of Enchantment.

A year passed. It was a fine morning in early summer when Jack got up, stretched, yawned, then remembered that it was a special day. Today he was going to marry the miller’s daughter! He walked through to the kitchen where wedding preparations were in full flow. His mother was baking and half the village were bustling around, carrying food and drink and flower garlands down to the little bower in the woods where the marriage was to take place.

Jack got dressed in his best clothes and walked down to the clearing where the bower was; it wasn’t yet noon. As he walked towards the wedding place, he saw a slight figure, dressed in rags, darting from tree to tree around the edges, and he decided to investigate.

Closer still, and Jack could see that it was a young woman, wise of face and twinkling of eye. She was chasing two ravens that were playing hide-and-seek and weaving between the branches to annoy her. ‘Come back!’ she called. ‘Behave yourselves!’

‘Who are you?’ said Jack.

The girl looked up and grinned. The birds both settled on a branch behind her and observed Jack closely.

‘Don’t you remember me, Jack?’ asked one.

‘No,’ said Jack.

‘Don’t you remember the Green Man of Knowledge, Jack?’ asked the second raven.

‘No,’ said Jack.

‘Don’t you remember me, the woman you love, the one destined for you, Jack?’ said the first raven again.

‘No, no I don’t,’ said Jack, slightly unnerved that the young woman wasn’t talking for herself.

The second raven croaked, remembering something else. ‘Don’t you remember that I killed my own father for you?’

The air changed in the clearing, from innocent sunlight to wide-awake, knowing. Jack looked to the second raven, then to the first, putting his head to one side as they were doing; then he looked at the young woman, the Green Man’s daughter.

‘It’s you, isn’t it? You’ve come back,’ he said finally.

It was the Green Man’s daughter who married Jack that day at the little bower in the woods, with the wood ants and the dung beetles circling around their feet, the blackbirds and robins singing among the leaves, and the ravens kraaking in the tall branches.

Of course, they lived happily ever after.

THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS

This is a dark little tale, collected from Berwickshire by the folklorist Katharine Briggs. In this story, the woods are a place of death. They hide terrible things you might not entertain in your own home … and, perhaps, unexpected help.

A farmer lived in a remote part of the country, wild and wooded, where there were few visitors. He had been brought up there, so he thought it was all right. This farmer had a beauty of a wife, who was all perfect skin and rosy cheeks and tiny waist. He prized her and thought her his best possession, so that even as she did all the hard work around the place, he was watching her every move. He didn’t like it when she went out of the house, less still when she went to market, and he could hardly bear another man to set eyes on her.

One night a tiny boat washed up on the shore of the nearby beach in a storm. The farmer and his wife knew nothing of it until there was a knock at the farmhouse door, and there stood a young man, soaked and sorry-looking. ‘Please may I come in to the warm?’ he asked. ‘I have battled with the waves to get this far, and I am lucky to be alive.’

Of course the farmer and his wife welcomed the man inside. They offered him a room and dry clothes, and by the time he came back downstairs the farmer’s wife was bustling round the kitchen getting the dinner ready.

The farmer took a long cool look at the young man from the comfort of his kitchen chair by the fire. He was a handsome young lad, no doubt, with dark curling hair and darting eyes. Oh, he was polite enough, and straightforward enough, but he had better not look too long at his wife … they would make a pretty pair, for sure.

They say that tiny things are fuel to the fire of a jealous heart. It wasn’t long before the farmer had imagined in his head that this man was his wife’s long-lost lover, and he had contrived to be at the farmhouse that night to see her again. As he imagined it, so he believed it to be true.

It just so happened at that moment that the young man yawned, and a few moments later the farmer’s wife yawned as well. What more proof did he need? thought the farmer. The whole thing was clearly a plot. Did they mean to make an idiot of him in his own home?

Dinner that evening was a miserable affair. The farmer glowered with hate from under his beetling eyebrows, and the farmer’s wife tried to make polite conversation that only seemed to make matters worse. The young man retired to bed soon after the meal, relieved to be out of the bad atmosphere, and the farmer’s wife cleared up the meal and the kitchen.

The farmer reached up to the kitchen beam and took down two long pieces of hemp rope.

‘Come on then,’ he said, ‘We’re going to the woods.’

He took his wife’s hands and bound them behind her back with one of the pieces of rope.

‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ she said. ‘You’ve been horrible all night. Let me go!’

‘I wanted to keep you an honest and true wife, but I see tonight that I’ve failed. You’ve contrived that your old love should come to our house. So to spare your soul, I’m going to hang you now.’

‘I swear to God I’ve never seen that man before tonight!’

‘I saw the way you looked at him, and how he looked at you. Don’t deny it. Come on.’

No matter how much she cried, and protested her innocence, the farmer would not be swayed. His hand was rough and his voice was harsh, and he was resolved. He pulled and pushed his wife, kicking and screaming, out of the kitchen door, down the farm track and into the dark of the woods.

They made their way through the trees in sparse light, and a flock of birds flew past them so close that their wingbeats added to the last blasts of the storm. They halted at an old oak tree, its branches stout and low, the woman sobbing and terrified beneath. The farmer made a rope loop around his wife’s neck and threw the other end of the rope over one of the branches.

But the rope wouldn’t stay. There were the birds that had flown past them, clicking and chattering, settling on the branch, spreading their wings so that the rope wouldn’t settle; some of them picked up the rope in their claws as if it was a giant worm. The rope slid back off the branch, and the farmer cursed. He tried to throw the rope over again, but it failed: the birds were having none of it.

‘We’ll leave that tree to the birds,’ said the farmer. ‘There’ll be another one along the way.’

He pushed his wife forward along the track, and overhead the flock of birds followed them. Here was another suitable tree, and again the farmer tried to throw his hanging-rope over a stout branch. This time, many little beaks and feet pushed it off the branch again. The farmer’s wife gasped and the farmer cursed even more loudly.

The farmer was determined to finish what he’d started. He tried his rope on tree after tree in those woods, each one with his wife cowering beneath and the flock of chattering birds doing everything they could to stop the rope from clinging to the branch.

Finally, exasperated, he said, ‘There’s an old crooked pine tree up the hill, out of the woods, that would be a perfect ending-post for you. It’s well away from any shelter and the wind is so wild that no birds could cling on. You’ll swing nicely from there!’ He pushed his wife further along the path, and up, up, up the slope until they came out into the open, with racing clouds and a skittering moon above. A cloud of birds rose up from the woods behind them, and they were gone from sight – for a while.

Under the pine tree, in the pale light before the sun rose, the farmer felt high for a solid branch. ‘There’s no little birdies here to save you from what you deserve!’ he snarled, and threw the rope high over the branch. There was a whirring sound, and the birds descended and beat the rope away from the branch, their wings a flurry of star-spangled black. The rope fell to the ground in a defeated heap. The flock of birds rose up above the tree again, ready for whatever the farmer would bring to them next.

The first rays of the sun came over the hill from the east, then, and the birds started to sing and chatter to each other; and that’s when the farmer’s heart started to soften. He looked at his wife. She was little more than a crumpled, sobbing heap lying on the ground.

