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Nature Notes

Nature Notes 9: Magic in the Thicks

I put the car up on a sandy bank, irrigation guns jetting water into the low sun over fields of purple-flowered potatoes, and walked back to the ancient woodland called The Thicks. In the middle of the Sandlings, a patch of coastal Suffolk Arthur Young 200 years ago judged fit for nothing but sheepwalks and rabbits, is Staverton Park, medieval parkland of pollarded oaks and the greatest hollies in the land. A canopy of bracken surrounds the wood, paths made by deer and people. Inside, the air is still, sunlight streaming into the glades. The squat oaks (Q. robur) are enormous, gnarled, great bosses on their deeply fissured bark. All were pollarded by feuding brothers in an argument over their father’s estate in the 1780s. Each is said to have “nipped out” the other’s trees, cutting out the leading branches. What remains is the unusual shape of mature oaks firing out branches from boles between 6 to 15 feet from the ground. Many are rotten through, the heartwood gone. I measure the girth of one - at 18 feet that makes it about 400 years old. Some say it was the monks of nearby Butley Abbey who planted them in the early 1500s.

The oaks catch the eye, but it is the magnificent hollies that are nationally important. One is the tallest in the land, reaching over 65 feet. Girths of the largest exceed 6 feet. I find many examples of Siamese twins, oak-holly trunks bound together by years of co-growth. On the smooth bark of some hollies are carved names, old graffiti of other who walked in the deep woods for escape. A heart with initials SF. FD on a rowan. A woodland for dreaming in, perhaps: “dream, and so dream all night without a stir”, wrote John Keats of oaks.

These woods are known locally as a place for druids. There is more in any woodland than meets the eye. G F Peterken of Monks Wood does not mention mistletoe, but it is closely associated with oak-holly woodland in the west country. There were always strange goings-on, as they say in the east. Great Rendlesham Forest nearby, flattened by the 1987 hurricane, is the site for supposed alien landings on Boxing Day 1980, when flashing lights were seen in the forest, and American airmen and Suffolk police wrote oddly suggestive memoranda afterwards. Down the road at Orford was once a merman; at Shingle Street an incident wrapped also in myth about bodies washed ashore in the War. But the druid and witch stories persist. East Anglia is notable for its Cunning men and women - healers and magicians. Cunning Murrell was born in Essex in 1780, and walked the whole region collecting plants for cures. He slept by day and walked at night, always with a basket of herbs hanging from his gingham umbrella. He would ask, so you want high or low? Did you require magic or material help. He was known as the last Wizard of Essex.

That evening, I sat at dusk and watched two stag beetles whirring around the garden, clattering into birch and beech as a bat slipped silently up and down. They are several weeks early this year. Hereabouts, they are known as the billywitch, in Surrey the devil’s beetle.