21st-Century Yokel

November tends to be the most high-spirited time for the grey squirrels of south Devon. They fling themselves about like flouncy teenagers with too much energy and dance across the canopy, sometimes appearing to balance dozens of feet above the earth on nothing but a gossamer sycamore leaf. Some have been seen riding on the back of sheep, although despite carefully studying them and even drawing a rough map of squirrel activity in my area, I have never witnessed this myself, and I sense the motive for doing so might be less altruistic than that of jackdaws. I don’t have a horse chestnut tree in or near my garden, but in October I often find numerous spiky, half-opened conker shells on the lawn, which I have realised is the work of picnicking squirrels. An especially bold one will sometimes barrel down the middle of the lane, creating a queue of cars behind, like a tiny furry tractor. Only a day of strong winds seems to slow down their autumnal high. Squirrels have, however, allegedly found ingenious uses for wind. In his 1607 book History Of Foure-Footed Beastes Edward Topsell writes of the squirrel, ‘for when hunger or some convenient prey of meat constraineth her to pass over a river, she seeketh out some rinde or small bark of a tree, which she setteth upon the water or goeth into it, and holding her tail like a sail letteth the wind drive her to the other side.’ This is a pleasing image but one which striketh me as bullshit.

I have stood in the dense steep copses near my house in November storms and heard the fearsome creak of bending trunks above me, a far more fearsome sound, surely, if you are a foot and a bit long and covered in fur. A red oak ripped itself out of the ground on the hillside above the house during my first autumn here with a noise beyond thunder. In another storm, a holm oak behind my garden – a vast elevated maze of a tree over three hundred years old – came down on my phone line. Sometimes, when the leaves seem to be holding on a little too long, these storms apparently come along to do a kind of necessary industrial clean to hurry winter along. But the final deleafing of trees will often take place on the most windless of days, the pressure of icy still air sending the last crinkled brown survivors gently to the ground, defeated. There are long bony months ahead but it’s still a good time to be heavily into wood. Summer’s the big party season for trees, but winter is when you really get to know them as people. It’s when you see behind the green curtain to the detailed architecture of the branches of an elm or a maple. It’s when you see ivy’s roots stretching up a trunk like veins on the tensed ageing wrist of an arm-wrestler. Last winter I kept watch on a solitary, huge, two-century-old oak on the hillside near me – a wise but not wizened tree, confident in its loner status – and photographed it every few days, yet even in its barest months its moods still palpably swung. On a Wednesday it might be cloud-whipped and cantankerous, then sheep-sniffed, sun-kissed and soporific on Friday then greyly ice-glazed and impenetrable on Saturday. You could argue that late autumn and early winter are the most tree-dominated seasons of all in rural Devon as it’s when their aroma is most prevalent: the time of woodsmoke’s primal reminder of the woodier place we all come from. There’s nothing quite like the way woodsmoke cuts through cold country air, and even if you’re like me and seek it out and delight in it, summer is always enough to make you forget just how heady its aroma is. I climbed to the top of my favourite local mystic hill, Yarner Beacon, last December and caught a strong whiff of it: an invisible cloud of promise in the dead chill. The smell was initially confusing, as there is no house within a quarter of a mile of Yarner Beacon’s summit, and it took me a few moments to realise that it was in fact coming from one of the bandsaws in the woodyard at the foot of the hill.

I’d walked past the woodyard numerous times and was dying to find out what went on in there. I only had to look through the gates at the giant logpiles and headlightless old vans to want to write a vast, epic work of fiction set within its boundaries. But you never know with a woodyard: you could pop your head inside and get a cheery welcome in a cloud of sawdust, or it could contain a dog who will bite off one or both of your testicles. Fortunately, when I finally got the chance to visit this one – through Dave, who in a bit of serendipity or perhaps mere logic in a world where woodsmen tend to stick together, was friends with its owner, Alan – in March 2017 it turned out to be delightful. Alan is seventy but says he will continue working with wood ‘until I drop dead’. He leaves the actual tree surgery to his son and grandson now but is on the receiving end of a relentless campaign from his new partner to get him to spend less time at the yard. ‘She won’t win,’ he told me. I asked him what it was he did there on an average day. ‘Just playworking, really,’ he replied, grinning from ear to ear. ‘I love it.’ When I arrived, he was standing on top of his tallest logpile, doing something I assumed to be very important and which I worried about interrupting. Now it occurred to me he was probably just enjoying the unalloyed pleasure of picking up and holding logs, as men have done since time immemorial for reasons