‘I think these birds are trying to tell me something,’ he said. ‘Perhaps they are telling me that you are a true wife after all. Perhaps, if I hang you now, they will follow me for ever after, and who knows what they will do.’ He took the rope from his wife’s neck, and untied her hands. ‘Come on, let’s go home.’

The flock of starlings settled in the tree and watched the two people walk back down the track to their life at the farm.

Whether the farmer’s wife stayed with him after that, this story doesn’t say.

7

TREE FOLK

Owd girl, give me of thy wood

And I will give thee some of mine

When I become a tree.

Woodcutter’s saying

Woodlands are more than just a collection of trees; they are a community of species, both above and below ground. The trees that form the canopy also create the conditions under which everything else in the woodland will live. Under that quiet canopy, there is intense competition for light, food, water and place. Every animal, every bird, every plant and every fungus has its own strategy to survive and thrive.

British and Irish folklore has long ascribed different characteristics and consciousness to different species. The Ogham alphabet, where each character corresponded to a type of tree, was used in ancient Ireland as a language of meaning and magic. Our tangled traditions have retained some of the old tree knowledge down the centuries. The elder tree is still dark and malevolent, oak strengthens and inspires us, while hazel casts its magical mercurial threads across the understorey.

Our stories also tell of strange creatures, dragons and worms and trolls and bogles. These don’t arise from fairy enchantment but seem to come from the earth itself. Part of our folklore community of the woods, they hide in the dark places and the last refuges of the wild.

AULD CRUIVIE

When we walk through a woodland, we seldom think of what’s underneath our feet, and how deep the tree roots go. Underneath our feet is a whole new ecosystem.

In the great storm of 16 October 1987, the Turner’s Oak blew over in Kew Gardens near London. This great tree, planted in 1798, was uprooted but the root plate was replaced while Kew’s gardeners tended to hundreds of other tree casualties. On returning to the Turner’s Oak, three years later, they found it was flourishing better than it had done before the storm. The uprooting had broken up compaction of the soil around the roots caused by many visitors’ feet over the years. They learned that soil compaction around tree roots can cause real problems for the tree, and their learning is now being used across the world.

This story is an environmental classic, with a clear message of what happens if you try to take too much from Mother Nature. It comes from Aberdeenshire, north of Deeside. I would love to have heard it told by the late great traveller storyteller Stanley Robertson, the original source for this story.

Midsummer’s Day is traditionally 24 June, not the solstice itself.

A woman lived in a little tumbledown stone house, somewhere in the middle of Aberdeenshire where there were still old woods that had never been cut down. She worked as a washerwoman for the local laird, but he had a black heart and he paid her scarce enough to survive. All her furniture was made of sticks cobbled together from the woods next to the house. Her husband had died but she had a little boy, Jack, who was the apple of her eye.

When Jack was about five years old, the evil laird appeared at the door of the cottage one morning. He looked around him with contempt. ‘If you want to remain here,’ he said, ‘you will have to do more. I need a new shepherd – I’m sure that lad of yours can do it. He’ll start tomorrow, and I’ll hear no more about it.’

‘But he’s only five years old!’ cried his mother, but the laird was gone.

Jack’s mother had no choice. She decided to put her little boy both in sight of the sheep and in sight of her, in the safest place she could think of. She would put him under the greatest oak tree in those woods, that some called Auld Cruivie, the father of the place. Auld Cruivie would look after Jack well.

That’s how Jack grew up, learning to watch and listen and look out for danger. If there were any problems for the sheep, the little boy called out and his mother would come running to help. Jack’s eyes and his ears became as keen as those of any wild animal, always on the lookout for any trouble. The old oak tree shaded him from the sun, and protected him from the rain and wind: it looked after him.

Over the years of his learning, Jack also learned the calls and the language of the birds. He learned their alarm calls that all the creatures in the woods knew, foretelling danger. He learned their quiet contact calls of the woodland at peace. He knew the tiny chatter of the subsong when winter turned to spring, as teenage robins experimented with their new-found notes. And best of all, he learned the bird songs that set the woods alight with joy.

By the time Jack was a young man, he was helping his mother out with all the tasks, the foraging and making and weaving and mending, that meant they could just about scrape by on the poor wages from the miserly old laird. But the part of the day he looked forward to most of all was the shepherding, the time in the woods with Auld Cruivie, listening and watching. That was when he felt most alive.

One Midsummer’s Day Jack was resting with his back against the great oak, the sheep doing fine, the wild flowers blooming in the grass and the birds less insistent now after their springtime surge, busy looking after their fledgling young. But their songs today were different to usual, and Jack listened hard to find out what was happening.

‘We’re leaving this evening,’ called the blackbird, calling its alarm at the wrong time of the day.

‘Just for one niiiight,’ trilled the wren.

‘We’ll be back tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, after the trees, trees, trees have danced,’ shouted the song thrush.

The birds were leaving? The trees were dancing? How odd, thought Jack. But look, here was his dear old mother in her skirts and shawl, bringing him food for his lunch, as she always did.

Jack’s mother sat down beside him. ‘There’s something I need to tell you about. You will think me mad for saying it, but there you are.’

‘Go on then,’ smiled Jack.

‘There is an old saying around here that once every fifty years, on Midsummer’s Night, the trees start to dance, and they go to drink from the little burn,’ said his mother carefully.

‘Oh, the birds have told me all about that already. You thought you were mad!’

‘There’s more,’ said his mother. ‘When the trees come out of the ground and stand on their roots to dance, they leave big earthy holes, and the bigger the trees, the bigger the holes. They say that in that earth, there is treasure to be found, because that’s where the trees were born. The old stories talk of gems and gold and silver.’

Now Jack had stopped joking, and he was listening carefully.

‘You have to be sure,’ she continued, ‘to only go into the smaller holes that the saplings and young trees have left behind, and only take a little bit of treasure. It’s not right to be greedy, the trees don’t like it.’

Jack called out to Auld Cruivie. ‘Would you mind if we just took a little bit of treasure?’ he asked. ‘We need to replace and renew so many things in the old cottage. Could you share just a little bit with us?’

There was no voice to answer, but both Jack and his mother felt in the rustle of the leaves, and the shimmer of the sunshine in the glade, that Auld Cruivie trusted them and he was giving them permission.

‘On no account,’ said Jack’s mother, ‘try to go down the hole in the earth that Auld Cruivie leaves behind. You would be lost to the world, you would never get out. I’ve made you something to help, just in case,’ and she handed him a little ball of nettle-fibre cord.

Jack’s mother left him to the sunny afternoon and the shepherding, and the sun was getting low in the sky that evening when Jack saw another figure in skirts striding towards him through the ferns and the grass. It was the young servant from the big house. Molly was her name; Jack had a bit of a sparkle for her, and he thought she was beautiful there in the woodland glade with the summer evening shadows cast all around her.

Molly ran up to Jack under the oak tree. ‘Jack! The old laird’s in a funny mood today, I thought I should come to warn you,’ she said. ‘He’s muttering something about “tonight’s the night” and sharpening his knife. Something’s being planned.’

‘The old story?’ asked Jack.

