An island of wild and ancient woodland in an urban sprawl
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Version 0 of 1. Here’s a strange little peace in a tightened noose of noise. If you stumbled on it by footbridge, housing estate passage or nondescript pull-in, it would be a surprising find: an ancient worked wood caught in an outer eddy of the city. Thorpe Wood was here long before Peterborough grew up around it, before the city began to squeeze, before what little was left was mercifully protected. The morning’s snowfall has gone. In spring there might be bluebells here, wild garlic, wood anemone, the “pock” of woodpecker, smells, shade. But in January life has descended to waist height and is thick with hardy, sharp things. At eye-level, winter’s transparency makes the wood a weave of disorderly trunks. The rafters are empty and naked, and it’s here the trees spread, contrast, throw flamboyant shapes against the sky. Ash, birch, beech … but it’s oak’s stage. One rises in a neat, ballistic length, not antlering until incredible height. The branches of old squat oaks gnarl and coil like sculptures. Another, beheaded, is a bare totem. Some are fallen, left to damp-darkened decay, for bats and bugs and living green. Low leaf mulch, plates of sloughed bark, a brown smell. There is green too, but most of it is rampant, dark ivy, thickening trunks like baggy clothing on a scrawny frame. One tree has an ivy tattoo of a heart from heart-shaped leaves. Perhaps the start of another strangling takeover. Rich green through the grey turns out to be two fir trees at the back of someone’s garden – evergreen incomers screening off a real native wood. Maybe they serve more usefully to screen off the house. Adjacent windows in brown-brick buildings look, as eyes from a line of faces. A police station. Gyms, hotels, big business. And that other more insidious nature-thief/masquerade: a golf course. And noise. Traffic from the swollen roads, wrapped uncomfortably tightly around this little wood. If it were lost, its space would be instantly absorbed. At one end of it is a car park; at the other, brown boards funnel me on to a footbridge astride the A47. Over it, a quieter section of the wood is closed to the public. Pity. Or perhaps not. Follow Country diary on Twitter: @gdncountrydiary |