May woods

[puddleshark]

Powerstock Common is probably the closest thing to wild woods we have in Dorset. Once a royal hunting ground, then an area of common land, never enclosed (perhaps too boggy to be worth the expense), now a nature reserve of tangled woods, ponds, rough pastures.




Following green paths...


...past a 19th century brick kiln, now flooded.


In May, Powerstock is the realm of the bluebells & the violets.










A passing shower of apple blossom.



I usually have a strong sense of direction when walking in the woods, but the narrow twisty paths of Powerstock turn me around and lose me. I always have to rely on a compass here. And it always surprises me a little that the compass actually works, rather than the needle spinning aimlessly. Powerstock is one of the secret, spooky places of West Dorset. You wander in. You may not always wander out again.






Bark beetles have written cryptic messages on the fallen trees.


There are cattle roaming the common. But they are placid older cattle, too busy chewing the cud in the sunshine to bother a passing walker.





With the aid of my compass, I find my way back to the nature reserve car park. Then it's a long drive along narrow twisty nameless lanes, lined with bluebells and shaded over with trees, before I finally come to a crossroads with a signpost, and can find my way home.

Comments

[puddleshark]

Thanks!

The landscape of Powerstock Common still looks as it did in medieval times. There's a nineteenth century brick kiln hiding there, but the trees have already mostly devoured it, the way they devour all the old industrial architecture. Once you enter the woods, the modern world seems to drop away.

[full_metal_ox]

Puck's Song

See you the dimpled track that runs,
All hollow through the wheat?
O that was where they hauled the guns
That smote King Philip's fleet!

See you our little mill that clacks,
So busy by the brook?
She has ground her corn and paid her tax
Ever since Domesday Book.

See you our stilly woods of oak,
And the dread ditch beside?
O that was where the Saxons broke,
On the day that Harold died!

See you the windy levels spread
About the gates of Rye?
O that was where the Northmen fled,
When Alfred's ships came by!

See you our pastures wide and lone,
Where the red oxen browse?
O there was a City thronged and known,
Ere London boasted a house!

And see you, after rain, the trace
Of mound and ditch and wall?
O that was a Legion's camping-place,
When Caesar sailed from Gaul!

And see you marks that show and fade,
Like shadows on the Downs?
O they are the lines the Flint Men made,
To guard their wondrous towns!

Trackway and Camp and City lost,
Salt Marsh where now is corn;
Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease,
And so was England born!

She is not any common Earth,
Water or Wood or Air,
But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,
Where you and I will fare.

–Rudyard Kipling, from Puck of Pook’s Hill.

[puddleshark]

And see you marks that show and fade,
Like shadows on the Downs?

I have always loved that poem! The Dorset landscape is full of enigmatic traces of human occupation - barrows and cursuses and cross-dykes, Roman roads, Celtic field systems, deserted medieval villages...

[full_metal_ox]

That’s a sense of millennia-deep layered mythic continuity and connection to the land that White Americans don’t get to have: the suburb where I grew up hadn’t much in the way of structures much older than me, or at most my parents (and even a lot of those have been razed and redeveloped since; my mother, during her last visit, had to relearn her way around the neighborhood.)

(Of course, that’s what we get in a place where we’re an invasive presence, having bulldozed over or appropriated the millennia-old historical markers—including language and memory—of the people who have that rightful claim.)

[puddleshark]

I suppose we are lucky here in that a lot of the prehistoric monuments - Neolithic long barrows, Bronze Age round barrows, Iron Age hillforts - are on hilltops, and managed to escape the plough. They were instead used for grazing livestock, and some of them are astonishingly well-preserved. There can be an eerie sense of connection, walking the ramparts of an Iron Age hillfort, and knowing that someone was making that same circuit two thousand years ago.

We do less well preserving 19th and 20th architecture in our towns. All sorts of interesting buildings get pulled down when the developers flash the cash.