‘So you’ve heard it too?’ she said. ‘I think the old fool wants to gather treasure tonight, as much as he can. I have to go, but … be careful, Jack!’ She flashed him a smile as she ran back to the house.

That evening, Jack crept out of the cottage near to midnight and up into the clearing in the woods with Auld Cruivie standing close by. The full moon was bright in the sky, and the stars were blinking through the deep blue, with the last of the dusk of the day departed to the north-west.

Jack stood in the clearing and a strange hush descended over the place. Then, quietly at first, a creaking and groaning started all around from the earth itself, getting louder, impatient. The trees were lifting into the sky, the graceful birch and ash swaying and the hollies crackling their leaves against one another. Slowly but determinedly, every tree in that place began to stand on its roots and shake the earth free from around it.

The breeze whipped up around Jack as the branches of the trees swirled, and up on their roots, they danced together as if to invisible music. Then, creaking loudly with his ancient cracked bark, Auld Cruivie himself started to move, haltingly at first with his bark groaning, and then gradually more and more as his roots came free and he danced slowly with the other trees.

Jack could see that the trees were moving down the hill, a great sea of branches and leaves rustling and swaying. When they had moved from the clearing he walked carefully over to one of the smaller holes left by a birch tree, picking his way across the ground carefully to avoid falling or tripping. The hole in the ground was still huge, and as Jack peered into it he could see the sparkle of a gem in the moonlight.

Treasure!

Jack climbed carefully into the hole in the earth, and scrabbled in the soil where he had seen a glittering. Before too long he had unearthed a golden cup, and a whole heap more earth had fallen. He unearthed a sizeable ruby and a small gold cuff, and then remembered his mother’s words.

‘That’s enough, I reckon,’ he thought. ‘It won’t do to be too greedy.’ He grinned to himself, and whispered, ‘Thank you.’

‘Jack!’ whispered someone, or something, from above, and Jack’s heart leapt into his mouth. It took a moment for him to recognise Molly’s voice.

‘Jack, hurry up! The trees are coming back!’ Sure enough, Jack could hear the swishing of the leaves and swaying of the branches getting louder again, getting closer.

Jack tried to get a hold on some clods of earth above him, and a foothold to climb out, but he fell back deeper into the earthen hole. Time and time again he tried, but he only made the earth looser, as Molly’s terrified face peered above him.

Then Jack remembered the nettle cord that his mother had given him. ‘Molly! Catch this!’ He kept one end and threw the ball of yarn up to her. She tied it to a nearby rock and Jack finally managed to climb out to safety.

In the moonlight the place looked wrecked, with huge black holes all over the ground. Jack heard a scrabbling and clanking noise from the largest hole, the one that Auld Cruivie had left behind. ‘It’s the laird,’ said Molly. ‘I followed him up here. He’s collecting treasure in a big bag.’

‘But the trees are coming back! He has to get out, or he’ll be buried alive,’ cried Jack. He picked his way over to the great hole in the ground and called down to the laird. ‘You need to get out of there, now!’

‘Away with you, leave me to what’s rightfully mine!’ called back the laird, as the moon shadow of a huge oak tree slowly moved across the ground towards him.

That was the last time they heard the laird’s voice. Jack and Molly retreated to safe ground in the meadow. They watched with a mixture of fascination and horror as the trees danced and swayed their way back to where they had grown, where they belonged, where the earth would hold them. The swaying slowly died away as first one tree, then another, put its roots back into the soil, dug deep and drank deep of the earth, and became still again. Last of all was Auld Cruivie.

The laird was so greedy, he had made his own grave.

Jack and Molly took their treasure back to Jack’s mother, where she was presented with the gold cuff. They sold the ruby and made enough money to mend the house and keep them all comfortable for all their days to come. And six weeks later, in the warm light of the first harvest, Jack and Molly drank honey-mead and oak-leaf wine from the same golden cup and they made their pledges to each other.

A few weeks after that, the new laird arrived at the door of the little house. ‘Good morning,’ he said, looking around the little place. ‘I’ve heard you are hard workers. I think I can reward you a little better than you have been used to.’ The new laird didn’t have a black heart, he had a kind heart. Jack, his mother and Molly were all treated better from that day onwards, and they all lived together in a bigger house at the edge of the woods. Whenever they could, they would go back to the clearing, sit underneath the shade of Auld Cruivie, and listen to the songs of the birds; and they taught the same to the little ones who came after them.

THREE WISHES

Here is a silly story. All over the islands of Britain and Ireland, the little people pop up beside all kinds of trees in the woods: watch out next time you take an axe to a tree …

There was a woodman, and he lived with his wife in a little cottage at the edge of a great woodland. Every day he went into the wood to cut timber: some for firewood, some for planks, some for hurdles, some for carts, some for the lathe. The best time for cutting was in the winter, when the sap of the trees was low and the leaves had fallen. But sometimes, the woodman had to go into the woods and cut trees in the spring and summer time as well, to keep them both in food and rent.

One autumn morning, the goodwife filled her husband’s bag with food and his flask with water, and he was off into the woods again with his axe. He walked for a good hour or so on a track he didn’t often use, and there in front of him was the perfect oak tree. It was tall and straight and proud, stout but not too stout, its bark even and its side branches few, and it had a good amount of space around it to fall well after it had been cut. This tree would be good for planks and good for their pockets. It was his lucky day.

The woodman walked around the tree and took a measure of the slope of the land and the way the tree was growing, where it might fall to and where he could cut it safely. But he had forgotten about one of the rules of cutting a tree safely – listening to the little people.

The woodman swung back his axe for the first cut of the oak’s trunk, low and clear, but a small cough from beside the tree made him stop.

It was a young woman, no taller than his knee, with a pinched face and a worried look.

‘Please don’t do that,’ she said. ‘Please don’t cut this oak tree down. It is important to us. Please stop.’

The woodman had never seen one of the little people in his life, and he was dumbstruck. He looked at the fairy, and the fairy looked back at him. Somewhere above in the canopy, a nuthatch called out in laughter at the both of them.

Eventually the woodman managed to splutter out a few words: ‘All right, yes ma’am, of course, whatever you say ma’am. I’ll leave it alone, just for you, yes.’

The little woman broke into a smile. ‘You’ve done more of a favour to yourself than you think,’ she said. ‘To show my gratitude, I’ll grant you that the next three wishes that are spoken, whatever they are, they will come true for you.’

Then the fairy disappeared, leaving the woodman scratching his head next to the tree and wondering what had just happened. He was there for a while, and then considered what to do next. He ate his lunch too early, and then he decided he couldn’t fell any tree that day, so he turned around and walked all the way home again.

The woodman’s mind was racing and bewildered – what had happened there? Was it a curse? Was it a blessing? What could he wish for? A new axe? A big heavy horse? A fine joint of beef for dinner? A bigger house? A different wife? No, that was a bad thing to think. He tried to think of something else, and hoped the fairy hadn’t heard his thoughts with her magic. She had said that the wish needed to be spoken out loud, hadn’t she?

When the woodman event-ually got back to the little cottage he was exhausted, and all he wanted to do was sit down by the fire and rest his sore bones and his confused mind.

‘I’m hungry, wife of mine,’ he said. ‘Is there food ready?’

‘Nothing for a couple of hours yet,’ said his wife.

‘I wish I had a good link of black pudding here before me, that’d go down well,’ said the woodman without thinking much about it.

No sooner had he spoken, than – Crash! Thump! A fine black pudding came down the chimney of that little cottage in a cloud of soot, and landed on a plate in front of him.

Well, if he was staring at the pudding, his wife was staring three times as much.

‘What’s going on, husband of mine?’ she said.

He told his wife the whole story the tree, the axe, the cough, the little woman, the promise, and the wishes. The more he told her, the angrier she got.

‘You’re nothing but a fool, to let that good tree go … just a prize idiot. As for me, I wish that pudding were at the end of your nose, so everyone could see what a fool you were.’

Before they could even blink, there was the woodman’s nose, longer by a good link of black pudding attached to the end of it.

The woodman pulled at the pudding on the end of his nose. It wobbled a bit, but it was definitely stuck fast.

‘What do I do now, you stupid woman?’ he cried.

She looked at him sideways. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘in a way, it suits you,’ and he started to chase her round the kitchen, until he realised his black-pudding nose stopped him from seeing where he was going.

Even the woodman knew there was only one chance to sort this out, and so eventually he wished the black pudding away from his nose again, and there it was now on a plate on the kitchen dresser.

Now the three wishes from the fairy had all been used up. The woodman and his wife didn’t ever live in luxury or riches or finery, after all.

But they did have a fine black pudding for supper that night, the finest pudding that anyone could wish for.

THE GURT VURM OF SHERVAGE WOOD

Bilberry, also called whort or whortleberry in south-west England, wimberry in Shropshire and Wales, blaeberry in Scotland and fraochan in Ireland, is a small, low-growing shrub found in acid woods and heathland. Anyone who has tried to collect bilberries will tell you that it is back-breaking work, but definitely worthwhile. One contributor to Richard Mabey’s Flora Britannica noted that people in Somerset would warn of danger and discomfort to potential whort-pickers, precisely to deter them from high-yielding areas. Could this be how the Gurt Vurm story started?

This tale comes from the Quantock Hills in Somerset, collected by Reverend Whistler at the turn of the twentieth century. A broom-squire was a man who gathered heather and birch twigs from the heaths and woods to make besom brooms for a living. Shervage Wood is now a National Trust nature reserve.

There was a great worm living in Shervage Wood on the Quantock. It was huge: as wide as three oak trees, and as tall as that too. It had been there for a good while, and it liked ponies and sheep for its supper. But it was starting to run out of food. All the rabbits and foxes and squirrels has decided, very sensibly, to move over to the other side of the wood, and there weren’t many ponies left for the Bridgwater Fair that year.

After a shepherd and a couple of broom-squires went up there to find out what was going on, and they never came back, nobody dared to go into that part of the woods any more.

This was a problem for an old lady in a cottage at the bottom of the hill, at Crowcombe. Every year she made bilberry tarts, the best in the county. She sold them at the fair, and she found all the bilberries she needed in the woods. As the whort-ripening time approached that year, she didn’t dare go into the woods to find the berries. It was looking bad for her, and she needed the money to see her through the winter with the rent, poor old thing.

Around that time a stranger came to Crowcombe, and he bumped into the old lady in the village and asked her where was good to cut firewood. The old lady thought quickly, and she told him the place in the woods that was good for the whorts, but she didn’t tell him about the worm. ‘If you look to see whether the whorts are ripe, and if yer pick me some and bring them to me too, I’ll give you tuppence,’ she said. She felt a bit bad saying it, but she was desperate for the berries.

The man made his way along the path and up the hill and into the wood. It was a fine wood, and hadn’t been worked for a while, he could see: there was plenty of firewood for the taking, and plenty of bilberries peeping out from under the leaves too, purple-blue and ripe. But it was hilly in Crowcombe, and he wasn’t used to climbing hills. It would take an effort to get anything out of there.

By the time he got to the middle of the woods he was tired and out of breath, and so the woodman sat down on an old log and got out his flask and his lunch from his backpack. The log wasn’t too damp, and it didn’t make his bottom too cold when he sat on it, but after a few minutes … That was odd. Had the log underneath him just moved?

It moved again. Turned out the old log on the ground wasn’t a log after all.

Suddenly the woodman remembered how to move very quickly. He grabbed his axe and chopped and chopped, and there was a great cry from one end of the log, which squirmed and bled and stank horribly from the mortal wound in its middle. He chopped and chopped, and then there were two bits of the great creature.

‘It’s a great vurm!’ shouted the man. ‘Off with yer, foul thing.’

One half of the great creature slithered limply towards Stowey and the other half shuffled towards Quantoxhead. And because the two ends couldn’t meet again, it died.

Meanwhile, the man chopped wood in the same spot, and picked bilberries. Towards sunset after a hard day’s labour he was at the old woman’s door with several bags and baskets full of ripe purple berries, claiming his money.

‘Didn’t you see anything strange, out there in the wood?’ she asked, relieved he was still alive.

‘Just an ol’ vurm, an’ killed it dead. No good for burning though,’ he replied.

JEANIE THE BOGLE

A bogle is a creature from the north of Britain, faintly related to boggarts and goblins, that exists purely to annoy and perplex humans – or, so it seems to us. Bogles usually hang around our countryside feeling slightly confused. This female bogle from North Yorkshire clearly had other ideas.

Everyone knew there were boggarts in Mulgrave Wood. You could hear them doing their washing in the well on a Monday, and they made a right racket, especially when they were arguing. Some people said that the bogles could be friendly, and could even find the herbs to help cure a cough, or quieten a fever. But nobody ever talked to them to find out.

‘Best to leave bogles well alone,’ the people of nearby Sandsend said to one another. ‘Life’s enough trouble with-out bogles.’

But there’s always one, isn’t there?

A local farmer had heard of the chief of the bogles, called Jeanie, and he bet with his friends down the pub that he would go to meet her and find out what she really looked like. ‘They say she’s as ugly as sin,’ he joked. ‘Bogles don’t know what sin really is, so I’ll bet she’s a sight uglier even than that.’

‘You’re not serious about meeting her, are you?’ said one of the other farmers, putting down his jug of ale. ‘They say she’s as strong as ten cows, and all.’

‘Of course I’m serious,’ said the first. ‘Put money on it. Who’s coming with me to witness the face of the lovely Jeanie?’

There was silence. Not one single man volunteered.

‘You’re all cowards!’ cried the farmer. ‘Well I’m going anyway. By myself.’

The following morning, as the farmer rode into Musgrave Wood, he wasn’t feeling quite so brave. It was a clammy, misty, still morning, and he was riding into a part of the woods that nobody ever went to. His horse wasn’t too happy about it either.

Eventually, up ahead through the trees, the farmer could see the rocky caves where the bogles were meant to live. It was dank there, and dripping with ivy and slime, and great brackets of fungus sprouted from the trees.

‘Jeanie,’ he called. ‘J-Jeanie …?’

There was no answer, although he thought he could hear a faint snuffling from inside the cave. She wasn’t upset, was she?

‘Jeanie, come out, I want to talk with you!’ The farmer was a little bolder now.

There was a noise like a fox that had just had its tail trapped in a mangle, and Jeanie appeared. The farmer had difficulty describing her afterwards, and when he spoke of the encounter his face was so twisted and horrified that nobody could really make out what he was saying. But they reckon she was about half human height, as broad as she was tall, old and stooped, and indeed wretchedly ugly, with thick lips stretched back over her sharp yellow teeth. She was waving a pointed stick at the farmer, which looked to all intents and purposes like a magic wand.

Jeanie could move fast, in fact she could move like a whirlwind, and she was heading straight for the farmer and his horse. The farmer took a split second to assess the situation and realised he didn’t want to talk to Jeanie so much after all. His poor horse reared up, its eyes rolling and its ears flattened, and it turned and bolted with the farmer hanging on for dear life.

The farmer had never ridden so fast through the woods, and yet Jeanie was gaining on them, all the time thrashing the stick around and yelling bloodcurdling incantations he couldn’t understand. Somewhere in all the madness, a small quiet voice in the farmer’s mind said: ‘Cross the river. They don’t like water.’ So he turned the horse towards the little stream at the bottom of the wood, and man and horse fairly flew through the trees with the screaming Jeanie hurtling after them.

There was the water! The farmer prepared to leap, and glanced behind him: Jeanie was close. As the horse rose into the air, the bogle’s stick-wand came crashing down on them, with the result that the farmer and the front half of his horse sailed through the air to safety on the other side of the water. The back half of the horse, sadly, fell down into the water, because Jeanie’s stick had cleaved that horse in two as if it were butter.

The farmer returned to his friends in the pub some time later that day, sorry, soaked and bruised. Nobody in Sandsend ever went looking for bogles again after that.

8

THE PATH AHEAD

Conservation is about letting trees be trees, not gateposts with leaves.

Oliver Rackham,
Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape

What future lies ahead for our woodlands? Responsibility for land management across the British Isles is a complex and political affair, yet we have more influence than we think.

Some might reasonably argue that it has never been more difficult to look after our woodlands. Dutch Elm disease in the 1970s is now being followed by the tragedy of ash dieback. Deer nibble at any regenerating trees, and grey squirrels kill off young trees just established. Ancient woodlands are still destroyed by unscrupulous governments and developers whose only priority is money. Our changing climate means that oak is now coming into leaf three weeks earlier than in the 1950s, and increasing storms will do much damage.

However, woodlands may also give us part of the solution to these challenges. Woodlands lock up carbon in their trees and soils, help to manage flood water and produce fuel and materials. The recent upsurge in tree-planting enthusiasm across the communities of Britain and Ireland, if harnessed well, could mean that we choose to have more woodlands in the future, together with more wildlife-rich farmed land, rivers and urban areas.

I’d like to think the old stories would be cheering us on. Most land, if left alone, will return to woodland naturally over time, and we would be wise to allow more space for wild processes and wild places in these beloved islands. As we travel such uncertain times, and learn to change and adapt, there will be new woodland stories to tell. I hope you find inspiration here for the journey ahead.

THE GREEN WOMEN OF ONE TREE HILL

In our busy lives of fourscore and ten, we humans can easily forget that trees have a longer lifespan, and many of the trees around us have started life with very different surroundings from the ones they live in today. Perhaps they started life as a seed in a woodland but now find themselves alone and surrounded by concrete in a town, or they were planted as a part of a hedge that was neglected and now they are a huge tree in a field. If you have never mused on what a particular tree has seen in its lifetime, I can recommend it.

Our tree spirits can have many names, from the dryads (originally from the Greek) to the Ghillie Dhu of the Scottish Highlands and the Hyter Sprite of Norfolk. I love the idea in the following tale of giving the last of the year’s primroses to the tree spirits. Primroses as late as midsummer are rare in Britain and Ireland, and with climate change they will become rarer still.

This story, originally recorded in Derbyshire in the 1930s, is beloved of environmental storytellers for obvious reasons. It’s not just a story about honouring the fair folk, it talks about our connection with nature. But it also asks questions of us. If you were the younger brother, would you have done anything differently?

Under the canopy of the green wildwood there was a little hill. The wildwood was such a tangle of oak and honeysuckle, elm and ash and ivy, that if you were looking at it from above you might find it difficult to see the hill underneath. But if you were in that wood, picking your way through the undergrowth carefully and quietly, trying to avoid the attention of the local wolf, then you would notice that the land rose up and your breath would get shorter as the place demanded more effort from you to get through.

Years passed and the wildwood changed. Lime and hazel trees gave way to oak, ash and elm; harsh winters and storms caused trees to fall; large animals grazed at clearings and rivers rose and receded as they carved out the landscape. Beavers nibbled at the willow trees and braided the river with their ponds; eagles and owls scoured the land for prey. Trees seeded, trees grew, trees died and rotted.

Over time, the people appeared, and then they settled. The sound of axes rang out as the fertile land in the valley was cleared and crops were tended; then armies marched across the land and trees grew back again; two centuries later it was cleared again to meadow. Now, animals were bred and kept and slaughtered, first cattle, then sheep. When the animals weren’t nibbling at the grass, they were nibbling at the trees.

In the wildwood that remained, where the slope was not too steep, the tallest oaks were taken out and turned into roof-beams and boats. Hazel rods were cut and coppiced, ash was felled for carts and furniture, elm was taken for ships, bark was stripped and charcoal burnt, hurdles made, and lathes whirred. Still trees seeded, trees grew, trees died and rotted.

Soon there were more fields than wildwood. Then, the only place with woodland was the little hill; and then, people cut into that place as well, for they needed timber and firewood. In time there were only seven trees left on top of the hill. Then, there were only three trees left. Nobody knows why they were saved, but they stayed, and everyone called them the Green Women. One tree was an elm, majestic and towering; one was an ash, graceful and delicate; and one was an oak, sturdy and strong. Sheep sheltered under the three trees and rubbed up against them. The trees still produced elm-coins and ash-keys and acorns, but no seedlings would survive under the trees, for they were all nibbled.

All the people of the local farms and villages knew those three trees. They said that at the full moon when the sky was clear, the Green Women would dance in the moonlight and sing to each other, in just the same way that the woodland had danced and sang in the old days when it covered the hill. The song was carried on the breeze and it stirred the hearts of all who heard it.

Nobody dared to go up that hill except the old farmer, and he only went there once a year, to keep an old family tradition. Every year on Midsummer’s Eve, the madness time, before dusk, he would take garlands of the last primroses of the year up to each of the three Green Women, leave them at the roots of each tree, and mutter his thanks. He would be sure to be safe indoors before nightfall. Everyone knew that midsummer was a magical time, and the little people were out and about.

He had three sons and he told them: ‘My father told me that the luck of the farm is kept in that place, and that we should take care of it. His father did the same before him, and his father before him. Those old trees, they will remember all of us. When I am gone, mind you do the same.’

The three sons were all very different. When the old farmer died, his farm was divided into three. The eldest son got the rich soil and the hill with the Green Women on it; the middle son got a lot of the other fields further down near the river; and the youngest son was given a strip of old, stony ground at the foot of the hill, with not much going for it. He didn’t complain, but he set about making the best of it that he could, and he worked hard and sang hard and always made sure he was safely at home before the sun went down.

One afternoon his two brothers came to visit. They had noticed his rich fields of barley and rye, the few apple trees dripping with fruit, and the contented cows with udders fit to burst with milk, and they were angry. ‘Who has been helping you make this land so good?’ asked the middle brother. ‘Everyone down in the village talks of singing and drumming sounds all night long coming from your land. You should be in bed! A hard-working farmer always has to get up early in the morning.’

But the youngest brother gave no answer.

‘Did I see you on my land, up at the hill this afternoon?’ asked the eldest brother. ‘What on earth were you doing there?’

‘I was up there with primroses for the trees,’ said the youngest, quietly. ‘That’s what Father taught us to do. It’s Midsummer’s Eve.’

Then they were furious. ‘That’s my hill. You have no right to go up there, and you won’t go up there again,’ said the eldest son. ‘Anyway, I need to build a new barn and I need some good timber. I reckon one of those three trees will do just fine. I’ll take it down tomorrow, and you can both help me.’

The youngest brother went pale. ‘You can’t do that to one of the Green Women! And it’s the middle of summer!’ But the two elder brothers had left already.

The next day, a fine bright Midsummer’s Day, the youngest brother didn’t turn up and the middle one found some excuse not to be there. But the eldest brother called his men and his winch and his axes, and they set about felling the big old elm tree.

Chop! Chop! Chop! Metal on bark, metal on wood.

Chop! Chop! Chop! A high-pitched scream, the voice of a woman, came from the elm tree and it rang and rang around the valley. The men and horses all ran away, but the eldest brother kept on chopping and the tree kept on screaming. It did not stop until the trunk had been nearly cut through. Then the old elm creaked and groaned and twisted and crashed to the ground in a direction that hadn’t been expected, its branches breaking and leaves flying in all directions.

The eldest brother was underneath the elm tree when it fell. He was killed stone dead, and it was a sorry mess. They cleared him up, and they took away the old dead elm tree and chopped it up; part of it was used to make the elder brother’s coffin, and part to make a new barn for the middle brother.

And then there were two Green Women on the hill. The villagers said that at the full moon on a clear night, the old oak and ash tree could be seen dancing and their sorrowful song was carried on the wind around the valley, a song of longing and lullaby and the strength of the land.

The middle brother then took both of the farms and the youngest brother kept his scrap of land. He still took the last of the primroses up the hill to the Green Women on Midsummer’s Eve. But the two big farms didn’t flourish, and the crops and the animals were in a sorry state.

One Midsummer’s Eve the middle brother saw his younger brother up by the two trees on the hill. He was afraid to go up there, so he shouted, ‘Come down from there! That’s my land you’re trespassing on! I’m going to build a big fence all around my hill to keep you out. I’m going to make it from one of those trees, and you try to stop me.’

That night there was bright moonlight but no singing came from the hill, just a mournful rustling of leaves all the night.

The following morning the middle brother took men and axes up to the two trees, and decided he would take out the ash. He checked that there was no wind to blow the tree in the wrong direction, and then he started to cut.

Chop! Chop! Chop! Metal on bark, metal on wood.

Chop! Chop! Chop! A high-pitched scream, the voice of a woman, came from the ash tree and it rang and rang around the valley. The men and horses all ran away, but the middle brother kept on chopping and the tree kept on screaming. It did not stop until the trunk had been nearly cut through. Then the old ash tree creaked and groaned and crashed to the ground. As it fell, a huge branch twisted around and hit the middle brother square on the back of the neck, and he fell down dead.

They came and cleared away the dead man and the dead tree, and that ash tree was turned into many things: furniture, bowls, and a new cart for the youngest brother to carry his apples in, but he drove it to market with a heavy heart.

Now the youngest brother had all three farms, but he still lived in his little place at the bottom of the hill, looking up to the one lone Green Woman now standing there. Sometimes, when the moon was full on a clear night, the old oak tree would dance, a sad, slow, swaying little dance, and she would sing. The song would carry on the breeze down to the valley, and everyone who heard it had their heart touched and they learned of love and loss.

The youngest brother always left a garland of late primroses at the roots of the old oak tree every Midsummer’s Eve, and he made sure to be safe inside before the sun went down. His farm prospered. The story doesn’t tell us what happened to him next.

Many people in that area are still afraid of climbing One Tree Hill, even though they don’t remember why, because the stories have not been told to them.

The hill and the oak tree stand there alone. The grass is sheep-nibbled to the quick, and no wild flowers bloom. The tree still produces acorns, but none will manage to grow and be glad, for they will all be grazed away. But still the old oak tree stands.

It is a sad, dangerous place.

THE TREE’S REVENGE

The oak tree that doles out justice is a common feature in our folk tales. Here’s a cautionary tale for anyone who steals bits of land that don’t belong to them. It comes from north Somerset, near Bristol.

There was a cunning old farmer, and he had two sons. The eldest son was as conniving as he was, and those two were often out causing trouble and gaining the best for themselves. Even though they had a farm large enough to need twenty workers, they were always going out and taking what wasn’t theirs. They’d snip a bit of edge-hedge here, and move a bit of fence or gate there, and make their farm even bigger by taking the land around them without asking, and still they were never happy with the plenty they had.

The youngest son was a more kindly type. He could see what was going on, and he didn’t like it. He was the one who took their goods from the farm to market, and he had to drive through the woods that were on one edge of the farm to do it. They were dark woods, and the youngest son was always sure to ask the great oak at the gate whether he could go through before starting out. He was always careful.

The old farmer started to work away at the edge of his farm by these woods, and take away a tree here and dig out a coppice stool there to make his field bigger, always taking the wood away for himself. The youngest lad was horrified. What was wrong with the trees he already had on the farm? He decided to leave home. He went up to the woods to say goodbye, but the trees didn’t say anything, and that was bad. If they mumbled out warnings, you knew you would have a chance, but they were silent, and that meant trouble was brewing.

And it was. The following week the old farmer and the eldest son were driving their cart through the woods, taking timber that wasn’t theirs to market, when the great old oak tree dropped a limb on them and killed them both. The poor old horse was all right, because he had metal horseshoes. When the youngest son heard he ran to the scene, and the old oak tree rustled its leaves at him fit to deafen anyone.

So the youngest son got the farm and gave back all the land that his father and brother had pinched. He moved back the fences to their rightful places, and he prospered. All his days, he drove the cart with that old horse to market through the woods, and the old tree never caused him any problems. But he did put a criss-cross of nails on the soles of both of his boots, just to be sure.

THE FIRST CROP

If you want to establish a new woodland, either by planting or allowing it to regenerate naturally, it requires a leap of faith for the future, because you won’t live to see your woodland mature. The lifespan of birch is different to hawthorn, which is different again to hornbeam – but they will all live much longer than us, given the chance.

We live in a time when land is seen as a financial commodity and land prices are high, and this can also prevent landowners from committing to new woodlands. That’s why this tiny little Cumbrian story made me smile.

A man bought himself a field, but only on the condition that he would pay for it when the first crop was harvested – to check that it was good land, you understand.

The vendor agreed, and the written agreement was made and signed.

Then the man sowed his fine new field with acorns, because the first crop was to be timber.

THE WOODLAND UNDER THE SEA

We are suffering more stormy weather as our climate changes. In January 2014, south and west Britain had relentless storms and 4 miles of ancient petrified woodland was exposed off the Welsh coast between Tywyn and Aberdyfi. It wasn’t the first time that tree remains had come to light at low tide, but it showed how extensive this woodland once was. The petrified trees along the Cardigan Bay coastline, preserved in anaerobic peat, are oak, pine, birch, willow and hazel. Radiocarbon dating estimates they died about 1500 BC, or possibly even before that.

Western oakwoods are a wonderful phenomenon in their own right, where they have been allowed to survive along the western and northern coastlines of Britain. Sessile oak is dominant (the one that has no stalks to the acorns), and birch, along with many mosses and lichens that cause these woodlands to drip with green life and ancient character.

There are a number of versions of this story, among the oldest recorded in the mid-thirteenth century Black Book of Carmarthen. Some say that Maes Gwyddno, or Cantre’r Gwaelod – the Bottom Hundred – stretched out for 20 miles west of the current coast of Cardigan Bay.

This story is a reminder that nature will always bring change, but that humans take much for granted, and we may have less of a say in the outcomes than we would like. Perhaps some of our existing woodland is heading for a saltwater future.

The land of Cantre’r Gwaelod, or the Bottom Hundred, was a proud and ancient place. Like some other famous parts of Britain, it was mostly below sea level, and it boasted land that was four times as fertile as the mountains behind it. But this was all due to the sea walls and defences that had been built by the ancients long ago. Miles and miles of sea embankment kept out the salt water, with lookout towers and castles built along it at intervals.

Within the walls, Cantre’r Gwaelod was a thriving community. It boasted sixteen fortified towns and a port all of its own. Stretching back from the plain to the mountains was a great wild woodland that helped to tame the River Mawddach as it carved its way down to the sea, and to provide all the game, timber and firewood that the community needed.

Gwyddno Garanhir was the king of Cantre’r Gwaelod at that time. Like many kings, he enjoyed hunting and exploring the wild places of his kingdom, and so he built his castle in the great woodlands, in a beatuiful place of water, rock and trees, that formed both refuge and protection for his court.

All kings ensured the protection of their kingdom, and Gwyddno Garanhir was no different. He employed a watch for each of the towers along the embankment, and it was their important duty to look after a section of sea wall and make sure it did not fall into disrepair. He appointed Prince Seithenyn to be Lord High Commissioner of Embankment on his behalf.

Unfortunately, Prince Seithenyn was an infamous royal drunkard. He didn’t care about duties or maintenance or staff. He left the care of the embankment to his deputies, who in turn left it to their assistants, who largely left the sea wall to its own devices.

Only one assistant did his duty, and that was Teithrin son of Tathral. He was in charge of a watchtower, and he paced the walls around on a daily basis to make sure nothing was amiss.

One day on his usual maintenance check, Teithrin carried on walking along the wall and followed it south out of curiosity, to find out what the rest of the sea defences were like. He saw crumbling stone, missing mortar and rotten timbers, and he was shocked. Each tower that he came to, the assistant in charge seemed to be throwing a party and the mead was flowing freely. Teithrin declined their hospitality and said nothing of his concerns; he carried on walking until he had completed his condition assessment, both north and south of his own tower. He finished his work late and tumbled into bed, concerned and uneasy.

The next morning Teithrin hurried to the king’s palace in the woods to tell him of his concerns about the safety of their sea defences. The king’s great castle was made all of slate, on a small island in the middle of woods and waterfalls. When Teithrin got to the gates, he was informed that Gwyddno Garanhir was in the middle of hosting a great seven-day feast; the meat was on the platter, the mead was in the horn, and nobody was allowed to disturb the king.

Teithrin despaired, and thought of another way. He went to find the king’s son, Elphin, who had the reputation of being more responsible than his father.

Prince Elphin was sitting under the dappled light of an oak tree in the woods. The lichens were dripping grey-green around him, the wood sorrel was carpeting the ground in among the boulders. and the autumn sunlight was sparkling on the waters of the River Mawddach. He was meant to be fishing, but he had nearly drifted off to sleep when he started at the noise of someone approaching.

There was a rush of wind, and several green-brown leaves drifted down to meet the prince where he lay. The wind played with the canopy of the trees, but it seemed more insistent than usual, as if a storm might be approaching. Elphin suddenly recognised human words on the breeze through the oak leaves: ‘Beware of the wrath of Gwenhudiw!’

Gwenhudiw was the mermaid shepherdess of the ocean. The waves were her sheep, and each ninth wave, bigger than the rest, was a ram. Everyone knew that Gwenhudiw was to be respected. The king had heard a similar voice several times that year, and he thought it was a sign that he should not go out to sea; so he had stayed inland as far as he possibly could. How strange that he, Elphin, should now be hearing it!

Elphin didn’t have much more time to ponder, because a strange man was clambering over the boulders towards him. It was Teithrin, and he explained his concerns to the prince. ‘I will come to inspect the wall with you,’ said Elphin. ‘I wouldn’t normally do this, but for another voice I have heard.’

Teithrin took the prince to see the decaying sea walls, while the sun set in the west behind the great ocean. After agreeing the damage was serious, Elphin turned and looked out over the Bottom Hundred with the rays of the sun streaming out from behind him. He looked at its towns, farms and buildings, the great expanses of woodland stretching out to the mountains beyond, and thought about how much the sea wall was defending.

‘We must go and find the Lord High Commissioner of Embankment now,’ said Elphin.

In the last of the sun’s light they made their way to Seithenyn’s castle on the sea wall. As they walked into the hall, they heard harp, song, and voice, and above the whole racket, the roar of Seithenyn’s voice: ‘More wine!’

It took a long time for the Lord High Commissioner to notice that he had visitors. It took him even longer, by way of slurring formal greeting, to realise the son of the king was among them.

Elphin tried to talk to Seithenyn about the wall, but no matter what he said, he found that Seithenyn knew better.

‘Age has decay, but it also holds wisdom,’ drawled Seithenyn. ‘We trust the sea wall to do its job.’

‘But decay can destroy a wall,’ said Elphin. ‘We need to intervene.’

‘Ah, the ancestors knew more than we do,’ said Seithenyn, ‘and if we interfere with their work it shall be the worse for it. I will not accept there is any problem at all with the wall. The wall is fine.’

It wasn’t long before the whole feasting company had fallen fast asleep.

Elphin looked at Teithrin. ‘We’re on our own,’ he said.

A door opened and a striking young woman walked in. This was Angharad, Seithenyn’s daughter, and she looked in sorrow at her father and all the drunken, sleeping men. She introduced herself to the prince and Teithrin, who had noticed that the wind was starting to howl around the castle.

‘We are used to storms,’ said Angharad, ‘but this one is very angry. It’s high tide, and I worry at these times whether the sea will overwhelm us.’

The storm rattled around the castle and howled at the windows, and again the words of the wind were plain: ‘Beware the wrath of Gwenhudiw …’

There was an almighty crash and the whole place shook, and then they could see dark sky where part of the ceiling had been. The tall tower of the castle had fallen into the sea, its foundations eroded one stone too far by the relentless water, the storm winds tipping it over the edge.

‘Quick!’ cried Elphin. ‘The sea wall might have gone with it!’

Elphin, Teithrin and Angharad raced up towards the high defences, as water started to lap at the edge of the hall. They grabbed a spear each as they went out, and used them to steady their progress against the strong winds. Time was short, and they didn’t know how much of the sea defence would break around them.

They looked back once. Seithenyn had woken from his drunken slumber and was walking towards the oncoming sea that filled the great hall, brandishing his sword. ‘I’ll take you on, foul spirit!’ he cried.

‘My poor father,’ said Angharad. That was the last she saw of him.

Outside, they could see a torrent of sea water gushing in through a chasm in the sea wall where the tower had been. They hastened out towards the next tower, and then ran and ran along the sea defence for miles before they stopped. All the time the wind was howling around them, carrying the noise of crashing waves; the occasional sound of bells from inland carried on the gale.

As the night went on, the roaring of the sea became less and less. The wind died down, and the relentless anger of the storm was replaced by silence.

Eventually, the sun came up above the mountains to the east. Elphin, Teithrin and Angharad surveyed the full catastrophe before them. As far as they could fathom, seawater covered the land within the old defence, as much as it did the ocean outside. The fertile plains, farms and woods they had once known were submerged, save for the occasional rooftop of a tall building, and all the people had perished. It felt as if Cantre’r Gwaelod had never been there. They were the only survivors.

Today, occasionally at low tide and in storms, you can see the petrified remains of the great woodland of Cantre’r Gwaelod off the coast. They say that in a storm, you can still hear the bells of Aberdyfi ringing out to warn of danger. Different creatures live in the sea now, and the land there supports a whole community; but it is under the waves, and human beings have little to do with it.

THE WHITE HIND OF HOPE

A white deer is a rarity. It’s created by a genetic condition that causes the animal to lack pigment in its hair and skin. Seeing a white deer has long been seen as an omen, but what kind of omen?

Celtic people considered the white deer as a messenger from the otherworld. A white hart was often described as a great hunting prize in medieval British stories, and a bringer of great good luck and renown. In the Arthurian cycle, pursuing a white deer was a spiritual quest. In England, the white hart was the badge of James II, and Henry VII is said to have caught and collared a white hart near Ringwood in Hampshire.

Other folklore warns of a challenging fate following the sighting of a white deer. It can mean a message or a great change. It is certainly bad luck to kill one, but if you do ever see a white deer, don’t tell … there are trophy hunters out there who don’t believe in folklore and would love to hear your news.

This little story comes from a specific place, Kilmersdon, to the east of the Mendip Hills in Somerset. Given the massive damage that deer are doing to the woodlands of these islands, it might seem an ironic tale – but it’s heartening, nevertheless.

There were many deer in the forest of Kilmersdon, and among them ran a white hind. All the woodsmen knew that if they were lucky enough to see this magical beast, they would be lucky in their lives for the weeks to come. As with most wild animals, the more you looked for her the less you saw her; but it didn’t stop people from seeking.

One fine May evening the lord of Kilmersdon was riding back through the forest on his way over the hills. The springtime was bursting with life and colour and the birdsong rang out around him in all directions, but he didn’t notice. The lord’s brow was furrowed with worry and his body slouched in the saddle, weighed down with care. There was a great illness among his people, and nothing he could do would stop the misery and sickness from spreading.

Then, before his horse only a few trees’ distance away, he saw a flash of white, and the white hind, the fairy deer, bounded across his path and away.

He followed. The hind led him onward, dancing through the trees for more than a mile, away from the path and through the fresh new greenery, and then it vanished without trace.

And with the white deer went all the lord’s misery and heaviness. His heart was filled with happiness, and in the coming days there was a change in his people: small at first, but then more and more, as the joy and hope spread among them.

That’s when the healing began.

STORY SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

Addy, S.O., Household Tales with other Traditional Remains: Collected in the Counties of York, Lincoln, Derby, and Nottingham (Sheffield: Pawson and Brailsford, 1895)

Bevan-Jones, R., The Ancient Yew: A History of Taxus baccata (Windgather Press, 2004)

Briggs, K., A Dictionary of British Folk Tales (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971)

Buczacki, S., Fauna Britannica (Hamlyn, 2002)

Child, F.J. (ed.), The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1888–90)

Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval: The Story of the Grail, trans. N. Bryant (D.S. Brewer, 1996)

Colum, P., The King of Ireland’s Son: An Irish Folk Tale (Macmillan, 1916)

Coxhead, J.R.W., The Devil in Devon (West Country Handbooks, 1967)

Cross, T.P. and Slover, C.H. (eds), ‘The Adventures of the Sons of Eochaid Mugmedon’, in Ancient Irish Tales (Henry Holt and Company, 1936)

Crossley-Holland, K., British Folk Tales (Orchard Books, 1987)

Crossley-Holland, K., The King Who Was and Will Be (Orion, 1999)

Dickinson, W., Cumbriana, or Fragments of Cumbrian Life (Whittaker, 1875)a

Douce, F., The Customs of London, Otherwise Called Arnold’s Chronicle (F.C. and J. Rivington, 1811 [1502])

Edwards, I., Tales from the Forest (Edinburgh: Royal Botanic Garden, 2011)

Fitch, E.L., In Search of Herne the Hunter (Capall Bann, 1994)

Gee, H.L., Folk Tales of Yorkshire (Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1952)

Gomme, A.B. and Gerish, W.B., ‘The Green Lady: A Folk Tale from Hertfordshire’, Folklore, Vol. 7, No. 4 (December 1896), pp. 411–15

Green, R.L., The Adventures of Robin Hood (Puffin, 1956)

Gregory, Lady Augusta, Gods and Fighting Men (John Murray, 1904)

Griffis, W.E., Welsh Fairy Tales (Thomas Y. Crowell and Company, 1921)

Groos, A. and Lacy, N.J., Perceval / Parzival: A Casebook (Routledge, 2002)

Hagender, F., The Heritage of Trees: History, Culture and Symbolism (Floris Books, 2001)

Hagender, F., Yew: A History (Sutton Press, 2007)

Hart-Davis, D., Fauna Britannica: The Practical Guide to Wild and Domestic Creatures of Britain (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2002)

Harting, J.E., British Mammals Extinct within Historic Times, and Some Account of British White Wild Cattle (London, 1880)

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Jacobs, J., English Fairy Tales (David Nutt, 1890)

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McGarry, M., Great Folk Tales and Fairy Tales of Ireland (Muller, 1979)

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Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, trans. A.T. Hatto (Penguin, 1980)

Zall, P.M. (ed.), A Hundred Merry Tales, and Other English Jestbooks of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (University of Nebraska Press, 1963)

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